Demographics Are Not Destiny, After All
Trump’s reelection reflects the final exhaustion of the post-World War II liberal and conservative cultural consensuses.
In 2016, it was often said that the long 20th century of American culture and politics had ended. More precisely, an epoch in which Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism jousted with Reaganite market conservatism ended with the election of Donald J. Trump. Trump’s policy positions and voter base defied the binaries to which American politics had become accustomed; once-conservative Virginia was now a Democratic redoubt while blue-collar West Virginia became deep-red Republican. But in 2020, Joe Biden and his running mating Kamala Harris were elected, and with normal service apparently resumed, the Trump realignment looked to many observers like it might have been an anomaly.
In many ways, Biden’s term in office was like Barack Obama’s third term. The former president was instrumental in marshalling the Democratic establishment in 2020 behind his erstwhile vice president, and the ensuing administration was mostly staffed by Obama alumni. But the march of economic and political forces can only be delayed for so long. Not only did Trump win the idiosyncratic Electoral College in 2024, but he also received a plurality of the popular vote—the first time a Republican candidate for president had done so since 2004.
Today, it is the Biden administration that looks anomalous. It turns out that 2016 was simply an appetiser and Trump’s second term is the main course. A new coalition has emerged in American politics, anchored in the white working-class but also extending to racial minorities who lack a college education. The Obama coalition of highly educated whites and racial minorities has fractured as many socially conservative nonwhites align with Republicans and vote with their ideology. Trump now presides over a nation depolarised by race, in which class—defined more by education than money—has attained a new salience.
When Barack H. Obama was elected president in 2008, the legacy media heralded it as a post-racial moment in the country’s history. This was true insofar as the discussion was limited to Obama himself, a man with a white American mother, a black African father, an Indonesian stepfather, and a Eurasian sister. But Obama still won only 43 percent of the white vote, running up his numbers among black Americans and other minorities. At the time, this coalition seemed to herald a Democratic future as dominant as Roosevelt’s New Deal equivalent—an “emerging Democratic majority” or a “coalition of the ascendent.”
Set against this was the “Sailer Strategy,” named after heterodox conservative commentator Steve Sailer, which involved exploiting the racial polarisation of the American electorate by focusing on whites, still the largest racial cohort of voters. Sailer essentially pressed for the recreation of the Southern American model of political and race relations nationally. In much of the South, whites overwhelmingly voted for Republicans and blacks overwhelmingly voted for Democrats. With 95 percent of the black vote going to Obama in 2008, part of the strategy was already in operation. Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024 vindicated the Sailer Strategy insofar as his victory in purple northern states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was achieved through gains among the white working-class that Obama had held.
But 2024 also witnessed major structural shifts in racial politics. Trump almost won the Latino vote—he won Latino men outright—and he made massive gains among Asian Americans and more limited but still significant gains among black men. The racial and political assumptions of a generation have been upended, though close observers of the political landscape, like the Democratic operative David Shor, have noted that racial polarisation peaked in 2012. Trump’s coalition simply extended the subsequent trend of depolarisation.
The end of the long 20th century signalled by the Trump movement’s ascendancy transcends party politics. It reflects the final exhaustion of the post-World War II liberal consensus and its conservative counterpart. The 1960s saw the reinvention of the American republic with the Civil Rights movement that finally included black Americans in the political nation. The US Census in 1970 reported that 87.5 percent of Americans were white, 11 percent were “Negro” (black), and 1.4 percent were other. The 2020 Census reported that whites were 59.1 percent of the population, Latinos were 18.9 percent, blacks were 12.6 percent, and Asians were 5.9 percent. The remaining few percent were Native Americans and Hawaiians, and people of mixed and other races.
Despite the reality of radically different demographics, elite culture in the US remains fixated on the black–white racial dynamic due to its deep roots in our history. Even though Latinos became the largest ethnic-racial minority cohort in 2003, the “racial reckoning” that crested with the George Floyd protests in 2020 was mainly driven by the concerns and interests of black Americans. For the past sixty years, the American Left has tried to recapture the successes of the Civil Rights movement, but the moral clarity of the 1960s’ slogans now seem like tired nostrums. 2024 is a decade beyond the first black American president and a year in which the Democrats nominated a black woman for the presidency.
Ironically, given their appellation, American progressives conceptualise race and identity in a backwards-looking fashion. They tend to apply the lessons learned from the overthrow of Jim Crow to a much more complex 21st-century society. Kamala Harris’s background should have undermined these presuppositions. She is, after all, the daughter of a woman from India’s elite and a black Jamaican from that nation’s propertied class, and she is married to a Jewish man. Her family and biography demonstrate that the America of the 1960s is no more.
The Left is not the only political faction stuck in the past. Trump may have blasted a path into the political future, but he was born in 1946 and he is still haunted by the chaos and crime experienced by New Yorkers in the 1970s and ’80s. MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) is also a backward-looking slogan that credits progress with nothing and seeks to return the country to a perceived Golden Age. Much of Trump’s older base consists of Baby Boomers who were suspicious of—or flatly opposed to—the revolutionary upheavals of the 1960s. Many of them became “Reagan Democrats” or later served as the foundation for the Christian Right. This postwar conservative coalition found its highest expression in the 2000–08 administration of George W. Bush, an evangelical Christian who promoted libertarian economics at home and an aggressive foreign policy abroad.
Though today’s Christian conservatives still overwhelmingly support Donald Trump, no one pretends that he is anything more than a cultural Christian. In 1970, 91 percent of Americans were Christian, and 65 percent were Protestant. In 2023, 66 percent were Christian, and 33 percent were Protestant. While three percent of Americans said that they had no religion in 1970, 22 percent were willing to say the same in 2023. The America that conservatives of Trump’s generation remember was a white Christian America, and an implicitly Protestant one at that. Though Republicans are still generally regarded as the party of white Christians, 18 percent of those who identify as Republican today have no religion. The Left no longer has a theocratic party to fear because the Right’s Christian activist base has diminished.
The new Republican Party is fundamentally a vehicle for the personality of Donald Trump. No faction is as powerful as the labour Left once was in the postwar Democratic party or as Christian conservatives were in the Republican party at the turn of the millennium. But Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance’s tour of independent podcasts in the fall of 2024 reached young men whose lives and career trajectories sit outside the elite higher-educational pipeline.
Andrew Shulz, Joe Rogan, and Theo Vaughn all appeal to youth raised in a culture that emphasises the corrupting influences of white privilege and toxic masculinity. The minority of young Americans with college degrees have been conditioned to negotiate the verbal and social traps laid by 21st-century political correctness. But for the majority who did not attend university, these linguistic innovations look silly or sinister or both. Though the “gender gap” in American politics has existed since the 1980s, a sharp divergence between Republicans and Democrats at the level of staff has recently exacerbated the aesthetic differences between the two parties. A much higher proportion of Democratic staffers are female humanities graduates from Ivy League institutions while Republicans are more likely to employ males who attended a state university.
In 2012, the Obama campaign debuted the “Life of Julia,” which showed how a young woman relied on the government to get ahead in life. Curiously, her life seemed to be totally bereft of men—even her father and romantic partners were left unmentioned. In 2020, Joe Biden—a Roman Catholic who began his political career as a pro-life senator—reversed his longstanding support for a ban on federal funding of most abortions after his pro-choice (and mostly female) staffers revolted. During the 2024 campaign, Kamala Harris did not appear on the Joe Rogan podcast, in part because she feared a backlash from that same staff. Rogan—a socially moderate pro-choice comedian who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016—is no church lady. But his interests reflect a vision of unreconstructed masculinity that has been purged from the elite institutions of American society by the administrative class.
Ostensibly, Trump cares about trade protectionism, border security, and immigration more broadly, and his supporters point to these political positions when explaining their devotion to him. But there is more to this political cult than economic nationalism. Despite being upper-class by birth and educated at an Ivy League university, Trump instinctively recoils from elite mores and shibboleths. To paraphrase Chris Rock, Trump is rich but not wealthy. Trump’s garish lifestyle, combined with his proletarian taste for things like junk food and wrestling, allowed him to establish a unique connection with popular culture that enabled a multi-decade career as a cultural celebrity.
This inchoate crassness is what America’s working class, of whatever race, is defined by. The minority of Americans who go through the higher-education system are united by an interest in books, public intellectuals, and magazines that shape tastes, aesthetics, and norms. One may dissent from the expectations of bourgeois life, but these norms are intelligible and broadly shared. With increased labour mobility, the collapse of religion, and the fragmentation of the media, the working class is not as unified. The Vietnamese American shrimper has a very different life and worldview from the North Carolina good-ole-boy who works in a furniture factory. Some of these outsiders are not even economically working class, and include the rural and exurban gentry who own the car dealerships and run successful businesses on downtown main streets. But they all know what they are not, and they are not “woke.”
Trump is a 20th-century celebrity whose identity and notoriety were forged before cultural fragmentation, and that has enabled him to bind these disparate anti-elite factions together. A brash and bold personality who takes pleasure in smashing the taboos upheld by the cultural elite, Trump has taken the Republican Party of plutocrats and yoked it to a populist revolt against the college-educated clerisy that dominates American media, educational institutions, and government.
This elite operates through corporations and NGOs in a non-democratic fashion to shape the lives of Americans through training and re-education. Large sections of the American population never asked for or wanted these changes, and in Trump’s Republican Party, they found a vehicle for their frustration and a democratic instrument with which to express their rage and disaffection. Racially diverse, sometimes affluent but not professionally accomplished, and lacking the polish of a liberal-arts education, this new electoral coalition is potent because it cares less about wedge issues than it does about its shared contempt for coastal elites.
The Democratic Party’s goal in the near future is simple. It must make it clear that people who do not have a bachelor’s degree will be welcome within their political tent. Instigating moral revivals is the task of preachers, not teachers. The Republican Party has a more difficult project. After this term, Donald J. Trump will no longer be at the top of the presidential ticket, unifying disparate countercultural factions under the charisma of a single individual. The Republican working-class coalition will have to articulate an ideological vision that is more than simply a negation of the pieties of the elite. The destruction of the old order was the easy part—now comes the much more complicated job of rebuilding something better.
