1 THE NEW AMERICA
THE REPUBLICANS’ COUNTERREVOLUTION HAS BEEN animated by deep worries about America’s rapidly changing demography. Well, it turns out, they were not imagining or exaggerating. They have good reason to believe revolutionary changes are reshaping the country irretrievably.
The most important change is immigration. The globe has witnessed a massive, growing international migration over the last ten years. Migrants in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war ended up primarily in Europe in the most recent count, but before that fully one in five ended up in America, most coming from Mexico, China, India, and the Philippines.1 At the end of the Obama presidency in 2016, the growing numbers of foreign born in the United States was very real, and considered part of America’s dynamism. Immigrants fill many of the engineering positions in Silicon Valley and are overrepresented in construction, professional and scientific occupations, and recreation and food-service jobs. The number of foreign graduate students getting authorization to work in STEM fields surged in 2016.
Looking to the states, over a quarter of California’s population is now foreign born, as is over or near 20 percent in New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Nevada. Foreign-born people now comprise about 40 percent of the residents in New York City and Los Angeles and a majority in Miami; at over 20 percent they are a strong presence in Chicago and Seattle.
For myself, who struggles with any foreign languages, I am impressed that half of the foreign born speak English at home or very well, but half do not. Prior generations of immigrants, like my foreign-born grandparents and mother, were more insistent English be the first language at home. In the diverse metropolitan areas, most hardly notice the change, but not so in many rural counties. The slowest-growing with the biggest rise in foreign-born residents gave Trump some of his biggest gains in 2016.
Immigration is where globalization makes itself felt most directly, impacting the labor markets, demand on public services, and the meaning of citizenship. That is why Trump made immigration issue number one in his campaign, resisted any calls to help Dreamers or refugees, and proposed reducing legal immigration quotas. That is why the GOP has chosen to go into battle armed with warnings about immigrant gangs, U.S. citizens killed by illegal immigrants, and the need to stall the “infection” from uncontrolled immigration. “Zero tolerance” means the U.S. government will stop what seems inexorable.
Nonetheless, after Trump’s first year in office, the percentage of foreign born rose to its highest level since 2010, over 40 percent now from Asia.2 The number of undocumented immigrants dropped and net migration from Mexico was negative, yet the growing foreignness was just as important to his war on immigrants.
The Republican counterrevolution was also grounded in the decline of rural America and the growing dynamism of the metropolitan areas. Trump’s 2016 vote surged in rural and smaller manufacturing communities where people rightly demanded respect and policies that viewed them as more than collateral damage in the trade and skills debates. The elites of both parties supported the global disruption that made the growing metropolitan areas more dynamic. In the Rust Belt, 4.5 million people have lost jobs since the passage of NAFTA and China’s full integration into the global economy.3 A flood of articles and books sought to help elites and liberals understand the “twin convulsions” of 2016, Trump and Brexit.4
Well, Trump’s surprising vote got their attention. Many books were published by the big New York publishers in an attempt to understand the white working class and their plight. One, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years. Later Vance moved to Columbus, Ohio, and an array of entrepreneurs have focused on how to bring new investment to the area he grew up in.5
But no number of presidential trips to West Virginia, Montana, and Indiana will stall for a millisecond the growing movement of populations and the younger generations to the metropolitan areas across the country. The suburbs have grown 16 percent since 2000 and the cities by 13 percent, the rural areas by just 3 percent.6 Contributing significantly to the metropolitan growth was the moving in of foreign-born migrants, 5 million to the suburbs and 7 million to the urban areas.7
The economies of the fifty largest cities are responsible for two thirds of the growth of the GDP. They are the most integrated into the global trading economy, and they account for nearly all of America’s job growth. Major businesses and people are moving into metropolitan areas and even into the inner cities, attracted by the urbanism, universities and research institutions, culture, and the growing immigrant and racial diversity—all the ingredients that stir the GOP’s counterrevolution.
President Trump embraced every emotive policy priority of the GOP’s Evangelical base, but none of it would slow America’s growing secularism.
Every religious denomination is coping with drops in the number who are religiously observant, with the exception of the Evangelicals. “No religion” is now the faster growing faith in the religious census. More than one in five Americans identify as secular; they outnumber the mainline Protestants. The traditional family at the heart of the social conservative vision is giving way in the face of profound changes in marriage, child-rearing, and women working to produce a growing pluralism of family types. Younger people are delaying marriage, having fewer children, and fewer are getting married at all. Barely half of American adults are married.8
Getting back to having more men in breadwinner roles and a strong patriarchal family structure is pretty fundamental for many social conservatives and for many working-class women who wouldn’t mind being married to a husband who could really provide a family with some security. But the Women’s March, #MeToo, and the surge of women political candidates have put the spotlight on working women and their suppressed public agenda.
Three quarters of women are now in the labor force, and two thirds are the principal or co-breadwinner. Without much help from government for childcare, health care, or parental leave, working women put in a lot more hours than men doing childcare and household work. To make it that much more stressful, half of working women and a third of mothers are unmarried and on their own. More than 60 percent of unmarried mothers earn less than $30,000 a year.9
White working-class men over the last three decades have struggled to get the jobs that would get them into the middle class, which previous generations could count on. They marry later, some not at all, or get divorced. Their incomes have gone down and many have withdrawn from the labor force—and that is before we get to those who succumb to drugs and have other issues.10
As I point out in chapter 7, “Is This All They Have to Offer Working People?,” the only thing Republicans and President Trump have had to offer the struggling working class is all government benefits being subject to “work requirements.” They think food stamps and Medicaid for the working poor are a “hammock” that leads to indolence.11
Working women are not confused by this conservative fog. They know they are on their own despite seismic changes in work life. A large majority of women (62 percent) believe that men earn more than women for the same job, but fewer than half of men believe that (47 percent).12 They believe the playing field is tilted against women, and that is even more true when they move further up the job and status ladder.13 Their views are politically explosive.
So when Fox News commentators ask what family issue tops the public agenda, it is how you ensure pay equity for working women, not how you get back to a patriarchal family.
The triumph of the millennials is the last straw for the conservative agenda, and why it is so urgent the GOP stop the New America from governing. After all, millennials have displaced the baby boomers as the largest generation and will form 36 percent of the eligible voter population in 2020, 45 percent in 2024.14 And Generation Z, who were born after 1996 and were 13 to 21 years old in 2018, will be larger still, sealing the generational revolution.
If you want to see the changing face of America, look to the millennials. About 40 percent of millennials are racial minorities, and now 17 percent of their new marriages are interracial.15 Most describe President Obama as mixed race, not African-American or black. They just take for granted America’s multiculturalism. That attitude extends to gay marriage, supported by something near 80 percent of millennials.16
And they are the reason Republicans will lose the battle over rural and urban America. Millennials have not followed the path of other maturing young people to the suburbs. More than three quarters want to live in an urban area and a majority have no driver’s license. And they are acting on that worldview. Two thirds of millennials with a four-year college degree have already moved to one of the fifty-one largest cities.17
That millennials have won and consumers and business remain committed to a multicultural America is evident in Nike building a major ad campaign around former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. He began sitting, then taking a knee during the national anthem before games in order to protest racial injustice in America. President Trump vilified him and NFL team owners by claiming falsely that he was protesting the national anthem, and when he opted out of his contract in March 2017, NFL team owners allegedly blackballed him, thereby proving his point.18 “Believe in something,” Kaepernick said in the Nike ad. “Even if it means sacrificing everything.” President Trump tweeted, “What was Nike thinking?”
Old people didn’t approve of the ad, but two thirds of millennials did, and they mattered. Nike’s stock hit an all-time high and its direct digital sales jumped 36 percent during the game’s quarter the ad was aired.19
* * *
So Republican congressman and white nationalist sympathizer Steve King could have been describing America at large when the new Congress convened in January 2019, the Democratic side of the House including a record number of women, African Americans, and the first Native American and Muslim women, and he observed, “You look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men.”20
THE NEW AMERICA RESPONDS
As the GOP’s intensifying battle to keep the New America from governing became unabashedly anti-immigrant, racist, and sexist under President Trump’s leadership, the New America responded in real time.
Soon after Trump’s election, I discovered I could not put Clinton and Trump voters in the same room, because the Clinton, anti-Trump voter had become more vocal and assertive, sometimes disbelieving and rude. The same must have been happening across the country.
After one Trump voter in a focus group agreed with the president, the Clinton supporter turned to her and said, “So, I see. You are the face of those ugly things I hear being said on TV every day.” The project director for Democracy Corps Nancy Zdunkewicz and I were stunned, and we both thought, “Is she going to apologize?” She didn’t.
By the 70-day mark, the anti-Trump women pushed back against Trump voters in conversation, even when outnumbered in the room. The moderator had to make an effort to bring Trump voters into the conversation to ensure the outnumbered Clinton voters did not dominate the discussion and so the Trump voters could be heard. This turned out to be an unintended test of the strength of their views and resolve to resist.
Amazingly, at the seventy-day mark into the Trump presidency, the anti-Trump voters in these groups were bringing up the off-year elections to be held in 2018. Their doubts about Trump dominated their outlook, and they used words like “flabbergasted,” “devastated,” and “terrified” to describe how they felt about the country right now.
In my eyes, the biggest issue is going to be this president. He’s going to drive this country into a shithole.
—WHITE UNMARRIED WOMAN, UNDER 45, CLEVELAND
Every time Trump opens his mouth I want to scream.
—WHITE MILLENNIAL WOMAN, CLEVELAND
And that people were organizing and marching made them feel more optimistic about how this will all turn out for the country:
There are people organizing and finally getting their heads out of the sand and paying attention to what’s going on in politics.
—WHITE WORKING-CLASS WOMAN, AKRON
I think maybe people are bonding over their hate for certain things, like protesting and a lot of people are bonding in groups. I mean, people have a voice now with social media and everything. They’re really getting it out there. A lot of people are being heard.
—WHITE UNMARRIED WOMAN, UNDER 45, CLEVELAND
The Trump context changed the formula for political engagement in this so-called off-year election when a lot of presidential-year voters go to the sidelines. The anti-Trump, women college graduates were consolidated and motivated to resist the Trump presidency. They turned a simple “fact sheet” passed around a focus group into an organizing weapon. They were seeking out tools and information to win arguments and maximize their engagement and were increasingly intent to vote. The college-educated women seemed as much an anti-Trump base as African Americans who were discovering they too must be involved.
The Trump presidency so invaded the public’s consciousness that it was hard to talk to previously disengaged and unregistered unmarried women, people of color, and millennials without them going right to Trump. How is it going with your family and community? No, they wanted to talk about what was going wrong with the country. When asked how often they think about national issues, they said, “every day.” “Donald Trump’s everywhere … all over the news” and the big conflicts he stirs up were inescapable (African-American man, Detroit). Even the white unmarried women who were most likely to “try not to watch the news” said they “don’t have a choice,” including one bartender who said she hears “Trump all day long” at work (white unmarried woman, Cleveland).
They were being pulled into the political debate by members of their families who wanted them to pick a side. These were people who said they “are not interested in politics” and in the past, some avoided political decisions they didn’t feel informed enough to defend before their more passionate family members. Others, particularly the African-American men and women were “more likely to vote, now, because I hear my mom on my head about voting” (African-American woman, Detroit). The Hispanic women were most likely to say they were sharing information with their families and friends because “we don’t want to make the same mistake twice” (Hispanic millennial woman, Orlando).
These groups were very conscious that their parents’ generation and the country had sacrificed for their rights and lives. And here we have a president of the United States who was “dividing our country.” He was forcing us to fight again for the gains our parents won for us:
Just the way he talks it allows you to—it incites something. He incites some type of crazy feeling, like, oh no, all these criminal aliens are coming. It just sounds like something you hear a crazy dude on the side of the street saying.
—AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN, DETROIT
I don’t want him to be the example for my daughter, like the president of our country being accused of sexual harassment.
—WHITE UNMARRIED WOMAN, CLEVELAND
I remember a line in the movie Remember the Titans, where the guy told his teammate that attitude reflects leadership, and I just think right now America’s attitude is not good because of our leadership.
—AFRICAN-AMERICAN MAN, DETROIT
Trump produced a similar transformative shift in the consciousness of unregistered voters. They saw people who suffer from Trump’s new policies and saw “protections” that “were written in place,” and suddenly “they go.” You can’t change that “if we did not vote.” That double negative was now part of the new formula to get people mobilized:
We all have to do something. Can’t just sit and watch.
—HISPANIC MILLENNIAL WOMAN, ORLANDO
We already lost our health care, a bunch of rights and laws, it’s been racist, all in the white Congress, if you don’t vote, your just handing over America to the KKK.
—AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN, DETROIT
A white unmarried woman from Cleveland wondered, “Where are we going to be in the next 4 years if we are so miserable right now?”
Nobody struggled anymore to explain the risks of the wrong person winning an election. Donald Trump transformed our politics by showing people they must resist this horror-show representation of America.
AND WITH NEW CLARITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
This new engagement made itself felt first on immigration, where every Trump outrage increased the proportion of Americans who said, We are an immigrant country.
America was created by more than a century of virtually unregulated, open immigration from Europe until after World War I, after which America closed its doors. The Chinese were barred after 1882. But the civil rights period in the 1950s and 1960s saw major immigration reforms that reopened the doors and got rid of national quotas. Legal immigrants were mostly Hispanic and Asian, the numbers accelerated by Republican presidents who granted asylum to undocumented immigrants and expanded legal immigration. The most recent decade saw a surge in foreign-born people living in the United States, and Trump was able to exploit it to get the election to break for him.
Voters do want the country to better manage immigration, but this stoking the anti-immigrant fires will end badly for Trump’s GOP. The proportion believing immigrants “strengthen the country with their hard work and talents” surged to 65 percent. Just as Trump was charging that immigrants fueled gangs and included murderers and rapists, the proportion who said immigrants “burden the country by taking jobs, housing, and health care” plummeted to just 26 percent in mid-2017. Three quarters in mid-2018 favored granting permanent legal status to immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children.21 The country settled these issues. They are not contested.
America believes it is an immigrant country, but Trump’s election as an anti-immigrant candidate and his daily anti-immigrant provocations, unchallenged by his own party, made us all uncertain what Americans really believe. Well, individually, Americans recognize in larger numbers the benefits of immigration and, collectively, they have rushed to airports to protest the Muslim travel ban, to welcome refugees, and to protest babies being separated from their mothers at the Mexican border.
For most of the past decade, the public was evenly split on whether the country “needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites” or whether it has made the changes that were needed. But by being blind to discrimination and by disinviting black athletes to the White House, Trump changed all that. Suddenly, over 60 percent of Americans believe the battle for equal rights is unfinished.22 In 2014, 63 percent supported affirmative action programs to help blacks and minorities get to a university, but that grew to 71 percent in 2017.23 Trump’s counterrevolution is producing a counter-clarity for the changed America.
Acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage has reached the level of a norm, surging to 70 percent for homosexuality and 62 percent for gay marriage.24 Just a quarter of the country believes homosexuality should be “discouraged”—the core conviction of Evangelical Republicans.25
Three in five Americans consistently believe that stricter environmental regulations are worth the cost, and four in five believe there is “solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has gotten warmer.”26 Since the issue of climate change was broached at the beginning of the 2016 presidential election, that belief has jumped 13 points to 92 percent.27 A majority of 53 percent said that there is solid evidence that climate change is caused by human activity.28 Only a quarter of Republicans believe that, which is why they will be sidelined.
President Trump withdrew America from the Paris climate accord and joined a battle royal with the G-7, while 60 percent of Americans believed the “U.S. should take into account the interests of its allies even if it means making compromises with them”—the opposite of the posture President Trump offered to the world.29
President Trump’s one great legislative accomplishment before he lost control of the Congress was his $2.2 trillion tax cut for corporations and the richest 1 percent. It was supported by huge majorities of House Republicans and every Republican senator. His tax cut plans always favored the rich and big business, despite his promise to the working-class voter, but this corrupt tax scam was breathtaking in its benefits for Wall Street and billionaire donors. That massive tax cut was right out of the Tea Party playbook in the states where huge tax cuts for corporations, the oil companies, and the millionaires were followed by huge cuts in education spending.
Republicans didn’t notice or care that two thirds of Americans believed “the economic system in this country unfairly favors powerful interests” and “economic inequality in the U.S.” is a very big or moderately big problem.30 Nearly 60 percent thought “business corporations make too much profit.”31 The tax cut was the opposite of what most Americans wanted to see happen, which is part of why President Trump’s election and Tea Party–Evangelical agenda has produced such rage and determination to reverse it.
So, just as the Republicans and President Trump dramatically freed up business from regulation, they lost the favor of the voting public on government and markets, nearly 60 percent of whom said the government “should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of the people,” rather than leave more things to business and individuals.32 That is hardly a country hospitable to a businessman president doing his radical work.
Most telling was that at the beginning of 2018, as the Tea Party–dominated GOP made stopping government in its tracks its first mission, the proportion of people who wanted more government surged to its highest point in the twenty years of polling on this question by The Wall Street Journal/NBC.
The GOP campaign against government has met its match in the New America.
Copyright © 2019 by Stanley B. Greenberg
