Within the traditional liberal account, President Donald Trump reawakened America’s atavistic, bigoted facet, driving each the Republican Celebration and the US to the proper. Within the traditional conservative retort, it is the left that turned extra excessive within the 2010s, adopting radical views on race and gender that meant a reasonable might appear to be shifting rightward whereas in reality he was standing nonetheless.
However there’s a third risk: that liberals spent the last decade shifting leftward on questions of race and sexual orientation—and so did conservatives. And whereas the so-called Nice Awokening has cooled considerably since Joe Biden succeeded Trump as president, Republicans could have quietly continued to development leftward on racial points.
To be clear: I’m talking of public opinion right here, not public officers or public coverage. And I do not dispute that specific bigots turned rather a lot noisier within the mid-’10s, or that they acquired extra affect in sure circles.
However noisier and extra typical usually are not the identical factor. In a 2020 paper for Public Opinion Quarterly, the College of 
Pennsylvania political scientists Daniel Hopkins and Samantha Washington reported that from 2007 by means of 2018, antiblack and anti-Hispanic stereotypes declined amongst each white Democrats and white Republicans. It is simply that the Democratic drop in these surveys was a lot bigger, making a wider hole regardless that each teams, on common, have been shifting in the identical route.
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An analogous image appeared when Ohio State political scientist Thomas Wooden tried in 2017 to measure the connection between Individuals’ presidential votes and the way they scored on the “symbolic racism” or “racial resentment” scale, which Wooden described as a option to uncover “racial attitudes amongst respondents who know that it is socially unacceptable to say issues perceived as racially prejudiced.”
This scale is controversial, as a result of among the statements it asks individuals to judge—comparable to “Over the previous few years blacks have gotten lower than they deserve”—might elicit the “unsuitable” reply for causes unrelated to prejudice or resentment. The underlying downside was highlighted when surveys discovered substantial numbers of African Individuals endorsing the purportedly racist positions, main some social scientists to name for giving the measurement a much less loaded label. At greatest, the dimensions measures whether or not individuals attribute racial disparities to structural boundaries or particular person failings.
However whether or not or not the individuals who rating larger on the dimensions are racists, it appears honest to say that the individuals who rating decrease on the dimensions are racial liberals. So what did Wooden discover?
For Wooden, the large takeaway was that “we have by no means seen such a transparent correspondence between vote alternative and racial perceptions” in three many years of those surveys: The upper you landed within the scale, the extra possible you have been to vote Republican. However as Musa al-Gharbi identified in a critique of Wooden’s work for The American Sociologist, this ignored the route these Republicans have been shifting in. In line with Wooden’s personal information, al-Gharbi famous, whites who backed Trump over Hillary Clinton have been “much less racist than those that voted for [Mitt] Romney. The identical holds amongst whites who voted for Clinton as in comparison with those that voted for [Barack] Obama.” Once more, voters in each events have been getting extra racially liberal; it is simply that Democrats went additional.
The explicitly racist and even fascist parts of the proper—the type of people that chant antisemitic slogans whereas carrying tiki torches—could have gotten bigger and better-known within the early Trump years. However it’s one factor to be giant by fringe-group requirements; it’s one other factor totally to be embraced by the mainstream. Certainly, al-Gharbi argued in the course of the 2020 election that when voters related Trump with that type of rhetoric and habits, it made him much less fairly than extra standard, together with amongst white Republicans.
Evidently, most Republicans nonetheless are likely to favor particular person over structural explanations for racial disparities. However there’s nonetheless loads of variation inside that worldview, together with on such hot-button points as race and policing. In June 2020, a Washington Put up survey confirmed 53 p.c of Republicans endorsing the protests that erupted after a cop murdered George Floyd—and this was after among the protests become riots. Across the identical time, a Pew ballot confirmed a big minority of Republicans (40 p.c) endorsing Black Lives Matter.
Views on the George Floyd motion later turned extra polarized alongside partisan strains. However that preliminary configuration of opinions, persisting even after the road violence started, hints at how a lot the traditional narratives of the interval miss.
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The Trump period additionally marked what was, at that time, the best recorded rank-and-file Republican tolerance for gays and lesbians. In Gallup’s annual polls, Republican assist for same-sex marriage did not attain 40 p.c till 2016, however by 2020 it had gotten to 49 p.c. It later turned the bulk opinion, leaping to 55 p.c for the primary two years of the Biden administration, although it sank again under the 50 p.c mark in 2023 and 2024, most likely in response to current LGBT tradition wars. (The determine at the moment stands at 46 p.c.)
Most of these tradition wars focus on trans individuals, whose political fights are at the moment much more contentious than the battles round gays and lesbians. Many social conservatives have tried to make use of these trans-rights conflicts as a wedge to reopen older debates about homosexual liberation; one option to learn that drop in gay-marriage assist from 55 p.c to 46 p.c is as a measure of what number of Republicans have been receptive to that type of messaging. We won’t make sure whether or not that decline will proceed or be a brief recession. However it’s notable that even now, after a two-year retrenchment, Republican assist for same-sex marriage is larger than in any 12 months earlier than 2017.
On racial questions, there hasn’t been a Republican retrenchment in any respect. In June, the Democracy Fund printed a report on “how attitudes about race and immigration are settling and shifting after Trump,” drawing on surveys carried out commonly since 2016. On immigration, the authors discovered, each Democrats and Republicans have moved rightward since Biden took workplace. However after they checked out these “racial resentment” questions (whereas avoiding that doubtful time period), they discovered Democrats getting a smidge extra conservative since Trump left workplace—and Republicans getting a smidge extra liberal.
There’s yet another shift price noting right here. Whereas Democrats have continued to obtain a majority of the nonwhite vote, their share has been declining—even, to a small extent, amongst African Individuals. That might simply be short-term turbulence. However with Hispanics specifically seeming extra open to voting Republican, we could possibly be seeing the beginning of a long-term development similar to the motion of many “white ethnic” voters towards the GOP within the Sixties and ’70s.
No tradition conflict configuration is everlasting. Repeatedly, once-vivid fights have receded, as with same-sex unions, or disappeared virtually totally, as with interracial marriage. Typically an alliance fashioned to battle one cultural battle shall be what lastly buries an outdated one, as when conservative Catholics, Protestants, and Mormons got here collectively to battle liberal sexual mores. And even when a battle persists, the lineups on both sides can seriously change. Don’t be shocked if that occurs once more.
