America Ascendant

by Stanley B Greenberg

  When contemplating the exceptional changes in America’s politics, we will look back on 2004 as the year the legions crossed the Rubicon.

  The Democratic Party was beginning to resemble a coalition of the nonreligious and the Republicans a coalition of the religious, and top issues included the family, sexuality, and women, contraception, abortion, and same-sex unions. This was “the glue,” Putnam and Campbell write, “holding the coalition of the religious together.” The glue needs to be stronger and stronger because the country is moving away from the traditional values on issues such as crime, prayer in school, family, and marriage that once allowed conservatives to win the culture war.29

  Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee spoke to these issues that are very much alive with Evangelicals. He opposed the inclusion of preventive health services without copays in all insurance policies under the Affordable Care Act and called on Republicans to join the battle against government: “If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control, because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it.”30

  Social conservatives such as Huckabee probably still relate to the wording pollsters used before World War II when a plurality of Americans said it was “wicked” and not just “unfortunate” when “young women have sexual relations before marriage.” Today, though, just one in five says premarital sex is “always wrong,” while a near consensus has emerged that it is not wrong at all or not a moral issue. Almost half of Evangelicals, though, continue to believe it is “always wrong” to have sex before marriage, underscoring America’s continued polarization on the sexual revolution.31

  That means abortion has emerged as the most central and enduring issue for social conservatives.

  A 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision gave women the constitutional right to abort a pregnancy in the first three months and in later months with more restrictions. The decision extended the right to privacy under the Fourteenth Amendment to make such a decision, in effect accepting the autonomy of women on sexual matters.

  That decision propelled the country into a heated and politically polarized national debate about abortion. For long periods, a small majority of about 55 percent have said abortion should be legal in all or most cases and about 40 percent that it should be illegal in all or most cases. About one in four absolutely opposed or absolutely supported abortion.32

  Yet forty years after the landmark decision, fewer than 30 percent nationally want to completely overturn the decision and less than one in five now say abortion is a “critical issue” for them. That has made it difficult for pro-life candidates to make headway nationally on the issue, but the majority of white Evangelicals now want to “completely overturn” Roe v. Wade. That has steeled Republicans, and they have continued to move aggressively to effectively ban abortions wherever they govern.33

  Regardless of whether voters want this to be the main issue for the political parties, this is the issue where Democratic and Republican members of Congress are most polarized. Leaders from both parties welcome attending pro-life marches or Planned Parenthood conventions, respectively. Democrats link the issue to their attack on Republicans for their “war on women.” To energize their Evangelical base in lower-turnout elections, Republicans are adding state referendums to enshrine legal protections for the fetus. In 2014, the fetal personhood amendment was on the ballot in Colorado and North Dakota. To motivate women voters, Democrats spent $4.6 million on advertising on abortion and birth control alone in the very off-year 2013 Virginia governor’s race. And in 2014, Democratic Senate candidates in North Carolina, Iowa, and Colorado ran ads charging the Republican candidates with leading crusades in their states to ban all forms of birth control, backing harsh anti-abortion laws, and voting to defund Planned Parenthood.34

  In the prelude to the 2014 off-year elections, both Republican and Democratic voters said the biggest factor in their vote was stopping candidates who did not share their own views on the Affordable Care Act and their own views on abortion. The vote on the health care law, we know now, was really an expression of people’s views on the role of government, race, and dependence, and the vote on abortion, about secularization and the sexual revolution.35

  Homosexuality and gay marriage are now a very close second to abortion as an issue sorting the country into camps. A 53 percent majority say they cannot vote for a candidate who does not share their views on this issue. Acceptance of same-sex marriage has advanced at a breathtaking pace over the past five years, and a majority of Millennials describe themselves as a “supporter of gay rights.” That is greater than the number who describe themselves as patriotic, religious, or an environmentalist.36

  Between 2013 and 2014, all religious dominations witnessed accelerating support for gay marriage, especially among black Protestants. The more than 10-point jump in support among black Protestants is a strong statement about the primacy of equal rights and the power of outspoken civil rights and black leaders. The NAACP, the Chicago Urban League, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and President Obama—the first president to publicly support same-sex marriage—have all framed gay marriage as an issue of equity and part of their ongoing struggle for civil rights.

  Only white Evangelicals remained steady in their views between 2013 and 2014, and just 27 percent supported gay marriage in 2015.37

  In a video posted on a church’s YouTube page a couple of years ago, Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty warned that homosexuals committed “indecent acts” and that they received “the due penalty for their perversion.” For him, their behavior is an insult to God: “They are insolent, arrogant God haters. They are heartless. They are faithless. They are senseless. They are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil.”38

  If you want to understand the two parties’ reaction to this issue, look at what their state attorneys general did when the federal courts overturned state bans on same-sex marriage. In Ohio, Utah, Michigan, Colorado, and New Jersey, Republican officials asked the courts to block any gay unions while they appealed lower-court rulings. They argued that the states have a sovereign right to ban gay marriage and that “nobody knows right now the precise impact same-sex marriage will have on traditional marriage, children, and society at large.” They argued that same-sex couples are not qualified to marry, as they cannot procreate, that heterosexual couples are better parents, and that banning same-sex marriage promotes “responsible procreation.”39

  In Virginia, Oregon, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Kentucky, the Democratic attorneys general declared that they would not defend the bans in their states. They say that these laws are unconstitutional, violating the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Virginia attorney general Mark Herring vowed, “as attorney general, I’m going to make sure that the [people] presenting the state’s legal position on behalf of the people of Virginia are on the right side of history and on the right side of the law.” The U.S. attorney general defended their refusal, saying state attorneys general do not have an obligation to defend laws they view as discriminatory and called gay rights one of the “defining civil rights challenges of our time.”40

  When the Supreme Court granted constitutional protection to same-sex marriages, it overturned the bans in thirteen, mostly southern, states and extended the meaning of equality and tolerance in all fifty. The White House lit up in a rainbow of colors made its own kind of statement to the world.

  Yet Republican attorneys general, governors, and presidential candidates bitterly condemned the ruling. Louisiana’s attorney general said the ruling “overturns the will of the people” and Mississippi’s governor called the new marriage mandate “out of step with the majority of Mississippians.” Alabama’s chief justice compared the ruling to fateful wrongfully-decided cases and called for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriages. And Texas’s attorney gen
eral acted to protect county clerks and magistrates who object to same-sex unions on religious grounds. He declared that this 2015 “fabricated” decision created a “new constitutional right,” but it “did not diminish, overrule, or call into question the First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion that formed the first freedom in the Bill of Rights.”

  Score that one for the values of equality, equal rights, marriage pluralism, and tolerance.41

  The ferocious battle over values will obviously not quiet. As we have seen in this section, social conservatives are very invested in their fight against secularism and the sexual revolution and their defense of faith and marriage. Abortion is the front line in the culture war.

  BATTLING THE IMMIGRANT REVOLUTION

  Globalization has brought a surge in global migration, and one in five migrants comes to America and moves to one of the metropolitan centers across the country. The United States is increasingly open to the rest of the world due to a comparatively open immigration policy and an increased border security that has led many undocumented immigrants to stop risking trips home and to settle in cities far away from the borders. Universities, high-tech clusters, and metropolitan centers are becoming magnets for the new immigrants, skilled and unskilled alike. Our megacities are 40 percent foreign-born, and every growing metropolitan area has become a vast mix of languages, skin colors, cultures, cuisines, and heritages.

  That a large majority of the country currently thinks immigration is good for the country is not just support for keeping the door open. It reflects support for the core value of openness to outsiders, appreciation for rising diversity, and growing support for multiculturalism.

  Yet multiculturalism is an acquired taste in the world, even in America. Citizens expect their leaders to protect their national identity, language, traditions, way of life, borders, standard of living, and economic welfare against foreigners and foreign competition and to preserve public services for the citizenry who built them up. The irresistible integration of outsiders only increases the demand that leaders assert the primacy of U.S. citizens and citizenship, U.S. interests, and English as the official language. America first.

  The comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the U.S. Senate in 2013 but stalled in the House, unsurprisingly, produced a debate that reasserted values central to America’s revolutions and counterrevolution. In fact, both proponents and opponents elevated the value of citizenship and putting America first. Leaders embraced the centrality of English and the commitment to protecting U.S. borders and labor markets. The proposed immigration legislation would greatly expand immigration, bring the undocumented out of the shadows, and provide a path for legalization of illegals; but it would also militarize the border, levy high penalties on employers hiring the undocumented, require those applying for registered provisional status to pay a fine and pass a background test, and force those seeking citizenship to wait ten years, be proficient in English, and pay back taxes.

  The majority of Republican senators voted against the bill, though they were particularly determined to ensure that any newly legalized immigrants could not get government subsidies, including subsidies to buy health insurance under the new health care law until after the ten-year waiting period—something seven in ten Americans support. In fact, three-quarters believe that legal residents should not receive government benefits such as food stamps, Medicaid, and Social Security before they become citizens.42

  The norm of putting “America first” remains very strong. Many new immigrants, like the immigrants from old and new Europe before them, themselves became ambivalent about the struggles of new arrivals and expressed concern about competition for work and classrooms as well as the lack of proficiency in English. The lack of proficiency in English also concerns naturalized immigrants, and 87 percent of Hispanics think adult immigrants need to learn English to succeed. Today second- and third-generation Hispanics are using English at a faster rate than immigrant groups such as the Germans who preceded them.43

  The national Republican Party, with the support of southern Democrats, led the fight after World War I to stop the flood of immigration and get the country back to “100 percent Americanism”—which meant stopping the flood of Jews, Poles, Italians, Japanese, and Chinese.

  Well, state Republican leaders jumped at the opportunity to play that role in the face of America’s current waves of immigration. Governor Wilson in California started the two-decade anti-immigration struggle closed by Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona. They sought to transfer enforcement of immigration laws from the federal government to the states, which would supposedly be more vigilant in chasing down the illegals and denying them access to schools, employment, and housing. These efforts were overturned by the federal courts because of evident racial profiling and because they unconstitutionally usurped the federal government’s responsibility for immigration.44

  Nationally, the Republicans’ presidential nominee vowed to pass and enforce laws that would make life so hard for undocumented immigrants that they would “self-deport.” The House and Senate Republican leaders committed to giving the highest priority to reversing President Obama’s executive order legalizing the “DREAMers” and five million additional undocumented immigrants. With the appropriation bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security the hostage, Republican leaders promised to use the Congress’s funding authority and the courts to block the president’s executive orders. And when that stalled, Republican state leaders worked to limit undocumented immigrants’ access to state universities.45

  The public is nervous about the permeability of the border, particularly when tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America poured through it in the fall of 2014 and most ended up remaining in the United States. Nonetheless, when President Obama announced his executive order, he declared, “we are and always will be a nation of immigrants” and “For more than two hundred years, our tradition of welcoming immigrants from around the world has given us a tremendous advantage over other nations.”46

  These political battles over immigration have been joined by an expanding pro-immigration coalition, the Catholic Church, and a growing social movement that expropriated the values of early civil rights struggles. On the occasion of the anniversary of the March on Washington, Clarissa Martinez-de-Castro, the director of immigration policy for the National Council of La Raza, observed, “There’s continued progress and struggle that needs to happen on the issues that were fought on in the 1960s, and then we have new and different iterations of those struggles, one of them being the immigration issue.”47

  The Republican Party embrace of 100 percent Americanism is embedded in a broadly shared desire to defend the primacy of being an American citizen and protect the American way of life. But that has consequences in the context of the immigration revolution, something the official Republican Party postmortem warned about after the 2012 defeat. A large majority of the country thinks immigration is good for the nation and that it is evidence of a greater openness to outsiders and appreciation for infusions of different ways of thinking that come with more diversity and multiculturalism.48

  Elected Republicans continue to block immigration reform, but they will have to let it pass at some point—likely after the 2016 presidential election. The Republicans’ focus on work, responsibility, faith, and family might well get an audience with some of these newcomers, yet the Republicans are blocked by the threshold attitudes and values that remain central for conservatives.

  RED AND BLUE: THE METROPOLITAN CAULDRON

  America is being transformed by seismic changes in the country’s racial and immigrant makeup, as well as by the mobility of the best-educated and the Millennials, too. They are all meeting in America’s metropolises. And, of course, this is all about values. The metropolitan areas are cauldrons for the ascendant values at the heart of the revolutions in blue America.

  The big cities have elevated the importance of equality, equal rights, social justice, and oppo
rtunity. This is manifest in the primacy of empathy—compassion for those in need and a presumption that successive generations should see expanding opportunity and rising living standards. The cities have elevated the virtue of tolerance, characterized by openness to many viewpoints and by a comfort with diversity, outsiders, foreigners, and different cultures, forming a kind of urban multiculturalism.

  The metropolitan cauldron has elevated a distinct type of individualism—one that values individual autonomy and sexual freedom for men and women. Marriage is not itself important, yet alongside it is an emerging acceptance of the burgeoning plurality of family types, from single-headed households and single mothers, to LGBT couples and marriages, and that is close to a new value.

  All parts of ascendant America, though particularly in the cities, express great faith in education that transcends any reasonable calculation of income gain over a lifetime. They value science, technology, creative occupations, and learning as means to opportunity and fulfillment. They also seek answers to discoverable truths through empiricism and pragmatic problem solving over traditional authority and moral absolutes about good and bad.

  The college-educated, particularly among the Millennials, are moving to the fifty largest cities, and women are rushing into college programs and professional schools there. Not surprisingly, an overwhelming majority of the women say a four-year college degree is critical to success. Universities, colleges, and research institutions are integral to the economic success of metropolitan centers, and they shape the values and attitudes there. As a result, big majorities of those living in urban and suburban areas say a degree is critical to success, and even more say that raising the proportion of people with a four-year degree will be good for the economy.