In today’s New York Times, Rob Flaherty, who was Kamala Harris’ deputy campaign manager, argues that Democrats lose “opt-out voters,” people who distrust all politicians and all traditional media and who obtain their politically relevant information from other sources, such as online influencers or real-life contacts who follow the influencers. These “opt-outs” may start out looking for tips on health or nutrition or relationships or gaming (not politics), but they find their way to right-wing propaganda.
I can support some of these generalizations with data from the 2020 American National Election Study. (I don’t think 2024 data are available yet). For example:
61.5% of strong Republicans and 5.5% of strong Democrats expressed no trust in the media.
26% of strong Republcans and 8% of strong Democrats fully agreed that “Much of what people hear in schools and media are lies by those in power.”
6% of strong Republicans and 30% of strong Democrats trusted experts much more than ordinary people for public policy.
Of those who said they did not follow the 2020 campaign using any source listed on the survey, 57% said they intended to vote for Trump; 27% for Biden.
It would be possible to overstate this problem. If most Americans only got information from unreliable influencers, then Trump’s approval rating would not have declined across most of the population in 100 days, before his tariffs and cuts had directly affected many people. If influencers had persuaded everyone to hate civil servants and researchers, then DOGE’s personnel cuts would not be as unpopular as they are. Evidently, many non-Democrats are seeing hard news. Nevertheless, Flaherty’s diagnosis is important.
His recommendation is to build an alternative media environment that carries people from “culture” (their interests in regular things like health or relationships) to liberal political ideas.
I doubt this approach is realistic, and it creates more of conflict or even contradiction for the institutionalist center-left than it does for the MAGA right (or, indeed, for the radical left). Basically, it asks liberals who believe in institutions to use anti-institutionalist means, which looks hypocritical and may prove impossible.
Here is an alternative: People have reasons to trust big, impersonal systems only when the human representatives of those systems relate to them well. For example, I trust the mainstream scientific views of vaccines and climate change not because I understand all the science, but because human beings who represent science as an institution–my own k12 and college teachers, doctors and nurses, and now my academic colleagues–have generally earned my trust. They relate to me with respect, as a fellow citizen.
Actually, not even scientists understand the science, because the necessary knowledge exceeds any person’s capacity (and much of it is built into instruments and software and datasets that each user must simply trust). But some of us have confidence in the whole process because we have benefitted from most of the moments when it has touched us directly.
The sociologist Anthony Giddens calls this process “re-embedding”: contacts between abstract systems and ordinary people via professionals who represent the systems. To be honest, I have never read a significant amount of Giddens, but I take his vocabulary from a relevant article by Mills and St Clair (2025).
The employees who are points of contact between abstract systems and regular people include teachers and professors (and educational administrators), doctors and nurses, lawyers and police officers, local elected officials, and reporters.
Americans have widely differing experiences with these professionals and varying grounds for trust. If you are at risk of being stopped and harassed by the police on account of your race, you do not have a reason to trust the criminal justice system. If your doctor dismisses your concerns, or you can’t even afford to see one, then you have less reason to trust the health sciences. If you can’t get into college, can’t afford the tuition, or experience contempt for your home culture in a college classroom, then our trust in academia is bound to fall. If your kids’ k12 school is failing–or if it seems driven by standardized curricula and tests and there’s no way for parents to engage–then you have reasons to be skeptical of schools.
For center-left institutionalists, I don’t think there’s any shortcut. In an environment where it pays to attract outrage by attacking abstract systems, we must make these systems as accountable, caring, and interactive as possible so that people will have reasons to trust them more.
The goal is for people’s “influencers” to be their own kids’ teachers, their doctors, and the reporters for their local newspaper (among others). This requires not just encouraging them to trust people who often have more education, power, and income than they do, but also making these professionals more consistently trustworthy.
My colleagues at CIRCLE have issued a report with Protect Democracy that is based on a nationally representative sample of citizens between 18 and 29 that they conducted soon after last fall’s election.* At the heart of the study is a categorization of young American citizens into three groups. In the words of the report, these groups are characterized by:
Passive Appreciation: The majority of youth (63%) value the basic values and practices of democracy, but they are relatively disengaged from civic action and may be passive in the face of current threats to democracy.
Dismissive Detachment: Nearly a third of young people express lower support for core democratic principles; they are “checked out” of a democracy that has not served them well or met their needs.
Hostile Dissatisfaction: A small (7%) but significant number of young people believe in the principles of our system of government, but are extremely dissatisfied with our democracy as it exists today, and they are willing to consider political violence in order to achieve change.
The first group is relatively likely to be conservative (or perhaps less likely to be on the left) and less likely to be queer. Members of this group not very involved with civic actions like volunteering and protesting.
Those who exhibit “dismissive detachment” tend to have less education and are more likely to be people of color. They “are less likely to value the basic principles of democracy such as free and fair elections, the protection of civil rights, and bipartisan cooperation.” They are more hostile to people who disagree with them and feel less efficacious in politics. They have the lowest media literacy and other civic skills.
People in the “hostile dissatisfaction” group are more likely to be on the left and more likely to be queer. “Youth with this profile do tend to value the principles and rights of our democracy, scoring slightly above average in those areas. But they have very low confidence in democracy as they are experiencing it today.” They express strongly negative views of people with the opposite political ideology, which could be labeled “affective polarization.” They are the most engaged in political action and also the most favorable to violence.
You can read the whole report here. It offers important insights for anyone who provides civic engagement and civic learning to young people in this moment.
*Apau, D., Suzuki, S., Medina, A., Booth, R.B. (March, 2025). How Does Gen Z Feel About Democracy? Insights from Three profiles of Youth and Democracy. CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) & Protect Democracy.
I believe that left parties should draw their votes from lower on the socio-economic hierarchy, so that they can compete by offering more governmental support. Right parties should draw their votes from the upper end, so that they can compete by promising economic growth. This debate and competition is healthy.
In contrast, when left parties draw from the top of the social order, they tend to offer performative or symbolic policies, while the right promises low-SES voters some version of ethnonationalism. This debate is unhealthy because it blocks more effective and fair social policies, and it sets the right on a path whose terminus can be fascism.
Education is a marker of social class. We saw a social class inversion in the US 2024 election, with Harris getting 56% of college graduates and Trump getting 56% of non-college-educated adults.
Nowadays, we are used to assuming that Republicans have an advantage in the Electoral College because they are dominant in the states with the lowest percentages of college gradates, while Democrats win easily in the most educated states. But the opposite should be true.
I am fully aware that race is involved in the USA. Recently, less-educated white voters have formed the Republican base, whereas voters of color have preferred Democrats, regardless of their social class. However, in 2024, we saw a significant shift of low-education voters of color toward Trump.
Besides, race plays different roles in various countries, but many countries display a trend of lower-educated people preferring the right and moving in that direction .
The World Values Survey has periodically surveyed populations in 102 countries since 1989, for a total sample of almost half a million individuals in the dataset that I used for this post. The WVS asks most respondents to place themselves on a left-right spectrum, and the global mean is somewhat to the right of the middle. It also asks people their education level. For the entire sample, the correlation between these two variables is slightly negative and statistically significant (-.047**). In about two-thirds of sampled countries, the correlation is negative. This pattern is upside-down, suggesting the people with more education tilt mildly to the left around the world.
However, considering the heterogeneity of the countries and years in this sample (from Switzerland in 1989 to India in 2023), it is important to break things down.
The graph with this post shows the correlations for wealthy countries with democratic elections: the EU countries, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. A positive score indicates that people lower on the educational spectrum are more likely to vote left. The trend is slightly downward, meaning that the highest-educated have moved a bit left (and the lowest have moved right).
Among the countries that have recently demonstrated a class reversal (with the lower classes voting right) are Australia, Canada, Greece, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, the UK and the USA. Czechia and Slovakia are the main exceptions. In Japan and South Korea, less educated people have consistently favored the right to a small degree.
By contrast, for a sample of Latin American and Caribbean countries, the trend has generally been toward what I consider the desirable pattern, with lower-educated people increasingly voting left. The mean for all voters in this region is distinctly left of center.
In a cluster of countries that were part of the Warsaw Pact and are not now members of the EU, the trend is flat. Interestingly, in these countries, the mean voter is on the right.
Finally, the WVS surveys in some countries from the Global South–from Bangladesh to Zimbabwe-but these countries do not seem representative of the whole hemisphere. For what it’s worth, the trend for this sample is just slightly upward, and the results vary a great deal among countries.
I am still in the “deliverism” camp, believing that left parties have not delivered sufficient tangible benefits to less advantaged voters since the 1990s. (One explanation could be their dependence on affluent voters, who do not really want them to do much.) Achieving more tangible change could turn things right-side-up again.
However, it should give us pause that the Biden Administration actually spent trillions of dollars in ways that will benefit working-class Americans, yet Trump won and drew an increasing proportion of lower-educated voters of color. The “deliverist” thesis now depends on the premise that Biden-Harris had too little time and suffered from post-COVID inflation.
Meanwhile, if your premise is that US working-class voters moved right due to (increasing?) racism and sexism, you need an explanation of similar trends in many countries, including some without substantial ethnic minorities.
Last Monday, I gave a talk at Colgate University. I claimed that if you read a lot of mainstream survey research, you’re likely to conclude that “people are stupid and they hate each other,” but this negative assessment reflects some bias. A student, Colgate senior Clementina Aboagye, told Maddie Koger of the Colgate Maroon-News:
“I think it was important that we had someone like Peter Levine who comes from an institution like Tufts University to present us [with the idea] that as much as we may disagree with each other, we still have complexities in how we think — that it’s important we search for gray areas because politics isn’t so black and white,” Aboagye said. “Those gray areas are important for us to not only converse about, but also to give each other space to speak — even when we don’t agree, because we can’t always agree — and we live in a world where people’s experiences and access to things determine what kind of ways in which they think — that deserves consideration.”
The very next day, a majority of American voters chose Donald Trump, concluding a campaign marked by polarized media, misinformation, hostility, and attacks (from one side) on basic liberal norms. Yet I still think there’s truth in the argument I offered at Colgate, which you could watch in full here.
The previous week, I had givenAmerican University’s annual Lincoln Scholars Lecture on “What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life.” Although my topic was quite different, this talk also offered a more positive view of civic life than one would glean by focusing only on an ugly and dangerous national election. According to Ridha Riyani’s summary in the AU Eagle newspaper, I said,
“We disagree because we care, and we need to do it better. …
[Levine] ended with a call to action, reminding attendees that civic life extends beyond national politics and requires thoughtful collaboration.
“In conversation, we can move towards greater wisdom,” Levine said. “We communities are capable of changing the rules.”
I would not argue now that all we need is to listen generously across differences and explore the complexity of other people’s views. We must also stand up against injustice. Confrontational nonviolent civil resistance was a major theme in my AU talk, and I have been preparing for a Trump victory for several years. Still, there remains a place for listening, bridge-building, and collaboration, and I strive to offer useful concepts and skills for those purposes.
My colleagues at CIRCLE (The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement) have already produced an incredible body of analysis of the 2024 youth vote. Overall, they find that youth turnout was higher than in past decades but lower than in 2020, and young adults supported the Democrats, but much more narrowly than previously.
I recommend all their work, but I’d like to discuss one pattern. It appears that being working-class predicted support for Donald Trump when holding race and gender constant, with the exception that young women of color supported Harris by the same amount, regardless of their social class. These trends are stronger for older Americans but still evident among the 18-29s.
(I interpret education as an indicator of social class. Especially for younger people, income is much less revealing. An MBA student might earn less current personal income than a mechanic of the same age.)
Young adults who have not attended college favored Trump by two-to-one, whereas those with postgraduate educations preferred Harris by 14 points. Nearly half (42%) of young Latinos without college experience chose Trump. Thirty-four percent of all young Black men favored him, a pretty remarkable increase that may also be related to social class.
I would be reluctant to explain this pattern by citing any specific policies of the Biden Administration or proposals of the Harris-Walz campaign, nor by criticizing the candidates or their rhetoric. This is because the same pattern–working-class voters supporting the right–has been evident recently in France, Germany, and the UK–the other democracies that I’ve studied–and was already strongly present in the USA in 2022.
My pet theory is that liberal or progressive parties prefer to regulate, because they can shift the costs to private entities and local governments. The regulated organizations then pass mandates on to workers and consumers, and the rules that originate in legislation are mixed together with all the things that companies require or prohibit for their own profit. The same department that tells workers not to use polluting chemicals also warns them not to take unauthorized work breaks. As a result, regulation that has social benefits looks like corporate monitoring, and progressives sound like the nation’s HR department or legal office. It doesn’t help that almost all Democratic elected officials are, in fact, lawyers or former managers.
My preferred alternative would be to spend public money to benefit workers, because that is a more direct and transparent way to achieve public purposes. However, the Biden Administration and congressional Democrats did authorize $1.9 trillion of new spending on green manufacturing (and microconductors) and reaped no apparent political gain.
Perhaps contingent factors interfered, such as the pandemic and the end of pandemic-related benefits, global inflation, and Joe Biden’s inability to make the case when it mattered. But the failure of nearly $2 trillion to move working-class opinion requires reflection. Unless something changes fast, the formative experiences of our rising generation will not incline them to progressive values.
The Internet is saturated with explanations of the 2024 election. Some of these “quick takes” are dispassionate, while others take the form: If only Harris had done what I know is right, she would have won.
The challenge is epistemic: it’s virtually impossible to explain a single past event that involves many decision-makers (in this case, about 150 million of them).
Explaining the decisions of a few powerful people is hard enough, but at least then we can use evidence about their individual values, goals, and personalities. For instance, we can investigate why Napoleon ordered the main assault at the Battle of Borodino in 1812. However, says Tolstoy,
It was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for none of his orders were executed and during the battle he did not know what was going on before him. So the way in which these people killed one another was not decided by Napoleon’s will but occurred independently of him, in accord with the will of hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action. It only seemed to Napoleon that it all took place by his will (War and Peace, 10:28)
It’s easier to explain the pattern displayed in a large set of cases (inductive reasoning). John Burn-Murdoch observes that every incumbent government in the world that has faced an election in 2024 has suffered major setbacks. John Sides argues that inflation lowered Biden’s approval rating, and the incumbent’s approval predicts reelection.
But these generalizations cannot explain the single event of the 2024 US presidential election. Generalizations inevitably involve variance, and 2024 is obviously anomalous. Should we even categorize Harris as the incumbent, when she was a vice president stepping in for a president and running against the previous president?
We can also look at patterns within the population to try to explain why individuals voted. For instance, Michael Tesler assembles evidence that few American women vote from gender solidarity and race consistently trumps gender as an explanation of voting.
This is a valid approach that will yield more precise insights once we have voter files and better survey analysis for 2024. But this method also has limitations for the purpose of explanation. As the (true) cliché reminds us, correlation is not causation. Besides, individuals vary in ways that are not captured in generic surveys. And we must distinguish carefully between two tasks: explaining why large numbers of people voted for each candidate, versus explaining the marginal change since 2020. Big blocs of the electorate vote predictably, yet much of the conversation is about changes at the margin. Our whole discussion would be different if Harris had won by 4 points instead of losing by less than one point, but either way, most people would have voted the same.
To emphasize the last point: I strongly suspect that a male Democrat would have fared no better than Kamala Harris, or even possibly worse. One of many pieces of supportive evidence is the fact that people whose survey answers indicated sexism already tended strongly to oppose Joe Biden in 2020 (Spencer 2021). I doubt that sexism explains the marginal change between 2020 and 2024, yet that hardly makes sexism irrelevant, since it helps to explain the 2020 baseline. Whether you feel that sexism is at stake may reasonably reflect your own depth of concern about misogyny in our society; this is not simply a statistical question. Put another way, whether you explain the result in terms of sexism depends on whether you are trying to a) combat misogyny or b) win an election. The explanation is relative to its purpose.
We might conclude that it is fruitless to make a model to explain any particular case. But that is exactly what we must do before we act. Even if there is no way to know now what would have happened had Harris acted differently, Harris and her team had to do something. In September, they needed a prospective model of the single case that confronted them: the election.
In 1903, Charles Sanders Peirce coined the term “abduction” (or “abductive judgment”) for the logic that explains a single case. Abduction is a pragmatic necessity because we always act in specific circumstances. In my view, valid abduction never depends on a single claim. There is no way to test whether one premise caused a given outcome in a given case. Rather, a good abduction consists of many linked components: a whole model. And it is appropriate for the model to contain facts, values, and strategies.
Thus, if you were Kamala Harris in September, you needed a coherent account of the current US electorate (facts), what you sought to achieve as a president (values), and how various messages and methods would affect the outcome (strategy). You had to guard against biases (believing facts because they confirmed your values), but you were entitled to bring your self into the analysis. For one thing, this was a model for how you should act, so it had to motivate you and your team and sound authentic coming from you.
We cannot tell which parts of Harris’ implicit model were right or wrong–and it remains possible that her model was as good as it could have been. But what we need now is a model to guide our own next steps.
Since I am not running for president, my model should not be designed for that purpose–although I might start armchair strategizing in 2026 or so. For now, I need a model that guides my actions as a concerned citizen during the Trump Administration. To a limited extent, my model might be guided by my retrospective assessment of the 2024 presidential campaign–but not by much. The main question, as always, is what should we do?
In July, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.” His statement reflected some bluster and hype, and Trump distanced himself from Heritage. Nevertheless, Roberts expressed a mood that will be shared by many–perhaps more than 1,000–new White House staff, senior federal appointees, allied members of Congress and staff, and ideological lobbyists. They will all be thinking hard about what to do to advance their “revolution.”
To plan a response, we should imagine what such people will do. Here is a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) assessment of the situation from the perspective of the second Trump Administration:
Strengths: Ability to make appointments, issue executive orders, negotiate with foreign governments, and command attention. Immunity from prosecution for all official acts and the power to pardon people who follow illegal orders. A compliant congressional GOP, a friendly Supreme Court, and some fawning media platforms. A claimed mandate from the election, and tens of millions of actual supporters.
Weaknesses: At this moment, the House remains in play. Democratic control would mean no laws or budgets without Democratic support. Even if Democrats lose the House, they will be able to filibuster legislation in the Senate. The economy looks healthy right now, but Trump’s tariffs and other economic proposals would cause inflation and/or contraction. MAGA true-believers will be tempted to introduce bills that are clearly unpopular.
Opportunities: Picking fights to establish dominance, discourage opposition, motivate supporters, and dare opponents to promote positions that many voters consider radical. If the opposition looks radical, many voters will perceive that politics is polarized, not that the president is extreme, and they may accept authoritarianism to “restore order.”
Threats: Trump voters include substantial subgroups who don’t really share his ideology but who believe that he is competent to deliver prosperity and order. (According to the exit polls, 31% of voters chose the economy as their top issue, and of those, 78% voted for Trump.) If he causes chaos and controversy, and many voters abandon him, he will become toxic for GOP candidates looking toward 2026. If a small group of GOP defectors in Congress join the Democrats, they can block Trump. If he loses the appearance of influence and momentum, he could quickly become a lame-duck (especially if he continues to display cognitive decline). If momentum swings strongly to the opposition, there will be opportunities to make the Supreme Court and other institutions more democratic, rather than less so.
Next, we might brainstorm specific moves that Trump may make in the early stages of his administration and think about counter-moves.
Their most pragmatic option would be to avoid prominent controversies while turning the quieter processes of the executive branch against immigrants and environmental programs. If Trump took that path, he might be able to avoid an energetic resistance and claim credit for the positive economy that he will inherit. He could play golf and retire in four years. But he and his people will be tempted to take riskier actions:
Appoint numerous radical supporters to senior positions. Perhaps give them all “acting” titles and not even request Senate confirmation, thus defeating the norm that political appointees require approval. They will cancel grants and contracts, slow-walk appropriations, fire civil servants, and direct funds to friendly groups and legislative districts. Much of this activity will be unreported, since the executive branch gets little coverage.
Negotiate privately with Putin, without a readout or meaningful public declaration. Offer Russia free scope in Ukraine and promise to block or sabotage US aid. Likewise, communicate privately with Netanyahu and encourage Israel to operate without limits in both the West Bank and Gaza.
Pardon all the January 6th insurrectionists. Convene them on the White House lawn. Possibly deputize them as federal agents or at least encourage them to organize as a private militia. If any of them commit violent crimes against protesters, journalists, or residents, immediately pardon them again. Deploy them to break up marches and demonstrations and to patrol the capital.
Order federal law enforcement and perhaps state national guards to detain immigrants in large numbers, hold them, and physically move them across the southern border.
Some counter-moves:
Large, regular, orderly marches that, as Bayard Rustin would recommend, are aimed at winning mass public support. At first, the main message should not be that Trump is illegitimate, since he won the election. Nor is this an opportunity to advance progressive policies, including those that I passionately support. Rather, the message should be opposition to specific things that Trump does that are both unpopular and illegal. The aim is to establish a legitimate counter-force in support of the Constitution and the rule-of-law. The priority is to preserve a system within which progressives (and others) are able to advocate their goals, not to accomplish those goals immediately. The larger and more diverse the protests, the better.
A mass walkout like the one that defeated the Kapp Putsch in Berlin in 1920 and preserved German democracy for more than a decade. That story makes important reading right now. I could envision Trump provoking a self-coup, much like the Kapp Putsch, even if he doesn’t really plan to do so. This could begin to happen if armed MAGA supporters exercise violent control in DC, perhaps in reaction to peaceful marches. However, a similar attempt failed in 1920 when Berliners refused to work in the face of a coup, the city shut down, and civilian resistance spread to regular military units. The Berlin work-stoppage did not begin with a formal strike but happened organically when frightened Berliners just stayed home.
Building organizations that allow many Americans to take concrete steps to protect democracy in a coordinated fashion.
Finally, some points about the movements that should form:
There should be no expectation that the opposition will coalesce into one big organization. For one thing, the Democratic Party will constitute part of the opposition, but not everyone will want to–or be able to–coordinate with any party. Besides, diversity and choice are valuable. We should expect opponents of Trump to hold diverse beliefs, from radical leftist ideals to genuinely conservative or libertarian values. It is important for people to be able to find groups in which they can feel reasonably comfortable.
On the other hand, the opposition will be weak if it consists of lots of evanescent, hyper-local, voluntary groups that have loose and shifting memberships. Such groups simply cannot accomplish much. In turn, a grassroots opposition will quickly lose momentum and confidence unless it enlists many Americans in tangible work that accomplishes victories.
The middle ground between one big organization and lots of ad hoc meetings is a widespread commitment to organize at medium scales. People need templates for forming small organizations that function and survive, including processes for selecting accountable leaders, making concrete decisions, and recruiting new members. Leaders of small groups should then seek each other out and form coalitions that, in turn, make decisions and elect accountable leaders for larger scales.
A healthy, broad-based nonviolent resistance movement will have leaders, but not just one or a few. It will be “leaderful,” and its best-known representatives will demonstrate some diversity.
I am in the camp that says that Kamala Harris ran a nearly flawless campaign, and she will make a plausible case to be renominated in 2028. But she cannot be the leader of a whole broad-based movement, if only because she is a potential presidential candidate. I would not be surprised to see a range of people from various sectors and walks of life gain prominence as part of a civil resistance. There is no need for them to agree in detail, but we will benefit if they communicate and come together at key moments.
As I have argued, successful movements need scale (lots of people), unity (the ability to coalesce), depth (some activists who develop impressive skills and networks), and pluralism (disagreement and dissent about many issues).
SPUD is hard to attain because combining unity with pluralism requires tolerance and patience within the movement; and combining scale with depth means finding ways for committed activists and peripheral supporters to collaborate. Nevertheless, good movements build SPUD.
One pitfall to avoid right now is debating whether Kamala Harris lost because she didn’t stand for what you believe–whatever that may be. Maybe you’re right (although it is always hard to prove such counterfactuals). If you’re planning a partisan political campaign for 2026 and 2028, you should think about why Trump won this time. But retrospective arguments will not help to build a citizens’ pro-democracy movement that includes people who both agreed and disagreed with Harris on key points.
To put it more bluntly: it’s alienating to be told that Trump won because Harris took a stance that one agrees with, and why alienate people whom we need? This was an election season of shifting “vibes,” and now we need the vibe to shift to unified resistance.
When brainstorming concrete actions for people to take, one option that is always worth considering is to send everyone out to conduct one-to-one meetings. In the tradition of relational organizing, these are not mainly about persuading individuals to endorse, support, or join the group. They are about genuine listening: learning what a range of people believe, experience, and care about. That said, whenever anyone demonstrates enthusiasm for the organization’s current vision, that person should be recruited to join.
I posted the graphic that accompanies this post immediately after the 2016 election, and it went a bit viral. (Thanks to my colleague Alberto Medina for improving its appearance.) Although the name “Obama” should be changed to “Biden,” and some other minor tweaks might apply, I think the diagram remains pertinent and is perhaps even more urgent today.
In Forbes yesterday, Meg Little Reilly paraphrases and quotes me:
American students are generally taught that the U.S. Constitution is unbreakable — which has been true, thus far—but this narrative reinforces the notion that if the Constitution were to fall, so too would the nation. For many Americans, everything that comes after political unrest is a “blank page,” according to [Peter] Levine. It’s a paradoxically fragile characterization of a country.
But this isn’t how civilizations or humans respond to political chaos. In reality, an existential challenge to the U.S. Constitution would trigger the next chapter, not the end. Preparing students with this more comprehensive understanding of human history could be constructive in November and long into the future.
Reilly also quotes my friend Emma Humphries from iCivics, who says, “Teachers are going to be a safe and steady presence for their students” in the aftermath of next week’s election, regardless of who wins and whether the outcome is resolved immediately.
I’d elaborate my comment as follows: Love it or hate it, the US Constitution is the oldest in the world. It suffered a catastrophic crisis in 1860, but the people who sought to preserve it won the ensuing Civil War. Although explicit amendments and subtler reinterpretations have changed the Constitution significantly, its stability has been evident. As a result, Americans are taught to assume that the document will always govern us–for the rest of our lives. We learn to equate the Constitution with the nation, as if it had constituted us as a people. Given this civic religion, a constitutional rupture sounds like the end of our history.
The prospect of a possible second Trump administration (which is, of course, very far from guaranteed) is causing people to mutter phrases like “Game over,” as if there would be no future for the republic if Trump wins and overrides constitutional limits.
I do fear a constitutional rupture or a period of deep constitutional instability, especially if the cause is an authoritarian presidency (no matter how competent). We could be much worse off than we are now, and the rest of the world is at risk as well. I do not want our system to break down.
However, it is an idiosyncratic US trait to view the Constitution as both fixed and fragile and to equate that document with the people and the nation. France has had five republics, two monarchies, two empires, a nascent commune, and a Quisling dictatorship during the period that our Constitution has stood.
French history is not enviable. More people were executed during the suppression of the Commune in 1871 than during the Terror of 1793-4, to name just two cruel episodes. Yet the French nation and people have demonstrated deep continuities, even when their formal system has changed.
Between the Second and Third Republics, Napoleon III ruled as a quasi-dictator. This was a betrayal of democratic rights and values, yet the republic in a deeper sense persisted. French history continued, and the French continued to influence their own state–as well, tragically, as the subjected peoples of their colonies. When Napoleon III won his rigged 1851 referendum, I doubt that many French people thought that the game was over. In fact, there were three more republics to come. And their history is far more typical than ours.
We Americans must be ready in case we have to use vocabulary and concepts that are familiar around the world: coups and auto-coups, oligarchs and juntas, Bonapartism, unrest and disorder, state media and oppositional media, states of emergency, security forces (and security-force defections), popular fronts, civil service strikes, general strikes, electoral boycotts, mass civil resistance, and constitutional restorations and re-foundings.
I devoutly that hope we experience none of these things, but if we do, it will be up to us to determine how they turn out. In that sense, the republic will still be ours, whether we can keep it consistently or not.
It’s easy to imagine that our fellow citizens see the same political news that we do, and yet many of them draw the opposite conclusions about the candidates. But this impression is only partly true. To a significant extent, prospective voters are seeing and hearing different things, depending on their parties and demographic groups. Specifically, the most inflammatory comments often reverberate most widely among a candidate’s opponents and hardly reach his supporters at all.
This point is well known, but it would be informative to quantify it for the 2024 campaign. CNN and several partners have been asking an online panel an open-ended question about what news they have heard lately. The results are published after a significant delay (presumably due to the work involved in the analysis), and the only reports that I have found are rather cursory so far. They leave me with a methodological concern: individuals’ reports of what they hear may not match what they were actually exposed to, because their attentions and memories may be selective. Still, these simple reports offer insights.
The graphic with this post shows the main topics that a sample of Americans say they heard regarding Donald Trump during several days in September. At that time, some of us were hearing his lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH–which echoed the inflammatory and hateful slanders that have preceded massacres of vulnerable minority groups here and around the world–and we wondered how anyone could consider voting for this man. But the people who heard about Trump and pets and immigrants had something in common: they were generally Democrats.
Republican and Independent voters remembered hearing one main news item about Donald Trump in late September: he had survived a second assassination attempt, this one on his own golf course. For them, Trump was a victim of crime, and the main events of this campaign were attacks on him. In general, many Americans get a diet of news about crime and unrest. According to Pew, crime is usually the second-most common news topic, after weather, and 77 percent of people see crime news. That is the context in which Republican and Independent voters processed the news that Trump was a crime-victim.
A more recent article about news consumption from Oct 11-14 doesn’t divide the data according to the respondents’ choice of candidates, which makes it less relevant for my purposes. But it is interesting that the word “assassination” continued to be prominent in news about Trump in mid-October.
It’s worth asking whether “the media” is responsible for our balkanized news environment. There are many competing news sources, and people can choose among them, so it’s possible that balkanization is inevitable.
It’s also worth asking whether individuals are responsible for choosing to follow–and remember–high-quality news, and if so, what that is. (I am far from perfect in that respect, spending too much time on polls and horserace news and not enough on troubling issues.)
In any case, it is an analytic mistake to assume that many people support the most awful things that one observes. To understand is not to forgive, but I can at least understand why people would feel differently about Trump if they didn’t hear what I hear about him.
In an article reporting The New York Times‘ recent battleground state polls, Lisa LererandRuth Igielnik quote Jonathan Ball, a Michigan floor-installer:
[He] said he believed Mr. Trump would do more to help working Americans than Ms. Harris. “I think she’s more liberal. I just don’t think she’s all for the middle class,” said Mr. Ball, 46, who plans to support Mr. Trump for a third time this fall. “I just see her one-sided. You know, for the rich.”
I don’t know how many people associate being liberal with being from (or for) the rich. I would like to see survey data specifically on that question, which would allow us to measure the prevalence of this view in various parts of the electorate. But we know that Mr. Ball’s view is not unique. In her book American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears, Farah Stockman discusses an Indiana industrial worker who divides the world between workers (such as himself) and capitalists, urges his union to fight the company, and votes for Trump. His wife is more favorable to management. On that basis, he categorizes her as a “liberal.” I’ve heard real people say the same kind of thing myself.
I grew up believing the opposite: that liberals were more favorable to workers than conservatives were. I acknowledge that this assumption is debatable. Libertarians argue that liberal policies are especially costly to working people. Socialists may distinguish bourgeois liberalism from more radical reform and sometimes see liberals as the main obstacles to social justice. But I doubt either framework is driving these workers’ interpretation of liberalism as favorable to the upper class.
Here is an alternative theory. If you are a worker and a consumer, you are always being notified of rules and policies that constrain and modify your behavior. Some of these rules result from governmental policies that I would code as “liberal.” For instance, the state might pass a law that results in your HR department warning you against sexual harassment. Some of the rules come from government but are not especially liberal, e.g., Don’t use marijuana. And many are not due to the government at all. For example, the same HR department that warns you not to sexually harass your colleagues also warns you not to take unauthorized breaks and not to use the company’s equipment for private purposes.
The tone, format, and consequences of all these rules are similar. The same people deliver and enforce them. These people are managers: white-collar workers with college degrees, sometimes from the corporate HQ in a big coastal city.
They talk and act rather like the most prominent advocates of liberal policies. First of all, politicians in general come from the same professions that set and enforce rules in the workplace. Nicholas Carnes notes that 75% of members of Congress were lawyers or business owners before they ran for office, compared to less than 2% who “came [directly] from working class occupations. … Even districts where working-class people make up disproportionate shares of voters seldom elect working-class politicians” (Carnes 2011). And, among politicians, Democrats are perhaps especially likely to sound like upper management. For instance, Democrats now represent the 17 richest congressional districts.
You’d have to be very politically sophisticated to separate the directives that result from liberal (or progressive, or leftist) governmental policies from those that are meant to profit the company. They all sound like the wishes of highly-educated and well-paid people at corporate headquarters. And the national leaders who advocate for the policies that are liberal sound just the same as your corporate managers.
Regulations can be beneficial and even necessary, but they are not very transparent. It is hard for the recipients to understand who is responsible for a given regulation; and legislators can’t be sure who will be affected, or how. Laws must go through regulatory agencies, courts, and private offices (like a corporation’s HR department) before they reach the people who are regulated, by which time the legislators who voted for them may not recognize the results. And workers and consumers receive a constant stream of directives that reflect companies’ wishes rather than legal mandates.
I am more enthusiastic about taxing and spending as tools of public policy. And I prefer direct, transparent taxes, especially taxes on personal income, rather than sales taxes, tariffs, or corporate income taxes, which have opaque and unpredictable costs for various people. We should be able to say: We compelled these people to pay this proportion of their incomes to buy these goods, which include new jobs for working people.
As long as we deputize private actors to regulate behavior, we must try to mitigate the resulting confusions. Small steps may be worth taking, like nominating Tim Walz instead of yet another big-city lawyer to be a face of the Democratic Party. But the problem may be endemic to the administrative state, in which case it requires more than cosmetic changes.
