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Why Do Black People Vote for Democrats?

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

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When it comes to America’s two political parties, we may be in the midst of another great realignment. Not until Election Day will we learn how various demographic groups will vote for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, but trends suggest that education polarization and racial depolarization will continue. More and more college-educated voters are sorting into the Democratic Party, as many Hispanic and some Black voters shift toward the Republican Party.

Perhaps the most famous realignment is the shift of Black voters to becoming a reliably Democratic voting base in the mid-20th century. In his research on the phenomenon, the Georgetown University professor Hans Noel studied this change and put pundits at the heart of the causal story.

Noel created a dataset of political thinkers writing in magazines and newspapers to show that their published arguments predated congressional voting patterns by at least 20 years. Ideology matters! In the mid-20th century, Democrats moved left on race not simply because it was strategic, but because an argumentative edifice was built by the chattering class to push them leftward on race. In fact, partisan adherence to ideology can even run counter to the strategic goal of winning elections.

“One example that I like to think about a lot is the development of the Affordable Care Act,” Noel explains. “The Affordable Care Act—it’s pretty clearly the kind of thing that Democrats would have liked to have done. They talked about trying to reform health policy for a long, long time. And it certainly has an electoral incentive, right? I’m going to do this thing, and people are going to vote for it. But actually, after the Affordable Care Act went through, a lot of Democrats lost their seats. And they lost their seats, in part, because of a backlash to the Affordable Care Act. You can start to piece this apart. And there’s some evidence that if you were from a close district and you took this risk, it cost you.”

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Jerusalem Demsas: The political parties are changing. Democrats are increasingly winning college-educated voters, and Republicans are performing better with Latino and Black voters. I think it’s the most important electoral trend of our time, and some people are already calling it another “great realignment.”Last week on this show, we talked about how the parties had shifted their views on trade policy. And this week, we’re going to talk about why parties shift on ideology at all—and why the coalitions that make up the parties shift, as well.

The most-often cited example of one of these changes has to do with civil rights. The Republican Party had been founded in 1854 as antislavery party and had been seen as the party of racial liberalism through the 19th and early 20th centuries. But by 1964, it was Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson who signed the Civil Rights Act into law and his opponent, Republican Barry Goldwater, who opposed it.

In order to understand what might be happening now, I wanted to talk with Georgetown University political scientist Hans Noel. Hans has written a book that has been very influential to my thinking. Published in 2013, Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America explores why Democrats and Republicans seemingly flipped sides during the 20th century.

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My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic. And this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

The racial realignment of the parties is most often seen as a question of strategy. Democrats were seeking Black votes in the North and made a tactical decision to switch their views on race in order to win elections. This is a popular model for understanding politicians. After all, look at how Donald Trump easily disavows positions he held on the Affordable Care Act and Social Security, or how Kamala Harris has tried to shed all of her most left-wing positions taken in 2019. But Hans thinks this model is incomplete.

Hans, welcome to the show.

Hans Noel: Thanks for having me.

Demsas: So we’re here about a book that you wrote and a paper you wrote a long time ago, but I think it has lasting relevance, particularly in this moment where we’re seeing a change in the party composition yet again happen and real, large ideological shifts happening within both parties.

But I want to start where you started, which is in the realignment in the 20th century over racial issues. I’m hoping you can lay some historical groundwork for us. What actually happened with the Democratic and Republican Parties on race over the course of the 20th century? Before we get into the why, what literally changed?

Noel: Sure. This is what’s sometimes referred to as the great reversal or big reversal, which is maybe a little bit overstating exactly what happened. But at the time of the Civil War—the Civil War was a partisan conflict. The North was largely represented by Republicans. Lincoln was a Republican. And the people who were most opposed to the campaign that was underlying the Civil War to either abolish or, at least, limit slavery, were Democrats.

And so, of course, that doesn’t line up very much with how we think about things now. And so there was this broad and general transformation on exactly that. But for a long time after the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of the Confederate flag, and they would claim that the North was being aggressive, and they’re the ones who talked about the lost cause and the war of northern aggression and all the rest of it.

And then there was a shift. And the shift was, you could easily just say, Okay. Well, it’s a shift where, somehow, eventually the liberals on race moved from the Republican Party into the Democratic Party and vice versa. It’s not literally wrong, but a more nuanced way to say it is that the southern coalition included people who were pretty comfortable with government intervention on behalf of the less well-off, as long as those less-well-off people were white. The Southern Democrats were in favor of and preferred to continue the legacy of segregation that comes back roaring after the end of Reconstruction.

And then, meanwhile, also in the Democratic Party now, especially in the North, both as African Americans move to the North—and so there’s a lot of Black voters that are in the North who are thinking about these things and having a different kind of influence on politics because they’re in northern cities—you have a lot of people who are in favor of government intervention for the less well-off, including people who are not white and maybe especially including concerns about race.

And so you had this tension within the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party, the New Deal coalition that we talk a lot about—what was the keystone of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency—was this combination of northern desegregationists and southern segregationists.

And they found common ground on a lot of things, particularly when it comes to resources being spent on building schools and infrastructure or whatever like that. But also, they had this big, long trade-off, which they had built in, which is that the North wanted, among other things, stronger labor unions and the like. And the South, maybe a little skeptical of things like labor unions, was like, Okay. We’ll go along with that as long as you don’t extend it to racial desegregation. And so that was the key setup of the New Deal coalition, but that’s not a position that’s very long-term stable, for reasons I get into in the book.

But what eventually happens is that, you know, there’s this conflict within the Democratic Party over which side we should take on the civil-rights question, mostly forced by civil-rights activists that are actually making it a big thing, and so you have to take a side. And eventually, the northern pro-civil-rights movement part of the party wins and effectively kicks the Southern Democrats out. It takes them a while to fully move into the other party that eventually welcomes them, and it becomes a keystone of what the Republican Party has been like and what it’s been about since then. And so in 1950, 1960, you probably had the strongest people who were both for desegregation and for continuing segregation both in the Democratic Party.

The Republican Party was people who maybe didn’t care as much about it at all. To where we are now, where the successors to the people who are most concerned about ending segregation are all in the Democratic Party, and the successors to the people who are concerned about preserving it are in the Republican Party. Of course, the policies have changed, but the kind of impulse and who’s in your coalition and who’s not has not changed.

Demsas: So I think that’s a story that many people are familiar with, but I think that the why is something that most people don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about. I tried to pretend I hadn’t read your work and think back on what I believed before, and I think it was probably something that started with the Great Migration, right?

So Great Migration happens. Six million Black people move from the South to the North, Midwest, West from 1910 to 1970. And there’s a political scientist, Keneshia Grant, who has this really interesting work where she looks at Detroit, New York, and Chicago, and her research shows that Democratic Party leaders were forced to respond to the influx of new voters by realigning, and also that Black elected officials in northern cities forced the issue of race onto the table. That builds on a lot of other people’s work and this analysis of the party shift as being strategic.

Clark Clifford—I think this is a very seminal example of this—is a Democratic consultant, and he’s an advisor to multiple presidents, and he writes this memo to Truman in 1948, arguing that losing Southern Democrats was less important than gaining in the North. I pulled up that memo, and it’s pretty frank. This is not the kind of memo I think people would write in public these days, but he writes, “The basic premise of this memorandum—that the Democratic Party is an unhappy alliance of Southern conservatives, Western progressives and Big City labor—is very trite, but it is also very true. And it is equally true that the success or failure of the Democratic leadership can be precisely measured by its ability to lead enough members of these three misfit groups to the polls on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, 1948.”

It goes onto argue that “the northern Negro voter today holds the balance of power in the Presidential elections for the simple arithmetical reason that the Negroes not only vote in a bloc, but are geographically concentrated in the pivotal, large and closely contested electoral states such as New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.”

So this story—that argument there is just a strategic view of what happens here. It’s that these leaders in the Democratic Party are like, We would like to win elections. We enjoy winning. We like power. We like Harry Truman. We want him to be president. And that there are people who are just party loyalists outside of ideology is the kind of idea. And so they shift because they see this bloc of voters become available to them, and they see it as more valuable. So what’s wrong with that story?

Noel: Well, as far as it goes, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the story. And, in fact, I really like Keneshia Grant’s book that you just mentioned. It’s a really great story about why politicians in northern cities were motivated to do the strategy that they did. Clifford’s memo is not—it’s real. It happened. And people did listen to it, and they responded to it.

But, of course, there’s all kinds of strategic arguments for why to do certain things, and there are strategic arguments to try something else, as well, right? There’s a strategic argument that people were making also at that time that the Democratic Party doesn’t want to lose that solid bloc of the South, right? There’s this apocryphal story, probably, that [President Lyndon] Johnson declares, on signing the Civil Rights Act, that he’s given away the South Republican Party for a generation. And whether he literally said that or not, that was a concern that a lot of people had, that the cost of this would be too great.

And meanwhile, of course, it’s not just about strategic behavior on part of any particular politician. You’ve got all of these people who are embedded in the Democratic Party in the South. They don’t want to give up their connections to that, and so it’s going to be a struggle. And so part of the question is, Well, why does the struggle play out the way that it does? Why does one side win and not the other? And while I don’t think it all comes down to the thoughts of pundits and comments that people have to say, I do think that it somewhat matters that the current of the way to be liberal on the things that we care about should extend to and include the civil-rights movement is a compelling argument that a lot of people started to believe. And it started to have some sort of grounding in who they were.

It’s hard to trace that sort of thing, so what I tried to do in the book is to find where you can see these alliances. And because it takes place over such a long timeframe, I look at these slices in 1930 and 1950 and 1970 and so on. And a lot of it’s happening in between. And there’s a lot of more subtle shifts, and you can only pick up the big, drawn, block picture. But what you see is that, in the conversation that people are having, the idea that support for the civil-rights movement and support for, say, labor unions—those are pretty well tied together among liberals, even as Clifford is making his memo saying, These are the things that we should strategically be doing.

So there was already a set of people who really believed fairly strongly that these things ought to go together, even before the strategic action to seize on it. And so I think that part is kind of important—the degree to which people believed that there’s a particular vision of what, sort of in the American sense of the word, liberalism means, that it’s not just about economic inequality, but it’s about all kinds of inequality.

Demsas: Can you walk us through your paper? What did you actually do?

Noel: What I was interested in is whether or not the way issues are organized among pundits was different and maybe influenced the way it was among politicians. Easy to see how politicians organize things, because that’s what’s happening in Congress, say. And so I developed a way to look at the publicly taken positions of these pundits in magazines and newspapers and did something that was parallel to that. And then you can see the change and evolution of those attitudes there a little bit sooner than you see it among politicians.

Demsas: When I read your work, it’s almost oversimplified. It’s a very chicken-and-the-egg kind of debate, right? It’s this question of what is actually moving first. And it’s this question of: Is it the case that these pundits, these writers, these public intellectuals, their arguments about what it means to be liberal and what it should mean to be liberal, especially on racial issues—is that driving people to think differently about the coalition to then create within the Democratic Party? Or is it just that those sorts of things are just rationalizations of strategy, right? These are two very, I think, different conceptions. Many people think of these parties as essentially just trying to get votes, and then after that, kind of ad hoc putting politics and ideas on top of that to rationalize their decisions to get power. And so can you help me understand or just draw out for us exactly what your thesis is there and how you came to it?

Noel: I think a little bit of this comes from just, Why is it that people believe the things that they believe? And the standard political-science answer for why an ordinary voter believes the bundle of things that they believe is that they hear messages from friendly speakers—people who they agree with—and they say, I think we should do X, Y, and Z. And then, for whatever reason, they like X. And so then they start to like Y and Z, and then they agree with that sort of thing.

And this is the dynamic John Zaller’s book Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion lays out pretty clearly. But I think we understand, Where do people’s opinions come from? They’re not all just waking up one day with opinions. They receive messages, and they move in that direction. But then if you say, Okay. Well, so then why do politicians choose the policies that they’re doing? You get a story that’s this strategic behavior. I’m going to figure out where the voters are, and I’m going to say what I think the voters want.

Well, but something has got to be more than that, right? There’s got to be some other friction that’s happening. Now, it could be just big demographic changes that cause changes in the constituencies that politicians have to pay attention to. And I think that’s probably part of it. And that’s the Keneshia Grant story, which I think has a lot of truth to it. I think it’s not wrong. But also, there’s something about, Here’s a voter who thinks about these things, and what are the things that they care about? And the things that they care about—they’re not just getting it from politicians. They’re getting it from other sources, too. And they’re getting it from political thinkers. They’re getting it from people who maybe even barely qualify as political thinkers but who are advocating for things.

Demsas: (Laughs.) TikTok stars.

Noel: Exactly. Right. Well, and you think about the importance of someone like a Rush Limbaugh or, today, the other talk-radio figures, right? They are, in a lot of ways, just trying to justify a coalition that exists, but they lay out things that matter, and they say, I really care about this. And eventually, they talk about immigration enough that a politician can’t ignore immigration as an issue that they want to engage with. And so that process—it probably doesn’t reach most ordinary voters. Most ordinary voters aren’t ideological at all. Well, one wouldn’t suggest they don’t have considered opinions, but they’re everywhere because they’re just not as structured. They’re not engaged with political questions.

But people who are politically engaged do. And those are the folks who are the labor force for politics. They’re the ones who are the people who are volunteering for someone’s presidential campaign, for someone’s presidential primary campaign. And you need to excite those people. And you excite them by saying, Look. These are these issues that I know you like and I also like, and you get them together there. And so there’s this large dialogue.

And in the book, in order to be clean about it, I focus on the contribution of the nonpolitical, independent actors. But, obviously, lots of people—including people who are in the dataset in the book—are elected officials, and they’re moving back and forth and the like. And some of them are just trying to steer public opinion in a direction that will help them get elected. I’m sure that’s part of it. And I think if we start to extend this to what’s going on today, a lot of it’s also very clearly that, too.

But there is also a big part of just people—they’re trying to think, This is the position that I believe in. This is what I think is right. And I want to persuade people to that. And you start to get a collection of people, of ideas that are bound together by that, partly led by intellectuals but also led by activists and people who just care a lot about politics and people who are trying to build alliances. And they find a somewhat sympathetic partner. And then they start talking to each other, and then their ideas start to blend together and the like. In reality, of course, it’s much more complicated and multifaceted, multidirectional stuff. But what I try to do in the book is lay out that there at least is evidence that there’s a path that comes from the intellectual conversation to the party-coalition conversation that is hard to imagine is going the other direction.

Demsas: I guess, then, the mechanism here is really interesting to me, because a bunch of people start writing about why liberals should care about Black people and that they should care about racial justice and include that in their thinking on redistribution and helping the poor. Why does anyone care what they’re saying? How does this small group of people—who, you even say, likely are not being read by the masses who are voting—how do they actually impact whether politicians are worried or not worried about their own political careers?

Noel: That’s right. It’s not a direct path, either to politicians or to voters. But it starts to be that there’s this set of ideas that have some resonance. And they have resonance maybe in the classroom, and they have some resonance in other conversations about policy ideas and so forth, and behind the scenes people are activists and the like.

There’s an interesting dynamic that you can see unfolding in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, where there’s this attitude about, What is race? Like, discussion: Is this a fundamentally different thing? Or should we think about it as a social construct and how to deal with all of this? And that conversation mostly takes place in an academic setting. And that conversation—there’s a winner in that conversation, that we ought to do when we think about race is not that there’s some kind of fundamental difference, and certainly not anything that has to do with fundamental superiority or inferiority, which was part of academic conversation on the topic towards the end—

Demsas: Yeah. Here at The Atlantic, published a lot of eugenics propaganda.

Noel: Yes. That’s right. Ton of that stuff. And first, academics start to reject, and then it takes a while for it to track in there. But the people that it has traction with—I mean, there are people today who would still be comfortable with those views. But the people who that has traction with are the same people who are saying, We ought to be thinking about the relative bargaining power of management and labor. And how does the unregulated labor market lead us to whatever outcomes that we want to have?

And there may be some sort of philosophical principles that are similar, like the idea of whether or not we’re just going to let the system go and do its own thing or not. But I think, more than anything, it’s just recognizing that these different interests ought to be seen together. And I, at least, don’t think there’s anything inherent in saying these have to be seen together. You can imagine—and, in fact, we can see—lots of cases where they are not.

But if you start to think of it that way, then you start to construct policies that are inclusive of all of the interests that are in your coalition. This is why I talk about coalition merchants, that what they’re selling isn’t so much the idea that segregation is a problem or that we ought to have better labor regulations but, rather, that the people who care about those two things ought to be friends.

Demsas: Yeah. I think this is something that’s really weird once you step back, and you realize there’s no reason why certain ideologies ended up getting together.

Like, why environmentalism is not a conservative idea, when its roots are very much in small-c conservative ideas and could very easily fit well with the Republican Party but happens now to be in the Democratic Party. This is somewhat like an accident of history or, at least, it was created by people who intentionally wanted that to happen.

I think one thing, too, that’s interesting is this idea that liberals and conservatives mapping onto these parties is a relatively recent phenomenon, which is something you talk about in your book. Is ideology as a driver of this, of partisanship, a new phenomenon? Why wasn’t it happening before? Why is it a new invention, then, in the 20th century that liberals coalesced into one party and Democrats and conservatives in another? Why don’t we see it happening earlier?

Noel: It’s a good question. Certainly, if you were to go back and talk to people in the earlier periods—and there’s a good thread of political-science scholarship that would take this position, as well—there is something like a Republican ideology and a Democratic ideology early on. It’s just that a lot of it’s really messy earlier. And so the ideology of the Democratic Party in the late 1800s, there’s some things that it agrees with, but the North and the South—to the extent that you have different regions that are appealing to the Democratic Party—they have different thoughts on what it means.

The Republican Party is this weird pastiche of people who care a lot about what kind of metal we use for our currency and concerned about tariffs and concerned about Reconstruction and trying to continue that process. All of those things don’t have to go together, and they kind of do because it’s part of the Republican coalition. But you can see in voting patterns that concerns about bimetallism and silver, that really matters in the West because that’s where the silver is being mined.

And they don’t really care as much about Reconstruction. And similarly, southern Republicans who care a lot about Reconstruction, they’re fine with silver but mostly on the grounds that they’re going to be trading votes. So it’s a long-term log roll that is there. And the people are aware of it, and probably a lot of voters who say, Oh, I just care about Republicanism. Maybe to some extent they’re like, Oh, yeah. Both of those are things that we’re going to support. But it doesn’t have that kind of glue that modern ideology has.

If anything, ideology today—however you want to think about it—has more glue, in some ways, than the party does, which is why you can have people who are like, I’m a conservative, but I’m not a Republican. And that glue—it just didn’t seem to be as clearly there, or to the extent that it did exist in the past. And I think that it’s not that there was nothing there. It was both less pervasive—because the voters were not as engaged with all the political issues—and less encompassing. There were fewer issues that were soaked into it, whereas increasingly everything, even what kind of car you drive, gets soaked into this.

Demsas: One question I can imagine someone having is, Why does this matter?Why would it matter if ideology is coming first? Why is that important to understand?

Noel: Well, I think one thing that’s important is: We tend to think if you take the opposite position and say, Parties—they’re just trying to win votes, and they don’t stand for anything, and they’ve come up with a menu of options just so that they can win your vote over, then when they tell you these are the things that they stand for, why do I believe that they care about them? Why is it important? They’re just going to say whatever they think matters that will get them reelected. And frankly, from a democratic standpoint, that’s fine, because they’re responding to voters, and so that’s good.

But there’s still a degree to which there is: Which voters are they responding to?and how you’re putting your coalition together and everything else. It’s a different story if you say, Look. Here’s a set of principles. This is a set of governing principles of how society ought to be organized. And the conservative set of principles is that we should rely less on government, and we should rely more on social structures, particularly religious and traditional social structures, and that’ll protect things. And if you’re struggling to get by, the problem is that there’s not enough faith and faith institutions in your life. And we should encourage that. As opposed to a different philosophy that is: Society has lots of different directions that people want to go. And what we ought to do is use government to try to make it possible for people to succeed in lots of different paths, even paths that some people don’t like. And the consequence of that is going to be that sometimes, if traditional ways are less popular in some places, they are going to fade away.

Those are two different visions about how the direction of things should be going. And it’s actually pretty useful as a voter to say, Which one of those visions makes more sense to you? And it also tells you something that, when the politicians are in power doing what they’re doing, you can get a feel for the things that they’re going to do and the attitudes they’re going to take, even outside on new issues that you don’t know where they’re going. And so, if you know that, Okay. These people care about—they’re mostly interested in trying to address structures that are unfair and try to find ways to help the less well-off to be more successful, and then there’s a new less well-off that emerges—like, say, transgender rights or something—then you’re like, Okay. That’s the side that they’re going to be on. And it’s not an issue now, but I know what I think about it, and I can figure out where I’m going to slot into it.

One example that I like to think about a lot is the development of the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act—it’s pretty clearly the kind of thing that Democrats would have liked to have done. They talked about trying to reform health policy for a long, long time. And it certainly has an electoral incentive, right? I’m going to do this thing, and people are going to vote for it.

But actually, after the Affordable Care Act went through, a lot of Democrats lost their seats. And they lost their seats, in part, because of a backlash to the Affordable Care Act. You can start to piece this apart. And there’s some evidence that if you were from a close district and you took this risk, it cost you. I think they knew that it was going to cost them or, at least, that there was a risk there. But they cared about the issue, right? The policy—

Demsas: Yeah. Tom Perriello ran for governor in Virginia after having lost his seat explicitly in order to vote for the Affordable Care Act.

Noel: Exactly. Exactly. And so doing that, making that decision—it’s because they believed in this set of principles. It’s not just, I’m going to choose whatever, because if all you do is whatever will get you reelected, then you don’t take that stand. So it’s a different picture about what politics is about and about what the role politicians are in that, at least in my mind, casts them in a little bit more principled place.

And for that reason, I think that it matters a little bit. There’s an actual substance to the difference between the Democrat and Republican Party. They change, and it evolves, and you’ve got to keep up with it. But when you’re voting for one or the other, it’s not just who managed to come up with the best package. But there are different visions or, at least, different coalitions, and you, as a voter, should be able to figure out which of those two coalitions you belong in.

 

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Demsas: After the break, what all this means for the modern-day Republican and Democratic coalitions.

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Demsas: One thing I want to ask you about is: How do regular people’s beliefs fit into your model here, right? Because as you said, if you read interviews with regular voters, they often don’t seem to map onto the parties very well, or they seem largely nonideological, or sometimes they’re articulating very competing viewpoints in the same sentence even, on times. There’s one world in which their inputs into elite ideology—because even elites trying to shift policy one direction understand the constraints that regular people who are voting are putting on their own ideas.

There’s another in which lead argumentation is trickling down and moving people and sorting them eventually. So you don’t think a lot about politics, but you trust, I don’t know, like, Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow, or you trust Rush Limbaugh or whoever it is, and therefore you’re just following what they’re saying, and saying, This is what people who generally have my values are thinking. But are they just then experiencing it? Are they also inputs? How do they fit into this?

Noel: Yeah. I think this is a place where the idea of a coalition really matters a lot. It’s definitely true: Most voters are not very ideological. Kalmoe and Kinder have this nice book on the degree to which voters are “innocent of ideology,” is the phrase that they use.

Demsas: Or guilty.

Noel: Or guilty. (Laughs.) But they don’t know about it. And that’s not a factor for what affects them, for most voters. But most voters do know some idea of what groups in society they are closer to and which groups in society are not. People have an idea of what their own identity is.

And so if you can figure out the things that matter to you, which party those mapped you to—if you’re a fundamentalist traditional conservative in the rural South, it’s not hard to figure out which party thinks what you do and what you care about are really important, and which party thinks it’s not so important—and that’s all you need to care about. You don’t need to know about anything else.

And then the people who are doing the work on the ideology—they’re including that. They’re saying, Well, part of what shapes my conservative view is that this stuff should be important, and also some other stuff that needs to be important and everything else. And so if all of those voters suddenly started caring about something else, then the intellectuals and the party-coalition builders and everyone else would have to say, I’m going to respond to that change that those folks have.

Of course, people don’t have sudden changes too often. They have slow changes, and you can track it. But actually, abortion politics is a pretty good example of this, where it just wasn’t on anyone’s radar. And then Roe comes down, and this large group of people says, Wait a minute. I didn’t realize this was a political question. And then, all of a sudden, there’s this fire up for that. And that shaped and changed what it means to be conservative in that way. And so at the same time that the parties are shifting their ideological context, all the pieces are moving, but that’s responsive to some voters.

So I think some ordinary voters, ordinary citizens have influence, but it’s mostly through the identities and interests that they care about. And you get to choose, of course, because everyone has lots of things that they care about, but you find the things that matter the most to you, and then those shape how you connect to politics. And the bundling of the whole coalition is something that maybe not a very many people see, but a lot of people do. And then what’s trickling down isn’t just what attitude you want to take but which coalition you should be part of. And sometimes that can be—it’s a shortcut, right? So it can be messy.

Demsas: I think it’s also interesting to think about the way that elites are also disciplined by mass public’s tolerance for different views, right? Because I think about this with immigration a lot. Immigration is a place where you do end up getting kind of a bipartisan consensus that, It’s good for growth. We don’t expect this to affect native-born wages. We’re going to have a quiet, sort of hush-hush—we get that people really don’t like it at the ground, but we need to do it.

Trump really breaks this. He’s like, I actually noticed that a lot of people on the ground—despite the elite attempts to make this and pass it by the population—are not okay with immigration, and I’m going to ride that to victory in the White House.

And so my question for you then is: In what way are elites beholden, then, still? Because it seems for a long period of time, people were able to ignore the fact that a lot of people didn’t like it. It just wasn’t a voting issue enough to push a party to denounce this ideological belief that they had. But then it broke. And so are there some other limits to what can happen here? Is it not just that the grassroots is taking in the coalition signals from the coalition merchants—they are also forcing on the coalition merchants some sorts of constraints?

Noel: Yeah. There’s a good question about exactly on that issue: Who’s the first mover there? And I think it’d be wrong to say—you can definitely find lots of intellectuals making the case against immigration and making the case that the Republican Party ought to be more of a working-class party. But by working class, we mean, working-class Americans who are here already—

Demsas: Native-born. Yeah.

Noel: And maybe especially white, but particularly, at least, people who are still here already and will protect that. And so there’s a number of conservative scholars who are making that argument over the past couple of decades, that there’s that sort of way of thinking about the direction. And so you could argue—I wouldn’t argue this, but you could argue—that, Oh, well. Trump is just picking up on this thing that was already being shaped in that direction. I think it’s a little bit more than that. I think that Trump himself just believes that this is whatever—Trump seems often to bounce around. He doesn’t have a clear set of policy beliefs on lots of domains—

Demsas: Not immigration.

Noel: But one area that he’s very clear that he really cares about is things about immigration and trade and the U.S. position in the world this way. And so he pushes on it. And there was this group of people who were untapped that could be led in that direction.

The interesting question would be: Let’s say Trump loses in 2016. Or let’s say, after 2020, he decides to go away. Would that new Republican coalition that cares more about immigration and maybe a little bit less about the traditional attitudes about class—although it’s still a little complicated there because the new Republican attitude toward the working class isn’t, Stronger labor unions and more benefits. It’s, The way to help this group is to fight immigration, and so forth. But will this thing dominate? Will J. D. Vance be the future of the Republican Party if and when Trump is no longer a figure? And, of course, the longer he’s a player, the more that this becomes the stable part, so the counterfactual: What happens if he weren’t there? Would they have snapped back to something else?

Demsas: But also maybe he was there because there would always have been someone to take advantage of this.

Noel: Exactly. Yeah. And I think that that is probably more likely, that there was this growing tension within the Republican Party and within the conservative movement between people who were—this is the Republican autopsy after 2012. You know, We should be more inclusive, including on immigration. And that’s why Romney lost. And that’s what we need to address, versus the other, No. This is a group of people, maybe like southern whites in the middle of the last century, that you can afford to lose to get the benefits of all these white, working-class, northern, midwestern, rural voters.

And that’s a fine trade-off to make. And they’re like, Will they go? Will they go? And the fact that there’s this argument that’s tying it together probably helps. But how much of that argument do we want to give credit to Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat and the folks who have made that argument, and how much is it just, Well, Trump capitalized on this thing, and so now it’s turning?

I do think that the fact that the working-class appeal of the current Republican Party is built around things like immigration, as opposed to built around concrete benefits to working-class folks, like government benefits—it’s a stress point, a testing point. How much does this really appeal to working-class voters? Or is it really about defining the working class as people who don’t have a college education but might be economically just fine?

But there’s a thing there that—to get back to the original question—there is a thing there that is constraining the politicians of how much they can do. I do think that there’s an intellectual conversation that’s shaping it, but it’s not driving it all by itself, certainly not.

Demsas: I think that’s something we’ve been hinting at a lot in this conversation is that there’s this realignment that appears to be happening right now in both parties, at least since 2016: Racial depolarization, I think, is something that people have started to hear about a lot more.

I don’t want to overstate this—Black voters, for instance, still are solidly Democratic voters—but Democrats are now at their weakest with nonwhite voters since the 1960s. That’s pretty dramatic. I think that that’s not what people were expecting when Obama was running for office. There was all this talk about this unbeatable coalition that would come about once you had racial minorities as a majority of the voting base, in general.

And so, obviously, this is something that requires a lot of study. We’re all debating a lot here. But do you have a theory about whether there are preexisting coalition merchants that have been pushing this? And maybe not specific people, but are there specific arguments that you see as having led to getting more racial minorities willing to vote for Republicans? Particularly with what you mentioned with Black voters, who—I mean, it has been a source of deep American identity that Black voters are Democrats.

Noel: Yeah. I think part of it is just: The degree to which that identity is there erodes as you get further and further away from the civil-rights movement. When the politicians that you’re voting for and that you’re imagining and centering are people like John Lewis, then, of course, that is the center. And there was the fight that he did, and, I’m going to continue that.

And now that there’s some distance, and the voters don’t remember this, because they’re younger, then the connection to that particular alignment—and now they’re like, There’s some other things that might matter. And there’s more Black role models, to stick to that example, who are in the Republican Party, and it might be something to look at.

So part of the way in which that was reinforced is fading into the distance. But I think it’s more about the degree to which, for many liberals and Democrats, the connection between the appeal to Black voters and the appeal working-class voters is to assume that they’re the same thing. And so, If you’re Black, of course you have to vote for the Democratic Party. But it’s not the same. This was a thing that came up in 2016, when sometimes the language coming out of both Bernie Sanders and the rest of his campaign sometimes talked about race in that way, where he would move smoothly into talking about class. And the opposition, to him, within the party was like, No. It’s not just about class.

Demsas: Yeah. What was the Hillary line? Breaking up the banks doesn’t end racism, or something like that.

Noel: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And then this idea of like, What are you going to do for Black Americans? And you’d start talking about labor unions. And there’s a break there. And bottom line is there’s a ton of Black voters who identify and think as conservatives, except for on some small set of racial issues, and even then, maybe not always. And so once you can break the connection for them that they’re supposed to vote for this party, then the actual party that is more ideologically consistent with them might be the Republican Party.

In order for that to really play out, I think you really do need the Republican Party to back off of some of the more extreme racist elements of the discourse. Like, the conversation about Springfield is a barely hidden conversation about, These people are not part of our community, even though they’re legal immigrants, because of stuff that—it’s hard to get past that. But once you move from that—and to make it more about, Well, it’s about national origin. And it’s about investment in the community—and you separate that, you can see where there’d be a different kind of conversation.

Demsas: We saw that in Chicago when there was a lot of anger about how badly the migrant resettlement was handled there, and you saw folks who were having to sleep on the floor of police stations, and it caused a lot of disorder in the city. And a lot of Black Chicagoans were very angry, and they were like, Why are resources being spent on these people rather than us? And it was a different sort of coalition you could see emerging there that’s not the traditional Democratic one.

Noel: That’s right. This is why it’s not obvious that it’d be the coalitions that we’re used to, that things can be organized in lots of different ways. And the argument for why you can make an appeal to working-class whites on the grounds that, The real enemy is not your bosses or the rich people—it’s the immigrants. That same logic can apply very easily to working-class Black voters, and say, The real enemy is not white voters, and it’s not the power structures. It’s these people who are coming in who are changing things around.And that’s a completely coherent argument.

I think that the way that you hear this in play in politics doesn’t always carefully avoid shifting into—people are revealing their true beliefs that maybe there’s something more than just, It’s not just illegal immigration. It’s any immigration. There’s a little bit of that that’s still present. But both as message discipline gets better, but also as people who care, really, only about immigration and are not actually motivated by the fear of the changing demographics, per se—those people start to be the ones who are talking—you can see the Republican coalition changing in the way that it structures itself.

Demsas: And at the core of a lot of your arguments is that ideas matter, right? The arguments you’re making in public matter. Rationalizations matter. Fact-checks matter. And all of these go into forming a sort of coherent worldview. And that’s really oppositional to a dominant cynical view, which is: None of this stuff is important. Everything is, really, just the material and demographic economic shifts that are going on, and that determines everything downstream of that. And you’re not rejecting that those things are important, but you’re finding this kind of role for ideas.

And do you view centering ideas as the central purpose of your work? Do you see trying to get people to care more about the arguments you’re making in public and take that seriously?

Noel: To some degree, yeah. Caring more about ideas, but also caring about—it’s an argument that ideas matter, but at least this argument is a particular way in which ideas matter, right? It’s not an argument that says, You make a compelling case for why immigration should be encouraged, that’s then going to affect people. I think that may actually be true that if you make such a compelling case, that would be influential.

But the argument in the book is: If you make a compelling case that we should be increasing immigration and that the United States becomes stronger because of a multiethnic background, etcetera, etcetera, and you link that to the other liberal positions that you had before—about why it’s important to have reproductive rights and rights for women, and why it’s important to have economic protections for working-class citizens—and that those things all go together, and that they’re related. They don’t have to go together. We were just talking about how they might not. But you make this case that those go together—and maybe even don’t explain why they go together, although I think people do, but just the same people saying both things—eventually, people start, Okay. That’s part of what it means to be a Democrat. That’s part of what it means to be a liberal. And so I care about those things. And I’m going to fight for them all together. And I can fight for just the ones that I care about, but I know that if I care about the other things—or I just do a little bit to help along those other things—that’s a really good signal for my coalition that there’s progress there.

So in some ways, I definitely think it’s true that I’m trying to argue that ideas matter. But I think I’m also trying to argue that coalitions matter, and that the people who are on your team matter a lot. I always like to say: If you’re, say, a pro-life person, and a politician walks into the room, and the only thing that they tell you is that they are pro-choice, but you’re pro-life, and also, you’re a Democrat and everything the other way, this person—the only thing they’ve told you is that they disagree with you on something that matters. But actually, that’s who you should vote for, because you’re a Democrat, and probably they’re a Democrat because of all that.

So knowing how those coalitions are held together is meaningful, I think. Politics really is a team sport, and who’s on your team matters. What ideology does that is really interesting is it makes those teams stand for something in a way that NFL teams don’t stand for something, even though it’s also a team.

Demsas: It’s funny. The way in which I feel like so much of this has affected my own thinking about politics is around noble lies, right? It’s, like, this idea that there’s a good kind of lie you should do to either pacify the population, or if you’re trying to make sure—a lot of people view Trump as a threat to democracy beyond the normal right-left thing—and so the idea that you should just say whatever needs to be said in order to make sure that he does not end up in office, whether or not you believe that’s true or not true.

And it’s almost like people will justify this behavior as, like, Everyone knows what we’re doing. We’re just trying to win. We’re trying to get elected, and don’t really think through the long-run implications of inculcating sorts of ideas and coalitions together. And you see a lot of backlash from people who do view that, right?

I think this is really clear with—recently, Kamala Harris had Liz Cheney at an event with her. And she’s obviously worried about the perception that she’s too liberal and progressive. She’s trying to inoculate herself against attacks that she’s taken on very far-left positions from 2019. So she is doing these events with Republicans and bringing them in. And you see people who were very opposed to what Liz Cheney represents, just this kind of centrist Republican, but also this praise to her father, Dick Cheney, who they see as someone who is a warmonger, very antithetical to Democratic positions.

And setting aside whether or not the strategic decision here makes sense or not, I think there’s a lot of people who often underrate the long-term impact of saying, Actually, we are in a coalition with Liz Cheney, something like that—whether or not you think that’s good, whether or not that will be impactful beyond just getting you elected this cycle. I don’t know how you think about that.

Noel: Yeah. I think that’s exactly the dynamics playing out right now. It’s very relevant to all of this. And I think one of the things that’s interesting—I happened to be in Chicago for the DNC. And so I was actually there listening to the speeches, so it wasn’t just on in the background—and they had a lot of Republicans come and speak at the convention, and then, people like Liz Cheney speaking now.

One of the things that a lot of them say when they speak is, I don’t agree with all of you in this room. I’m not a Democrat. I’m not going to vote for the Democrat, but I’m going to do this. And I think that’s really important for both sides of the story. It’s important for the appeal of Republicans to say, Look. Voting for Kamala Harris doesn’t make you a Democrat. As a part of that message, reaching out to those folks, it’s important in that direction.

But it’s also important for the Democrats to say, We’re not just welcoming all these people into our coalition, and then they’re going to have a stake, right? They know that they are joining and backing Harris because they care about this bigger-picture thing, and they’re going to go back to being out of our coalition and perhaps fighting against us in the next round of things. Because you could have the opposite problem, where you invite people into the coalition, and then they change what the coalition stands for, which is exactly what I think people are worried about. And that’s the long-term, dangerous thing.

The story that I think of that fits this really well is actually a story from Canadian politics. During the height of the Tea Party in the United States, there was also a Tea Party, if you will, in Alberta, in Canada—the Wildrose Party. And it was this much more extreme, conservative party. And Alberta is the Texas of Canada, so this is driven by oil money. It was all very, very similar.

And part of the reason why that party emerged is that the sort of center-right party that existed was being infiltrated by all of these liberals, because it was the only party that could win. Just like the Republican Party is the only party that could win in Texas, the conservative party was the only party that could win in Alberta. And so all these liberals or centrists coming from the left would join that party because that’s the only way to get elected. But then, as a consequence, they were pulling the center of gravity of that party towards the center, and then all these people defected.

And so you don’t want that, especially if you’re on the farther end.

Demsas: Yeah.

Noel: So if you’re more ideologically liberal, you don’t want the Democratic Party to move towards Liz Cheney. You’ll take her vote, but you don’t want to move this direction. And it’s hard to do that. All that nuance—I don’t know how long I was just rambling there—but a lot of nuance there to communicate quickly: These people are going to vote in our coalition this one time only. And we don’t expect them to stick around. They don’t expect to stick around. And we’ll go back to having our principal disagreements after we save democracy, so to speak.

Demsas: I just don’t think that it’s real. Honestly, I look at the Never Trumpers, and I think they are more pro-Democrat than many Democrats, you know what I mean? People like Bill Kristol, where you’re just like, This was a voice that I thought was very similar to the Liz Cheney voice right now, where he’s like, I’m for the Democrats. But now it’s like he is all on Team Blue. And, again, I think it depends from what vantage point you think whether that’s positive or negative. A lot of people think that’s a positive development. You want to get more people in, but if you’re on the far left, that feels very scary because you’re like, Where is this power coming from?

And I think one thing that is interesting is how much of this story or this model you have is constrained to a specific time period when media functioned in the sort of gatekeepery way. And now it seems very, very hard to even get to stable coalition equilibriums, because anyone can become a coalition merchant. And really quickly, the speed with which there are individuals who become influencers in public and are affecting how people think about who’s on their team and who’s not, it’s remarkable. Over the course of a year, there’s, like, five or six names that will come in and out that will be really important for a moment and then go away in terms of how people think about politics. And so I wonder how you think about your model shifting in the social media age.

Noel: Yeah. There’s a reason why I finished the book and ended when I did and didn’t extend things in further. And part of it’s just—it would be very difficult. It’s much less tractable when you can’t say, Here are the publications we’re going to focus on, and that’ll be a good representation. And now you’ve got to look at everything.

In some ways, it might be easier. Like, if you can tap into the Twitter firehose and somehow filter it, which some people do. But it’s a lot, just a different dynamic. And you don’t have a good sense of how influential is somebody on Twitter? How many followers they have is one thing, but that’s not the same as: How much are their followers paying attention to their particular positions? Or is it because of the other cat pictures that they post or whatever else?

I do think there’s a change there. I think that, in many ways, it probably makes the role of this conversation bigger, because more people are paying attention to it, and more people can participate in it. But what it also means is that the poles of the conversation are more complicated and harder—like, sort of, Well, there’s just a left and a right.

You’ve got this sort of, like, “woke Bill Kristol” conversation. And I think he and a lot of Never Trumpers are moving all the way over, and they’re in this place. And that is going to just change. That’s going to be a realignment, eventually. They’re not comfortable identifying as Democrats, in the same way that Southern Democrats weren’t comfortable identifying as Republicans in the mid-20th century. But eventually, they got over it. And this may happen here, too, and then that may mean a change.

I think the big difference is that so much of what defined the Never Trumpers’ attitudes about politics before Trump was some pretty conservative stuff that the Democratic Party isn’t going to champion. They might be a little more tolerant of—or they might not push as far—but they’re really not going to embrace that, which is to say: Bill Kristol has changed his attitude about a lot of stuff. He appears to care more about racial and gender inequality than he would have done 15 years ago.

Demsas: Yeah.

Noel: One thing that it does touch on that perhaps is really significant is that it’s more obvious just how many different clusters there are, as opposed to just a Democratic and Republican cluster. I think there’s always been the potential for multiparty democracy in the United States. There’s always been multiple coalitions that are at play. Middle of the 20th century, when we have this tension within the Democratic Party, the easiest solution would have been just to split the Democratic Party and have three parties.

And, in fact, sometimes that’s what it looks like is going on in Congress. But that pressure is here, and a lot of people are talking about it. And so I could easily see a fracturing of the parties, especially if we have some institutional changes that accommodate that better. And the social media environment makes that potential clear in a way that it might not have been clear before.

Demsas: People often say, We have just as many diverse opinions as other countries. But all of that organization is happening—it’s just happening within the Democratic Party. There is a green faction.

Noel: Yes. Exactly.

Demsas: There is a far-left socialist faction. They’re just all organizing before the nomination, rather than after the nominations have it.

Well, this has been a great conversation, but always our final question, which is: What is an idea that you had that you thought was good at the time but ended up only being good on paper?

Noel: Actually, just jumping off this last conversation about multiparty democracy in the ideological space—there’s this literature that says the reason you get multiple parties in other democracies is that you have all these different divisions, dimensions of politics, and that, therefore, when you only have two parties, it’s because everything is just one dimension.

When I first came across that, I said, That doesn’t sound right to me. It sounds like we have lots of divisions in the United States, too. It’s just that maybe some of them are lined up with each other, and then some of them get organized in the party system. And so, really, it’s about the institutions that seem to matter, rather than the underlying structure of preferences.

And I still think that. But I had an idea that the way that you can test this is to look at how strong and how important the left–right ideological spectrum is across different democracies, and how many parties they have. And the argument, the expectation, would be that in a multiparty democracy, you’d actually have a stronger, left–right dimension, because with more parties to help define what the polls are about, then it would really tie things together. Whereas, with just two parties, you can just make it be, Well, it’s the two parties, and you don’t really need to have the ideological organization. And I actually still think that’s true, even though that’s the case.

But when I went about, and I actually wrote a paper in which using the methods that were in the paper showed that that was the case, that there is this pattern. And then I came back to it again, more recently, and made better choices, also had more recent data. And it got messy, to the point that it’s not so clear. And I think it really illustrates, if you say, That idea that looks good on paper, but it doesn’t pan out, oftentimes, the world is complex. Most of the answers that we get from social sciences aren’t, You’re wrong, but actually, It’s messier than you think, and we don’t know. We don’t know the answer.

And so, of course, we don’t know the answer means that you don’t end up publishing anything. You don’t end up saying anything, which is unfortunate sometimes, but is the right direction. And social science is hard because these concepts that we talk about—democracy and pragmatism and everything else, ideology—they’re easy to discuss, but the concrete measurement of them, let alone concrete measurement in a way that can be connected to other things, is really difficult.

Demsas: Yeah. I’m Team Journals Should Publish and Should Venerate Null Findings because I just feel like we’re losing so much information. Also, it penalizes people for taking risks. And then you’d say, Oh, you’ve hurt your career, instead of going the way that you could have—found an easy causal identification strategy and then just found something. And it just really pushes research in one direction when the hard questions in social science are, How do you measure persuasiveness? You can’t vary the amount of democracy in each state. That would be impossible and unethical for various reasons.

Well, thank you so much, Hans, for coming on the show.

Noel: Thanks for having me. This was a great conversation. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Jerusalem.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jerusalem Demsas is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

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Author: Editors Desk, Jerusalem Demsas

Source: The Atlantic

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