Either former president Donald Trump’s standing in early 2024 polls is inflated, or we are headed for a sizable realignment in how non-White voters cast their ballots.
Multiple polls in recent weeks have shown Trump performing historically well among Black and Hispanic voters in head-to-head matchups with President Biden, helping put him neck-and-neck with Biden in a way he rarely was during their 2020 matchup.
Across five high-quality polls that have broken out non-White voters in the past month, Trump is averaging 20 percent of Black voters and 42 percent of Hispanic voters.
Both numbers — and especially that for Black voters — could set modern-day records for a Republican in a presidential election. Trump in 2020 took just 8 percent of Black voters and 36 percent of Hispanic voters, according to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter survey. Exit polls pegged those figures at 12 percent of Black voters and 32 percent of Hispanic voters.
(The validated voter surveys involve conducting a huge poll of American adults and then getting a more accurate picture than the exit polls by verifying whether respondents actually voted, using official records.)
No Republican presidential candidate in the past 50 years has approached receiving 20 percent of the Black vote. Since Republicans took 18 percent in 1972 and 16 percent in 1976, according to exit polls, they haven’t taken more than 12 percent of Black voters. Their average share over the past 50 years is 9 percent — about half of where Trump currently sits in the polls.
Hispanic voters have trended toward the GOP in recent elections, but the party’s current high-water marks over the past half-century are 37 percent in 1984 and a disputed 44 percent in 2004. (Other estimates placed President George W. Bush’s actual share of the Hispanic vote that year at about 40 percent, which would be shy of where Trump currently is in the polls.)
So how plausible is this?
The first thing to note is that individual polls tend to feature small sample sizes of Black and Hispanic voters, which is why we have combined multiple surveys. Trump actually takes as much as 25 percent of Black voters in a recent Quinnipiac University poll and 47 percent of Hispanic voters in a recent CBS News poll — numbers that would appear implausible even if those voters have trended toward him significantly.
Another point is that despite the GOP’s claims about Trump’s ability to appeal to Black voters and especially Black men, this wouldn’t appear to be strictly about Trump. Fox News’s pollsters last week tested seven 2024 Republicans against Biden, and just about every GOP candidate was near 20 percent.
(Interestingly, the worst-performing GOP member among Black voters: Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the leading Black Republican in the race, who took 15 percent.)
There is also recent precedent for polls overstating how much these groups, particularly Black voters, ultimately cast ballots for Republicans.
Just before the 2022 election, quality polls — including from many of the same pollsters detailed here — showed Republicans taking an average of 40 percent of the Hispanic vote and 16 percent of the Black vote (as much as 21 percent in one late poll). That share of Hispanic voters ultimately more or less matched the results, but exit polls showed Republicans getting 12 percent of Black voters. And the later, more in-depth data from Pew pegged the GOP’s share of the Black vote much lower, at just 5 percent.
But Democrats clearly suffered with non-White voters in 2022, for one main reason: lower turnout. And that’s certainly a prospect that looms large for Biden.
The New York Times’s Nate Cohn recently assembled data across multiple Times-Siena College polls, which also reflected the tightening of the non-White vote — albeit not as much as the more recent polls. Enthusiasm was the culprit:
The dissatisfaction of younger and lower-turnout voters raises the possibility that Mr. Biden’s weakness in the polls may show up primarily as low turnout among Black and Hispanic voters, rather than as a titanic shift toward Mr. Trump. Something similar might have happened in the last midterm election, when Democrats appeared to maintain usual shares of support among Black voters, but the racial turnout gap increased to multi-decade highs.
Indeed, Mr. Biden’s lead among nonwhite voters expands to 57-27 among those who voted in 2020 or 2022, compared with 53-28 among all registered nonwhite voters. And his lead among those recent voters could grow further, to 63-29, if undecided and dissenting voters are assigned to the candidate whom they said they backed in the last presidential election.
A 63-29 lead would be much closer to Mr. Biden’s standing among nonwhite voters in the last presidential election, as would his 84-11 lead among Black voters and his 55-37 lead among Hispanic voters in that same scenario.
Yet even after allocating the remaining undecided voters, these tallies might still be the worst for a Democratic leader among Black and Hispanic voters since Walter Mondale in 1984.
The recent polling also reinforces this concern for Democrats. While late in the 2020 election, polls showed Black voters came up just shy of White voters in terms of their motivation to vote, a recent CNN poll of the 2024 election showed a chasm.
While 89 percent of White voters said they were at least “very” motivated to vote, just 67 percent of Black voters said the same. And while 72 percent of White voters were “extremely” motivated, just 44 percent of Black voters were.
All the caveats that come with early polls apply here. These are snapshots in time that rely on small subsamples, and things can and will change over the next 14 months. But this is certainly looking like one of the most significant subplots of the early stages of the 2024 election.
Time away has not improved your brain function, Lash.
The way to beat them is to turn out to vote in overwhelming numbers.
This should be the Democratic Party’s moment. Donald Trump’s stranglehold has lurched the G.O.P. toward the fringe. Republican congressional behavior echoes that of an intemperate toddler and the party’s intellectual and ideological foundations have become completely unmoored.
But far from dominant, the Democratic Party seems disconnected from the priorities, needs and values of many Americans.
Current polls show a 2024 rematch between Trump and Joe Biden too close for true comfort; the same is true should Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis be the Republican nominee. Many constituents who were once the Democratic Party’s reliable base — the working class, middle-class families, even Black and Latino Americans and other ethnic minorities — have veered toward the G.O.P. In a development that has baffled Democrats, a greater share of those groups voted for Republican candidates in recent elections.
Something worrisome has happened to the party of the people.
This worry isn’t entirely new. In 2004, Thomas Frank’s book asked, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Why, Frank wondered, did working- and middle-class Americans vote Republican when Democratic policies were more attuned to their needs?
The question to ask now is: Why isn’t the Democratic Party serving their needs either?
John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, authors of 2002’s hugely influential “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” might seem like the last people to have an answer, given that book’s failed prophecy that America would be majority Democratic by 2010 given shifts in the electorate and the population.
But in “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” they give a pretty persuasive explanation — one that should be read as a warning.
If the answer to Frank’s question was that cultural issues can trump issues of class in ways that favor Republicans, Judis’s and Teixeira’s answer looks doubly troubling to Democrats: Not only is the Democratic Party increasingly failing on matters of culture (despite its strength on abortion rights), it’s also seen as failing in matters of class. In a country that has become more overtly populist in its values and needs, Democrats are the ones who look like the party of out-of-touch elitists.
“We’ve had this peculiar situation where the reigning power in the Democratic Party has been between progressive social organizations and the neoliberal business elite,” Judis told me when I spoke to him last week. The majority of Americans are feeling left behind.
This bodes ill for Democrats. As he and Teixeira write in the book, “The Democratic Party has had its greatest success when it sought to represent the common man and woman against the rich and powerful, the people against the elite, and the plebians against the patricians.”
When it comes to economics, the authors say, Democrats have too often pursued the interests of their own elites and donors. Since the 1990s, the party has pursued policies that worsen the economic plight of Americans who are not well off. President Bill Clinton, for example, supported NAFTA and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which undermined American manufacturing; the administration also endorsed the Banking Act of 1999, which accelerated the financialization of the American economy. While Barack Obama conveyed a populist message on the campaign trail, as president, they say, he became captive to neoliberal Washington.
Much of the Democratic Party’s agenda has been set by what Judis and Teixeira call the “shadow party,” a mix of donors from Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, wealthy foundations, activist groups, the media, lobbyists and scholars.
Democratic leaders seem too willing to settle for a kind of cheap progressivism — a carbon-neutral, virtue-signaling, box-checking update on what was once called limousine liberalism. But the Democratic Party cannot win and America cannot flourish if it doesn’t prioritize the economic well-being of the American majority over the financial interests and cultural fixations of an elite minority.
Biden has curtailed some of its shadow party’s economic agenda — less so its cultural and social policies. There, Judis and Teixeira argue, the party seems bent on imposing a narrow progressive stance on issues like race, “sexual creationism” (commonly known as gender ideology), immigration and climate, at the expense of more broadly shared beliefs within the electorate.
The moral values may differ at each extreme of the two parties, but their efforts to moralize can sound an awful lot alike to many Americans. Even though Democrats themselves are adopting “a pretty aggressive way to change the culture,” Teixeira told me, the Democratic Party acts as if anyone who reacts against the assumptions of its progressive wing is completely off base.
“There’s a certain amount of chutzpah among Democrats to assume that it’s only the other side pursuing a culture war,” he said.
For too long, the Democratic Party depended on shifting demographics to shore up its side. Then it relied on the horror show of the G.O.P. to scare people onto its side. Both have been an effective and damaging distraction. As Judis and Teixeira put it, Democrats “need to look in the mirror and examine the extent to which their own failures contributed to the rise of the most toxic tendencies on the political right.”
We can no longer afford to avoid the hard truths. If the Democratic Party doesn’t focus on what it can deliver to more Americans, it won’t have to wonder anymore where all the Democrats went.
I think when we look at this, as a whole, I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians. I don't think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians.
Quote:on't think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians.
Of course, the proper analogous framing would be "innocent German civilians" but that doesn't suit his agitprop intentions.
Analyzing the reasons why voters d0n't turn out in overwhelming numbers and addressing these reasons when possible would seem to be a potential way to secure more votes.
Especially when your ticket is as unpopular as Biden/Harris.
There's little likelihood of the Democrats nominating new candidates with more star power, so the Dems will need to run a more issue-oriented campaign. And, if your analysis of Trump' followers is correct, neither the "white" supporters nor the minority supporters are the type to be swayed by rational arguments appealing to their economic self-interest or love for democratic institutions. With the electorate being so disappointingly evenly-divided, the loss of minority votes, whether a trickle or a hemorrhage is a concern.
This puts the campaign in a bind.
Biden can't compete with Trump's populist appeal – any attempt to do this would backfire and probably send voters scurrying to third party candidates. And while Biden can make a very good case that his policies have been good for the country, his message would likely be drowned out by shrill warnings about border security, the deficit, violent crime, and the war on Christmas. And in addition, there are always unanticipated world events over which we have no control, like a wider war in the Mideast or an outright Russian victory in Ukraine.
And, if your analysis of Trump' followers is correct,...
But as I understand it, for most of the English-speaking world, Germany between 1933 and 1945 was "Nazi Germany" and its citizens "Nazi citizens" for that very reason.
In a speech yesterday in Northfield, Minnesota, President Joe Biden explained his economic vision to rural Americans. “Over the past 40 years or so, we’ve had a practice in America—an economic practice called trickle-down economics, and it hit rural America especially hard,” he said. “It hollowed out Main Street, telling farmers the only path to success was to get big or get out.”
At the same time, he said, “[t]ax cuts for big corporations encouraged companies to grow bigger and bigger, move jobs and production overseas for cheaper labor, and undercut local small businesses. Meat-producing companies and the retail grocery chains consolidated, leaving farmers [and] ranchers with few choices about where to sell their products, reducing their bargaining power. Corporations that sell seed, fertilizer, and even farm equipment used their outsized market power to change farmers and charge them and ranchers unfair prices.”
Biden noted that the U.S. has lost more than 400,000 family farms in the past 40 years, an area of more than 140 million acres of farmland, equivalent to an area the size of Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota combined. Family farms have failed, and as they did so, small businesses, hospitals, schools, and communities also suffered.
Young people feel they have no choice but to leave home “in search of good-paying jobs and a chance at the American Dream.”
Biden explained that his plan to invest in America would create new and better markets and new income streams to help rural areas thrive. He noted that $20 billion of the Inflation Reduction Act will go to helping farmers and ranchers adjust to climate change by changing cover crops and managing nutrients and grazing, while urging farmers to diversify from single crops and sell in local markets.
Biden emphasized that the administration is promoting competition in agricultural markets, noting that currently just four big corporations control more than half the market in beef, pork, and poultry. If just one of their processing plants goes offline, it can cause massive supply chain disruptions (as the closing of a baby formula plant did in 2022). “[T]here’s something wrong,” he said, “when just 7% of the American farms get nearly 90% of the farm income.”
In addition to the existing national investments in power grids and broadband that will help rural communities, Biden announced $1 billion to fix aging rural infrastructure systems like electricity, water, and waste water systems that haven’t been updated in decades; $2 billion to help farmers fight climate change; $145 million for clean energy technologies like solar panels that will help lower electric bills; and $274 million for rural high-speed internet expansion.
The administration’s vision for rural America appears to be part of a larger vision for restoring competition to the U.S. economy and thus is closely tied to the administration’s push to break up monopolies. In July 2021, Biden promised to interpret antitrust laws in the way they had been understood traditionally, not as the U.S. government began to interpret them in the 1980s. Then, following the argument advanced by the solicitor general of the United States at the time, Robert Bork, the government concluded that economic consolidation was fine so long as it promoted economic efficiencies that, at least in the short term, cut costs for consumers.
Biden vowed to return to the traditional understanding of antitrust principles championed by presidents all the way back to Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the last century, arguing that protecting economic competition protects workers, promotes innovation, and keeps consumer prices down. To that, the coronavirus pandemic added an awareness of the need to protect supply chains.
“Bidenomics is just another way of saying ‘the American Dream,’” Biden said. “Forty years ago, trickle-down economics limited the dream to those at the top. But I believe every American willing to work hard should be able to get a job, no matter where they live—in the heartland, in small towns—to raise their kids on a good paycheck and keep their roots where they grew up.”
In contrast to Biden’s outreach to farmers, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is facing a dilemma over the nation’s next farm bill, which must be passed by the end of the year. According to Clark Merrefield of The Journalist’s Resource, Congress usually debates and renews the farm bill every five years, and the last one passed in 2018.
Farm bills include price support for farm products, especially corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, peanuts, dairy, and sugar. It also includes crop insurance, conservation programs, and a wide variety of other agricultural programs, making the farm bill hugely popular in rural areas that focus on farming.
Also included in the measure are nutritional programs for low-income Americans, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. SNAP serves 41 million low-income Americans, but as a member of the far-right Republican Study Committee, Johnson called for cutting SNAP benefits. Now his far-right colleagues are echoing his position, saying that the need to renew the farm bill is a great opportunity to make significant cuts to SNAP, especially since the farm bill is expected to bear a price tag of more than $1 trillion for the first time in our history.
“I can’t imagine the Mike Johnson that we know would pass up the opportunity to secure as many conservative wins as possible in this farm bill,” a Republican aide told Meredith Lee Hill of Politico, “[a]nd that means serious SNAP reforms.”
But even some Republicans—primarily those who hail from agricultural states—object to loading the farm bill up with the poison pill of SNAP cuts, knowing such a tactic would repel Democrats, whose votes will be necessary to pass the measure as far-right Republicans balk.
It will take a deft hand to get the measure through Congress, and its failure at Johnson’s hands will infuriate hard-hit rural areas. It is one more thing to add to the new speaker’s to-do list, as the deadline for funding the government is looming. The continuing resolution funding the government at 2023 levels, the measure that cost Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) his speakership, expires in just over two weeks, on November 17.
Johnson’s willingness to load bills with poison pills that his conference likes showed today in the House’s passage of Republicans’ aid bill for Israel—Ukraine aid had been cut away—along with dramatic cuts to funding the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a provision that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warned would add to the deficit rather than reducing it. Knowing that the measure will not pass the Senate, a number of Democrats voted for it, likely to avoid attacks from conservative opponents.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) says the Senate won’t even take up the House bill. Instead, the Senate continues to work on its own strongly bipartisan bill that ties together aid to Israel and Ukraine.
As Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo put it, if the Senate continues to work in this bipartisan way, we will continue to see the same pattern we’ve seen throughout this Congress: “Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans and House Democrats all supporting more or less the same thing, with a chunk of House Republicans out on a branch alone.”
After an angry fight last night over Senator Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) holds on military promotions, in which Republican senators joined Democrats in confronting him, the Senate today confirmed General David Allvin to be Air Force chief of staff and Admiral Lisa Franchetti as chief of naval operations, by votes of 95 to 1. Franchetti is the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Wednesday’s fight appears to have been prompted by the hospitalization of acting Marines Commandant General Eric Smith after an apparent heart attack. Smith was holding down two high-level positions at once owing to Tuberville’s holds, and he had warned his schedule was “not sustainable.” Although the Pentagon says Tuberville is endangering national security, Tuberville insists that his hold on almost 400 military promotions is not hurting the military.
The new additions mean there are no vacancies on the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the first time since July.
If thousands of people decide they prefer Trump to Biden, I won't start devoting huge amounts of time and energy trying to figure them out.
At this same point in time before Obama's election AND reelection, his popularity numbers were practically identical to Biden/Harris'.
No, it's NOT a concern - though people like you seem bent on making it so.
Do you care if Biden/Harris get reelected?
"Oh, horrors! What negative implications does the present situation have for Joe Biden?"
I hear and respect everything you said in that last post.
Except for trying to equate trump supporters to “people with different political beliefs”.
If they had actual, articulable, defensible “beliefs”, I could see trying to reason with them, or reason about them. I don’t dismiss them just because it’s easier than trying to figure them out. But Hightor, these people think Trump is an innocent man who is being persecuted like Mandela; they think he’s athletic, and chosen by Jesus. They “believe” **** like Hamas is walking here from the Gaza Strip through our southern border.
Except for trying to equate trump supporters to “people with different political beliefs”.
Today, Representative Ryan Zinke (R-MT), who was former president Trump’s Interior Secretary until he left under accusations of misconduct, introduced a bill to ban Palestinians from the United States and to revoke any visas issued to Palestinians since October 1 of this year. Although the U.S. has resettled only about 2,000 Palestinians in the last 20 years, ten other far-right members of the House signed onto Zinke’s bill, which draws no distinction between Hamas and Palestinian civilians.
This blanket attack on a vulnerable population echoes Trump’s travel ban of January 27, 2017, just a week after he took office. Executive Order 13769 stopped travel from primarily Muslim countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—for ninety days. The list of countries appeared random—Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, countries from which terrorists have sometimes come directly to the U.S., weren’t on the list—and appeared to fulfill a campaign promise and assert a new view of executive power.
Insisting that immigrants endanger the country is a key tactic of authoritarians. Excluding them is a central principle of those eager to tear down democracy: they insist that immigration destroys a nation’s traditions and undermines native-born Americans. With tensions in the nation mounting over the crisis in the Middle East, this measure, introduced now with inflammatory language, seems designed to whip up violence.
Representative Greg Landsman (D-OH) called out his Republican colleagues on social media. “Un-American and definitely NOT in the Bible, [Speaker Johnson],” he wrote. “You going to tell them to pull this bill?”
But, far from trying to work across the aisle, Johnson has been throwing red meat to his base. In the last two days, for example, the House has voted to slash 39% of the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and 13% of the budget of the National Park Service. It voted to require the Biden administration to advance oil drilling off the Alaska coast. It has voted on reducing the salary of the EPA administrator, the director of the Bureau of Land Management, and the Secretary of the Interior to $1 each.
Yesterday, Johnson told reporters he considers extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) close friends and said “I don’t disagree with them on many issues and principles.”
To direct his communications team, Johnson has tapped Raj Shah, a former executive from the Fox News Corporation, who was a key player in promoting the lie that Trump won the 2020 presidential election. As the head of the “Brand Protection Unit,” Shah demanded that the Fox News Channel continue to lie to viewers who would leave the station if it told the truth. Johnson has hired Shah to be his deputy chief of staff for communications and, according to Alex Isenstadt of Politico, “help run messaging for House Republicans.”
The extremists are doubling down on Trump and his election lies even as his allies are admitting in court that they are, indeed, lies. Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows is in trouble with the publisher of his memoir after admitting that under oath that the election had been fair. The publisher is suing him for millions in damages for basing his book on the idea that the election had been stolen and representing that “all statements contained in the Work are true.”
The publisher says it has pulled the book off the market.
House extremists continue to back Trump even as he is openly calling for an authoritarian second term. In September, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley had to take “appropriate measures” for his own security after Trump accused him of disloyalty to him, personally, and suggested that in the past, such “treason” would have been punished with death.
On Wednesday, Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Trump was frustrated in his first term by lawyers who refused to go along with his wishes, trying to stay within the law, so Trump's allies are making lists of lawyers they believe would be “more aggressive” on issues of immigration, taking over the Department of Justice, and overturning elections.
They are looking, they say, for “a different type of lawyer” than those supported by the right-wing Federalist Society, one “willing to endure the personal and professional risks of association with Mr. Trump” and “to use theories that more establishment lawyers would reject to advance his cause.”
John Mitnick, who served in Trump’s first term, told the reporters that “no qualified attorneys with integrity will have any desire to serve as political appointees” in a second Trump term. Instead, the lawyers in a second term would be “opportunists who will rubber-stamp whatever Trump and his senior White House staff want to do.”
Trump has also made it clear he and his allies want to gut the nonpartisan civil service and fill tens of thousands of government positions with his own loyalists. Led by Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Trump’s allies believe that agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission should not be independent but should push the president’s agenda.
This week, Trump vowed to take over higher education too. In a campaign video, he promised to tax private universities with large endowments to fund a new institution called “American Academy.” The school, which would be online only, would award free degrees and funnel students into jobs with the U.S. government and federal contractors.
“We spend more money on higher education than any other country, and yet they’re turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions,” Trump said. “We can’t let this happen.” In his university, “wokeness or jihadism” would not be allowed, he said.
In admirable understatement, Politico’s Meridith McGraw and Michael Stratford noted: “Using the federal government to create an entirely new educational institution aimed at competing with the thousands of existing schools would drastically reshape American higher education.”
Trump has made no secret of his future plans for the United States of America.
Meanwhile, Republicans appear determined to push their agenda over the wishes of voters. In Ohio, where voters on Tuesday will decide whether to amend the state constitution to make it a constitutional right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” Republicans first tried to make it harder to amend the state constitution, and then, when voters rejected that attempt, the Republican-dominated state senate began to use an official government website to spread narratives about the constitutional amendment that legal and medical experts called false or misleading.
Adding reproductive health protections to the state constitution is popular, but In an unusual move, the Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, quietly purged more than 26,000 voters from the rolls in late September. LaRose is a staunch opponent of the constitutional amendment and is himself running for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
In Virginia, where Republicans are hoping to take control of the state legislature to pass new abortion restrictions as well as the rest of Republican governor Glenn Youngkin’s agenda, a study by the Democratic Party of Virginia shows that officials are flagging the mail-in ballots of non-white voters for rejection much more frequently than those of white voters. As of today, 4.82% of ballots cast by Black voters have gotten flagged, while only 2.79% of the ballots of white voters have been flagged.
In Richmond, The Guardian’s Sam Levine reported, city officials flagged more than 11% of ballots returned by Black voters but only about 5.5% of ballots cast by white voters. After the ballots are fixed, or cured, the rate of rejection for Black voters remains more than twice as high as that of white voters.
Virginia officials also reported last week that they had accidentally removed more than 3,400 eligible voters from the rolls.
It’s easy to become inured to the extremism that has suffused the Republican Party in recent years. Donald Trump, the dominating front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination, spends days in court, in a judicial system he regularly disparages, charged with a long list of offenses and facing several trials.
In the House, Republicans recently chose a new speaker, Representative Mike Johnson, who not only endorsed the attempted overturning of the 2020 election but also helped to devise the rationale behind it.
We shouldn’t grow complacent about just how dangerous it all is — and how much more dangerous it could become. The efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed. We’re told that’s because the institutions held. But it’s more accurate to say that most of the individuals holding powerful positions within those institutions — the White House, the Pentagon, the courts, election officials in Georgia and other states — sided with the Constitution over Mr. Trump’s desire to remain in power.
But what if key individuals decide differently the next time they are faced with this kind of choice? What if they have come to believe that the country is in such dire straits — has reached a state of apocalyptic decadence — that democracy is a luxury we can no longer afford?
A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people of just that — giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country.
The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024. It includes respected scholars at prestigious universities and influential think tanks. The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.
That makes this a crucial time to familiarize ourselves with and begin formulating a response to these ideas. If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.
The Claremont Catastrophists
Probably the best-known faction of catastrophists and the one with the most direct connection to Republican politics is led by Michael Anton and others with ties to the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank in California. Mr. Anton’s notorious Claremont Review of Books essay in September 2016 called the contest between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton “The Flight 93 Election.” Mr. Anton, who would go on to serve as a National Security Council official in the Trump administration, insisted the choice facing Republicans, like the passengers on the jet hijacked by terrorists intent on self-immolation in a suicide attack on the White House or the Capitol on Sept. 11, was to “charge the cockpit or you die.” (For a few months in 2000 and 2001, Mr. Anton was my boss in the communications office of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and we have engaged in spirited debates over the years.)
Mr. Anton’s “Flight 93” essay originally appeared on a website with modest traffic, but two days later Rush Limbaugh was reading it aloud in its entirety on his radio show. The essay set the tone of life-or-death struggle (and related imagery) that is common among catastrophists.
After leaving the Trump White House, Mr. Anton updated and amplified the argument in a 2021 book, “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.”
America faced a choice: Either Mr. Trump would prevail in his bid for re-election or America was doomed.
John Eastman, a conservative lawyer also at the Claremont Institute, agreed. That is why, after Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Mr. Eastman set about taking the lead in convincing Mr. Trump that there was a way for him to remain in power, if only Vice President Mike Pence treated his ceremonial role in certifying election results as a vastly broader power to delay certification.
Despite legal troubles related to the efforts to overturn the election, Mr. Eastman’s attitude hasn’t changed. In a conversation this summer with Thomas Klingenstein, a leading funder of the Claremont Institute, Mr. Eastman explained why he thought such unprecedented moves were justified.
The prospect of Mr. Biden’s becoming president constituted an “existential threat,” Mr. Eastman said, to the survivability of the country. Would we “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles” and allow ourselves to be “eradicated”? Those were the stakes, as he viewed them.
Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up.
That’s how, in May 2021, Mr. Anton came to conduct a two-hour podcast with a far-right Silicon Valley tech guru and self-described “monarchist,” Curtis Yarvin, in which the two agreed that the American “regime” is today most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy.” In that arrangement, an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in executive branch agencies, the universities, elite media and other leading institutions of civil society promulgate and enforce a distorted and self-serving version of reality that illegitimately justifies their rule.
In this conversation, Mr. Anton and Mr. Yarvin swapped ideas about how this theocratic oligarchy might be overthrown. It culminated in Mr. Yarvin sketching a scenario in which a would-be dictator he alternatively describes as “Caesar” and “Trump” defies the laws and norms of democratic transition and uses a “Trump app” to direct throngs of his supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital to do his bidding, insulating the would-be dictator from harm and the consequences of his democracy-defying acts.
A year ago, Mr. Anton revisited the topic of “the perils and possibilities of Caesarism” on “The Matthew Peterson Show” with several other intellectual catastrophists with ties to the Claremont Institute. (Another panelist on the online show, Charles Haywood, a wealthy former businessman, used the term “Red Caesar,” referring to the color associated with the G.O.P., in a 2021 blog post about Mr. Anton’s second book.)
On the Peterson show, Mr. Anton described Caesarism as one-man rule that emerges “after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function.” (He also said that he would lament the United States coming to these circumstances because he would prefer the country to embrace the principles of “1787 forever.” But if that is no longer possible, he said, the rule of a Caesar can be a necessary method to restore order.)
The Christian Reverse Revolutionaries
Those on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.
Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”
Other authors aspire to greater nuance by calling the dictatorship weighing down on religious believers soft totalitarianism, usually under the rule of social-justice progressivism. These writers often draw direct parallels between the fate of devout Christians in the contemporary United States and the struggles of Eastern Europeans who sought to practice their faith but were harshly persecuted by Soviet tyranny. Establishing the validity of that parallel is the main point of the most recent book by the writer Rod Dreher, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.” (The title is drawn from the writings of the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.)
But Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame offers the most elaborate and intellectually sophisticated response in his recent book, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.” (Mr. Deneen and I worked together professionally at several points over the past two decades, and Mr. Dreher and I have been friends for even longer.)
Mr. Deneen’s previous book, “Why Liberalism Failed,” was praised by writers across the political spectrum, including former President Barack Obama, for helping readers understand the appeal of the harder-edged populist conservatism that took control of the Republican Party in 2016. “Regime Change” is a much darker book that goes well beyond diagnosing America’s ills to propose what sounds, in certain passages, like a radical cure.
The book opens with a tableau of a decaying country with declining economic prospects, blighted cities, collapsing birthrates, drug addiction and widespread suicidal despair. The source of these maladies, Mr. Deneen claims, is liberalism, which until recently has dominated both political parties in the United States, imposing an ideology of individual rights and historical progress on the country from above. This ideology, he says, denigrates tradition, faith, authority and community.
Growing numbers of Americans supposedly reject this outlook, demanding a postliberal government and social, cultural and economic order — basically, hard-right policies on religious and moral issues and hard left on economics. But the forces of liberalism are entrenched on the center left and center right, using every power at their disposal to prevent regime change.
Mr. Deneen is inconsistent in laying out how postliberal voters should achieve the overthrow of this progressive tyranny. In some passages, he advocates a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” and proposes modest reforms to replace it. They include relocating executive branch departments of the federal government to cities around the country and the establishment of nationwide vocational programs.
But in other passages, Mr. Deneen goes much further, describing the separation of church and state as a “totalitarian undertaking” that must be reversed so that American public life can be fully integrated with conservative forms of Christianity. He even affirmatively quotes a passage from Machiavelli in which he talks of the need to use “extralegal and almost bestial” forms of resistance, including “mobs running through the streets,” in order to topple the powers that be.
Despite that shift in content and tone, Mr. Deneen has been embraced by many New Right conservatives and G.O.P. politicians like Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Senator Marco Rubio’s former chief of staff has called him “one of the important people thinking about why we are in the moment we are in right now.”
Mr. Deneen and other discontented intellectuals of the religious right can perhaps be most accurately described as political reactionaries looking to undertake a revolutionary act in reverse.
The Bronze Age Pervert and the Nietzschean Fringe
Farther out on the right’s political and philosophical extremes there’s Costin Alamariu, the person generally understood to be writing under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert.
He self-published a book in 2018, “Bronze Age Mindset,” which follows Friedrich Nietzsche and other authors beloved by the European far right in proclaiming that Western civilization itself is on the verge of collapse, its greatest achievements far in the past, its present a “garbage world” in an advanced state of decay.
All around us, Mr. Alamariu declares, greatness and beauty are under assault. Who are its enemies? Women, for one. (“It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization.”) Then there’s belief in democratic equality. (“I believe that democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe.”)
But blame must most of all be laid at the feet of the creature Mr. Alamariu calls the “bugman,” a term he uses to describe a majority of human beings alive today. This insectlike infestation venerates mediocrity and is “motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful.”
Mr. Alamariu proposes breeding great men of strength who model themselves on pirates, disregarding laws and norms, plundering and taking anything they want and ultimately installing themselves as absolute rulers over the rest of us. Mr. Trump, Mr. Alamariu believes, has pointed us in the right direction. But the former president is only the beginning, he writes. “Now imagine a man of Trump’s charisma, but who is not merely beholden to the generals, but one of them, and able to rule and intimidate them as well as seduce the many. … Caesars and Napoleons are sure to follow.”
In a recent essay, Mr. Alamariu wrote: “I believe in fascism or ‘something worse’ …. I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”
It’s hard to know how seriously to take all of this. Mr. Alamariu, who has a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, writes in such a cartoonish way and laces his outrageous pronouncements with so much irony and humor, not to mention deliberate spelling and syntax errors, that he often seems to be playing a joke on his reader.
But that doesn’t mean influential figures on the right aren’t taking him seriously. Nate Hochman, who was let go by the presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida after sharing on social media a video containing a Nazi symbol, told The New York Times that “every junior staffer in the Trump administration read ‘Bronze Age Mindset.’”
Mr. Alamariu’s recently self-published doctoral dissertation reached No. 23 on Amazon sitewide in mid-September. Among those on the right treating the author as a friend, ally or interlocutor worthy of respectful engagement are the prominent activist Christopher Rufo, the author Richard Hanania and the economist-blogger Tyler Cowen.
Combating the Catastrophists
Some will undoubtedly suggest we shouldn’t be unduly alarmed about such trends. These are just a handful of obscure writers talking to one another, very far removed from the concerns of Republican officeholders and rank-and-file voters.
But such complacency follows from a misunderstanding of the role of intellectuals in radical political movements. These writers are giving Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.
In a second term, Mr. Trump’s ambition is to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants throughout the federal bureaucracy and replace them with loyalists. He also reportedly plans to staff the executive branch with more aggressive right-wing lawyers. These would surely be people unwaveringly devoted to the president and his agenda as well as the danger the Democratic Party supposedly poses to the survival of the United States.
These writers also exercise a powerful influence on media personalities with large audiences. Tucker Carlson has interviewed Curtis Yarvin and declared that with regard to the 2024 election, “everything is at stake. What wouldn’t they do? What haven’t they done? How will you prepare yourself?” Other right-wing influencers with large followings assert more bluntly that if conservatives lose in 2024, they will be hunted down and murdered by the regime.
It’s important that we respond to such statements by pointing out there is literally no evidence to support them. Other intellectual catastrophists are likewise wrong to suggest the country is ruled by a progressive tyranny, and we can know this because people on the right increasingly say such things while facing no legal consequences at all.
Yes, our politics is increasingly turbulent. Yet the country endured far worse turmoil just over a half-century ago — political assassinations, huge protests, riots, hundreds of bombings, often carried out by left-wing terrorists — without dispensing with democracy or looking to a Caesar as a savior.
The question, then, is why the intellectual catastrophists have gotten to this point — and why others on the right are listening to them. The answer, I think, is an intense dislike of what America has become, combined with panic about the right’s ability to win sufficient power in the democratic arena to force a decisive change.
None of which is meant to imply that liberalism is flawless or that it doesn’t deserve criticism. But the proper arena in which to take advantage of liberalism’s protean character — its historical flexibility in response to cultural, social and economic changes over time — remains ordinary democratic politics, in which clashing parties compete for support and accept the outcome of free and fair elections.
Those on different sides of these conflicts need to be willing to accept the possibility of losing. That’s the democratic deal: No election is ever the final election.
In refusing to accept that deal, many of the right’s most prominent writers are ceasing to behave like citizens, who must be willing to share rule with others, in favor of thinking and acting like commissars eager to serve a strongman.
There may be little the rest of us can do about it besides resisting the temptation to respond in kind. In that refusal, we give the lie to claims that the liberal center has tyrannical aims of its own — and demonstrate that the right’s intellectual catastrophists are really just anticipatory sore losers.
