I did this same analysis with my civics students on Monday and can confirm it completely. We also looked at 2004-2024 trends, and over that time, the party realignment is obvious. Age, sex, race: none of these moved (Latinos and Asians +20 points Dem during Obama and have now shifted fully back and are trending Rep.) What did move? The poor (<$50K) went +10 Rep; the rich ($100K+) +10 points Dem. A partisan educational gap did not exist in 2004; today a BA/BS makes you 20 points more likely to vote Dem vs someone who has never been to college.
However, on the basis that "if your enemy insists on shooting himself in the foot, you should let him", I'm all-in on the media narrative. Don't look a the data, please! Racist, sexist white guys; they kept Kamala out.
Key takeaways:
1) The Democrats hitched their cart to a pony instead of an ox. The educated and wealthy are powerful groups to have, but in sheer numbers, they are dwarfed by the non-college working class. Abandoning the latter for the former was a Dem mistake. (Thanks Barack.)
2) Racial and sexual identity politics is a failure. However, these trends are tied into postmodernism, the de-facto religion of the educated-class, which will make ending them hard for the Democrats. Walking back "men can get pregnant" and "slicing the boobs off of teenage girls is empowerment and liberation" is going to be harder than they realize.
3) 1950-2000 was weird. Most nation's politics are essentially aristocracy vs everyone else. Maybe it was the Cold War, but that class-partisanship divide largely evaporated over the last half of the 20th century, which allowed American politics to reorient around race and sex and a bunch of other weird postmodernist criteria. That's over. Class matters again.
4) The realignment is past tense. The GOP could certainly screw it up (they're masters at that), but the Dems have systematically lost credibility with 2 generations of the working class. Their kids might rejoin the Party, but those generations are likely gone.
"Stealing Elections Still Is A Tall Order" Thank you for being willing to say this, Max. Because of our decentralized management and electoral college, America likely has the most secure national elections in the history of the world. (State level offices may be more susceptible to fraud -- ala WI. That could be largely eliminated with voter ID and a return to "election day" as you suggest.)
I marvel that the Left's ability to endure whiplash. "Biden is George Washington" becomes "Biden is a senile fool" in less than 2 hours. "Trump is Hitler" morphs to "Biden's so nice to have Trump for tea" in a couple of days. Do they actually believe in anything other than their own power and holiness?
Your students are likely receiving an education superior to what they'll get in college.
One reason the Democratic Party became the largest, most powerful political party in the world, is because they appealed to the non-college working-class. Historically, college-educated Americans were a minority, so if you wanted to win in a mass democratic system, you needed to have the non-college working class on your side. I don't know for sure, but I wonder if the Democrats, with their belief that the arc of history bends their direction, thought there would be a lot more college-educated Americans by now or think that education rates would rise infinitely.
Education has become a major fault line, more than I anticipated. I pointed out on X yesterday that the only criteria under which the Left considers restricting franchise is when it comes to education. But if they did that, most voters would be White and Asian. Black and Hispanic/Latino have far lower levels of educational attainment or even literacy. I suppose restricting Blacks and Browns from voting is fine in their eyes, though, since White leftists think they're casting votes on behalf of people of color.
Racial and sexual identity politics eventually run into a wall. I think we've finally run into it. You cannot escape biology and as times get harder, that's going to become tougher to deny, even for progressives. Also, people are just exhausted by it. There's no way to make anyone happy. However, I expect the media to continue pushing Wokeness well past the point of diminishing returns. About 10 years from now, I expect it to be a fringe movement, hard as it might be to believe.
That's why they say having a strong middle class is so important for social stability. As the middle-class dwindles, politics will return to more of that blunt-force, zero-sum game it's historically been. That said, the Democrats are now the party of the poor and rich, while the Republicans are the party of the middle and working classes. These are interesting coalitions and I don't know if they have a historical precedent.
The winning faction in the Fourth Turning will establish the political environment to come. Following the end of the Civil War, the Republicans dominated national politics. Following the Great Depression, the Democrats dominated national politics. Since we're not at the end of the Fourth Turning, it's still too early to say which faction will come out on top or even what the dominant political dogma will be. Either way, I don't think it's going to be politics as usual going forward.
"Most secure national elections in the history of the world"? The Right is going to rip you a new one for that! But yes, I think fraud is a problem at the state level. Ironically, Trump called this election "too big to rig," but if that's the case, so was 2020. But our elections, our democracy, needs to be critically looked at. The lack of voter ID is a serious problem and there's no real argument against it unless you want non-citizens or the ineligible to cast votes.
There’s a Charlie Kirk clip Rod posted this morning on his Substack which I think will be the rub over the next four years. It will be an incalcitrant bureaucracy sabotaging Trump’s presidency at every turn, just as they did in his first term. However, Trump then was unable (more likely) or unwilling to defend his agenda against them. This time, it appears, he means to play ball, and hard.
The president’s supremacy over the military is of course unquestionable. The rule for officers unwilling to carry out any president’s agenda is to comply or resign. I actually take the classical approach to the constitution and apply this standard to all bureaus under the executive. The bureaucracy is the president’s domain and his alone. All of them serve at the pleasure of the president— regardless of what petty laws Congress pass (they shouldn’t have ceded to the executive powers they formerly held and which they don’t want to see abused!). I digress. There are several points of recourse for Congress and the people that stop short of unilateral bureaucratic nullification of the president’s wishes— impeachment, court rulings (though of shaky precedence), and zapping the president of monies.
All of this is to say, this moment, to me at least, feels more like the Restoration in England or the Bourbon Restoration in France. I’m tinkering with an idea (totally not fully committed to it) that the past 60+ years have been the Revolution. A bloodless revolution, sure, but one nonetheless. Think about all the mores and customs which have been completely overturned since 1945 or 1965. How Americans fundamentally see the world. I think we’ve grown somewhat disgusted at our own moral corpulence and that of our government. We want the “old times” back. Just as the English threw off the yoke of Cromwell for a !Catholic! king. And how the French grew tired of the Jacobins and Napoleon and put on the cloak of glory in the form of a Bourbon prince.
Don’t get me wrong— I’m not spinning a particularly hopeful forecast here. The English Restoration, while somewhat peaceful threw the country into dynastic turmoil (much bloodshed) that wasn’t resolved until the Bonnie Prince was expelled at Culloden. The Bourbon Restoration threw France into a century of political turmoil for another century resulting in the loss of countless lives through various monarchical and republican ambitions.
My hopeful bit will be this though. The age of the revolutionary weirdo, I think and hope, is over. The automaton Robespierre and the Christmas-hating Cromwell have been thrown out permanently (we hope). If Trump is successful in dismantling or reinventing the bureaucracy (I’m hopeful), the struggle will very much be between factions of normies trying to define what normal will be going forward (Jacobite or Hanoverian / Bourbon or Bonapartists or republicans).
I think your parallel here is a very good one. Run with it. And while it certainly bodes ill for near-term stability (as you say), it's worth noting that today, both France and England were relatively stable electoral democracies until French postmodernism and American wokeness set about destroying them in the last 50 years. Might Europe replicate our shift? The EU ruling class appears very worried; German intelligence is openly spying on AfD and France is trying to throw Marine Le Pen into prison over paperwork violations (just like the American ruling class tried to do with Trump.) Is there still enough residual Judeo-Christian inertia left in Europe; I fear Houllebecq might be right that there's not.
My riff here is somewhat based on Carl Benjamin’s motif of the “return of the king.” His YouTube channel is “Sargon of Akkad” for anyone interested. He’s also the founder of Lotus Eaters. While obviously American doesn’t have a king, and we never should, what he’s getting at is that the return of the king in traditional English lore represents the return of the country to its traditional mores. The restoration of what made England England and America America. Trump, though not king, feels very much like an avatar for that at this moment in history.
Again, I’m not wedded to this idea, but the Leftists feel routed at this moment. Maybe it’s the election jubilee. But it feels more like a football game in the third quarter when your team is down by 21 but you know they’re going to win… usually they do. It’s an intangible thing and one you can only feel in person. A similar intuition for me in regards to this election.
Honestly, I’m pretty optimistic about the next few months. Trump decisively winning all seven battleground states only hours after the polls closed, plus him winning the popular vote, has taken the wind out of the sails of the #Resistance people. What I was most nervous about was a contested election. I genuinely think riots and mass protests were on the table no matter who won, provided it was close—say, Donald Trump winning Pennsylvania by 2,000 votes, or Kamala Harris winning the Electoral College by literally one vote (holding the Blue Wall + winning that Nebraska district.) But Trump’s dominant victory sends a message that has even a lot of partisans rethinking their priors. Nobody apart from the talking heads feels cheated—they’re just shocked they lost so badly.
Democrats will be motivated to cull the most extreme policy positions from their membership, although I think it’ll take a while to destroy the positive feedback loop re: trans issues, DEI initiatives, etc. (Lots of Democrats are more interested in winning than in being ideologically pure, but so many of the DEI types stand to lose their livelihoods that I expect them to fight tooth and nail to maintain their status in our institutions. Republicans will do the heavy lifting of expelling these people from the public teat, while pragmatic Democrats will breathe a sigh of relief that their far-left flank gets eviscerated without them having to take the heat.)
What worries me is that perhaps Trump axes so much of the bureaucracy so quickly—there’s talk of firing hundreds of people from the NIH, eliminating the Department of Education, and creating a board that will remove three- and four-star generals—that it unnerves the public and makes it hard to govern. That being said, I wholeheartedly endorse him thinking outside the box and purging the Deep State, so to speak. Trump’s first term was full of leaks and palace intrigue because 1) the bureaucracy was unanimously against him, and 2) the Republican Party was staffed by the Old Guard, who weren’t completely on board with Trump’s policies and thought they could outlast him. Oops on both counts—the guy’s been through the ringer, his life has been totally upended ($500 million judgment, bullsh*t felony convictions, FBI raids, biased media coverage, getting shot at, etc.), and he’s going to take a wrecking ball to anyone who stood up to him. Tough.
I’m sure there’ll be some amount of nepotism, chaos, and corruption within his second term, but it pales in comparison to what’s going on right now under Biden. I just don’t know how far the Deep State will go to keep their perch in society…
A quick note on race. Blacks were forced into developing a parallel culture and society due to slavery, Jim Crow, and racial injustice. In spite of massive progress on race and civil rights, they have not taken the opportunity to integrate themselves into mainstream American culture, for various reasons. In essence, you have a nation within a nation. What nation do you owe loyalty to? The American nation or the black nation? I think there has been plenty of times over the last fifty years which show that it is the black nation blacks basically owe allegiance to. It is a difficult problem to solve. Maybe Trump has made a dent in it, but time will tell.
The Democratic Party was the party of the plantations 150 years ago. In many ways, the modern Democratic Party is simply a political extension of the plantation. However, I'm more optimistic than you or Max. Black men in particular moved by about 5 points from 2020-2024. That sounds small, but it's about a 25% change, which is huge in politics. 1 in 5 black men voted for Trump. That means most black men likely have a Trump-voting friend of relative. That could be the beginning of a cultural shift. Perhaps the blacks aren't stuck on the plantation but are instead just the last ones to leave it. We'll find out in 2028.
The problem is that Black women are locked into the Democratic vote. So we could very well see a South Korea-like political-sexual divergence among Blacks specifically.
It's true that unique circumstances made it uniquely difficult for Blacks to integrate themselves into mainstream U.S. culture. At the same time, no other group has been given extra incentive to do so, but efforts seem to have backfired. As you said, they're a nation within a nation. The only thing they're missing is their own autonomous region, which is something all nationalities would chomp at the bit to have, but only Blacks seem to regard it as segregation.
It's a problem without a solution. To come to some sort of modus vivendi, demands need to be reasonable, but the demands of the Black community have become unhinged. We could offer them their own state and they'd consider it a return to Jim Crow.
I did this same analysis with my civics students on Monday and can confirm it completely. We also looked at 2004-2024 trends, and over that time, the party realignment is obvious. Age, sex, race: none of these moved (Latinos and Asians +20 points Dem during Obama and have now shifted fully back and are trending Rep.) What did move? The poor (<$50K) went +10 Rep; the rich ($100K+) +10 points Dem. A partisan educational gap did not exist in 2004; today a BA/BS makes you 20 points more likely to vote Dem vs someone who has never been to college.
However, on the basis that "if your enemy insists on shooting himself in the foot, you should let him", I'm all-in on the media narrative. Don't look a the data, please! Racist, sexist white guys; they kept Kamala out.
Key takeaways:
1) The Democrats hitched their cart to a pony instead of an ox. The educated and wealthy are powerful groups to have, but in sheer numbers, they are dwarfed by the non-college working class. Abandoning the latter for the former was a Dem mistake. (Thanks Barack.)
2) Racial and sexual identity politics is a failure. However, these trends are tied into postmodernism, the de-facto religion of the educated-class, which will make ending them hard for the Democrats. Walking back "men can get pregnant" and "slicing the boobs off of teenage girls is empowerment and liberation" is going to be harder than they realize.
3) 1950-2000 was weird. Most nation's politics are essentially aristocracy vs everyone else. Maybe it was the Cold War, but that class-partisanship divide largely evaporated over the last half of the 20th century, which allowed American politics to reorient around race and sex and a bunch of other weird postmodernist criteria. That's over. Class matters again.
4) The realignment is past tense. The GOP could certainly screw it up (they're masters at that), but the Dems have systematically lost credibility with 2 generations of the working class. Their kids might rejoin the Party, but those generations are likely gone.
"Stealing Elections Still Is A Tall Order" Thank you for being willing to say this, Max. Because of our decentralized management and electoral college, America likely has the most secure national elections in the history of the world. (State level offices may be more susceptible to fraud -- ala WI. That could be largely eliminated with voter ID and a return to "election day" as you suggest.)
I marvel that the Left's ability to endure whiplash. "Biden is George Washington" becomes "Biden is a senile fool" in less than 2 hours. "Trump is Hitler" morphs to "Biden's so nice to have Trump for tea" in a couple of days. Do they actually believe in anything other than their own power and holiness?
Your students are likely receiving an education superior to what they'll get in college.
One reason the Democratic Party became the largest, most powerful political party in the world, is because they appealed to the non-college working-class. Historically, college-educated Americans were a minority, so if you wanted to win in a mass democratic system, you needed to have the non-college working class on your side. I don't know for sure, but I wonder if the Democrats, with their belief that the arc of history bends their direction, thought there would be a lot more college-educated Americans by now or think that education rates would rise infinitely.
Education has become a major fault line, more than I anticipated. I pointed out on X yesterday that the only criteria under which the Left considers restricting franchise is when it comes to education. But if they did that, most voters would be White and Asian. Black and Hispanic/Latino have far lower levels of educational attainment or even literacy. I suppose restricting Blacks and Browns from voting is fine in their eyes, though, since White leftists think they're casting votes on behalf of people of color.
Racial and sexual identity politics eventually run into a wall. I think we've finally run into it. You cannot escape biology and as times get harder, that's going to become tougher to deny, even for progressives. Also, people are just exhausted by it. There's no way to make anyone happy. However, I expect the media to continue pushing Wokeness well past the point of diminishing returns. About 10 years from now, I expect it to be a fringe movement, hard as it might be to believe.
That's why they say having a strong middle class is so important for social stability. As the middle-class dwindles, politics will return to more of that blunt-force, zero-sum game it's historically been. That said, the Democrats are now the party of the poor and rich, while the Republicans are the party of the middle and working classes. These are interesting coalitions and I don't know if they have a historical precedent.
The winning faction in the Fourth Turning will establish the political environment to come. Following the end of the Civil War, the Republicans dominated national politics. Following the Great Depression, the Democrats dominated national politics. Since we're not at the end of the Fourth Turning, it's still too early to say which faction will come out on top or even what the dominant political dogma will be. Either way, I don't think it's going to be politics as usual going forward.
"Most secure national elections in the history of the world"? The Right is going to rip you a new one for that! But yes, I think fraud is a problem at the state level. Ironically, Trump called this election "too big to rig," but if that's the case, so was 2020. But our elections, our democracy, needs to be critically looked at. The lack of voter ID is a serious problem and there's no real argument against it unless you want non-citizens or the ineligible to cast votes.
There’s a Charlie Kirk clip Rod posted this morning on his Substack which I think will be the rub over the next four years. It will be an incalcitrant bureaucracy sabotaging Trump’s presidency at every turn, just as they did in his first term. However, Trump then was unable (more likely) or unwilling to defend his agenda against them. This time, it appears, he means to play ball, and hard.
The president’s supremacy over the military is of course unquestionable. The rule for officers unwilling to carry out any president’s agenda is to comply or resign. I actually take the classical approach to the constitution and apply this standard to all bureaus under the executive. The bureaucracy is the president’s domain and his alone. All of them serve at the pleasure of the president— regardless of what petty laws Congress pass (they shouldn’t have ceded to the executive powers they formerly held and which they don’t want to see abused!). I digress. There are several points of recourse for Congress and the people that stop short of unilateral bureaucratic nullification of the president’s wishes— impeachment, court rulings (though of shaky precedence), and zapping the president of monies.
All of this is to say, this moment, to me at least, feels more like the Restoration in England or the Bourbon Restoration in France. I’m tinkering with an idea (totally not fully committed to it) that the past 60+ years have been the Revolution. A bloodless revolution, sure, but one nonetheless. Think about all the mores and customs which have been completely overturned since 1945 or 1965. How Americans fundamentally see the world. I think we’ve grown somewhat disgusted at our own moral corpulence and that of our government. We want the “old times” back. Just as the English threw off the yoke of Cromwell for a !Catholic! king. And how the French grew tired of the Jacobins and Napoleon and put on the cloak of glory in the form of a Bourbon prince.
Don’t get me wrong— I’m not spinning a particularly hopeful forecast here. The English Restoration, while somewhat peaceful threw the country into dynastic turmoil (much bloodshed) that wasn’t resolved until the Bonnie Prince was expelled at Culloden. The Bourbon Restoration threw France into a century of political turmoil for another century resulting in the loss of countless lives through various monarchical and republican ambitions.
My hopeful bit will be this though. The age of the revolutionary weirdo, I think and hope, is over. The automaton Robespierre and the Christmas-hating Cromwell have been thrown out permanently (we hope). If Trump is successful in dismantling or reinventing the bureaucracy (I’m hopeful), the struggle will very much be between factions of normies trying to define what normal will be going forward (Jacobite or Hanoverian / Bourbon or Bonapartists or republicans).
I think your parallel here is a very good one. Run with it. And while it certainly bodes ill for near-term stability (as you say), it's worth noting that today, both France and England were relatively stable electoral democracies until French postmodernism and American wokeness set about destroying them in the last 50 years. Might Europe replicate our shift? The EU ruling class appears very worried; German intelligence is openly spying on AfD and France is trying to throw Marine Le Pen into prison over paperwork violations (just like the American ruling class tried to do with Trump.) Is there still enough residual Judeo-Christian inertia left in Europe; I fear Houllebecq might be right that there's not.
My riff here is somewhat based on Carl Benjamin’s motif of the “return of the king.” His YouTube channel is “Sargon of Akkad” for anyone interested. He’s also the founder of Lotus Eaters. While obviously American doesn’t have a king, and we never should, what he’s getting at is that the return of the king in traditional English lore represents the return of the country to its traditional mores. The restoration of what made England England and America America. Trump, though not king, feels very much like an avatar for that at this moment in history.
Again, I’m not wedded to this idea, but the Leftists feel routed at this moment. Maybe it’s the election jubilee. But it feels more like a football game in the third quarter when your team is down by 21 but you know they’re going to win… usually they do. It’s an intangible thing and one you can only feel in person. A similar intuition for me in regards to this election.
Honestly, I’m pretty optimistic about the next few months. Trump decisively winning all seven battleground states only hours after the polls closed, plus him winning the popular vote, has taken the wind out of the sails of the #Resistance people. What I was most nervous about was a contested election. I genuinely think riots and mass protests were on the table no matter who won, provided it was close—say, Donald Trump winning Pennsylvania by 2,000 votes, or Kamala Harris winning the Electoral College by literally one vote (holding the Blue Wall + winning that Nebraska district.) But Trump’s dominant victory sends a message that has even a lot of partisans rethinking their priors. Nobody apart from the talking heads feels cheated—they’re just shocked they lost so badly.
Democrats will be motivated to cull the most extreme policy positions from their membership, although I think it’ll take a while to destroy the positive feedback loop re: trans issues, DEI initiatives, etc. (Lots of Democrats are more interested in winning than in being ideologically pure, but so many of the DEI types stand to lose their livelihoods that I expect them to fight tooth and nail to maintain their status in our institutions. Republicans will do the heavy lifting of expelling these people from the public teat, while pragmatic Democrats will breathe a sigh of relief that their far-left flank gets eviscerated without them having to take the heat.)
What worries me is that perhaps Trump axes so much of the bureaucracy so quickly—there’s talk of firing hundreds of people from the NIH, eliminating the Department of Education, and creating a board that will remove three- and four-star generals—that it unnerves the public and makes it hard to govern. That being said, I wholeheartedly endorse him thinking outside the box and purging the Deep State, so to speak. Trump’s first term was full of leaks and palace intrigue because 1) the bureaucracy was unanimously against him, and 2) the Republican Party was staffed by the Old Guard, who weren’t completely on board with Trump’s policies and thought they could outlast him. Oops on both counts—the guy’s been through the ringer, his life has been totally upended ($500 million judgment, bullsh*t felony convictions, FBI raids, biased media coverage, getting shot at, etc.), and he’s going to take a wrecking ball to anyone who stood up to him. Tough.
I’m sure there’ll be some amount of nepotism, chaos, and corruption within his second term, but it pales in comparison to what’s going on right now under Biden. I just don’t know how far the Deep State will go to keep their perch in society…
A quick note on race. Blacks were forced into developing a parallel culture and society due to slavery, Jim Crow, and racial injustice. In spite of massive progress on race and civil rights, they have not taken the opportunity to integrate themselves into mainstream American culture, for various reasons. In essence, you have a nation within a nation. What nation do you owe loyalty to? The American nation or the black nation? I think there has been plenty of times over the last fifty years which show that it is the black nation blacks basically owe allegiance to. It is a difficult problem to solve. Maybe Trump has made a dent in it, but time will tell.
The Democratic Party was the party of the plantations 150 years ago. In many ways, the modern Democratic Party is simply a political extension of the plantation. However, I'm more optimistic than you or Max. Black men in particular moved by about 5 points from 2020-2024. That sounds small, but it's about a 25% change, which is huge in politics. 1 in 5 black men voted for Trump. That means most black men likely have a Trump-voting friend of relative. That could be the beginning of a cultural shift. Perhaps the blacks aren't stuck on the plantation but are instead just the last ones to leave it. We'll find out in 2028.
The problem is that Black women are locked into the Democratic vote. So we could very well see a South Korea-like political-sexual divergence among Blacks specifically.
Considering the rates of black family formation (not birthrate, but marriage) are already sub-S. Korea, you might be right.
Wow. That's crazy!
It's true that unique circumstances made it uniquely difficult for Blacks to integrate themselves into mainstream U.S. culture. At the same time, no other group has been given extra incentive to do so, but efforts seem to have backfired. As you said, they're a nation within a nation. The only thing they're missing is their own autonomous region, which is something all nationalities would chomp at the bit to have, but only Blacks seem to regard it as segregation.
It's a problem without a solution. To come to some sort of modus vivendi, demands need to be reasonable, but the demands of the Black community have become unhinged. We could offer them their own state and they'd consider it a return to Jim Crow.