Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Four Ways That America Is Polarizing

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

David Frum joins Derek to talk about rising and falling polarization by race, gender, education, and place—and what it tells us about America's strange new politics. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: David Frum Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Twice a week, Van Lathen and Rachel Lindsay dissect the biggest topics in black culture, politics, and sports on their show, Higher Learning. They discuss the most important and timely conversations while also frequently inviting guests on the podcast and occasionally debating each other. Check out Higher Learning on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to plain English. Today I want to talk about political identity. The question of today's episode is something like,

what is identity? And how is identity contributing to the craziness of American politics today? And I want to start this all off with a confession, which is that I honestly think the conversation around identity

can get a little bit woo-woo, a little bit philosophical, a little vague, a little bullshitty. And I want to start with something super concrete, a story, a history, a history of how we became polarized

around one very specific sliver of our identity, which is where we live, So today in the 2020s, Democrats win in cities, period, and Republicans win in rural areas, period. This is an ironclad rule of politics. In 2020, Joe Biden won all 20 of the largest cities in the country. But 100 years ago, the heart of the Democratic electorate was not in American cities. It was a bunch of rural white southern dudes and Western farmers.

So how did we get from there to here? What is the 100-year history of how the Democratic Party went from being a rural coalition to becoming a strong urban identity? And this is a story in four parts. Part one, call it the New Yorker effect. In 1928, Al Smith won the Democratic nomination for president, who is Al Smith. You probably haven't heard of him because he lost to Herbert Hoover. But Al Smith was an Irish Catholic New York governor. He had a strong backing from immigrants and left-wing urban workers, and he loses.

But four years later, his successor as New York Governor runs on a similar left-wing platform, and that guy crushes. His name is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And so you're beginning to see the Democratic Party at the national level, a connection between the urban left and Democrats. Part two, The Great Migration. In the first half the 20th century, millions and millions of black people moved from the rural south to the cities of the north and the Midwest. In 1900, Detroit was 2% black.

By the 1960s, it was more than 20% black. That is the Great Migration. And Black Americans played a critical role in pushing the Democratic Party left on especially civil rights. And so the party of the urban left-wing worker also becomes the party of the urban black. voter. But this only takes us to about 1970. So part three is the culture wars. Starting in the 1970s, evangelical Christian leaders become more political and they find a home within the GOP, especially under Ronald Reagan. So the GOP moves right on abortion and issues like that, which appeal to the religious, rural-based. So what do Democrats do in response? Well, they become the pro-choice

party, appealing more to urban, cosmopolitan values. Rural moves right, cities, move. left. Finally, around the 2000s, you have the diploma divide. After the 1980s, factories shut down and the urban economy moves toward finance, media, marketing, tech. What do all these jobs have in common? Blue-collar urban workers don't do them. Al Smith, poor old Al Smith, his base does not do these jobs. College graduates do them. So Democrats become advocates for the so-called knowledge economy because they're already becoming the party of the city where the knowledge economy is based. Their interests become the interests of the urban educated. And because politics is just a game of dividing the country in half and trying to win 51 percent, Republicans go in the opposite direction.

They become the anti-college party that dominates the less educated and more rural parts of the country. So that's it. Al Smith, Great Migration, Culture Wars, College. That is in something like two and a half minutes, the 100-year history of how Democrats became the party of the city, and that is why the identity of place today plays such a huge role in American politics. So for the rest of the podcast, we have as our guest, Atlantic staff writer David Frum. David is a former speechwriter to George W. Bush, a prominent essayist about the dangers of Donald Trump, and I thought we could use his erudite, modern, moderate perspective to help us understand the big identity questions of the moment. Where are we coming apart and where are we coming

together? I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. David, welcome. You're such a good big picture thinker that I want to start with the very biggest of all possible pictures. I think American politics is in a berserk moment right now. Certain realities, certain fundamental truths do not seem to break through the way they used to. So you look at the economy. People used to judge the president based on the economy. But today, you see in polls that people judge the economy based on whoever the president is. Like right now, Democrats say the economy is great. Republicans think things are terrible. Ten months ago, it was the total opposite. Republicans were happy, Democrats were not. What's the difference? Who is sitting in the Oval Office? I thought a pandemic, a shared tragedy,

like a pandemic, would enforce a shared reality. But instead, we're still living in two different worlds. maybe more different than ever, half of middle-aged Republicans say they will not get a vaccine. Just 2% of Americans who are Democrats say the same. That is a 25x reality gap between 45-year-old Republicans and Democrats. What is going on? I think we need to retire that old slogan.

It's the economy, stupid. And to realize we have moved from an age in which the fundamentals mattered to a new age in which identity matters. I think we've seen lots and lots of data points on this, that the strongest predictor for how you feel about the economy is not the economy. It's not even your personal economy.

It's your partisan identification with the party of the precedent. We have these other strange things that are showing up, which is the increasing antagonism of parts of America to each other. I'm sure you saw this Pew survey about how Americans don't want to befriend each other across party lines or date even more strongly date across party lines. So I think a lot of this is, and I'm reluctant to admit this because I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to understand the connections between economics and politics. But I think we need to overcome our conservatism, our attachment to the past, and say, we've moved into an era in which the economy matters less and less. And so you can't reason with people about this because they see something that's more important to them. One last thing about this.

So once upon time, there was a psychologist named Abraham Maslow who argued that human needs were stacked in a kind of pyramid. And we moved up this pyramid from basic physiological needs, shelter food to psychic needs. And maybe it's not surprising that as the country becomes more prosperous, that our political identities become much more. about these kinds of hierarchy issues than before. And it's just not going to matter so much that there's a road or there's a bridge. What matters is, does the politician validate who you are, affirm who you are, express your identity? And for half the country, a little more, Trump offended that.

And for about half the country, Biden offensive. There we are. All right, David, so let's say you have Joe Biden's ear. He gives you a call next week, and he says, David, I have an assumption that there is a new norm in American politics a day, such that the old fundamentals don't matter. It's not the economy stupid. It's your identity, stupid. It's group identity, stupid. What do I do to navigate those waters? How do I put the Democratic Party in a position to win in 2022 and myself in a position to win in 2024 if I am swimming in a current of group identity politics.

The first answer to that is you have to get smarter about what identity means. Democrats in particular are enthralled to a model of identity that is based on assumptions the census made a long time ago and on the practices of college admissions offices. So one of the great challenges that Democrats have had in the past decade, and we're seeing it now in the U.S. surface, is there's something that there's something called Latino or Latinx or Latin Esher, however they like to put it. There's this thing that is made up of all of these immigrants from all parts of the Western Hemisphere, and I think logically Portugal and Spain as well. And they are a block and they are going to, and they are defined by their sameness to one

another. They are voters of color, so they will naturally fall into line behind other Democratic groups. And this just, I mean, I think every day is bringing this reputation. The identities that matter are rural versus urban, educated versus less educated, male versus female. That one is especially with young people. And I think so much of what is going on in our social life and in our politics is driven by increasingly increasing tension and friction. And I say this as somebody who wants to have lots and lots of grandchildren. So this is a very not anything on my own. heart. But the tension between young men and young women, their non-complementarity.

And that's, by the way, if you want to start a successful media company, a new one, that your target market is men who are angry at women or women who are angry at men. And those are the two most exciting parts of the podcast, substack industry. And that, as we see with the latest, I think this is an NPR survey on the enormous gender gap among so-called Latinos, which is what, like 40 points based on sex? Well, at what point do we say that we're looking at these data points? We're imposing completely the wrong pattern on them and seeing unity where there is not, and missing the unity where there really is, which is young men and young women are increasingly

oppositional to one another, politically, culturally, romantically, sexually. I think a breakdown here would be really useful. I mean, first, I should say, you're making me totally rethink the posture of this podcast that I'm not nearly, you know, I'm not nearly doing well enough job choosing the side of the gender wars here. I'm being pretty sort of, amenable to all genders was my original strategy, but that might not be antagonistic enough. So a quick breakdown to put some stats on what you just said. There was a Wall Street Journal poll of Hispanic voters that asked them their opinions of the Democratic Party. In the 2022 generic ballot, Hispanic women were plus 17 for Democrats. Hispanic men were plus 16 for Republicans. So quick mental

math, that is a 33 point gap between Hispanic men and women. In 2024 for the presidential election, Hispanic women are Biden plus 25 percent. And Hispanic men are, you know, Trump plus 23%. That is a 48 point gap between men and women among Latinos, among Hispanics. I mean, I really do think that the evolution of the Hispanic vote might be the most interesting development in electoral politics right now. You go back to 2000. Democrats are used to winning the Hispanic vote by somewhere between 18 points. That was their advantage in 2004 to 44 points. their advantage in 2012. But in December, the Washington Journal just did this poll of Hispanic voters, and the Democratic advantage among Hispanics was not 40, it wasn't 30 or 20 or 10, it was one.

Their advantage among Hispanics has declined from about 30 to one. Again, David, sorry to keep putting such impossible questions to you, but what the hell is going on there? Well, the process of Americanization, assimilation, the process of education, the process of education, which has these hugely powerful impacts on those who get it and those who get less of it. Gender divides, as I've said. And I think the real question is, why would anyone think it was otherwise? I mean, supposing we were doing politics in the year, I don't know, 1935, and the United States has had a lot of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.

Why do we invent a category called, you know, East. South Europe, Serbs and Croats, Ukrainians and Jews. If we can find an Ashkenazi Jew for our ticket, that'll really help because the Ukrainians, they're all from the same part of the world. They must be, I mean, it's, it, what you would say, that's, this is, there are a lot of antagonisms here. There are a lot of cultural differences. Now, there is some unity of language in the Hispanic world, some because many of the people who are defined as Hispanic actually speak indigenous languages and not Spanish. And there are other divisions of class and race. I mean, the assumption behind the Hispanic vote was always the descendants of Cortez and the

descendants of Montezuma. They had so much in common. They're bound to be political allies. So I think we just need to say that we created a category in the United States for American reasons that began with the Census Bureau spread to college admissions campus, and we then, departments, and we then reified it and assumed that this is going to be a powerful predictor of how people who are bubbling away in the American melting pot. And at this point, I think it's also true that a lot of the identification as Hispanic is volitional. I mean, if someone is born to a father who chases most of his ancestry to South America and a mother who traces most of her ancestry to Eastern Europe, that young person then makes a choice about how do I identify.

And it's quite possible that that family could have many children, each of whom have a different choice. And at that point, you say, this category is not making any sense for any purpose. Right. Right. It doesn't make sense from like an original definition purpose to say that people from Brazil and people from Mexico are, you know, one shared ethnicity with one shared culture. But it makes less and less sense over time as they assimilate as first generation become second, third, fourth, and they retain a kind of census identification, a census self-definition of Latino. But maybe in their day-to-day life, they don't think about that Latino self-identification as much. about other ways of identifying yourself, urban versus rural, left versus right male versus female, and those other categories of self-definition are more the driver. It makes me think,

and this is a hard question to ask, and it's a question that makes me exquisitely aware of the fact that we're two dudes talking about this. So I want to phrase the question delicately. But why do Democrats have the guy problem? Why is it Democrats who are losing men year after year, generation after generation, not just among white voters, but now as we're seeing among Latino voters, Hispanic voters as well, what is wrong with the way that Democrats are talking to men? Well, let's also let's note that there's an equal and opposite Republican female property. Oh, sure. Yeah. And so I don't know that we need to pathologize one party more than another. And just as a clinical point of view, I mean, yes, I understand because it's very important

that Donald Trump not be president again, so you worry about why are the Democrats underperforming. You have correctly diagnosed the origin of the question, yes. But from a clinical point of view, you need to say, why are men and women voting increasingly differently from one another, and why are they grouping in these two ways? And so once you put it that way, you can sort of, it becomes a less difficult question to answer. What you can see is there are a series, there are just the Republicans identify with and champion a series of issues that make men feel validated and powerful. Why has the gun issue become so important? And what do guns mean?

And guns are very much, although there has been an uptick in 20 and 21 of women buying guns, it remains an exclusively male. not a disproportionately male preoccupation, and certainly is a voting issue. Men care about it much more than women. We can see that. Well, the gun puts power in your hand. And you can see the power of life and death, the ultimate power.

And you can see why people who feel that in so many other areas of their lives, power is ebbing away from them. You pick up this tool and you feel powerful. And you put it in your, you tuck it into your pants, and you walk around. And for a moment, you are God.

I mean, you dispense death at will. And even though you might be constrained enough by law that you don't do it unless somebody really cuts you off in traffic, you know, you know you have this power. And it's tremendously for those who want it, tremendously gratifying. As the sexes become less complimentary in the economy, in sexual life, in romantic life, that, yeah, there's a party that channels male grievance and there's a party that is more hospitable to female aspiration. And it's not perfect because, look, as my daughters and their friends will point out, that there are quadrants of the progressive left that offer a lot of play space for dickish behavior. Convierce your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of the pay with a better conversion of the world.

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pointe bar records. I want to stitch together a couple ideas that we're talking about because I can

imagine a listener saying, oh, well, we're talking about polarization by education,

by gender, by place. How are they all connected? Here's a statistic. This year, it was reported

that Women now account for 60% of college enrollees. College now is 60-40 women over men. How is that relevant? Well, as women become more educated and the Democratic Party becomes more dominated by college graduates, it's naturally going to lean more toward women who account for the clear majority

of college graduates. And then, one more degree, where do college graduates, especially young college graduates, move? They move to cities. where Democrats also dominate. So this is the underground river connecting all of these trends. This is in part how the Democratic Party

has become the party of women, of college graduates, and of cities all at the same time. I wonder what you make of that. Yeah. Well, you're... I mean, you look at sort of counties, the counties that because

prosperous counties, the knowledge counties. I mean, I think Hillary Clinton once, the counties that produced 66% of the GDP of the United States, And Biden, one counties that produce 70% of the GDP of the United States. And increasingly, the model of red states versus blue states is obsolete. That every state virtually reproduces this. So the big ones in Texas and Georgia.

I mean, that Houston is Democratic, Dallas is Democratic. Austin famously so, San Antonio. And we're getting to the point where Fort Worth now is a Democratic. city. So the battle is now for Amarillo and Tyler in Texas. And Georgia has a similar kind of story. And Georgia is going to be very important that way in 2022. So so far, black Americans have been more resistant to this trend than other groups. And there are powerful historical reasons why that would be so. And maybe it will continue. But maybe the undertow is so strong that at least, I mean, not, I don't imagine that black Americans become as competitive.

as Hispanic Americans are, but you may see some of this trend happening, especially if, you know, under a post-Donald Trump leadership. And, of course, this has implications, not just for what happens in campuses, but what happens for lifetime incomes. I mean, because there's historically, and this may change, but historically that women have greatly valued partners who make at least as much money as they do and often express a preference. and there's a social science on this for partners make even more money than they do. Well, if women are getting 60% of the BAs, and that hope is going to bump into some realities, that more and more women are going to be making more money than more and more men, and that will mean either they have to change their ideas about what they're looking for in a partner,

or they are going to be unpartnered. And on the male side, you're going to have more and more men, and who feel like bringing home the bacon entitled them to certain things inside the house, and now they don't, but they still have their expectations of what they're entitled to inside the house. And that's where I think a lot of the friction between the sexes comes from with all of its political effects. Let me jump in here and share a theory that I've heard about why women overall lean

toward Democrats while men lean toward Republicans. This theory comes from Elizabeth Cassio at Dartmouth College. And it's a story that begins in 1980. So 1980, you have the nomination of Ronald Reagan for president. The GOP drops its support of the Equal Rights Amendment that would have guaranteed legal gender equality for women and men. They start to speak out against abortion, and they embrace the Christian right,

which at the time made a really big deal about the problem of working women for quote-unquote traditional families. So November 1980, Reagan wins easily, but he loses women by eight points. the first ever mention of a gender gap appears in the Washington Post three months later in 1981, the year Reagan becomes president.

So what happens now, starting in 1981, you have a sorting effect. There's some evidence that male voters in the U.S. had for decades been more conservative than women on welfare, homosexuality, use of force, foreign policy. But as the parties became more ideological, men and women started to sort themselves

by their ideological differences. The Democratic Party became more reliant on women on winning women's votes. And so their policies became really attuned to women's issues. Women are more likely to live below the poverty threshold, more likely to rely on food stamps,

more likely to be employed in education and healthcare. And lo and behold, what party talks more about poverty? What party talks more about food stamps? What party talks more about expanding education and healthcare is Democrats. And so you see this gender gap growing.

Eight percentage points in 1980, 12 points in 2000, 13 points, 2016. And I find this stuff just absolutely fascinating. And I think you can sum it all up with the question, you know, where is America becoming more polarized and where are we becoming less polarized? So you look at gender. We're clearly becoming very polarized there. But now look at something like race. And I think this is going to surprise some people. Race is becoming a little bit less polarized. Hispanic voters, as you said, they're moving toward 50-50. Black voters, still overwhelmingly Democratic, but moving a tiny bit toward parity, where polarization is really rising is gender,

geography, and education. Urban counties, basically all democratic leaning, rural America, veering sharply to the right. Then you look at education. College grads have swung left, non-college has swung right. And then they're the vaccines. And this is where I finally want to off-ramp to you, David. There's this irony that I can't get over, which is that vaccine production was accelerated by Donald Trump, and he takes credit for it, maybe even too much credit. But half of middle-aged Republicans say they refuse to be vaccinated. How did polarization, which has existed in gender, has existed in race, has existed in geography, how did it come for the vaccines? Well, this is a rich topic. And let me just say to the way you've prefaced the question.

there was a period when it looked like a way to sell the vaccines to the resistant part of the population was to give Trump a lot of the credit for it. And so as a matter of salesmanship, I'm willing to yield. But it turns out it didn't work. And so now we can just talk about what is true. And it's, you know, it happened on his watch. So that's good. But at every point of the way, Trump's priority was to deny the reality of COVID.

And he regarded it as an impertinent piece of, you know, an important little miniature Washington Post delivering fake news that made him look bad. And his reaction to that was just to deny its existence. And so the administration, it's true that they removed some. barriers that would have otherwise slowed the development by private sector people. But let's remember the most important work on this vaccine was done in Germany, not in the United States. And Donald Trump, so you could as well call it the Merkel vaccine, if you're going to call it anything. Right.

I don't call it anything. Yes. And that wouldn't be true either. What is the connection? So there's a popular level and there's an elite level. At the popular level, the number of Republicans. refuse it. There's just a kind of, they figured out that Trump, they got the double, the true message. Trump's two double messages, yay vaccines, no, this, this pandemic is a fake and an

insult and not my fault and any acknowledgement of it undercuts me. They got the message he was more serious about. And so there's just a kind of truculence, which is, I am not going to surrender to this reality or this purported reality. I am going to stay here and say, Trump was right, the whole thing is overblown, the whole thing is an insult, it's in my way, and the right thing is just, you know, either believe the conspiracy theories that it doesn't exist at all, or believe the conspiracy theories that it was invented by Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci, but just truculent, dogged, no, I won't go along with this. I'm not going to do it. And if I get sick, I get sick, you know. It's also true that fried foods aren't good for you and that having a gun in the house isn't good for you. Do I listen to the experts about those things? No, I don't. I'm not going to start now.

So I think you're absolutely right that a lot of vaccine denialism is downstream of COVID denialism. I think if you don't think this pandemic is a big deal, then yeah, you're going to be offended by the suggestion that you have to get a shot in your arm to make it go away. You are going to be even more offended by the suggestion that you'll be mandible. by the state government to sit in a chair and let some person stab you in the deltoid. Like, look, this isn't my philosophy, but, like, I recognize it as internally coherent. I think it's coherently wrong, but I get the philosophy. But I also think this anti-vax philosophy, and again, tying us back to identity and education and why I wanted to talk to you in the first place, how identity seems to shape everything that's happening right now, there's something at work here about putting the scientific elite in their place.

like about getting to say screw you to Fauci, you're wrong. Screw you to the CDC, you're wrong. Screw you to the New York Times and all you, you know, neurotic liberals with your masks and your marching orders and your rules, you're all wrong. You were all wrong about this thing spreading on surfaces and wrong about the vaccines being protection against transmission. And what I see here, which I think is very interesting, is a political movement on the right that is devoted to skewering the educated elite.

but they're so devoted to this project that they miss the big question. They miss the big issue. The vaccines save lives. The vaccines block severe illness. They make you less likely to die. And I guess I just wonder, what do you make of this?

The way that education polarization, which might be one of the most important stories in politics today, has merged with this instinct to deny the pandemic and the therapeutics that could end it. To paraphrase another saying, the only thing that can stop a bad expert with a wrong fact is a good expert with a better fact. So when you say that at first scientists hypothesized that the disease could be spread on surfaces,

and later they were refuted by the weight of scientific. The very act of saying they were wrong and they were exposed. It's a child's view of how science proceeds. It's an argumentative is a smart Alex view. because what actually happens is a new problem comes along. And there is a lot of noise and static. And people of good faith and relevant expertise, working urgently, that this is not something that you can wait for the answer,

offer early approximations of what they know. And then as evidence accumulates, and as they are channeled by other people with comparable expertise, they discover that some of their early presuppositions are mistaken. And let's bracket here, because this is the one you hear about most. The political people who said, it's bad to gather if you're gathering for reasons for fun, but good to gather if it's Black Lives Matter. So somebody gave that quote to some public health person.

Okay, so that kind of behavior is obviously wrong and obviously discrediting. But most of the time what was going on was in the early stages of the pandemic, People who were scientifically minded, who were asked for real-time advice, said, this is the best we know now. They weren't wrong. They were just early. And we weren't going to, we didn't say to them, I'll tell you what, here's this new thing. Why don't we all die for the next six months? And you go into a room and we will wait patiently dying all the while until you come up with a really bulletproof answer to what the problem is.

That's not what we asked. We said, we want what you know now. Tell us what you know now. And we'll take the risk that it's going to turn out to be partially correct or maybe entirely wrong. But tell us what you know now. And they did. And some of those things did turn out to be premature, not wrong, but mistaken or overturned by later evidence. And I think one of the things that the people on the Internet who make these arguments,

They're blind to the difference between good faith errors based on acting fast on inadequate information and bad faith deception. The difference between the people who said, we don't think right now masks are going to be helpful. And the people who promoted hydroxychloroquium was the people who said, we don't think at this point of the epidemic masks are going to be helpful, were acting on the basis. Really, the only thing they were concerned about was, how do you stop? the disease. And they were giving you their best reading of the information they had it. The people who said the answer is hydroxychloricone were motivated by the desire to protect President Trump

from his inhumane disregard of human life and to come up with some excuse for him. And then they ransacked. They were acting not, they were acting like lawyers. I mean, that we, I was trained as a lawyer. So as a lawyer, you don't care whether your client is actually guilty or actually innocent. The guilty or the client, the greater the glory if you can win the client and acquittal. and you say what you think will tend to support your preferred outcome and you know the preferred outcome and you're paid for from the start. You're not interested in the pursuit of truth. And we need to separate those categories of behavior. And so, yeah, as the scientists say about error, that a mistake is not a mistake.

A mistake is a success in proving the, in disproving a mistake and hypothesis about the problem. That's also how the process of human knowledge advances. Well, if I had to summarize what you just said in one sentence, it would be science is hard. And maybe that's not the deepest observation, but I don't know. An observation doesn't have to be deep to be true. Scientific thinking, actually putting evidence over ideology, is really friggin' hard. It's so hard that it makes us desperate for shortcuts, for cheat codes, and by, is a cheat code. Identity is often a cheat code. Having an enemy, having a political enemy that you can

just bounce off of, that is a cheat code. These are all excuses to let go of our brains and choose the opposite of thinking. And I think that is what I see running rampant in American politics today. It's not just craziness. It is the opposite. of thinking. So on that study note, David, thank you for helping me think through some of these issues. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Plain English with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. We are off for the next week. The next episode will be in the new year. We will see you in 2022. Happy holidays. Please be safe. And we'll talk to you soon.