Recorded on October 25, 2024, this panel examined the shifting demographic and political forces that are redefining the traditional bases of the Democratic and Republican parties and their efforts to build new electoral coalitions. Panelists analyzed voter trends and realignment along key dimensions, including gender, age, race and ethnicity, and explored how issues like the economy, abortion, immigration, and threats to democracy are motivating different segments of the electorate.
The panel featured Ian Haney López, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC Berkeley; David Hollinger, the Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus of History at UC Berkeley; and Omar Wasow, Assistant Professor in Department of Political Science. The panel was moderated by G. Cristina Mora, Associate Professor of Sociology and Chicano/Latino Studies (by courtesy), and Co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. The event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Travers Department of Political Science, the Institute of Governmental Studies, and the Center for Right-Wing Studies.
Matrix on Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
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Podcast Transcript
[AUDIO LOGO]
[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
[MARION FOURCADE] Hello, everyone. Welcome to this new panel on the 2024 election. My name is Marion Fourcade. I’m the director of Social Science Matrix. So we’re just a few days away from the election, and the date looms not as just another quadrennial ritual, but as a potential turning point in the nation’s story.
We have assembled, I think, an amazing panel to help us map the fault lines of this historic moment and what it may mean for America’s future. In an age where assumptions are upended almost on a daily basis, we will explore how both Democrats and Republicans are scrambling to mobilize their base while also working to forge fresh electoral alliances.
We will dissect how kitchen table concerns about inflation and job insecurity collide with existential fears about Democratic erosion and status loss, and whether emerging demographic divisions should be read as potentially durable realignments, which is the title of the panel.
So, this event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Traverse Department of Political Science, the Institute of Governmental Studies and the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing studies.
Before I turn it over to the panelists, let me just give you, as I always do, a preview of a few upcoming events, we will have two– actually three with mine– book panels in November– Yan Long’s, Stephanie Canizales, and myself. And then on December 3rd– sorry, on November 21st, we have another election event, but this time will be more of a postmortem trying to figure out what it all means if things are settled, which of course is not clear at all.
Let me now introduce our moderator, Cristina Mora. Cristina Mora is an associate professor of sociology and Chicano and Latino studies by courtesy and the co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies here at Berkeley. Her research focuses mainly on questions of census, racial classification, immigration, and racial politics in the US and Europe.
Her book, Making Hispanics, was published by the University of Chicago Press, and provides the first historical account of the rise of the Hispanic-Latino panethnic category in the US. And she is currently working on two new book projects, both funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. The first one, entitled California Colorlines, with Tianna Paschel, examines the contradictions of racial politics in the nation’s most diverse and seemingly progressive state.
The second book, Race in the Politics of Trust in an Age of Government Cynicism, with J. Dowling and Michael Rodriguez-Muniz, provides a first mixed method examination of race and political trust in the US. So without further ado, I will turn it over to Cristina and our panelists. Thank you all for being here.
[APPLAUSE]
[CRISTINA MORA] Great. Thank you very much. Is this on? Yeah. Certainly, a pleasure to be here with you all today. And it’s certainly a great pleasure to be on this table with this esteemed panel. I guess we’ll start from my left to my right. We first have Ian Haney Lopez, who is the Chief Justice and Earl Warren Professor of public law here at UC Berkeley.
We then have David Hollinger, the Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus of History. And then we also have Omar Wasow, the assistant professor of political science here at UC Berkeley. And from what I understand, we’ll have three different presentations, about 15 minutes long each, and then we’ll open it up to some conversation and Q&A. So I guess we’ll start with Ian first.
[IAN HANEY LÓPEZ] Thank you. Thank you, Cristina, and thank you all. Really delighted to speak with you all. Just by way of background. So I’m a law professor at UC Berkeley. My main focus is on race and racism. For years, I wrote about race and law, and then race and constitutional law, until it became clear somewhere around 2008 after sort of intensive study of what the Supreme Court was doing, that the Supreme Court’s race jurisprudence made no sense as law, but made perfect sense as politics.
And in particular as electoral politics, a sort of electoral politics in which presidents campaigned for support by mobilizing stories of a Supreme Court out of control in the area of race, and the area of gender, and the area of abortion, that this was an activist court that needed to be reined in. That shifted my focus.
So from that point forward, I started looking at presidential politics and the exploitation of coded racial narratives. Dog Whistle Politics, so that’s my 2014 book, which then told a story of race as a class strategy. That is to say, it was the Republican Party, formally the party of big business that was using culture war politics, family, friendly policies, and opposition to affirmative action and integration, in order to win support for voters who thought they were getting populism but instead were getting support for oligarchy.
This approach ended up was attractive to unions, and with the encouragement of unions and support from AFL-CIO and SEIU, I then launched another big project to think about how to respond to dog whistle politics, including working with pollsters, working with communication specialists, working with nonprofits and unions. And that was merge left fusing race and class. So that’s 2019.
In 2020, I did a project that specifically focused on Latino voters. So I want to talk a little bit about Latino voters. Latino voters are part of the hot counterintuitive story, like the press, the media needs counterintuitive stories. Why else would anybody read the newspaper? They seem to think, so they’re constantly latching on to these counterintuitive stories. And one of the recent ones is Kamala Harris is losing support from Latinos and African-Americans.
And shockingly, majority of Latinos support mass deportation. What the F. So that. So I want to talk a little bit about that story. Here’s how I want to begin. This is a message I tested in 2020. This is around 15 focus groups with Latinos across the country. And then based on that, created a poll and then polled 145 Latinos, 400 African-Americans, and 400 whites.
All right. So here’s part of the message we tested. And the question is, then imagine you’re taking the poll. You would have a little dial. You can turn it up if you feel warmly towards the message. You can turn it down if you feel negatively about the message.
Our leaders must prioritize keeping us safe and ensuring that hard working Americans have the freedom to prosper. Leaders who build a strong economy once can do it again. Taking a second look at China or illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs is just common sense. And so is fully funding the police. So our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.
We need to make sure we take care of our own people first, especially the people who politicians have cast aside for too long to cater to whatever special interest groups yell the loudest or riot in the streets. Obviously, I ripped that message off from the Republican talking points.
The question I have is, if you’re thinking of yourself, how persuasive is that message? Think about whites as a category. Dial up, dial down, where would they be. Essentially, whites on average dialed to 60 on a 0 to 100 range, anything above 50 is positive.
Where did African-Americans dial to? 60. Where did Latino style to? 61. We think– and this is, Trump learned this lesson. We think that a message that’s rooted in scare stories based on racist stereotypes about China, about dark-skinned illegals, that these racist manipulations are evident to the majority of voters. They’re not. They’re evident to those of us who are paying attention, who are critical and who are highly engaged.
What most voters here in the context of dog whistle politics is a basic story about good people, who are hard working and deserving and bad people, who are pathologically violent and undeserving and flooding into our country. And when people hear a story about good people versus bad people, most want to be with the good people, most.
So that’s what we’re up against in terms of dog whistle politics. Now, the question is, obviously the voting patterns are very different between whites, African-Americans and Latinos. So what explains the difference? Well, there’s more than just one story out there. There are these countervailing stories and the stories among African-Americans about hostility from the Republican Party and also about the salience of race are much more powerful and act to compensate for the basic attractiveness of this dog whistle narrative.
What about among Latinos? In terms of Latino receptivity to this dog whistle message. The single most important factor that I found was how Latinos conceptualized Latino group identity. I’m actually saying something surprising there. We’re often told it’s a matter of how they– it’s a matter of gender. It’s a matter of age. It’s a matter of national origin– Mexican-American or Cuban, like particular to their identity. Or maybe we’re told it’s a matter of their race. What race they think they are.
I’m not saying any of those. I’m saying it’s a matter of how they conceptualize the group position of Latinos. So that’s slightly different. I can say more about these other gaps, the gender gap, the age gap, national origin gap, maybe in Q&A if we want to go into it a little bit more, we can. I have my suspicions about the gender gap. I think that’s one of those stories that’s fun for the press to tell because it correlates with Latino machismo and da-da-da.
So I’m skeptical of it. But I’m going to set that aside for a moment. There is one gap that I didn’t study that does seem to be really important. So I want to flag it. Don’t have much more to say on it. Recent polling suggests that there’s an enormous gap among Latinos in terms of whether they’re a Protestant versus Catholic versus religiously non-affiliated.
Religiously non-affiliated Latinos are about half of all Latinos. And they are– let me see my gap. So religiously non-affiliated Latinos compared to Protestants are 69% more likely to support Harris. That’s an enormous gap. Catholic Latinos compared to Protestant Latinos are 39% more likely to support Harris versus Trump. These are really big gaps. I didn’t study.
I studied religiosity, but I didn’t study the Catholic Protestant. So my bad. This seems to be a really important factor. With that caveat in mind, I want to come back to this idea of racial group conception.
Here’s the way I did it. I gave respondents three choices. I asked them, are Hispanics like African-Americans destined to remain distinct over generations? Option one. Option two, are Hispanics a group that, like European Americans over generations, become part of the mainstream? That was option two. Option three, are Hispanics a group that over generations can get ahead simply through hard work, with no racial identity there.
OK, so three options. Basically, are we people of color, are we white, are we outside of race? Almost all Latino activists, almost all of our students, almost all of our faculty, say we’re people of color. Great and we have the support of one out of four Latinos. 25% of Latinos say we’re people of color, 32% say Latinos are essentially like other European immigrant groups going to join the mainstream, 28% essentially saying we stand outside of race.
What’s going on here? First, it’s not skin color. The Latinos who say we are people of color are also the Latinos who say others are most likely to think they’re white. And again, if you think about your students, you think about me, I’m biracial, half white, half Latino. I identify as Latino. I identify as a person of color. I’m sure a lot of people think I’m white, especially passing me on the street. What’s going on?
I have adopted through education and through analysis of political conception of Latinidad as a person of color. And I think that’s the story of a lot of our students. So it’s not necessarily that we’re dark. In fact, the group with the darkest skinned Latinos is that third group who say race doesn’t matter, I’m just going to get ahead through hard work, with the exception of Afro-Latinos.
Afro-Latinos are going to say that there are people of color, but otherwise, this is not a skin color dynamic, nor is it a dynamic of self-hatred. Interestingly, the group that expressed the highest level of pride in being Latino, we’re the group that said that Latinos were joining the mainstream similarly to Euro Americans. So this isn’t, like there’s a story among Latinos that either you think you’re a person of color or you’re engaged in self-hatred.
Or there’s another story that says you’re engaged in passing. You’re trying to leave Latinos behind. Levels of a sense of linked fate were the same across all three groups. So something else is going on. What is this other thing that’s going on? Racial status anxiety. Where are we as a people? Where do we fit in a society in which there’s a very strong white, Black hierarchy?
Are we able to join the mainstream? Will we be regarded as full citizens instead? Are we and our children doomed to be part of a denigrated caste? Does none of this apply to us? And to really think about this, think about this in terms of immigrant parents asking this about, why they immigrated to this country, and what the racial caste system in the United States means for their children.
Or shorthand version of this, my mother thinks of herself as a Spanish lady, even though she’s a dark-skinned immigrant from El Salvador. And she’s super bummed that I study race and think of myself as a racial minority. Because that’s not what she wanted. That’s not why she came here. So where do people fit?
Next up. If it turns out, as it does, that 60% of Latinos reject the idea that were people of color. How do you think a sort of a left Democratic message that responds to dog whistle politics by saying they’re racists is going to perform. And that’s about how it performs. Because the left denounce white supremacy message is a message that asks Latinos to suppose that are people of color, and most don’t want to do that.
At the same time, the standard left alternative to that, more centrist alternative to that is to say, let’s not talk about race at all. Let’s just focus on economic issues because these people don’t think there are people of color. That message doesn’t perform very well, either and why not. Because the community is shot through with anxiety about whether we’re good people or not, and an economic message doesn’t address that. What does address that? A dog whistle story.
And so when I was running these focus groups, one of my throwaway questions is was– I thought of as an icebreaker. I was like, what does Trump say about Latinos? I figured icebreaker. They’re going to say, he says, we’re rapists. And people were saying things like, well, he says that they’re gangbangers and illegals and I know them, they’re my neighbors. Like, they were willing to punch down themselves in order to say there are bad ones.
I know them, but I’m not one of the bad ones. I’m one of the good ones. So that message doesn’t work either. What does work well, a race class fusion message. I’m going to transition here and wrap up here really quickly. I want to do that in terms of the mass deportation message.
There is a lot of support among Latinos for mass deportation. But I think a lot of what’s happening here is that people don’t understand what the question is that’s being asked. When you look at recent data, for example, in The New York Times. Latinos are split 45 through 48 in support of mass deportation. But in the same poll, Latinos support a path to citizenship by 67% to 29%.
That is. If you just say mass deportation in the context of Trump’s rhetoric, people think they’re going to deport the illegals. They’re going to deport the gangbangers. They’re going to deport the racists, without them listening to Stephen Miller and taking a look at Steve Bannon and what their plans are, in which they claim they’re going to deport 12 to 20 million people.
That they’re going to end birthright citizenship, that they’re going to build concentration camps, that they’re going to use the military. Like none of that is being communicated to the Latino population, it’s a huge mistake, I think, on the part of the Democratic Party. We can talk more about the immigration messaging.
But in addition, here’s a message on immigration that I tested. This message was the most single most popular message with Latinos and also performed really well with whites and more importantly, performed really well with African-Americans who are susceptible to a message that immigrants are coming in and taking as Trump puts it now, “Black jobs.”
So I’ll just read you this message. Whether it’s from another town or another country, most of us move for the same reason, to build a better life for our families. But certain politicians are insulting immigrants while billions are going to a handful of corporations. The richest 1% benefit when politicians blame immigrants for the hard times regular people face.
We need to recognize the contributions of immigrants in our communities and states, and embrace people with the courage to move. When we come together, we can elect new leaders who will put fairness back into our immigration laws and make this a country that provides a better life for everyone, whether we’re brown, Black, or white.
I’m going to close with an emphasis on that phrase. We need a message of cross-racial solidarity as an antidote to intentional class-driven, oligarchy-driven divide and conquer. And the message of racial solidarity should not presuppose that this is a message of cross racial solidarity that only applies to people of color. Instead, it’s a message of cross-racial solidarity that says that white people too have an equal interest in building bridges along racial lines in order to stand up to class warfare.
And notice, that sort of message doesn’t ask anybody, and it certainly doesn’t ask Latinos to specify whether they think they are brown, or white, or Black, or standing outside of race. That is we, whatever you think you are, we all have an interest in seeing clearly the way in which race is being used as an intentional strategy of divide and conquer and responding with an ethos of uniting across racial differences to build the country we want. And I’ll stop.
[APPLAUSE]
[CRISTINA MORA] Thank you very much. Professor Hollinger.
[DAVID HOLLINGER] The shifting alignment I’m going to talk about is the capture of the Republican Party by its evangelical client, with among other results, the loss on the part of the Republican Party of a capacity to treat the opposition Democrats as co-stewards in running a pluralist democracy.
When the Christian supremacist Senator Josh Hawley asserted in 2017, that the ultimate authority of Jesus Christ has to be established in every aspect of life, including the government of the United States. There was nothing the least bit novel about this. Generations of preachers have encouraged the faithful to see themselves as a morally superior community required by God to either stand apart from a sinful society or to take control of it.
Harold Ockenga opened the first meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942, with a call for tribal solidarity to confront a threatening panorama of liberal iniquity. I see on the horizon ominous clouds of battle which spell annihilation unless we are willing to run as a pack. All of us Christians must go on the offensive, Ockenga said, against political liberalism, theological modernism, secularism, and the new deal’s pernicious legacy of a nation being run by the government rather than by private interest.
The notorious Manichaean and dominionist claims of the new apostolic Reformation, which we read about all the time, are not new, and they were developed in their current form by the ostensibly, a respectable institution Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.
Here’s a recent utterance of Donald Trump delivered to a convention of evangelicals. [CLEARS THROAT] This is the final battle. Well, we know where that comes from. This is the final battle, so he begins his speech. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalist. We will cast out the communists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates us. We will root the fake news media and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.
In speeches parallel to this, Trump has promised Christians that if they vote him in, they will never have to vote again because he will establish Christian hegemony in the government of the United States.
Now, theologically, liberal versions of the faith have never paid much attention to the Manichaean and dominionist themes of the Bible. But the Republicans, by developing evangelicals as clients, catapulted evangelical ideas from the margins of American public life to its center. And in a historic juxtaposition, a historic juxtaposition often missed.
The Republicans did this during the same late 20th century decades when the mainline Protestants declined, depriving the society of a countervailing power against evangelicalism. Just at the time that the Republicans were bringing evangelicals into greater prominence, the rival ecumenical, mainline Protestants, were losing what had long been their major role in American society.
Secular critics could talk about racism, sexism, homophobia, and the bad readings of the constitution common among evangelicals. But these secular critics almost never contested the religious foundations of Christian nationalism, thus entirely missing the actually operating justifications for evangelical political behavior.
As Linda Greenhouse charged in The New York Review of Books, secularists don’t know how to talk back to evangelicals. They don’t even know how to frame the questions. The Manichean existential conflict between a good and evil is an enduring element in the inventory of the Christian project, even if downplayed by the ecumenical theologians.
Extreme sectarianism finds ample scriptural warrant, not only in the resoundingly apocalyptic book of Revelation, but scattered here and there among the 30,000 verses of the Bible from which preachers can choose. So we take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ 2 Corinthians 10:5 or Matthew 12:30, this is Jesus himself. Whoever is not with me is against me. Galatians 1:28, where he grants dominion over all things on the Earth.
Now the mainline leader like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich could debate this stuff, including Isaiah 4:5, where Cyrus is anointed, which is a scriptural warrant. We see invoked almost every day by evangelicals to justify the demonstrably immoral Trump as their champion. Thus, an ironic consequence of the secularization process, more and more people leaving religion, more and more nones, as we say, the mainline churches in decline.
A ironic consequence of all of that was the loss of what had been the nation’s most formidable obstacle to evangelical influence in American life. The Manichaean and dominionist strains of evangelical Protestantism, whatever their claims under subspecies analysis. Our constitute, a deeper, more structural problem for democracy than the Christian nationalism that these doctrines facilitate.
To be sure, sectarianism is not– Republican sectarianism is not exclusively a consequence of evangelical influence. In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, urged Republicans to demonize Democrats and to stop working with them on collegial terms. Gingrich famously asked Republican office seekers to get nasty, and demanded that Republicans in both houses of Congress blow up bipartisan projects and run the tables their own way.
Buchanan made his reputation by insisting that Reagan had betrayed his revolutionary potential and become a conventional, compromising politician. Gingrich and Buchanan did not need evangelical inspiration to turn their party in more polarizing directions, but they understood that Ronald Reagan had delivered to them a voting constituency ready to go with their florid flow.
Reagan, you’ll remember, began his 1980 campaign for the presidency by telling the National Association of evangelicals that he endorsed them. Immediately after praising states’ rights, while standing virtually on the graves of the Neshoba County martyrs from 1964, Reagan linked his government is the problem mantra to his appeal to white southerners unhappy with federal support of civil rights for African-Americans.
And he offered both of these as being fully in harmony with his celebration of evangelical Protestantism.
The Republican political dependence on evangelical voters is more intimately connected to the southern strategy than is usually recognized. That strategy developed as early as the Nixon years, was unashamedly aimed at the white population, uncomfortable with school integration and federally guaranteed civil rights for African-Americans.
But the culture of Southern whites in the former slave states was already the most thoroughly evangelical regional culture in the nation. The Southern strategy was, from the start, an evangelical strategy. There were implications for education. It helps to remember that as late as 1970, nearly one fifth of the ministers of congregations affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention had no schooling beyond high school.
Historically, Republicans had long enjoyed the support of the bulk of the upper middle-class and in many states had given more support to public higher education than the Democrats. But by prioritizing white Southern evangelicals and their counterparts in the Midwest, the Republican Party gradually abandoned most of the states with highly educated electorates that had once produced Republican presidents and senators of real stature.
In neither 2016 or 2020, did Trump make a serious effort to win any state in the entire eastern corridor, from Maine to Virginia, with the sole exception of Pennsylvania, nor did he try to get the Pacific states of California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. Already, by 2014, before Trump, the GOPs abandonment of those 16 coastal states was so pronounced that of the 32 senators then representing those states, only Susan Collins of Maine and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania were Republicans.
The party located its power base in the States and the Congressional districts with the fewest college graduates. For the first time in American history then, one of our two major political parties has a vested interest, a vested interest in maintaining a relatively uneducated electorate. The study of history, sociology, political science, philosophy and literature might call into question, what was learned in church or in kinship networks?
Technical and vocational education are not problematic. When JD Vance the other day declared that professors are the enemy, echoing Nixon, he was not talking about professors of electrical engineering or nursing.
A liberal arts education makes individuals more likely to appreciate the value of vaccines, to recognize how much of human life opens up for women when they have reproductive choice, to respect scientific indicators of global warming, to understand the past disabling legacy for descendants of enslaved Americans, to grasp the evidence that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, to distinguish large scale economic indicators from the price of eggs, to understand what project 2025 means for the country if Trump becomes president, and to accept a host of other realities that low information voters, as the press calls them, often deny, especially when encouraged to do so by confident voices claiming to speak from or on behalf of their identity group.
When Republican governors try to take over the higher education system of their states, they know exactly what they are doing. They know who their enemy is, it is us. Evangelicalism changed little during this Republican sponsored rise other than being corrupted by a new proximity to power, bringing dominionism to greater prominence as evangelicals began to take seriously for the very first time that they might actually run the country.
But evangelicalism’s patron, the Republican Party, was changed profoundly. Republicans of yore were not so fanatically eager to police the bodies of women, to prevent public school children from learning unappealing truths about history and society, to shut down rather than to carefully manage the regulatory state, and to collapse the separation of church and state.
Today’s Republicans know how dependent they are on evangelical voters, who function as a kind of tar baby sticking to the hands of even those Republicans whose interest in evangelicalism was always more opportunistic than principled. Once you grab onto it, it’s very hard to get rid of. It’s hard to get rid of because it is so deeply embedded.
A recent flood of disillusioned autobiographies bear eloquent witness to the sticking power of this historic theological burden. Sarah McCammon, The Exevangicals, and Tim Alberta’s, The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory, mixed autobiography with reportage, recounting the experience of trying to live a non-sectarian life under evangelical authority. A complementary shelf of books by historians document the depth and extent not only of manicheanism, but also misogyny and racism.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, is the most compelling one volume testimony to the challenges faced by those who wish to remain evangelicals while participating in a pluralist democracy. Yet a revealing sign of how challenging it can be to reform evangelicalism rather than simply to abandon it, is the frequency with which anti-Trump evangelicals depart from the standard evangelical talking points to draw from the theological inventory of the long, scorned mainline liberal Protestants.
I’m here thinking especially of the op ed columnist, David French, Peter Wehner, Russell Moore, and David Brooks. Their writings, the writings of these pundits in The Times, The Post, and The Atlantic, show a striking pattern of appropriation and effacement. Priorities of the religious liberals that were long castigated as substituting politics for religion. That was basically the line you heard all the time from evangelicals about ecumenical substituting politics for religion.
All of those priorities are now appropriated, while the congregationalist, Episcopalians, and Methodists, who liberalized Protestantism are effaced from public memory. Staples of ecumenical sermons and Sunday schools are now used by the anti-Trump evangelicals as representative of Christianity. Matthew 25:40 I was naked and you clothed me and so forth. And if you do this to the least of these, my brother, you have done it to me. Or Luke 10:25, the good Samaritan story.
Galatians 3:28 and Christ, there is no Gentile or Jew, no male or female, so forth. All these things are straight out of the liberal Sunday schools, and then suddenly you find David French, writing them. I wonder how many more columns I could read by David French, where he goes into an evangelical church and he sees people that are mean spirited and he’s shocked, shocked to find these people.
So readers of the discussions of religion in The Times, The Post, and The Atlantic might suppose that the essence of evangelicalism had always been a species wide movement for love, service, and brotherhood, tragically twisted in the era of Trump. This is an egregious misrepresentation of American religious history.
The notorious Manichaean, and dominionist, New Apostolic Reformation would not attract so many of today’s individuals had not generations of preachers made its doctrines plausible and its style appealing. The Republican Party will not regain its historic role as a responsible participant in the nation’s two party system until it faces up to the damage done by its uncritical embrace of bad religion.
[APPLAUSE]
[CRISTINA MORA] Professor Wasow.
[OMAR WASOW] I want to begin by thanking the Matrix and the panel for inviting me. So I was interested in thinking about realignment, particularly around what has been observed both in recent polling and in the 2020 election around what sometimes called racial polarization. So one of the more striking findings in the 2020 election is that Trump outperformed sort of Republican presidential candidates among African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans.
And that was shocking for a variety of reasons to people who study politics partly, Trump’s rhetoric has often been quite alienating to members of those groups. And so it was sort of thought if anybody would have the reverse, it would be Trump and yet that’s not what happened. Some of this was picked up on already by Professor Haney-Lopez.
And I think there are at least a couple of things that might be specific to 2020 that I’m not going to go into in that much detail, but where some of it may be COVID effects, might if you were somebody who had a job that was hit heavily by COVID restrictions, that might make you more hostile to the party associated with COVID restrictions. And so there’s a class and education divide there that overlaps with race.
I think there’s some evidence, my primary research is on protest movements. I think there’s some evidence that among Asian-Americans and Latinos, there was some disaffection from the Democratic Party in response to Black Lives Matter protests in that period.
But again, those are the 2020 election. And I’m interested in thinking a little bit about some of the present moment. And in particular, I want to take the most provocative version of the question, which is to think about people like Enrique Tarrio, who is a Cuban– Afro-Cuban, was a former head of the Proud Boys, now convicted, who is very explicit about his enthusiasm for this, what was called like, I forget the term now, it was like European chauvinist group.
But it was also very clear that he was raised in a Black Cuban community and was like not anti-Black, and at least his conception of it. Nick Fuentes is an avowed neo-Nazi of Mexican-American ancestry. Mark Robinson, candidate for governor in North Carolina. I mean, a bit of a crackpot, but it’s not as easy to just say, oh, nobody of color would take these extreme positions because in fact, we have lots and lots of examples.
So I think it raises a puzzle that– to be clear, this is not research I’ve done. It’s something I’m kind of thinking about and speculating about and so I’m processing with you now in public. So these are speculations, some may be more grounded in evidence than others.
So what could be going on– and I think to be clear, I also want to say that the Enrique Tarrio’s of the world are extreme cases, but I think are leading indicators of this broader pattern we saw in 2020. And so we should think of them as worth at least considering even as their extreme of a broader set of trends in maybe a new kind of alignment around racial depolarization.
So one of the very common polling results that we’ve gotten in the last few months is that there is this particularly among Black and Latino young men, some shift away from the Democratic Party. And I want to begin with two kind of significant caveats. And I actually welcome your feedback on this as well.
First is it’s entirely plausible that a significant chunk of that story is polling error. And I don’t mean polling error in the sense of people are doing polls badly or there’s some kind of malfeasance or something. But it’s just when you are getting subgroups of subgroups, you have noisier estimates. And it’s entirely possible that we’re getting fairly noisy estimates that are somewhat over representing the disaffected than the affected, or maybe not the right way to put it.
And I think in that also, it’s important to say that among African-Americans, typical presidential election, 90% of African-Americans will vote for the Democratic Party. So if 80% of African-American men vote for the Democratic Party, that’s both a significant shift in the sense that you’ve gone from one in 10 voting Republican to two in 10.
But the overwhelming majority of African-American men are still voting for the Democratic Party. And some of the more recent polls suggest it might be 85%. So how big a transition are we talking about? I think that’s an open question we’ll hopefully know more shortly.
A second caveat is that this should be entirely unsurprising. That in a society where we are bathed in narratives of racial hierarchy that some of the people who are lower status strive to be a part of the higher status group and adopt the ideologies of the higher status group and behave in ways that are essentially about a kind of acculturating to the norms of a dominant group.
So at some level, we should think of this as– of course, this is happening. It’s been happening throughout American history. It’s been happening throughout the history of the world, that people in one form or another in the Black community would call passing are doing that in part as a way to gain status or income or other kinds of opportunities.
So with those two kind of caveats aside, let me add one other subtle one, which is that it’s also unclear to what degree this is a phenomenon that reflects broad trends that we’re going to see for years to come, or something idiosyncratic about Donald Trump.
So to go a little off script, I was staying at a hotel in Long Island. There was a visiting a hospital and the check in counter at this motel was a young African-American man wearing– this is, I think, around 2018– he’s wearing a MAGA cap. And I’m a political scientist. It’s like it’s just me and him. And so I’m like trying in a very nonjudgmental way to say, so don’t see a lot of brothers wearing MAGA caps. What’s going on?
He’s like, yeah, the sisters hate it, and he kind of pauses and he says, I just love Home Alone 2.
[LAUGHTER]
Which I did not see coming, right? But it’s like Trump is a celebrity. Trump has a level of celebrity that is exceptional. And not just a level of celebrity, but he has for– I don’t know how many years The Apprentice was on air, but a decade and a half, there was a level of marketing that he is a great businessman. And if you read the profiles of the production of The Apprentice, it turns out, in fact, he’s making all kinds of capricious decisions that the editors have to reverse engineer the show to make it look like a good decision was made.
And that, in fact, when– I’m forgetting the name of the producer, Mark– the person who oversaw the apprentice said when they first went to pitch Trump, he was very down on his luck. His office had lots of furniture with chipped wood and it’s an act of– it is theater that he is to the world, not a guy with six banks or six bankruptcies, but a great businessman.
So there’s something potentially idiosyncratic about Trump that will not translate to other candidates or the party. And I just don’t know. I mean, I think some of the stuff you brought up clearly is at play, but Trump is idiosyncratic. So now to get a little bit more into things that I think might be structural deeper.
I think one mistake that people make a lot when they hear this rhetoric, and again, this was touched on earlier, Mexico is not sending their best, they’re sending criminals and so on and so on. We assume that the reaction is going to be one of rejection by people targeted by that hateful language. And what we see again and again across many different groups is that when people are stigmatized, there are two different reactions.
In simple terms, one is a kind of rejection, but another is a distancing from the group. So to draw on some research by a scholar at Stanford who looked at German Americans following World War I, there was a rise of anti-German sentiment. And there are a bunch of things that German Americans do essentially to distance themselves from being identified as German.
So she looks at data, for example, at how they name their kids. And the prototypically German names for boys become– they go for more German names to more kind of quintessentially American names. So that act of distancing should not surprise us. This is like a human adaptation under conditions of discrimination, stigmatization to try and contort yourself to be less a target of that discrimination.
And so echoing exactly what was said earlier. If you’re associated with a group that’s being demonized, like an obvious strategy is to try and not be part of the group or to distance yourself from the group. And so I think on a range of dimensions, we’re watching distancing patterns play out that are, again, fundamentally very typical processes of accommodation to discrimination, to processes of being demonized.
Second, another idea. This is now– let’s see, so polling error, we raised in a bath of racial hierarchy, celebrity, response to stigmatization. So that’s four. So a fifth one is very speculative, which is that we’re in the middle of a kind of second realignment.
Well, so a classic term, there’s lots of debate about what is realignment, but in the 1960s, there’s this passage of landmark civil rights legislation. The two parties become more explicitly, the Democratic Party becomes expli– in the– let me, just because this may seem, it may not be obvious.
In 1962, there’s a Civil Rights Act that’s passed, and it gets more Republican support than Democratic support. Why is that? The Democratic Party is a group of northern, more liberal racial liberals, and southern segregationists. And so it’s not obvious that Democrats are going to be the party of racial liberalism more broadly. By ’64, the Civil Rights Act passes, Democrats are the party of African-American interests, and the Republican Party becomes more explicitly, the party aligned against civil rights.
And that split, sort of unfolds over decades to some of what we think of as now the racial realignment. So what would a second realignment look like? Marc Hetherington, who’s a scholar, a leading scholar of authoritarianism, although he’s now refining that, gave a presentation of a new book he was working on here yesterday as part of the Citron Center and the Matrix.
And I think he spelled out a more fine grained idea of conservatism that included things, like a taste for traditionalism, sometimes people being hypercompetitive. So that’s some of the Trump energy of just like this. And he got surveys that are teasing apart, disaggregating some of what we might call conservatism, a strong taste for personal responsibility over more systemic models of accountability.
And what I mean in this idea of a second realignment is that there’s this moment of possibility for now more fine grained sorting. So we’ve had one big sort around, how do you feel at some core level about equality for African-Americans. And now there’s this opportunity to yourself on more subtle things.
Well, I’m more of a traditionalist. And what people want to do with, say, transwomen in sports upsets my sense of traditionalism, and that that’s going to show up, not cleanly aligned with party. Let’s give another example that maybe is easier to grasp. He talked about these measures of hypercompetitiveness. What do we mean by hypercompetitiveness?
The questions on these surveys were like walking. You should never walk away from a fight. Walking away from a fight is a sign of weakness. Basically, questions that get at, do you think the world is defined by winners and losers? And it turned out that hypercompetitiveness shows up pretty evenly distributed across both parties.
But now you’ve got a candidate who is a hypercompetitive candidate. So if you’re somebody who has a taste for that, that’s potentially going to pull you out of what had been your historical home by party. So that’s what I mean by this more. We’ve gone from a big sort to maybe a more fine grained sort.
And that over time, we’re going to see these other kinds of traits leading to people who are cross-pressured. By which I mean, they may have a profile in The Times yesterday about Latino kid whose parents are for Harris and he’s for Trump and he’s got competing motives and instincts. But maybe he’s somebody who is a traditionalist in some way that makes it hard to align with these new ideas that the Democratic Party is associated with.
And I think it’s important to say that in order to have maybe this more fine grained sort, you need another thing. And so this is now the last potential thing that maybe is changing that I think is more structural, which is that we should think of identity as importantly downstream of institutions. And what I mean by that, I just taught a class this morning, where we were reading Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and it’s like you can think of the emergence of the nation state as non-trivially, a function of the emergence of print media, which gives people a sense of common identity across distance and even time that wasn’t there possible.
So media, as this very powerful institution shaping people’s sense of self, is one of those institutions. We read another piece about schools, which is, you can think of as almost another kind of media. But schools as a powerful institution shaping people’s sense of national identity.
And in the present era, we’ve got– I mean, the list of institutions goes on, churches, so on. There’s an unmooring for a lot of young people from a lot of those institutions. I grew up reading newspapers, that is clearly like now, like using a fountain pen. It is increasingly archaic.
And so what does it mean to be a young African-American kid coming of age, getting a sense of self from TikTok. Religious institutions in the Black community have been a very powerful part of the kind of baton pass of institutions of racial political identity. We’re seeing increasingly on this trend about secularization, like young African-Americans much less engaged in the church. So that we should assume there is some unmooring associated with that, too.
And linked to that, we might also imagine that there are these new identities. Maybe I am really into anime, and my sense of self is defined by the global community of anime enthusiasts, not by my local Black community. So this is speculative, but almost certainly there is some media and other ways in which these formerly central institutions that are now in some ways being decentered is having effects on giving people more latitude to move by party.
So where does that leave us? Just to wrap very quickly, I think we don’t have as social scientists, and maybe more generally in the public discourse, a good model for what I think of as an increasingly multiethnic, still overwhelmingly white Republican Party, but a multiethnic far-right. And that’s something new and interesting that we need to get our heads around.
[CRISTINA MORA] Great.
[APPLAUSE]
Great. Well, Eva has the mic. We’ll take questions from the audience. We’ll start right here and then right here. Thank you so much.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Thanks for the points made. I guess, one question. I have a couple of questions. One is, what is a Democratic Party to do in terms of– we’re trying to reach out to all these subgroups also evangelical, but also white, male, uneducated is a group diversity of the Hispanic group. And it’s just like the Republican Party has been very effective in capturing the far-right. What’s the message? What kind of leadership is required? Because I think it’s a combination of message as well as leader.
And then, it seems to me like a centrist policy with the right communication, the inclusive message you talked about is really critical. Because imagine, if the immigration– like, the border was not an issue. If the executive order was done the first year versus the third year. And you take that off. I always say don’t give the other side ammunition.
So what is the Democratic Party to do, run a more centrist model because the Republicans have captured the far-right, is a centrist in the left, a bigger group, but is that effective? And how do we avoid letting the Republicans have these ammunition points?
[LÓPEZ] So I would respond by saying the counterfactual in which strong border controls are enacted, that’s the wrong way to think about it. Like, Obama, the Obama administration deported more people than any other prior administration in the history of the country and nevertheless was dinged as weak on the border and open borders. What the Republicans are engaged in doing is bamboozling the public by lying to them consistently, egregiously, repeatedly, echoed through two large megaphones– three, I guess Fox and other media, social media, and the evangelical church.
And if that’s the case, then Democrats can’t win by enacting effective policy that responds to the complaints. And even– listen, to some of the language that David provided. We’re going to route out the communists and the friends like. The stories are telling aren’t connected to reality. And so don’t respond to reality. That means that Democrats need a powerful countervailing story.
Democrats have struggled to articulate a powerful countervailing story because they’ve been caught by two different forces. One, they’re being pushed in a sort of splintered identitarian direction, and that actually makes things worse. So if we tell a story to the American public in which we are indeed locked into conflict between different communities of color and white people, or we are indeed locked into conflict between the feminists and the rest, or between a gay identity movement and straight.
Like, if that’s the sort of political language we use, that’s going to backfire, and so Democrats stay away from it. What do they replace it with? Policy, which is about the worst thing you can replace it with. It’s like one channel is showing Scream 2. And then the Democrats are like, we know. Well, let’s get them to watch Washington Week in review. It’s like nobody’s turning from Scream 2 to Washington Week in review.
So Democrats really need a story. I actually think Harris and Walz are doing pretty good with that story. It’s a story of inclusion. It’s a story of working together. It’s a story of a shared vision. It’s a big tent. I think that they could do better in naming– well, I actually think one of the things that they’re weakest on is immigration. Because their record on immigration is kind of what you’re saying. We had a strong policy. It’s like, that’s not going to do it.
I think that they do better if they said, all those terrible lies about people in Springfield eating pets, those are lies of the worst sort designed to tear us apart. We know better. Let’s come together. This is just billionaires tech money, crypto money funding lies about poor people. We’re on to this. They could be much better on that. But I think that that’s the core insight here. And it goes to Omar’s conversation. All politics is identity politics.
Republicans have done incredibly well because they’ve mastered identity politics and really leaned into it and will say whatever they need to say to mobilize people around identity. Democrats as a party have run away from identity politics, and they’ve run away from it under pressure from different identity groups. And they’ve also run away from the sort of natural identity politics that they should lean into, which is identity as class or class as identity.
Democrats are unwilling to tell a story of working people beset by corporations and by billionaires, with notable exceptions like Bernie and AOC. And then you look at how popular they are and say Democrats really need to lean into this. Why are Democrats doing so poorly among working people? Because they no longer articulate a story of a class war, in which working people broadly defined or under threat from malefactors of great wealth to recover a New Deal type language.
So Democrats for 50 years have been trying to contest elections with very little recourse to identity. The two big exceptions, Bill Clinton, who mobilized white identity as the new Democrat, and Obama, who mobilized an identity of the post-racial America even as he evaded discussion of race. But that’s I think, the crux. Democrats need an identity story because they’re up against an identity story, and politics is fundamentally about identity.
[MORA] Don’t you think in some ways, though, if you see the polls and folks are asking, what’s the most important issue to you? Without question, the economy, the economy, the economy, across all groups. And so don’t you think some of this is also talking so much about identity and not enough about trying to understand how different groups are understanding what the economy is in the first place and what it is at all.
[LÓPEZ] I mean, the polling super interesting. People’s view of the economy tracks their partisan affiliation. The economy is too complex. And the policies are too complex, most people don’t understand it. So what do we see? How do you feel? How optimistic are you about the economy? Well, the Democrats are in power, so I’m down. Wait, a Republican just got elected. Now I’m super optimistic.
And then it flips with the Democrats. It’s following more than generating partisan affiliation. If people cannot answer the question, what sorts of policies are good for me. They can answer the question, who respects me, who esteems me, who’s like me, who will fight for me. Identity, identity, identity, identity.
And I think that, yes, the economy has to be part of the conversation, but nobody should make the mistake of thinking we’re going to talk economy in ways that cuts through identity. It doesn’t because there’s so much noise out there. Like the Republicans are saying, we’re the party of working people, which for any of us who are paying attention is the biggest hoot ever.
And the Democrats are saying sometimes we are the party of working people and we’ve got these policies, but most people can’t make sense of that. What can they make sense of, who esteems me, who will fight for me, who respects me. And they’re going to use identity markers to answer what is going to be good for me economically, which is deeply frustrating that people are saying– I mean, Trump has more credibility than Harris on whether he’ll be good for working Americans.
Because of his policies? Hell, no, because of identity. And so it would be a big mistake to say, no, we need to talk about the economy more, or at least– or maybe let me modify that answer. Talk about the economy in identity terms. There are rich bastards out there who are rigging the system for themselves, and all the rest of us are in trouble.
We, the American people, believe in hard work and believe in, let’s say, an opportunity economy, in which through hard work we can get ahead. And that requires that we stand up to these scheming strategic crypto billionaires who want to buy the presidency. That’s sort of economy, but it’s mainly identity.
[HOLLINGER] A while ago you were mentioning that you thought that Harris and Walz were sort of stepping in the right direction, even if they haven’t got altogether where they should be. And I was wondering how you would characterize their line as identity.
[LÓPEZ] It’s identity in the sense that they’re saying they’re trying to divide us, we’re in this together, we want to take care of each other. They’re weirdos. We’re not weirdos, we’re regular people. This is common sense. Like, these are really strong stories about what it means to be American.
[HOLLINGER] One way to put that. And I’m just wondering whether you would go along with this, is that they’re affirming national identity.
[LÓPEZ] I think so, but not in a nationalistic sense. Not in that America first and not with a heavy emphasis on America, America, America, like this that sort of patriotism. But in a national identity, in the sort of decency, and pluralistic, and diverse.
[HOLLINGER] And we’re all in it together democracy. Yeah. That’s good.
[WASOW] So let me make one friendly amendment to the comment earlier, which is I think that I agree. I talked about Trump as a performer, as a businessman rather than an actual businessman. In part because, yes, like the stories matter and can often Trump reality. The soundbite version of it is not that seeing is believing, but believing is seeing.
But I do think, at least in my experience and my own research, but also I think some degree with immigration and the present, some degree with the economy, it’s not entirely fiction also. People did have an experience of inflation. There have been cities like New York that we’re dealing with this influx of immigrants.
And so there’s kind of two things going on. One is it’s wildly overhyped. Like, why are people in Vermont concerned about the border? And we see a lot of this some of the most concerned Republicans are on the Canadian border. And it’s not quite clear what’s going on there. That’s downstream of a kind of fiction, I think, more than it is reality. But it’s not that there’s nothing.
The economy is doing extremely well by most measures, but there was this peak in inflation and people are very sensitive to that.
[MORA] Especially the working class is a real sense in which the Democratic Party continues to say the economy is doing so well. And then you’ve got a good group of people who are seeing– I mean, this is why JD Vance is in front of prices of eggs and things like that and so–
[WASOW] But I actually think, I think the Democrats, a year I think, for a long time, if you look at the history of deficits, for example, deficits go up under Republican administrations and down under Democratic administrations, and yet Democrats have done a terrible job of saying we’re the party of fiscal discipline, in part because I think it conflicts with their own sense of, no, we’re the party that fights for the poor, but we’re also the– it’s like you can be too empathetic sometimes and not have good message discipline.
So I think there’s actually a story to be told about the economy under Biden that has some amount of empathy and also says we’ve outperformed all of our peer countries and inflation is down–
[MORA] I think it’s divorced from reality, I think it’s what people are feeling and thinking, which is not necessarily what’s objectively true. And I think–
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Yes, I’ll take that as a–
But I think what you’re saying about the message, which I find really fascinating, is the message about economic inequality, which is what you’re saying. It’s like economic inequality as a bridger. Understanding economic inequality as a bridger of all of these different identities. We’re all in the same boat–
[LÓPEZ] Let me sharpen that.
–In this stratified system.
Let me sharpen that. I think you’re absolutely right that people are feeling economic pain. They’re feeling it post-COVID. But in the larger context, over the last 50 years since the inception of dog whistle politics and the sort of hegemony of a Republican Party that’s got itself elected over and over again through culture, war, politics, there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the American middle up to the economic stratosphere. Of course, people are feeling pain. The pain is real. I’m not downplaying that.
But I’m saying what people really want to know is who’s to blame and who will help. Those are identity questions. If instead you just say the pain is real. They know the pain is real. That’s not what’s important. And here are the policies that will solve it, too hard to understand. I don’t know who to trust. You need a concise story, who did this to me? Who’s going to fight for me? And those are identity stories.
[WASOW] The one other thing just on patriotism was, I think part of what we saw that was remarkable in the Democratic National Convention was a kind of liberal nationalism, a liberal patriotism that was a vision of an America that’s exceptional in its being pioneering on marriage equality was Buddha story. It’s an America that had an Americana where prince is like at the heart of like American Americana.
And so it was multiethnic and it was inclusive and it was at the same time, I think, speaking to some of the ways– or Senator Warnock talking about, my mother went from picking cotton to voting for her son for the Senate. Those are stories that are in some ways speak to a certain kind of American exceptionalism but from a liberal perspective.
[LÓPEZ] What I would highlight is the way Democrats have used patriotism to connect patriotism to defense of democracy. One of the most striking lines that they’ve developed is, if you vote for Harris, that doesn’t necessarily make you a Democrat, it makes you a patriot. That was a really powerful line to try and talk to co-opt patriotism from Republicans.
[MORA] We got questions in the audience that will take. Go ahead.
[MARION FOURCADE] Thank you so much. That was truly wonderful. I wanted to go to a topic that none of you really mentioned very much, which is the gender divide. I mean, you sort of said, well, I don’t really believe in it. But if you actually look at the data, it actually cuts across ethnoracial groups. It’s absolutely not unique to Latinos. And in fact, it is worldwide. We are seeing this divide increase worldwide.
So, how does it matter for David, the women are leaving church in droves and in actually just saw data that in Gen Z women are less likely to go to church than men. I mean, that’s historically, that’s a major transformation. And then to Omar, the far-right also, it’s also been very much about gender, but through a different line, mostly through the question of demographic anxiety, which, of course, ties it to control of women’s bodies, but also to immigration. So I don’t know. I just wanted to put that out there and see.
[LÓPEZ] I think that’s a fabulous question. I’ll just be very quick. A really important corrective. I think gender is enormously important in 2024 and may be more important than race. Like, it’s a huge, huge issue, both on terms of equality for women, and abortion issues, and also in competing conceptions of masculinity. Divisions in terms of conception of masculinity on the right, I think is enormously important.
What I was skeptical of was the idea that there’s a particular gender divide among Latinos and African-Americans that’s connected to a mythology of machismo or aggressive masculinity, particular to Latino and African-American men. That is the storyline that has purchased because it dovetails with this pernicious stereotype.
I don’t think is borne out by the data. But I don’t want to be understood to say gender is irrelevant. I actually think it’s enormously, enormously important, more important globally. I think, than in the United States what’s happening, I think there’s a dynamic of demagoguery that seizes on status anxiety in the United States, race is available, but now too, anxiety about gender. I think globally, gender is more readily available as a static anxiety that can be used to whip up Democratic masses. So I think it’s hugely, hugely important.
[HOLLINGER] Yeah, with regard to Protestantism. The exit of women from evangelical churches is very recent, and it’s especially because of what the court did with abortion and the stance that evangelical churches are making. Protestantism is still overwhelmingly female, and that’s been the case for quite a long time. Males are much more likely to have left the churches and not come back.
Most of the Protestant churches are actually increasingly run by women, and that’s also the case with a lot of Catholic parishes. So I’m not saying that gender is not important, but it’s functions differently in a religious context. And I think with these evangelical pro-Trump types, it’s important to know that there are a lot of very prominent women that lead this.
Paula White was the spiritual advisor to the White House throughout Trump’s term. And she led him from five or six years before he asked her basically to help him win the evangelicals. And she did. And so there are millions of people that follow her, and three or four other charismatic Pentecostal women that continue to have enormous support.
Now, whether or not the trend that you’ve referred to, which is genuinely true. Whether that will continue, I don’t know. But it’s definitely a new thing. And I don’t see anything in the overall picture about Protestantism and Catholicism in the United States to change the overwhelmingly gendered character of it. If you go into seminaries now, like you go up here to the Pacific School of Religion, GTU, go to Union or Chicago Div, it’s women that are there, not men.
[WASOW] I would add and I realize this is a weird referral is a total tangent. But I mentioned Home Alone 2 earlier, without clarifying that Donald Trump has a cameo in this film and that might not have been obvious, so I apologize.
[LAUGHS]
On gender, I think this is– actually, a really central point in getting at something that, again, I’m still sort of trying to process, but a lot of how we’ve thought of race politics in America is that they’re defined by white supremacy. And increasingly, a model that organizes a certain far-right politics around that misses all of the other contributing factors. So first, I think it’s important to note that the KKK was also anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish.
So it’s always been more multiethnic than just say anti-Black, and that’s an important factor. It’s also been steeped in all kinds of notions of men’s roles and women’s roles. So it’s not that that’s these other factors are entirely new. But I think– how does Enrique Tarrio fit into the Proud Boys? Well, it’s partly that he’s a chauvinist.
And so the crude way I think about this, is it’s almost like we could imagine a point system, where there are a set of things, where, are you Christian? Well, that’s a point. Are you a chauvinist? That’s a point. Are you anti-trans? That’s a point. Are you white? That might be a point. But it’s only one in a kind of consortium of attitudes and commitments that allow you to have status on the far-right.
And so being a male chauvinist, as the Proud Boys explicitly are, is part of what gives him access, maybe even as somebody who’s Afro-Cuban. And I think it works in other dimensions too, again, to pull away from the far-right, it’s someone like Bobby Jindal or Nikki Haley sits in an interesting place in the Republican Party, where they on the one hand, have converted religion. They’ve sort of anglicized names. There are these ways in which you, again, kind of acculturate into the party, but it’s not as organized around race as it might have been in an earlier era.
I mean, you said gender might be more important than race. And so I think, it’s like we want to think about an issues like transgender issues, don’t easily just shoehorn into our conceptions of race politics. And so I guess the way I am thinking about how some of the right-wing politics are organized is that, as a scholar of race and ethnic politics, that race is in some ways has less purchase. It’s not still central, but that gender, sexuality issues.
And to come back to the status threat idea, that there’s a simple model, which is, do you believe in a world where men should have status above women? Where straight people should have status above LGBTQ folk? Where white should have status over Black? And all of those– to the extent that any of those are part of your framework, like you are more going to find a home, but you don’t have to commit to all of them.
And so you might be four out of five on some, and that allows you to then have membership. And Nikki Haley might never be the nominee, but she can be the number two in a primary.
[HOLLINGER] There’s a column in The Post this morning arguing that gender is important, race is important. But the big thing in realignment, and this is a column that follows very much the language of our session is education. And that’s come up a couple of times here, and I appreciated the comments that Ian and Omar both made about that. I would say, with religion, education is just massively important and a better identifier if you want to choose people out on why they’re going this way or that way.
Education more than gender, more than race, more than class is the chief differentiator. So there’s something to it, anyway.
[MORA] Well, with that provocative comment, at the end, we’re at time now.
[WASOW] Join me in thanking the panel.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[AUDIO LOGO]
[WOMAN’S VOICE] Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
Daniel Gumbiner is a novelist and editor based in Oakland. His first book, The Boatbuilder, was nominated for the National Book Award. His new novel, Fire in the Canyon, was published by Astra House in 2023. He is the Editor of The Believer.
Annalee Newitz is a science fiction writer and science journalist. They are the author of nine books including, most recently, the science fiction novel The Terraformers. They are a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, a columnist in the The New Scientist, and the co-host of an award-winning podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct.
Aaron Sachs is a professor of History and American Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of several books, most recently, Stay Cool: Why Dark Comedy Matters in the Fight against Climate Change (NYU Press, 2023).
Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist, and a graduate of the Berkeley School of Journalism. She has written more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Together with Thelma Young Lutunatabua, Solnit edited the 2023 collection Not too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility.
Rebecca Herman (moderator) is associate professor in the History Department at UC Berkeley and author of Cooperating with the Colossus (Oxford University Press, 2022). She is currently working on a book about the unlikely ban on mining in Antarctica, told through the stories of the military wives and children, artists, writers, activists, soldiers, and scientists who traveled South in growing numbers during the 1970s and 80s.
