America Ascendant

by Stanley B Greenberg

  For white conservatives, racial diversity changes the political balance, and political control will come at the expense of whites. About 60 percent of Republicans, white conservatives, white “born again” Evangelicals, and white seniors also believe that racial minorities will use their hold over government to discriminate against whites. Yet just a third of college graduates and Millennials and a quarter of postgraduates think that.8

  For many conservatives, the worry is what these racial minorities will demand of government. Four of five Republicans and three-quarters of white Evangelicals say growing racial diversity means “there will be too many demands on government services.” An intense bloc of 36 percent of Republicans say this is “completely true”—affirming how much the reaction against diversity is a fear that the new majority will use its political power to expand government and spending on behalf of the now ascendant minorities.9

  To be fair, majorities of racial minorities and Millennials also worry about the demand on government services, though many fewer than for Republicans and without intensity. It likely reflects a genuine competition for services. We have seen this in prior generations as earlier waves of immigrants and minority groups came to worry about competition from newer arrivals. We have seen this in Britain as well, where black immigrants from Jamaica and Pakistan come to resent the new asylum seekers from Somalia or workers from Poland and worry that they are overloading the schools and the National Health Service.

  What does not seem to be driving the conservative reaction is worry that growing diversity threatens their job or wages—the flash point for racial and ethnic tensions for most of our history. About 60 percent of Republicans and the white working class say with this diversity “there will not be enough jobs for everyone.” But a like number of African Americans and half of Hispanics and Millennials think that, too. The response reflects worries about the job market shared by everyone, rather than a worry that racial minorities will compete for their jobs.10

  Most important, the ascendant groups view the rising diversity as potentially ushering in a new stage of tolerance and multiculturalism in America. Fully 70 percent of college graduates, Millennials, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians say it will bring a time of greater acceptance and tolerance. But Republicans balk at that future. Barely a majority of Republicans think “people will become more accepting of their differences and more willing to find common ground.” White conservatives and white southerners are more likely to agree with one conservative columnist’s diagnosis: “We have fetishized diversity, tolerance, compassion, and niceness”—the “left-wing pseudo-religion.”11

  The response of Republicans, Evangelicals, and white southerners to this growing racial diversity is deeply embedded in America’s unfinished white-black history.

  Slavery left us with a legal system of race domination and segregation well into the middle of the twentieth century, until challenged by a massive civil rights movement that eventually succeeded in directing the power of the federal government toward efforts to redress the past and get closer to equal opportunity. This turn was possible because major leaders in both national parties considered equal rights part of their legacy and both parties genuinely competed for the growing black vote. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 deepened the country’s commitment to equality and barred racial discrimination in public accommodations and government facilities and by employers and government agencies.12

  Since 1964, however, nearly all Republican presidential nominees put the grievances of white voters at the forefront of their campaigns. Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act and Ronald Reagan strongly opposed it, saying it was “humiliating to the South.” He parodied “welfare queens” when he ran. Richard Nixon was determined to restore “law and order” and called on the “silent majority” to make itself heard. George H. W. Bush put Lee Atwater at the top of his campaign and ran a flood of “Willie Horton” ads that depicted a convicted black murderer on weekend parole killing again. John McCain had to restrain running mate Sarah Palin from attacking Obama for his association with Rev. Wright. Mitt Romney’s promise to enforce onerous immigration policies that would lead the undocumented to “self-deport” and his disdain for the “47 percent” made clear for whom he would govern.13

  More recently, Republican signals to aggrieved white votes have been matched by serious efforts to deny blacks the right to vote. During four successive presidential elections, the country watched dramatic television coverage of African American voters forced to wait in long queues to cast their votes in the critical swing states of Florida and Ohio, where Republican governors and secretaries of state created shortages of voting machines, limited early voting, and challenged ballots at voting places. Republican state leaders were even accused of blocking traffic to make it difficult for blacks to get to their polling stations. With Republican secretaries of state battling with the U.S. Justice Department and federal courts to bar early voting or to purge voter rolls close to the election, the Republican Party has sent a defining signal about its views of the universal franchise for black citizens.

  When Republicans gained control of many new states after the 2010 elections and in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election, they passed a blizzard of laws to greatly restrict voting. They limited when people could register and vote, required government-issued photo identification that perhaps one in ten voters did not have, and reversed reforms that allowed people with criminal records to regain their right to vote. That set up a huge battle in the courts.14

  In 2013, the conservative Supreme Court overturned Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which required states with a history of discrimination to get preclearance from the Justice Department when changing election laws. Republican-controlled states in the South rushed to implement new regulations on registration and voting, with a disproportionate impact on blacks, Hispanics, and the poor. In 2013, eight Republican-controlled states passed voter ID laws, and others are considering adding mandatory proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or a passport, which minorities often lack, in order to vote. Remember, this was 2013, not 1964.15

  “What we see here is total disrespect and disregard for constitutional protections,” declared the head of the Georgia NAACP. Republicans say in their defense that this is about addressing the potential for fraud, though that does not pass the smell test. Half of the ten states with the highest black turnout in 2008 and seven of the twelve states with the largest Hispanic growth over the past decade passed restrictive voter laws by the spring before the 2012 elections.16

  Conservatives are taking these steps because they fear that the electoral power of minorities will translate into increased demand for government spending on social programs. Rather than rewarding hard work and self-reliance, that will increase idleness and dependence on government. For white conservatives, this is a values argument, not just political calculation or budget policy.

  With the unemployment rate near 7.4 percent, Senate Republicans blocked an extension of unemployment insurance for the long-term unemployed. Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama explained, “People, if you pay ’em for years and years, they won’t look for a job.” And on the fiftieth anniversary of the War on Poverty, Paul Ryan’s Budget Committee issued a report declaring defeat. It began by citing the breakdown of the family as the main cause of persistent poverty and blamed counterproductive social benefits for leading people into “the poverty trap.”17

  Ryan also declared that the subsidies in the Affordable Care Act compound this values problem facing the country. Ryan reflected conservative opinion Web sites that equated the health care reforms with welfare. From the start of the public debate, they set off alarms with their headlines: “OBAMACARE PUTS FAMILIES MAKING $192,920 ON WELFARE” and “OBAMACARE IS GOING TO BE THE BIGGEST EXPANSION OF THE WELFARE STATE IN U.S. HISTORY.” They warned that seventeen million people will get subsidies to purchase health insurance and twenty-one million will be put on expanded Medicaid rolls. It “
would eventually put most Americans on the dole, converting middle-class Americans into lifelong welfare recipients and government dependents.” With America in decline, “the number of Americans that are able to independently take care of themselves will continue to go down.”18

  And it was no surprise then that when the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the availability of subsidized health insurance in the individual market would lead some to choose to reduce their working hours, conservative critics pounced. Paul Ryan elaborated on the misplaced values: it is “inducing a person not to work who is on the low-income scale, not to get on the ladder of life, to begin working, getting the dignity of work.”19

  At the heart of this concern is a view of the ethos of these minority populations that have grown less self-reliant and demanding of support. Buried in Phil Robertson’s interview with GQ about Duck Dynasty was an observation that the blacks he knew growing up in Louisiana, “Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare,” were “happy” and “godly”—“no one was singing the blues.” Ryan’s racial assumptions were evident when he said, “We have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular of men not working. And just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.”20

  In the face of Republican hostility and continuing challenges to the right to vote, civil rights organizations, the NAACP, and the black churches and fraternal orders are on the march as part of a continuing battle for black advancement. That effort has produced a consistent and high level of black turnout regardless of the election and in spite of the new restrictive laws. Ohio—where Republicans doubled down on every conceivable restriction and produced the requisite queues—became the one state in the country where black turnout in 2012 exceeded the extraordinary 2008 levels. Blacks have turned out at a higher rate than whites and other minorities with comparable socioeconomic standing for some time, and in 2012 their overall turnout rate trumped white turnout for the first time.21

  Blacks comprised a still very insistent 12 percent of the 2014 off-year electorate, as they view their values and rights as still protected by the ballot.22

  Each new video of a police officer shooting an unarmed black man and the resulting protests confirm for the community that race matters and that the job is unfinished. Each week brings another Eric Garner in a chokehold beseeching, “I can’t breathe,” or a twelve-year-old Tamir Rice shot in a playground. They know that blacks are three times as likely as whites to be searched at a traffic stop and three times as likely to be arrested—and that Ferguson, Missouri, is more normal than not.

  Then a white supremacist pictured with symbols of apartheid-era South Africa and the Confederacy murdered nine black congregants in a bible class, “the beating heart” of the black community, as President Obama described it in his eulogy. And today’s generation would be reminded of its history, a church “burned to the ground because its founder sought to end slavery,” a pulpit where Martin Luther King preached against Jim Crow laws, and steps where the “marches began.” The president reminded America these lost lives matter for everyone “who cares about the steady expansion of human rights and human dignity in this country.”

  When America celebrates Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and the anniversary of the March on Washington, we do not hear the formulaic and requisite speeches given on most national and ethnic holidays. That is because there is a real sense that hard-won civil rights and social gains are not secured, despite the election and reelection of an African American president. Ministers and civil rights leaders are again calling on their congregants, allies, and country to reaffirm and defend equal rights, tolerance, and social justice against the renewed attacks. The continuous legitimation of equal rights in black-white history has made the principle of equality more available as a value and tool as women, immigrants, and gays joined their struggles to shape America’s diversity.

  FIGHTING THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION AND SECULARIZATION OF AMERICA

  America is one of the few developed countries where religious attendance has become one the strongest correlates of partisan political preference. That intertwining of faith and partisanship has grown ever tighter through two periods of growing polarization on social issues. The first period was shaped by the actions of President Ronald Reagan and President Bill Clinton between 1983 and 1996. President George W. Bush’s 2004 values election campaign launched the second decade-long period of polarization that includes the current contentious period. Karl Rove’s culture war took the religious sorting of the country to a new level.

  The potential for such polarization was there because the battles over the family, sexuality, and the role of women played out in a country where religion remains important for at least 40 percent of the country and particularly for Evangelicals.

  The first period of religious polarization began when President Reagan and President Clinton traded executive orders on abortion. Within hours of being sworn in as president in 1993, Bill Clinton reversed five executive orders regarding abortion, family planning, and stem cell research. This included reversing both the gag rule that prohibited government-funded family planning clinics serving low-income communities from counseling on abortion, and the “Mexico City policy,” which prohibited U.S. aid to international clinics that used their own funds to provide counseling or referrals for abortions. He commented at the time, “As a result of today’s action, every woman will be able to receive medical advice and referrals that will not be censored or distorted by ideological arguments that should not be a part of medicine.” Shortly after taking the oath of office, President Clinton also tried to change the long-standing prohibition against gays in the military, ordering the secretary of defense to draft legislation to overturn existing policies.23

  Religious conservatives rejected those actions. Influential Evangelical spokesman and Focus on the Family president James Dobson told his followers that Bill Clinton had “debase[d] the presidency” with his “homosexual agenda” and his “hands are stained with the blood of countless innocent babies.” Pat Robertson warned of the stark choice this created: “Either we will return to the moral integrity and original dreams of the founders of this nation … or we will give ourselves over more and more to hedonism, to all forms of destructive anti-social behavior.” A Christian Voice pamphlet commanded its followers to “make sure government is … punishing what is wrong and rewarding what is right.” And homosexuality was the ultimate wrong, Rev. Jerry Falwell declared, a sin “so grievous, so abominable in the sight of God that he destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of [it].”24

  As a result, Democratic presidential candidates and congressional party candidates became increasingly pro-choice and Republicans became increasingly pro-life. In the Senate, 80 percent of Democratic senators had already moved to casting pro-choice votes by 1987. Interestingly, almost 40 percent of Republicans still cast pro-choice votes then, though that plummeted to virtually zero by 2005 as the culture war was joined. The House was fully polarized by 2008: about 90 percent of House Democrats were pro-choice though only 10 percent of House Republicans were. Meanwhile, the number of Republican senators who were Baptist or Evangelical jumped from seven to sixteen and the number of House members jumped from ten to forty-one.25

  The second wave of religious polarization started with Karl Rove’s unlikely culture war in 2004 and has only deepened in the subsequent decade. Gay marriage and abortion gave Rove the critical material to ignite the culture war and launch President Bush’s polarizing 2004 campaign.

  What Rove saw in 2004 was an evenly divided country and a declining bloc of genuine swing voters, and he decided Republicans could win by raising the turnout of the base rather than by working to persuade swing voters across the electorate. His own campaign team described the plan as a radical departure, but Rove was intently focused on the millions of missing Evangelicals who did not turn out in the 2000 national election.

  President Bush invited expressions of fai
th during his time in the White House, including prayer, and said in debates that the Bible was his favorite book and cautioned on evolution, saying, “religion has been around a lot longer than Darwinism.” He hired Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition, and reached deeply into the religious communities to fuel his campaign: 350,000 of the 1.4 million campaign volunteers were “pro-family” Evangelicals. President Bush promised a constitutional amendment to nullify the Massachusetts decision to legalize same-sex marriage and supported the thirteen states that held referendums to define marriage as between a man and a woman. Evangelical minister Rick Warren wrote to the 136,000 subscribers of his weekly newsletter for pastors, urging them to use the pulpit to compare the presidential candidates on five non-negotiable issues: abortion, stem cell research, cloning, gay marriage, and euthanasia.26

  The intense cultural battle moved the turnout to 60.7 percent, the highest since 1968 and a 6.4-point surge from 2000. According to Democracy Corps’ postelection poll, the strategy raised the Bush vote by 4 percentage points in the Deep South, by 2 points in the white rural areas, and by 2 points among white Evangelicals (reaching 82 percent). The biggest issue for Bush voters was “moral values”—the first time that issue has topped the list. Gay marriage and abortion were at the top of the list of doubts about Kerry among Bush voters. On Election Day a whopping six million new Evangelical voters came out for Bush.27

  What Rove failed to take into account, however, was the resulting polarization and countermobilization in the non-Evangelical world. The strategy raised the Republican vote in southern and rural red states. But in the presidential battleground, where all the money and organizing were focused, Bush and Kerry fought to a draw. In those states, Bush gained less than a 1-point margin (0.8 percent) compared to his performance in 2000. Kerry came within 118,599 votes in Ohio of winning the presidency.28