Before the California GOP was consumed with addressing the state’s changing demography and culture, it was a state that was more than competitive for Republicans. After the LBJ landslide in 1964, the state voted Republican in every presidential race until 1992. Californians were as likely to elect Republican as Democratic governors until the battle over Prop 187 in 1994. In the decade up until 2000, California’s House delegation was fairly evenly split between the parties.
Republicans watched their strong position deteriorate after Governor Wilson left office. They lost every statewide office in 2010 and saw the Democrats win growing majorities in the State Assembly. Yet at no point did the threat of political annihilation move them to adapt politically. In fact, they doubled down on immigration and became more socially conservative, as abortion came to define the two parties nationally.
California conservatives believed they were the canary in the coal mine for the country. And they had to mobilize to save the Republic. California was already 32 percent Hispanic and 11 percent Asian in 2000.48 In the most recent decade before President Trump’s election, California’s white population dropped by 700,000, while the Hispanic segment surged by more than 2 million and the Asian by a million.49 Currently, Hispanics are 40 percent of California’s population.
Republican leaders like Ronald Reagan in California and George Bush in Texas, the states with the biggest Hispanic presence, welcomed Hispanics in their conservative vision. Both governed permissively in their states and both supported legalizing the undocumented and expanding immigration. Well, the California conservatives had no patience for elites’ comfort with immigration and the changing country. The stakes were much higher, and they started the GOP’s counterrevolution against immigration in 1994.
And California would have the final say.
Breitbart News was launched in Los Angeles. Its founder, Andrew Breitbart, met Steve Bannon there, and they began a long working relationship that put Bannon at its head and ultimately as chief strategist for Donald Trump. Breitbart News mentored Ben Shapiro, and he founded Daily Wire, which operates out of California and is one of the most widely used ultra-right sites in the conservative network. The Claremont Review published a widely discussed piece by Michael Anton on the urgent need to elect Donald Trump, and Anton would be hired to work along Stephen Miller in the White House. Miller grew up in Santa Monica. And President Trump’s trade adviser was Peter Navarro, who taught at University of California, Irvine.
So, the “intellectual engine” of today’s Tea Party–dominated Trump party is all grounded in California, and all “view themselves as philosophically, culturally, and demographically under siege,” as Jane Coaston observed in Vox. They created a political movement with such an “apocalyptic approach to politics” because they see both the country and the GOP as truly endangered. They are conservatives “that fight” and “have the mentality, and the unanimity, of people under threat.” They have lived this “nightmare scenario: an America in which they are powerless, demographically swamped, where the particular virtues and ideas that made America great for so long are uprooted by a surging left.”50
That is why, Coaston writes, these conservatives have “a laser focus on culture, immigration, and race.”
The California conservatives were disdainful of what they call “the National Review conservatives” and the Republican leaders in other states who had the luxury of offering “considered views on immigration.” Non-California Republicans didn’t live with the consequences of demographic change. Before there was a Donald Trump, California conservatives battled for Prop 187, in a campaign they branded “Save Our State.” They embraced Donald Trump, who called out the “national emergency.” He alone understood that the Republican base felt “isolated” and was “holding on for dear life against an endless attack from a culture and a demography.”
New analysis of the 2016 election and its aftermath by an academic team showed how central the California conservatives were.51
Donald Trump and Fox News joined Breitbart News and the Daily Wire to create a powerful ecosystem that reached about a third of the country.52 The intense reenforcement of the top conservative social media sites, Facebook, Fox News, and Donald Trump and his tweets confirmed what Coaston concluded: “California conservatism is simply conservatism writ large.”
The country entered a new world, which is brilliantly described by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts in Network Propaganda, of “epochal change” in how news is shaped, what is deemed accurate and fake, and how the new forces contaminate public discourse and standing of elected leaders.53 While the main media right-wing players changed over the course of the election, Fox News ultimately allied and amplified Breitbart News and Robert Mercer’s other opinion sites to create a right-wing media ecosystem. The authors show how the right, using hyperlinks, Twitter retweeting, and Facebook sharing, radicalized “roughly a third of the American media system.” They built distrust, hyper-partisanship, and belief in conspiracies and emerged victorious in their “sustained attacks on core pillars of the Party of Reagan—free trade and relatively open immigration policy, and more directly, the national security establishment and law enforcement when these threatened President Trump himself.”54
They delegitimized the military and intelligence agencies, but also the bureaucracy that with them formed the “deep state.” The right-wing ecosystem waged a war on the government that they believed was carrying forward President Obama’s socialist agenda, intent on President Trump’s failing.55
Breitbart News was “clearly the most effective media actor promoting immigration as the core agenda of the election and framing it in terms of anti-Muslim fears,” according to the authors. It was sometimes more effective than Fox News in driving the conservative discourse, elevating concerns about “personal security” and “fear of Muslims” to animate worries about immigration. The most shared stories from Breitbart News were about Muslims, Islam, and terrorism.56
“The major agenda-setting success of the Donald Trump campaign and Breitbart,” the authors write, “was to make immigration the core substantive agenda in the 2016 election.” That was clearly what both candidate Donald Trump and strategist Steve Bannon hoped to achieve when they constructed the “Make America Great Again” campaign that warned of a dark future without leaders fighting back against the “foreign” forces. President Trump and White House Chief Strategist Bannon would work to withdraw from trade deals and NATO and build the wall.57
THE GOP’S TOTAL POLARIZATION OF AMERICA
The leaders of the Republican Party fought an ever more determined counterrevolution against each successive, disruptive change that moved America toward greater racial equality, secularism, and sexual freedom that put the traditional family, patriarchy, and the male breadwinner role at risk and that required greater independence and equality for women, and the dramatic growth in immigration that made America more foreign and multicultural. The metropolitan elites, businesses, and the Democratic Party accepted legal equality for blacks, the legalization of abortion, the growth of legal and illegal immigration, and relished the election of African-American Barack Obama as president, but not the GOP leaders. They become even more alienated and determined to fight this changing country.
They could sustain this long battle because of the GOP’s base in the politically reactionary Black Belt, South, and states where Evangelicals were dominant, which put this high-stakes explosive battle forward and pushed the polarization of the political parties to greater extremes. They made partisan identity everything.
What made it so explosive was the growing recognition of conservatives after the Tea Party wave and President Obama’s reelection that the country was not only reelecting Barack Obama, but was accepting increased immigration as good for the country, tolerating foreignness, and embracing multiculturalism.
Conservatives were on the defensive; in fact, the proportion in the country identifying as “conservative” abruptly dropped
from about 45 percent to 37 percent in 2015 and has remained there. That is why they had to turn to an antiestablishment leader like Donald Trump, who had no limits. That is why Donald Trump told a group of pastors and Christian leaders in the State Dining Room before the 2018 blue wave that the election was a “referendum on your religion,” the First Amendment, because “they will overturn everything that we’ve done and they will do it quickly and violently.” He warned, “You’re one election away from losing everything that you’ve gotten.”58
Donald Trump did his part, relentlessly attacking NFL football players who took a knee or stayed in the locker room during the national anthem. He was suitably indifferent to the refugee children from Central America separated from their parents at the border. But so did Nike. By running ads featuring Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback blackballed from the league because he knelt to protest police brutality, it aligned big business with a multicultural America. This was in the tradition of Coca-Cola, which ran an ad during the Super Bowl in 2014 and again in 2017 with “America the Beautiful” sung in eight different languages. They knew the New America, as well as the generation of millennials who would set the future.
The GOP’s desperate counterrevolution produced two political parties that were increasingly defined by their ideology and values and polarized on what really mattered. And those values and ideology were now highly correlated with who won the presidential vote in each state, according to important academic studies.59
Liberals now prioritized “harm to the vulnerable” and “fairness,” and their secularism or “moral color-blindness” devalued faith-based conclusions; they minimized the role of “sacredness” and “authority”—central for conservatives. Liberals cannot grant that conservatives have moral reasons to oppose gay marriage.60 By contrast, the strongly conservative rated all values dimensions very high, but they viewed “authority” and “purity” as most important.61
The GOP-led counterrevolution produced a thoroughgoing ideological polarization of the two parties in 2017 that was certainly accelerating, if that were statistically possible. The median Republican is more conservative than 97 percent of Democrats; and the median Democrat more liberal than 95 percent of Republicans.62
This battle raised the importance of party identity dramatically, turned independents into partisans, and nearly eliminated ticket splitting. In 2016, all thirty-four states with a Senate contest voted for the same party for president and the U.S. Senate—the first time that has happened in about one hundred years. Since the 1990s, about a quarter of voters split their tickets in Senate races, but only 20 percent did in 2010 and a mere 10 percent in 2014—at the height of the Tea Party revolt against President Obama and the Democrats.63
The GOP battles against government, help for the poor, immigration, black rights, gay marriage, and environmental protections have created two dramatically polarized parties whose identities accompany the values that matter to people—and which party one identifies with is now dramatically more important than your gender, your class, your generation, your religious attendance, or your race. In 2017, the average gap on these measures between Democrats and Republicans was 36 points, compared to just +14 for race, about +11 for religion, education, and age, and +7 for the gap between men and women. Your party has become the identity that matters more than all others, and people use it to filter their perception of events and motivate their political engagement.64
In 1994, when Pew asked these ten questions about values for the first time, the GOP battle against legalized abortion had already made partisan identities more important than others, except for religious attendance. The two parties were sorting into religious and nonreligious camps and pro-life and pro-choice voters were shifting parties or their positions on abortion. Then, in 1996, the GOP nationalized its battle against immigration that would push the average difference to 17 points in 2004, already visibly bigger than the difference for all other identities. Then, Karl Rove launched George Bush’s culture war on abortion and homosexuality, and the partisan gap reached an unimaginable 26 points in 2011, right after the Tea Party takeover. The Tea Party effort to stop Obama and the Democrats from governing produced the steepest rise yet, to an average of 32 points. Donald Trump’s victory took the average gap between Democrats and Republicans to 36 points when the next most important identity, race, moved up to a modest 14 points. The gap with men and women was half that.
This GOP-driven polarization has flummoxed Americans who want to escape the deadening gridlock and want parties to get back to the days when parties worked together because they had to. Shutting down the federal government or threatening default or failure to fund simple highway projects is not normal. The polarization, ideological consistency, new consciousness about values, and politicization also demolishes the work of patronizing academics who studied this same period and pointed to “the sheer magnitude of most people’s ignorance of politics.”65 Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels write in Democracy for Realists that people “adopt beliefs, attitudes, and values that re-enforce and rationalize their partisan loyalties.”66 They are bemused that these partisans “misconstrue” their parties’ signature policies or the state of the economy to align with their party loyalty. They label these so-called rational voters as “the rationalizing voter.”67
Their ahistorical accounts miss how the meaning of partisanship has been shaped by the choices national leaders have made and what issues and values are contested in presidential elections. The Republicans’ choice to contest black equality, abortion, the sexual revolution, immigration, and multiculturalism has produced a new ideological coherence and political consciousness. Given how urgent people believe it is to push back against the GOP’s rejectionism and the GOP’s belief that their way of life is at risk, their aligning of the facts is completely reasonable. The evolving political battle has raised the stakes in politics and the voters’ determination to elect leaders who will advance their priorities.
BEYOND POLARIZATION
What’s next for America could be unimaginable if you assume that the past predicts the future and life is linear. That the line somehow just keeps getting steeper without some dramatic change. That line represents the escalating counterrevolution of the GOP against a country that is increasingly diverse and that increasingly embraces its multiculturalism. That battle has completely shaped party identification, so that a smaller and smaller coalition of voters identifies with the Republican Party and a larger and larger coalition identifies with the Democratic Party.
The Trump takeover of a Tea Party–dominated GOP accelerated every trend, and accelerated the sorting of voters who have been politicized, like never before.
They are intent on the Republican Party facing a shattering defeat, because there is no room for a party at war with a modernizing America. But what happens after it is humiliated and fractured? Is it California, where the Republican Party simply lives with its total marginality without any movement for renewal?
What happens if a shattered GOP can no longer impact what is happening in America on immigration, abortion, the sexual revolution, and the role of working women? What if it can’t stop government from functioning anymore? What if the GOP is focused on its own renewal, not fighting the New America?
4 THE TEA PARTY–TRUMP DECADE
IN THE 2010 OFF-YEAR ELECTIONS, the Republican Party achieved a once-in-a-century electoral triumph. They picked up sixty-three House seats, the biggest midterm gain since 1938, and six senators, which allowed them to filibuster all Democratic initiatives. They gained six governorships and occupied the executive branches of government in 60 percent of the states. The Republicans gained 675 state legislative seats and won control of both legislative chambers in twenty-nine states. After the 2014 off-year sweep, the GOP picked up more than three hundred legislative seats and had total partisan control of nearly half the states.1
President Obama described the 2010 defeat as a “shellacking,” but he surely would have use
d even more graphic terms had he realized the defeat was just the sound of the starter’s pistol for a decade of anti-government fervor, national gridlock, and Tea Party–Evangelical rule in most of the states.
Academics and pundits wrote of the scale of the 2010 electoral victories and the conservative swing in Congress, but they did not realize then that this sweep would lock in a decade of an escalating conservative war against Democrats and democratic governance that would allow Donald Trump to become president of the United States without winning the popular vote or a conservative mandate. That was before they realized this Tea Party–Evangelical domination was inspired to stomp out any effort by the Democrats to use the government for any public purpose.
Jonathan Chait understood that the GOP was waging a “guerrilla war” against President Obama that justified a “procedural extremism.”2 And Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein described in It’s Even Worse Than It Looks how an ideological party fearful of its opponent winning would exploit every nook of our constitutional system to produce a “willful obstruction.”3 But even they did not realize that a GOP, moved by an anti-government evangelism, tinged with fear of foreigners, would get to deconstruct government nationally and in the states and produce a harrowing gridlock worse than anything they had expected.
A victorious GOP stopped in their tracks the Democrats’ efforts to expand public investment to grow the economy, to give a government guarantee that all have health insurance, and to regulate the energy industry and address climate change. And that was before any of us realized the GOP would extinguish for a decade any effort to expand government investment, mitigate inequality, raise incomes of the poor and middle class, regulate corporate governance, expand access to health care, and do anything about climate change. That relentless and successful battle against governmental activism produced a country so polarized it defied measurement.
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