How liberals lost the culture wars

On race, religion, and gender, they're on the defensive

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One of the most jarring things about the re-election of Donald Trump last year was that it seemed to be accompanied by a pro-MAGA shift in the broader culture. Trump didn’t just fluke his way through the Electoral College as in 2016, he also won the popular vote and presided over a lean towards Republicans all across the nation. Segments of society which had previously ostracized Trump, from tech barons to popular entertainers, rushed to embrace him. Snoop Dogg performed at the new president’s inauguration, making G-funk even more of a dubious listening choice than it already was.

I still subscribe to the idea that Trump’s victory can mostly be explained by a reaction against inflation. Trump is himself such an unpopular figure that his narrow victory would have been unlikely without widespread economic discontent. In this respect, so long as the United States continues to have free and fair elections - and that’s a big if - Democrats don’t need to panic just yet. Trump will screw up, and they’ll have an opportunity to make a comeback.

But in another respect, Democrats should worry. Because it’s also clear that the Trump era, dating roughly since 2016, has seen a cultural shift to the right with potentially long-lasting consequences. This shift has affected the ways in which race, gender, and religion interact with American politics. It may present an opportunity for a future, less unpopular and incompetent, Republican politician to make major gains - particularly if the vibes aren’t yet done a-shifting.

The exhaustion of liberalism

Joe Biden was, in most respects, a good president. But at 82 years old, he was also the perfect metaphor for a liberal establishment which has grown decrepit, disconnected, and sheltered. One of the things that makes Biden such a successful politician is that he is a great triangulator with few firm beliefs of his own. His skill has always been to sense where the center ground of the Democratic Party is and to occupy it. In 2020, that meant putting a reassuringly old and white face on the identity-based liberalism that the Democratic Party had embraced as an antidote to Trump.

This liberalism is, in some ways, dynamic, young, and energetic. It made the Democrats the party of women, of young people, and of racial minorities - precisely the groups who it is often assumed will determine the future of American politics. This liberalism has produced figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Barack Obama, and Stacey Abrams. It has looked, for most of the past 20 years, like the future.

But in another sense, this liberalism and the Democratic Party that it dominates are both exhausted. Even as they have succeeded in elevating talented young individuals, they have seemingly lost touch with many of the real-world voters who they supposedly represent. The result has been a “party of women” which has lost female vote share to a self-professed sexual abuser in each of the last three elections, a “party of racial minorities” which only managed to nearly split Hispanics 50/50 in an election against a racist, and a “party of the young” that lost young male voters by a 13% margin.

The rightward march of culture

How did this happen? One reason, specific to 2024, is that Biden himself was a poor spokesman for identity liberalism. He was a man who clearly would never have arrived at this type of politics himself and had triangulated himself there out of necessity. An 82-year-old spokesman for the young is an absurdity on its face.

Another, deeper reason is that a type of liberalism which used to be radical and sexy became serious and un-fun. The arbitrators of identity liberalism nowadays are mostly well-paid consultants and aides talking to one another in Washington, far removed from the people they supposedly represent. The “long march through the institutions” that the radicals of the 1960s embarked upon was, if anything, too successful - guerrilla activists became bureaucrats, and they lost touch with their successors out in the trenches, many of whom are now to be found on social media.

Within those trenches, different rules apply, and the successful guerrilla activists of today are more likely to be the misogynists of the “manosphere” or tradwives. The problem again, in part, was Biden. For the last four years, the purveyors of left-wing culture had to square being cool with supporting the government of an 80-year-old grandpa, a task most found impossible to pull off convincingly.

But a bigger problem is that identity liberals became too comfortable in their control of old and powerful institutions. They focused on putting their message across in newspapers and on cable news shows that fewer and fewer people consume, and ignored the new, insurgent media rising from below. For decades, conservatives in the U.S. have done better than liberals at pioneering and exploiting new mediums of communication, from talk radio to Twitch. They’ve managed to position themselves as the outsiders, taking on a complacent establishment.

We don’t just have to rely on our own sense of the vibes to see how successful they’ve been. Instead, we can look at recent election results and survey data to see how this rightward shift is affecting race, gender, and religion.

Race, gender, and religion

Start with race. It is by now well known that Trump improved on his past performance with many minority groups in the 2024 election. A lot of this was to do with inflation, but not all of it, because he also improved his performance in 2020 over 2016. In order to understand what has happened more broadly, we have to instead talk about political ideology.

For decades, American politics has been polarizing along liberal vs. conservative lines. Sixty years ago, the United States didn’t have one liberal party and one conservative party - it just had two parties, each with a diverse group of followers. When asked by pollsters which party was more liberal and which was more conservative in the 1960s, most voters couldn’t even answer.

Nowadays, the parties and their supporters have much sharper identities. But racial minorities have for a long time been an exception to this rule. Whereas a conservative white person was overwhelmingly likely to be a Republican, a conservative African American was still overwhelmingly likely to be a Democrat. Race trumped ideology.

Much of the pro-Trump vibe shift among minorities can be explained by the breakdown in this pattern. Racial minorities have increasingly begun to sort themselves into the parties ideologically rather than racially. This trend is particularly pronounced among Hispanics and Asian-Americans, and still less so among African-Americans.

While this trend has complicated causes, it seems to be caused in large part by the rise to prominence of issues - the economy, pandemic lockdowns which harmed lower-educated workers more, transgender issues, and illegal immigration - which cut across racial lines. In particular, it has been facilitated by Trump focusing his racist rhetoric on an outgroup - illegal immigrants - which racial minorities can also mobilize against, provided they are citizens themselves.

Then there is gender.