America will always be divided. There is no way he could bring together over 300 million people from all races, faiths, and ethnicities around the world into one nation and expect anything like unanimity on important religious, cultural, and political issues. The real question is whether our sector is sustainable or potentially deadly.
That may be the central issue of our current political moment, and against that backdrop, assess the implications of some recent reports that American politics may be undergoing a kind of racial realignment. There is a need to. Looking at election results and polling trends, there is evidence that voters of color are leaning toward Republicans.
For example, 2016 exit polls show that Donald Trump improved Mitt Romney's performance with Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters in 2012, and in 2020 he won the popular vote by a much larger margin. Despite losing by the margin, they performed well again in 2020. How did this happen? His strong performance with voters of color was offset by his poor performance with white voters. He won the white vote by a 21 percentage point margin over Hillary Clinton. His lead over Joe Biden has narrowed to 17 points. In other words, racial disparities have narrowed in both directions. The turnout among minority voters was high for Mr. Trump, and the turnout among white voters was high for Mr. Biden.
Recent polling data indicates that this trend is likely to continue. As my colleague Tom Edsall notes in an interesting column analyzing the evidence for and against racial realignment in partisan politics, aggregated polling data shows that “among Black voters, Biden 55 points (73-18), far below his lead. In 2020, the difference was 83 points. Among Hispanics, Biden held a 6-point lead (48-42), compared to a 24-point lead in 2020. ”
My purpose is to try to answer the inevitable next question. If realignment is true, what does it mean? In the short term, even slight racial realignment may make it harder for Biden to defeat Trump, but in the long term it will shift our democracy from identity-based division to ideological disagreement. Such restructuring is healthy for the United States.
If you look at American history and look around the world, you will see the pernicious effects of separating peoples based on their broadly construed identities. Identity-based divisions such as Sunnis versus Shiites in Iraq, Catholics versus Protestants in Northern Ireland, class-based purges in various communist revolutions, anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, and conflicts between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda It dehumanizes its opponents and encourages collective punitive action.
Although divisions in American identity center primarily around race, events such as the Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844, when mobs of xenophobic Protestants attacked Catholic churches and Irish-American immigrants, We show that other identity characteristics can cause violence as well. Identity politics has a particular vulnerability to zero-sum messages of me and mine versus you and yours.
But when basic ideas are at stake, there is an opportunity for persuasion. It's nonsense to try to exclude someone from their race or class (religion can be much more than an idea, it's an identity), but it's nonsense to try to exclude someone from their own preferred welfare policy or their preferred foreign policy. You can persuade people about policy.
In other words, when ideas take precedence over identity, hate becomes an obstacle to success because it hinders persuasion. Hatred becomes an asset when identity takes precedence over ideas. Stirring up fear and hatred in others is the shortcut to political success. The greater the fear and hatred, the higher the turnout.
There are times when a defensive identity policy is wise and necessary. As the white majority in the South rallied against the black minority, collective unity among the black nation became a matter of survival. But still, the civil rights movement convinced enough Americans of the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, that all men and women are created equal, and that we all have unalienable rights. Without persuasion, he could not succeed.
Let's return to the potential racial realignment of America. There's evidence that it's driven by ideology, but there's also a core of concern that it's also driven by identity, especially the religious identity of nonwhite Democrats.
First, let's address the evidence that ideology drives realignment. As Edsall notes in his paper, “Detailed election survey data that analyze voting trends by race, ethnicity, and ideology show that the defection of black and Hispanic voters from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party Trump won a significantly larger share of conservative black, Hispanic and Asian voters in 2020 than he did in 2016. did.
Writing in the Washington Post, Perry Bacon Jr. summarizes the theory of ideological change nicely: people of color) have conservative views that include racial issues. ”
But racial realignment does not necessarily mean the end of identity politics. We would be better off if we replaced race with religion as a central part of American politics. And make no mistake: there is a “God Gap” in American politics. Data from the Pew Research Center shows that nonwhite Democrats, on average, have religious beliefs that are much closer to those held by Republicans than white Democrats.
Pew reports that 72 percent of white Republicans and 60 percent of nonwhite Republicans “believe in the God of the Bible.” 61% of nonwhite Democrats agree, but only 32% of white Democrats agree. This difference represents a significant cultural clash within the Democratic coalition. For every progressive post a white atheist makes online disparaging Christianity, there's a black Baptist who reads the Bible every day.
Black voters' historical ties to the Democratic Party are deep enough that religious differences matter less than they do for other voting blocs, especially Hispanic Americans. Hispanic voters not only have dozens of different national cultures (Mexicans are not Cubans, Cubans are not Venezuelans, etc.), but they also have different histories within and in the United States, and a unique religious background. I have a lot of experience. Namely, America's South American and Hispanic populations are in the midst of a religious upheaval, with millions leaving the Catholic Church and becoming evangelicals and Pentecostals.
Wise observers foresaw this coming. My newsroom colleague Jennifer Medina wrote a report in 2020 that said, “From conversations with Hispanic evangelicals across the country throughout the year, we found that religious identity is often more fundamental to political affiliation than ethnic identity.” It has become clear that this is the case.” “Hispanic evangelicals make up a small portion of the electorate, but Trump's consistent support from about a third of Hispanic voters, especially in battleground states such as Florida and Arizona, has been strong,” Medina said. It is the key to this,” he wrote.
Indeed, the rise of religious identity among Hispanic voters is another reason to be wary of Christian nationalism. As I wrote last month, religious identity politics is a fundamental element of Christian nationalism, and the idea that Christians must rule is the same as saying “white people must rule.” It can be very divisive and dangerous.
I don't want to overly idealize ideological differences. We know that debates over policy can be intense and emotional. The stakes are high. At the same time, these discussions are the lifeblood of a democratic society. No individual, no party, no movement has all the truth or all the answers to complex political and cultural questions. Combine experience and discussion to refine ideas and adjust policies.
Debate helps humanize opponents in a way that identity politics never can. Hearing other people's thoughts allows us to know more about their hearts. And we can see goodwill that never appears when a person is stripped of their individuality and herded into a group coded as “other,” or worse, “enemy.” ”
We don't know for sure whether racial realignment in partisan politics is underway. There are signs, but it may take a decade or more to determine whether the current polling represents a spike or a trend. In the meantime, that should give us some hope. The most dangerous divisions in American history center around race, and if that reality changes, and if voters of all races feel welcomed by both major American political parties, this Even dark political moments may contain the seeds of truly positive change.
