I will be honest: the last four years often felt to me like the country was at war, beset by a president and a Republican Party whose assault involved interrelated cultural, economic, and political campaigns of degradation and destruction. There was not a day that felt like politics as usual. Instead, the president worked to enrage his white base against their fellow Americans, demonizing immigrants and minorities while performing the alchemy of fusing his personal sense of victimization with that of white Americans, while working to weaponize the federal government in service of his own power. At the same time, most major accomplishments, such as they were, were recognizably traditionally Republican — like massive tax cuts for the ultra-rich paired with absolute indifference to the federal government having any actual responsibility or even relationship to the majority of the people it serves.
This war on America turned absolutely catastrophic when the coronavirus pandemic struck. The Trump administration had already dismantled important parts of our public health apparatus that could have helped stem the crucial early spread of the virus, while the president’s sociopathic insistence that the virus was not threat to American health (born out of fear of harming his re-election prospects) ensured that the federal response would be hobbled as long as he remained in office. And so the war on America began to count its casualties in the tens of thousands, then the hundreds of thousands, as the body count began to resemble an actual war, only with civilians filling the graves in place of soldiers.
But metaphoric war became literal on January 6, 2020, when an insurrectionist mob incited by the president stormed the Capitol. The danger had emerged fully-formed and undeniable; we were at the point that the president, abetted by a GOP that echoed his lies of a stolen election, was willing to goad right-wing extremists into a physical assault against the United States government, in an act of treason by an elected official matched only by the politicians who joined the Confederacy a century and a half ago.
I review this sordid recent history, first, as context for why, over the past couple months, it has felt difficult to grasp that that the country’s political direction may have turned much faster than I thought possible. Yet not only has Joe Biden become president, but the Democrats have moved quickly and aggressively to pass a massive $1.9 trillion bill to fight the coronavirus and provide economic support to millions of Americans; polling shows that the legislation is popular across broad reaches of the public, including Republicans. Meanwhile, vaccine production and crucially, distribution, have steadily escalated, so that Joe Biden can credibly tell us that by May 1, vaccinations should be open to every adult. On top of this, the Biden administration is already looking ahead to a huge infrastructure bill that will further goose the economy while repairing and modernizing decades’ worth of deferred spending and construction. In other words, by many objective measures, things aren’t just looking up, they’re heading in the right direction.
Obviously, Biden as president, combined with Democratic control of Congress, is the central reason for our turnaround. But the question I’ve been asking myself, coming out of the trauma and fears of the Trump years, is why the Democrats have been able to roll over the GOP so far. Beyond the basic fact that the Democrats control Congress (though narrowly) and the presidency, it seems like the initiative is simply on their side right now, with much of this momentum tied to the idea that the federal government has a central role to play in the economy on behalf of ordinary Americans.
This is all still in flux, of course, and we won’t have more definitive answers for years, but a few recent articles have offered some intriguing perspectives on what might be going on. At The Editorial Board blog, John Stoehr posits that the scale of the coronavirus crisis essentially broke conservative Republican opposition to big government spending; after Americans received multiple rounds of relief checks, even conservative voters became acclimated to the idea that the government has a larger role to play in the economy. Whereas before the GOP relied on inculcating fear among voters against government spending, these tactics can’t work the same way when it’s the GOP that started not just the higher federal spending, but also (at least tacitly) embraced the idea that the government has both a role and a responsibility to protect Americans’ economic well-being. Given that that the Democrats already believed this, the Republicans inadvertently helped establish a new consensus in American politics.
The Plum Line’s Paul Waldman provides another clue to a possible sea change in our politics. He argues that because a) Joe Biden is white and b) has a long-established centrist identity, the culture war tactics that the GOP honed to perfection during Barack Obama’s presidency, and that continued while President Trump continued to use Obama as his political foil, simply don’t work against Joe Biden. He points to white people’s “cultural anxiety” as key to Trump’s sway with the GOP base:
It was not “economic anxiety” that pulled so many White voters toward him, it was cultural anxiety: the feeling that your way of life is receding, that popular culture rejects your values, that you’re being forced to consider the sensibilities of people you thought were beneath you on the ladder of status, and that it will only get worse.
In other words, even when Obama was no longer president, Trump used the fears and resentments his predecessor had aroused (and had been used to arouse) to keep his white base engaged and enraged. But even though he served as Obama’s VP, it’s simply impossible to paint Biden as anything akin to a Kenyan socialist aiming to enslave white people and impose Sharia law on god-fearing Christians (I have seen Republicans say many nasty things about Joe Biden, but I haven’t yet heard any dare to claim that he wasn’t born in America).
And Waldman adds a point that others have made recently as well — that Joe Biden, whether based on personal inclination or conscious political strategy (or both), doesn’t seem interested in engaging in any sort of culture war exchange with the GOP.
What intrigues me is the way that Stoehr’s and Waldman’s theories complement each other. It’s not just that, as Stoehr describes, the GOP opened the spigots of government spending for the public good, thus helping to normalize the idea of a large government role in the economy and on behalf of working people. When white people received their stimulus checks and unemployment assistance, it also helped undermine the Republican myth that government spending is always for the benefit of undeserving minorities — a myth that the GOP has relied on to ensure that cultural anxieties about reduced social status and power can be used as a cudgel against government spending that would in reality benefit BOTH whites and non-whites alike. So if, as Waldman argues, the GOP is having trouble saddling the Biden presidency with culture war attacks because of who Biden is, Biden has also benefitted from Trump and the GOP’s economic relief efforts that saw white Americans receive massive amounts of government largesse.
And if Joe Biden continues and indeed expands those same policies — policies that undeniably benefit people of all races and indeed classes (save for the ultra-rich) — then the GOP’s culture war tactics may become less effective, and its resistance to an activist federal government politically dangerous (Waldman argues as much, seeing a GOP potentially in danger of being on the wrong side of a massive change in public consensus about the role of government in American life).
It’s way too soon to tell if we are witnessing a sea change or a temporary shift in attitudes connected to the pandemic and its aftermath, but after the brutal struggles during the Trump administration to simply keep our democracy alive, these possibilities are worth keeping an eye on. On the flip side, it’s also nearly inevitable that the same policies and leadership that may be making a dent in the attitudes of some Republican voters are also supercharging the resentments of others, so that even as we may be seeing the development of a new consensus in American politics, the backlash may grow still more severe, even if it’s embraced by a smaller chunk of the population than before.