Their shock deepened once they realized that the GOP had total control of the federal government, and Donald Trump doubled down on his determination to form a Tea Party and Evangelical government that would give conservatives control of the U.S. Supreme Court, repeal the Affordable Care Act, slash taxes and regulations for corporations and the rich, ban Muslim immigration and build a wall with Mexico, pit race against race, ban abortion, and end the battle against climate change.
The New America believes in their country’s diversity. They think immigration enriches. They believe in women’s aspirations. They want a fairer country that reins in corporate control of government. They hate the corruption. Every day, however, they came to realize that the GOP was rushing to enact an extreme mandate, the polar opposite of what most Americans believe and want from government.
Neighborhoods and offices became battlegrounds, friends defriended friends, and families were split: parents from children, siblings from siblings, cousins from cousins, as dining room table gatherings were broken into the United States and the Confederacy.
For a time the New America was unsure who spoke for the country, but the Women’s Marches on January 21, 2017, reminded them that they did. More than 2 million people protested across the country in what may have been the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history. It’s no wonder that the more than 500,000 people who jammed downtown Washington gnawed at President Trump, whose inauguration crowd a day earlier had paled in proportion to President Obama’s eight years earlier. This massive resistance began with a Facebook post, and brought 250,000 to Grant Park in Chicago, 400,000 in New York City, 175,000 in Boston, and 500,000 in Los Angeles. The official website reported 673 marches in all 50 states plus 32 countries. The marchers chanted, “Tell me what America looks like! This is what America looks like.” “We are the popular vote!” “Don’t take away our ACA.”
The millions who joined the Women’s Marches that dwarfed President Trump’s inauguration signaled to the New America: You are not powerless. You stand with the majority. President Trump may crash and burn, along with his political party.
Commentators asked whether this was a one-day event, or even “a little temper tantrum,”6 but a sign at a Boston protest declared otherwise: WE CAN DO THIS EVERY WEEKEND, ASSHOLE. The resistance to Trump and the GOP was followed by the wave of women candidates and their victories in the Democratic primaries. That was followed by Republican congressmen having to defend their votes to repeal Obamacare and its protections against preexisting conditions and demonstrations in Congress before the GOP failed to repeal. That was followed by the student walkouts after Congress did nothing after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland and the March on Washington. That was followed by teacher strikes in GOP-controlled states where the party had slashed education spending only to suddenly find new money for books, salaries, and additional teaching time. And then, the New America asserted itself fully in the 2018 election, which shattered voting records and in which women voters and candidates shocked Trump’s GOP.
These cascading shocks were a singular period of intense polarization and politicization that sharply divided America and produced civil war in families across the country. Across the spectrum, people became immediately engaged because the stakes were so high. They became politicized because they understood that politics now matters. They became newly conscious of their rights, having perhaps taken them for granted and now understanding that they were genuinely at risk. Every time President Trump took an even more outrageous step, public sentiment shifted even more strongly in favor of liberal democratic values and reform. Every time President Trump’s GOP sought to deconstruct the government, the majority that wanted to use government for a public purpose grew.
With pretty stunning speed, the New America became newly conscious of its values, what it truly believed. In a surprising punch back at President Trump, they began to feel more positively about immigrants and immigration. They became more concerned about inequality and the unfinished work of addressing discrimination against women and African Americans. As the president moved aggressively to dismantle the government, the New America pushed back and said, “We want more.”
The New America watched the president divide the country, setting group against group.
They watched the president’s attacks on immigrants.
They watched the president indulging his violent supporters and white nationalists.
They watched his sympathy for misogyny and disrespect of women.
They watched the president polarize the country.
They watched his assault on government, his attempt to destroy the Affordable Care Act and the Obama legacy.
A not insignificant number of Republicans were shocked, too.
Donald Trump’s winning the presidency accelerated the pressure for reform and movement toward a new progressive era in which Democrats are hegemonic. There is now a growing demand to attack corruption, raise taxes on the rich, achieve universal health care, boldly address climate change, and invest in education, infrastructure, and a Green New Deal and confront America’s inherited racial disparities. Against the Trump backdrop, America has embraced its multicultural identity and a reformed government that will address the country’s growing problems and forge an America that works for all.
The New America’s story and politics will soon be the ones that matter.
1 THE NEW AMERICA
THE REPUBLICANS’ COUNTERREVOLUTION HAS BEEN animated by deep worries about America’s rapidly changing demography. Well, it turns out, they were not imagining or exaggerating. They have good reason to believe revolutionary changes are reshaping the country irretrievably.
The most important change is immigration. The globe has witnessed a massive, growing international migration over the last ten years. Migrants in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war ended up primarily in Europe in the most recent count, but before that fully one in five ended up in America, most coming from Mexico, China, India, and the Philippines.1 At the end of the Obama presidency in 2016, the growing numbers of foreign born in the United States was very real, and considered part of America’s dynamism. Immigrants fill many of the engineering positions in Silicon Valley and are overrepresented in construction, professional and scientific occupations, and recreation and food-service jobs. The number of foreign graduate students getting authorization to work in STEM fields surged in 2016.
Looking to the states, over a quarter of California’s population is now foreign born, as is over or near 20 percent in New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Nevada. Foreign-born people now comprise about 40 percent of the residents in New York City and Los Angeles and a majority in Miami; at over 20 percent they are a strong presence in Chicago and Seattle.
For myself, who struggles with any foreign languages, I am impressed that half of the foreign born speak English at home or very well, but half do not. Prior generations of immigrants, like my foreign-born grandparents and mother, were more insistent English be the first language at home. In the diverse metropolitan areas, most hardly notice the change, but not so in many rural counties. The slowest-growing with the biggest rise in foreign-born residents gave Trump some of his biggest gains in 2016.
Immigration is where globalization makes itself felt most directly, impacting the labor markets, demand on public services, and the meaning of citizenship. That is why Trump made immigration issue number one in his campaign, resisted any calls to help Dreamers or refugees, and proposed reducing legal immigration quotas. That is why the GOP has chosen to go into battle armed with warnings about immigrant gangs, U.S. citizens killed by illegal immigrants, and the need to stall the “infection” from uncontrolled immigration. “Zero tolerance” means the U.S. government will stop what seems inexorable.
Nonetheless, after Trump’s first year in office, the percentage of foreign born rose to its highest level since 2010, over 40 percent now from Asia.2 The number of undocumented immigrants dropped
and net migration from Mexico was negative, yet the growing foreignness was just as important to his war on immigrants.
The Republican counterrevolution was also grounded in the decline of rural America and the growing dynamism of the metropolitan areas. Trump’s 2016 vote surged in rural and smaller manufacturing communities where people rightly demanded respect and policies that viewed them as more than collateral damage in the trade and skills debates. The elites of both parties supported the global disruption that made the growing metropolitan areas more dynamic. In the Rust Belt, 4.5 million people have lost jobs since the passage of NAFTA and China’s full integration into the global economy.3 A flood of articles and books sought to help elites and liberals understand the “twin convulsions” of 2016, Trump and Brexit.4
Well, Trump’s surprising vote got their attention. Many books were published by the big New York publishers in an attempt to understand the white working class and their plight. One, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years. Later Vance moved to Columbus, Ohio, and an array of entrepreneurs have focused on how to bring new investment to the area he grew up in.5
But no number of presidential trips to West Virginia, Montana, and Indiana will stall for a millisecond the growing movement of populations and the younger generations to the metropolitan areas across the country. The suburbs have grown 16 percent since 2000 and the cities by 13 percent, the rural areas by just 3 percent.6 Contributing significantly to the metropolitan growth was the moving in of foreign-born migrants, 5 million to the suburbs and 7 million to the urban areas.7
The economies of the fifty largest cities are responsible for two thirds of the growth of the GDP. They are the most integrated into the global trading economy, and they account for nearly all of America’s job growth. Major businesses and people are moving into metropolitan areas and even into the inner cities, attracted by the urbanism, universities and research institutions, culture, and the growing immigrant and racial diversity—all the ingredients that stir the GOP’s counterrevolution.
President Trump embraced every emotive policy priority of the GOP’s Evangelical base, but none of it would slow America’s growing secularism.
Every religious denomination is coping with drops in the number who are religiously observant, with the exception of the Evangelicals. “No religion” is now the faster growing faith in the religious census. More than one in five Americans identify as secular; they outnumber the mainline Protestants. The traditional family at the heart of the social conservative vision is giving way in the face of profound changes in marriage, child-rearing, and women working to produce a growing pluralism of family types. Younger people are delaying marriage, having fewer children, and fewer are getting married at all. Barely half of American adults are married.8
Getting back to having more men in breadwinner roles and a strong patriarchal family structure is pretty fundamental for many social conservatives and for many working-class women who wouldn’t mind being married to a husband who could really provide a family with some security. But the Women’s March, #MeToo, and the surge of women political candidates have put the spotlight on working women and their suppressed public agenda.
Three quarters of women are now in the labor force, and two thirds are the principal or co-breadwinner. Without much help from government for childcare, health care, or parental leave, working women put in a lot more hours than men doing childcare and household work. To make it that much more stressful, half of working women and a third of mothers are unmarried and on their own. More than 60 percent of unmarried mothers earn less than $30,000 a year.9
White working-class men over the last three decades have struggled to get the jobs that would get them into the middle class, which previous generations could count on. They marry later, some not at all, or get divorced. Their incomes have gone down and many have withdrawn from the labor force—and that is before we get to those who succumb to drugs and have other issues.10
As I point out in chapter 7, “Is This All They Have to Offer Working People?,” the only thing Republicans and President Trump have had to offer the struggling working class is all government benefits being subject to “work requirements.” They think food stamps and Medicaid for the working poor are a “hammock” that leads to indolence.11
Working women are not confused by this conservative fog. They know they are on their own despite seismic changes in work life. A large majority of women (62 percent) believe that men earn more than women for the same job, but fewer than half of men believe that (47 percent).12 They believe the playing field is tilted against women, and that is even more true when they move further up the job and status ladder.13 Their views are politically explosive.
So when Fox News commentators ask what family issue tops the public agenda, it is how you ensure pay equity for working women, not how you get back to a patriarchal family.
The triumph of the millennials is the last straw for the conservative agenda, and why it is so urgent the GOP stop the New America from governing. After all, millennials have displaced the baby boomers as the largest generation and will form 36 percent of the eligible voter population in 2020, 45 percent in 2024.14 And Generation Z, who were born after 1996 and were 13 to 21 years old in 2018, will be larger still, sealing the generational revolution.
If you want to see the changing face of America, look to the millennials. About 40 percent of millennials are racial minorities, and now 17 percent of their new marriages are interracial.15 Most describe President Obama as mixed race, not African-American or black. They just take for granted America’s multiculturalism. That attitude extends to gay marriage, supported by something near 80 percent of millennials.16
And they are the reason Republicans will lose the battle over rural and urban America. Millennials have not followed the path of other maturing young people to the suburbs. More than three quarters want to live in an urban area and a majority have no driver’s license. And they are acting on that worldview. Two thirds of millennials with a four-year college degree have already moved to one of the fifty-one largest cities.17
That millennials have won and consumers and business remain committed to a multicultural America is evident in Nike building a major ad campaign around former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. He began sitting, then taking a knee during the national anthem before games in order to protest racial injustice in America. President Trump vilified him and NFL team owners by claiming falsely that he was protesting the national anthem, and when he opted out of his contract in March 2017, NFL team owners allegedly blackballed him, thereby proving his point.18 “Believe in something,” Kaepernick said in the Nike ad. “Even if it means sacrificing everything.” President Trump tweeted, “What was Nike thinking?”
Old people didn’t approve of the ad, but two thirds of millennials did, and they mattered. Nike’s stock hit an all-time high and its direct digital sales jumped 36 percent during the game’s quarter the ad was aired.19
* * *
So Republican congressman and white nationalist sympathizer Steve King could have been describing America at large when the new Congress convened in January 2019, the Democratic side of the House including a record number of women, African Americans, and the first Native American and Muslim women, and he observed, “You look over there and think the Democratic Party is no country for white men.”20
THE NEW AMERICA RESPONDS
As the GOP’s intensifying battle to keep the New America from governing became unabashedly anti-immigrant, racist, and sexist under President Trump’s leadership, the New America responded in real time.
Soon after Trump’s election, I discovered I could not put Clinton and Trump voters in the same room, because the Clinton, anti-Trump voter had become more vocal and assertive, sometimes disbelieving and rude. The same must have been happening across the country.
After one Trump voter in a focus group agreed with the president, the Clinton supporter turned to her an
d said, “So, I see. You are the face of those ugly things I hear being said on TV every day.” The project director for Democracy Corps Nancy Zdunkewicz and I were stunned, and we both thought, “Is she going to apologize?” She didn’t.
By the 70-day mark, the anti-Trump women pushed back against Trump voters in conversation, even when outnumbered in the room. The moderator had to make an effort to bring Trump voters into the conversation to ensure the outnumbered Clinton voters did not dominate the discussion and so the Trump voters could be heard. This turned out to be an unintended test of the strength of their views and resolve to resist.
Amazingly, at the seventy-day mark into the Trump presidency, the anti-Trump voters in these groups were bringing up the off-year elections to be held in 2018. Their doubts about Trump dominated their outlook, and they used words like “flabbergasted,” “devastated,” and “terrified” to describe how they felt about the country right now.
In my eyes, the biggest issue is going to be this president. He’s going to drive this country into a shithole.
—WHITE UNMARRIED WOMAN, UNDER 45, CLEVELAND
Every time Trump opens his mouth I want to scream.
—WHITE MILLENNIAL WOMAN, CLEVELAND
And that people were organizing and marching made them feel more optimistic about how this will all turn out for the country:
There are people organizing and finally getting their heads out of the sand and paying attention to what’s going on in politics.
—WHITE WORKING-CLASS WOMAN, AKRON
I think maybe people are bonding over their hate for certain things, like protesting and a lot of people are bonding in groups. I mean, people have a voice now with social media and everything. They’re really getting it out there. A lot of people are being heard.
—WHITE UNMARRIED WOMAN, UNDER 45, CLEVELAND
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