The 2020 election, however, failed to produce a thoroughgoing repudiation of Trumpism and its race-based, grievance-driven brand of politics. Even amid a devastating pandemic and economic downturn, roughly seventy-two million Americans voted for the President, nine million more than voted for him in 2016. The Trump campaign managed to activate millions of new voters—stark evidence of the enduring appeal of Trump’s nationalistic, populist message. Democrats had believed that the great tide of immigration that is dramatically changing the country, the huge numbers of people going to the polls—this election is ultimately expected to record the highest percentage of Americans voting in a hundred and twenty years—and widespread revulsion toward the President could tip a wave of traditionally Republican states in their favor. But it became clear relatively early on Election Night that this hope had failed to materialize.
In Texas, the Biden campaign made a late push, counting on turning out supporters in the state’s booming cities and diversifying suburbs. Trump wound up winning easily, however, mostly because of his strength in rural areas and small towns, where he actually improved on his performance from four years ago. Similarly, Democrats invested heavily in Ohio, where Barack Obama won the vote in 2008 and 2012 but Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016. Trump’s eight-point victory in the state, matching his 2016 margin against Clinton, was so complete that he even defeated Biden in Mahoning County, in northeastern Ohio, a place with deep union roots—the aging industrial town of Youngstown is the county seat—where a Republican Presidential candidate had not triumphed in nearly half a century. Nationally, Democrats had hoped that Trump’s toxicity would sweep them to victory in down-ballot races, but the Party lost several seats in the House, and the near-certainty that many Democrats had felt about taking back the Senate has evaporated. Though, if Democrats are able to eke out a Senate victory in January, via two runoff races in Georgia—a challenging task without alarm about Trump driving voters to the polls—the Party will achieve a fifty-fifty split in the chamber, with Vice-President Kamala Harris able to cast deciding votes.
The election results reinforce just how entrenched the country’s partisan divisions have become. The nation’s most fundamental racial, ethnic, religious, geographic, and cultural divisions are now interwoven with the identities of its two major political parties. The G.O.P. has become increasingly reliant on voters in America today that resent the ways the country is changing around them. They are overwhelmingly white, religious conservatives, people without college degrees, and residents of small towns and rural areas of the country. By contrast, groups that support the Democratic Party—the young; African-Americans; immigrants; gay, lesbian, and transgender people; the college-educated; and city dwellers—largely celebrate these social and cultural shifts. Exacerbating matters, the members of the opposing parties are increasingly cut off from one another. They live in different neighborhoods; they get their news from different sources; they spend their Sundays differently. Voting preferences today are driven as much by intense loathing for the opposing party as they are by genuine policy differences. This combustible situation resembles the manner in which the country was riven by disagreements over slavery prior to the Civil War.
In “How Democracies Die,” published in 2018, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt document the ways in which President Trump resembles authoritarian leaders around the world with his undermining of democratic institutions and norms. A cornered, unhinged Trump, unwilling to concede the election, remains a dangerous prospect for the Republic over the next few months. But Trump’s exit, though restorative, will not cure American democracy of its implacable partisanship. A worst-case scenario for the country, as sketched by Levitsky and Ziblatt, is one in which partisan rancor continues to rise, turning America into a democracy without guardrails, in which “partisan rivals become enemies, political competition descends into warfare, and our institutions turn into weapons.” This is how liberal democracies have crumbled around the world.
A long list of priorities awaits the Biden Administration. Bold measures are needed to address the twin crises of the pandemic and the economy. During his campaign, Biden outlined an expansive agenda on health care, immigration, education, policing, and climate change. Progressives are also eager to begin the work of reforming a political system that increasingly thwarts the will of the electorate. If Democrats succeed in taking back the Senate, the Party’s leadership in Congress and the White House might prioritize any number of steps toward a lasting progressive agenda, including expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court; ending the filibuster; statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico; and new protections for voting rights. But a Republican-controlled Senate would likely extinguish hopes for a transformational Presidency. Under either scenario, the great uncertainty for American democracy is what happens next to a country that seems irretrievably polarized.
Since the Trump Presidency began, a progressive ferment has bubbled in communities across the country. The Women’s March, on January 21, 2017, which may have been the largest single-day protest in the country’s history, launched four years of demonstrations in response to the moral crisis of the Administration. Ordinary citizens, many of whom had never protested before—particularly college-educated, middle-aged, suburban white women—propelled that movement. Collectively, their organizing represented an inflection point in civic engagement, which had been declining in this country for years. Many of the groups that formed after Trump’s Inauguration redirected their energy to campaigning for Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections, helping the Party retake the House. They have now helped to expel Trump from the White House. The emergency that roused so many of them from their complacency has ended, but the work of saving democracy must go on.
Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol, academics who have researched the thousands of resistance groups that sprang up during the Trump Presidency, have highlighted the surprising ideological and geographic diversity of participants. Many of the groups deliberately sought to be inclusive across party lines. According to findings published by the American Communities Project, at George Washington University, the groups were not confined to big cities and blue states but had a significant presence in swing states such as Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. They can be found in all manner of communities—counties with large numbers of retirees, suburbs across the socioeconomic spectrum, exurbs, and small towns. These regular Americans, awakened by the Trump cataclysm, were compelled less by any particular issue than by a broader concern for the future of their country.
Putnam, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh, writes in “Upending American Politics,” published last year, that the motivation she heard over and over from those groups was “centered on protecting American democracy and reclaiming citizen ownership on public life.” Their aspirations were more democratic, in their essence, than Democratic, giving them the potential, in a world without Trump, to draw partisans from both sides. Social-psychology studies have long shown that contact between hostile groups can reduce tensions. More recent research, focussed specifically on political rancor, confirms that finding and, notably, identifies forging a sense of commonality as a key mechanism in defusing partisan hostilities. One experiment found that just having people read an article that extols the virtues of America and Americans, and then writing a brief paragraph about the positive aspects of America and their pride in being American, was enough to soften people’s views about the opposing party.
Biden, in his victory speech on Saturday, in Wilmington, Delaware, pledged “to be a President who seeks not to divide but to unify, who doesn’t see red states and blue states, only sees the United States.” It is a message he staked his campaign on and now plans to make a central theme of his Presidency. “We have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies,” he said on Saturday. “They are not our enemies. They are Americans.” He is hardly the first politician to make such an appeal, and Republicans, inevitably, will view him as an avatar of the Party they loathe. But ordinary citizens, conveying Biden’s sentiment to their friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family members, might actually succeed in rekindling an American identity that is resolute against intolerance and injustice, promotes inclusion and respect for all, and brings us closer to the ideal of one nation, indivisible.
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