As the wave of protests over George Floyd’s death engulfed the country, many pundits assumed a familiar posture of sadder-but-wiser concern-trolling. Yes, Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis cops was appalling, they stipulated, but the mass uprising against it was all too likely to spur a repeat of the Republican law-and-order playbook dating back to the civil unrest of 1968—and yet again, they warned, Donald Trump could exploit white grievance politics as his ticket to a second term in the Oval Office.
But here’s the thing: There’s no white backlash to exploit. As New Republic staff writer Osita Nwanevu details, the polling around the protests and the aftermath of the Floyd killing show a strikingly divergent trend in public opinion. Consistent polled majorities show support for the protests, even among Republicans; indeed, a majority of respondents who believe that the protests are violent (a claim with limited empirical support, to put it mildly) still think they’re justified. This was not the case as recently as 2014, following protests over the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and it signals a profound shift in how Americans view the question of racialized policing—and race relations more broadly. “The mechanisms for inducing white backlash, as we’ve understood it in modern American politics, are fundamentally broken in important ways,” Nwanevu writes. “The upheaval of 1968 was over half a century ago, and the underlying dynamics of American politics—from the ideological polarization of the electorate to its demographic composition—have changed in innumerable ways since then.”
That means Trump’s frenetic posturing over the protests as a dangerous outburst of coordinated antifa violence that must be contained in turn by a dominant show of state violence—a wholly fabricated fringe conspiracy theory intended to stoke backlash paranoia on the right—is largely falling flat. In the meantime, Black Lives Matter—the slogan and organization alike—has witnessed a striking upsurge in public approval, with an 11-point spike in polled support for the movement over the past two weeks, according to a recent Civiqs survey. “None of this should be terribly surprising,” Nwanevu writes. “Public opinion on race has swung dramatically to the left since the protests in Ferguson in 2014. Within just a few months of those demonstrations, in fact, the percentage of Americans who believed the country needed ‘to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites’ jumped over a dozen points to a 59 percent majority of the country.” As the present protests accelerate this trend in public opinion, it’s worth noting that a broader shift in attitudes toward the hoary conduct of the conservative culture ways is in motion—with serious ramifications for the politics of the 2020 election, and beyond.
America is already in the middle of a broad and electorally significant cultural backlash against radical politics. But it’s a backlash against the right, not the left. On a remarkable range of cultural and identity-political issues—from LGBT rights to immigration—the conservative movement has either lost outright to the left in the court of public opinion or adopted positions extreme enough to alienate important constituencies like Latinos or white college-educated women. Commentators whose political instincts were shaped decades ago might insist otherwise, but in the here and now, the right is losing the culture war and losing it decisively.
One deep tributary of this dramatic reversal is the defection of a traditional stronghold of the old backlash politics of the right: the white suburban voter. While it’s long been a tried and true strategy on the right to use various moral panics steeped in culture-war hyperbole, a major swath of the suburban electorate is now far more terrified of Trumpism than the specter of this or that looming threat to the bastions of civilizational order or white privilege:
Democratic success in the suburbs during the 2018 midterms was attributed largely to Trump’s unpopularity. While that was undoubtedly a factor, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the Republican Party has not won an outright majority of the suburban vote in the last three presidential elections. In a 2017 piece written more than a year before the midterms, Politico’s Charlie Mahtesian noted that while Trump had eked out a narrow plurality against Clinton among suburbanites in 2016, the ground was clearly falling out from under the GOP in these onetime strongholds. “A combination of demographic change and cultural dissonance is gradually eroding its ability to compete across much of suburbia, putting entire areas of the country out of the GOP’s reach,” he wrote. “It’s a bigger crisis than the party acknowledges, a reckoning that threatens Trump’s reelection and the next generation of Republican office-seekers.”
This is the bigger picture to keep in view as Trump resumes his public rally schedule, next week in Oklahoma—on the emancipation holiday of Juneteenth, in the city of Tulsa, which was home to a vicious anti-black riot, 99 years ago. As the president tries once more to rouse the shock troops of white backlash, the political environment around him is turning the conduct of the culture wars on the right into a revivalist brand of guerrilla theater playing to an increasingly empty house.
—Chris Lehmann, Editor |
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