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The project of American democracy — to live beyond such tribal identities, to construct a society based on the individual, to see ourselves as citizens of a people’s republic, to place religion off-limits, and even in recent years to embrace a multiracial and post-religious society — was always an extremely precarious endeavor. It rested, from the beginning, on an 18th-century hope that deep divides can be bridged by a culture of compromise, and that emotion can be defeated by reason.

Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life. For the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet, the tribe was the only form of human society. We lived for tens of thousands of years in compact, largely egalitarian groups of around 50 people or more, connected to each other by genetics and language, usually unwritten.

Tribal cohesion was essential to survival, and our first religions emerged for precisely this purpose.

Religion therefore fused with communal identity and purpose, it was integral to keeping the enterprise afloat, and the idea of people within a tribe believing in different gods was incomprehensible. Such heretics would be killed.

we became a deeply cooperative species — but primarily with our own kind. The notion of living alongside people who do not look like us and treating them as our fellows was meaningless for most of human history.

Successful modern democracies do not abolish this feeling; they co-opt it. Healthy tribalism endures in civil society in benign and overlapping ways.

in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts

most critically, there is the Über-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events, that forms the core unit of belonging that makes a national democracy possible.

Tribalism only destabilizes a democracy when it calcifies into something bigger and more intense than our smaller, multiple loyalties; when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole; and when it turns rival tribes into enemies. And the most significant fact about American tribalism today is that all three of these characteristics now apply to our political parties, corrupting and even threatening our system of government.

If I were to identify one profound flaw in the founding of America, it would be its avoidance of our tribal nature

The founders were suspicious of political parties altogether — but parties defined by race and religion and class and geography? I doubt they’d believe a republic could survive that, and they couldn’t and didn’t foresee it. In fact, as they conceived of a new society that would protect the individual rights of all humanity, they explicitly excluded a second tribe among them: African-American slaves

But it did happen here, on a fault line that closely resembles today’s tribal boundary.

in the first half of the 20th century, with immigration sharply curtailed after 1924, the world wars acted as great unifiers and integrators. Our political parties became less polarized by race, as the FDR Democrats managed to attract more black voters as well as ethnic and southern whites. By 1956, nearly 40 percent of black voters still backed the GOP.

The re-racialization of our parties began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, when the GOP lost almost all of the black vote. It accelerated under Nixon’s “southern strategy” in the wake of the civil-rights revolution. By Reagan’s reelection, the two parties began to cohere again into the Civil War pattern, and had simply swapped places.

The greatest threat to a politician today therefore is less a candidate from the opposing party than a more ideologically extreme primary opponent. The incentives for cross-tribal compromise have been eviscerated, and those for tribal extremism reinforced.

When it actually came to undoing the reform earlier this year, the GOP had precious little intellectual capital to fall back on, no alternative way to keep millions insured, no history of explaining to voters outside their own tribe what principles they were even trying to apply.

Add to this the great intellectual sorting of America, in which, for generations, mass college education sifted countless gifted young people from the heartland and deposited them in increasingly left-liberal universities and thereafter the major cities, from which they never returned, and then the shifting of our economy to favor the college-educated, which only deepened the urban-rural divide.

The myths that helped us unite as a nation began to fray. We once had a widely accepted narrative of our origins, shared icons that defined us, and a common pseudo-ethnicity — “whiteness” — into which new immigrants were encouraged to assimilate.

we should be clear-eyed about the consequence. We can no longer think of the Puritans without acknowledging the genocide that followed them; we cannot celebrate our Founding Fathers without seeing that slavery undergirded the society they constructed; we must tear down our Confederate statues and relitigate our oldest rifts. Even the national anthem now divides those who stand from those who kneel. We dismantled many of our myths, but have not yet formed new ones to replace them.

The result of all this is that a lopsided 69 percent of white Christians now vote Republican, while the Democrats get only 31. In the last decade, the gap in Christian identification between Democrats and Republicans has increased by 50 percent. In 2004, 44 percent of Latinos voted Republican for president; in 2016, 29 percent did. Forty-three percent of Asian-Americans voted Republican in 2004; in 2016, 29 percent did. Since 2004, the most populous urban counties have also swung decisively toward the Democrats, in both blue and red states, while rural counties have shifted sharply to the GOP

When three core components of a tribal identity — race, religion, and geography — define your political parties, you’re in serious trouble.

Some countries where tribal cleavages spawned by ethnic and linguistic differences have long existed understand this and have constructed systems of government designed to ameliorate the consequences

There is no neutral presidency here, and so when a rank tribalist wins the office and governs almost entirely in the interests of the hardest core of his base, half the country understandably feels as if it were under siege. Our two-party, winner-take-all system only works when both parties are trying to appeal to the same constituencies on a variety of issues.

Our undemocratic electoral structure exacerbates things. Donald Trump won 46 percent of the vote, attracting 3 million fewer voters than his opponent, but secured 56 percent of the Electoral College. Republicans won 44 percent of the vote in the Senate seats up for reelection last year, but 65 percent of the seats. To have one tribe dominate another is one thing; to have the tribe that gained fewer votes govern the rest — and be the head of state — is testing political stability.

Slowly our political culture becomes one in which the two parties see themselves not as participating in a process of moving the country forward, sometimes by tilting to the right and sometimes to the left, as circumstances permit, alternating in power, compromising when in opposition, moderating when in government — but one where the goal is always the obliteration of the other party by securing a permanent majority, in an unending process of construction and demolition.

And so by 2017, 41 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Democrats said they disagreed not just with their opponents’ political views but with their values and goals beyond politics as well.

61 percent of Trump supporters say there’s nothing he could do to make them change their minds about him; 57 percent of his opponents say the same thing. Nothing he could do.

When criticized by a member of a rival tribe, a tribalist will not reflect on his own actions or assumptions but instantly point to the same flaw in his enemy.

By the 2000 election, we were introduced to the red-blue map, though by then we could already recognize the two tribes it identified as they fought to a national draw. Choosing a president under those circumstances caused a constitutional crisis, one the Supreme Court resolved at the expense of losing much of its nonpartisan, nontribal authority.

In America, the intellectual elites, far from being a key rational bloc resisting this, have succumbed. The intellectual right and the academic left have long since dispensed with the idea of a mutual exchange of ideas.

Conservatism thrived in America when it was dedicated to criticizing liberalism’s failures, engaging with it empirically, and offering practical alternatives to the same problems. It has since withered into an intellectual movement that does little but talk to itself and guard its ideological boundaries.

among tribal conservatives, the Iraq War remained a taboo topic when it wasn’t still regarded as a smashing success, tax cuts were still the solution to every economic woe, free trade was all benefit and no cost, and so on. Health care was perhaps the most obvious example of this intellectual closure. Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act was immediate and total. Even though the essential contours of the policy had been honed at the Heritage Foundation, even though a Republican governor had pioneered it in Massachusetts, and even though that governor became the Republican nominee in 2012, the anathematization of it defined the GOP for seven years.

the now near-ubiquitous trend of “whataboutism,” as any glance at a comments section or a cable slugfest will reveal. The Soviets perfected this in the Cold War, deflecting from their horrific Gulags by pointing, for example, to racial strife in the U.S. It tells you a lot about our time that a tactic once honed in a global power struggle between two nations now occurs within one.

George Orwell famously defined this mind-set as identifying yourself with a movement, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” It’s typified, he noted, by self-contradiction and indifference to reality

As for indifference to reality, today’s Republicans cannot accept that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet, and today’s Democrats must believe that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism. Even now, Democrats cannot say the words illegal immigrants or concede that affirmative action means discriminating against people because of their race. Republicans cannot own the fact that big tax cuts have not trickled down, or that President Bush authorized the brutal torture of prisoners, thereby unequivocally committing war crimes.

Orwell again: “There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case … still one cannot feel that it is wrong.” That is as good a summary of tribalism as you can get, that it substitutes a feeling — a really satisfying one — for an argument.

When a party leader in a liberal democracy proposes a shift in direction, there is usually an internal debate. It can go on for years. When a tribal leader does so, the tribe immediately jumps on command. And so the Republicans went from free trade to protectionism, and from internationalism to nationalism, almost overnight

And then there is the stance of white Evangelicals, a pillar of the red tribe. Among their persistent concerns has long been the decline of traditional marriage, the coarsening of public discourse, and the centrality of personal virtue to the conduct of public office.

In the 1990s, they assailed Bill Clinton as the font of decadence; then they lionized George W. Bush, who promised to return what they often called “dignity” to the Oval Office. And yet when a black Democrat with exemplary personal morality, impeccable public civility, a man devoted to his wife and children and a model for African-American fathers, entered the White House, they treated him as a threat to civilization

And when they encountered a foulmouthed pagan who bragged of grabbing women by the pussy, used the tabloids to humiliate his wife, married three times, boasted about the hotness of his own daughter, touted the size of his own dick in a presidential debate, and spoke of avoiding STDs as his personal Vietnam, they gave him more monolithic support than any candidate since Reagan, including born-again Bush and squeaky-clean Romney.

In 2011, a poll found that only 30 percent of white Evangelicals believed that private immorality was irrelevant for public life. This month, the same poll found that the number had skyrocketed to 72 percent.

Total immersion within one’s tribe also leads to increasingly extreme ideas. The word “hate,” for example, has now become a one-stop replacement for a whole spectrum of varying, milder emotions involved with bias toward others:

Or take the current promiscuous use of the term “white supremacist.” We used to know what that meant. It meant advocates and practitioners of slavery, believers in the right of white people to rule over all others, subscribers to a theory of a master race, Jim Crow supporters, George Wallace voters.

But it is now routinely used on the left to mean, simply, racism in a multicultural America, in which European-Americans are a fast-evaporating ethnic majority.

Liberals should be able to understand this by reading any conservative online journalism and encountering the term “the left.” It represents a large, amorphous blob of malevolent human beings, with no variation among them, no reasonable ideas, nothing identifiably human at all

It’s not easy to be optimistic with Trump as president. And given his malignant narcissism, despotic instincts, absence of empathy, and constant incitement of racial and xenophobic hatred, it’s extremely hard not to be tribal in return. There is no divide he doesn’t want to deepen, no conflict he doesn’t want to start or intensify. How on earth can we not “resist”?

In 2015, did any of us anticipate that neo-Nazis would be openly parading with torches on a college campus or that antifa activists would be proudly extolling violence as the only serious response to the Trump era?

In fact, the person best positioned to get us out of this tribal trap would be … well … bear with me … Trump. The model would be Bill Clinton, the first president to meet our newly configured divide. Clinton leveraged the loyalty of Democrats thrilled to regain the White House in order to triangulate toward centrist compromises with the GOP. You can argue about the merits of the results, but he was able to govern, to move legislation forward, to reform welfare, reduce crime, turn the deficit into a surplus, survive impeachment, and end his term a popular president.

The Democrats are now, surprisingly, confronting a choice many thought they would only face in a best-case-scenario midterm election, and their political calculus is suddenly much more complicated than pure resistance. Might the best interest of the country be served by working with Trump? And if they do win the House in 2018, should they seek to destroy Trump’s presidency, much like GOP leaders in Congress chose to do with Obama? Should they try to end it through impeachment, as the GOP attempted with Bill Clinton? Or could they try to moderate the tribal divide?

if the Democrats try to impeach a president who has no interest in the stability or integrity of our liberal democracy, and if his base sees it, as they will, as an Establishment attempt at nullifying their vote, are we really prepared to handle the civil unrest and constitutional crisis that would almost certainly follow?

Tribalism is not a static force. It feeds on itself. It appeals on a gut level and evokes emotions that are not easily controlled and usually spiral toward real conflict. And there is no sign that the deeper forces that have accelerated this — globalization, social atomization, secularization, media polarization, ever more multiculturalism — will weaken

But we should not delude ourselves that this is all a Trump problem.

As utopian as it sounds, I truly believe all of us have to at least try to change the culture from the ground up. There are two ideas that might be of help, it seems to me. The first is individuality.

I mean valuing the unique human being — distinct from any group identity, quirky, full of character and contradictions, skeptical, rebellious, immune to being labeled or bludgeoned into a broader tribal grouping. This cultural antidote to tribalism, left and right, is still here in America and ready to be rediscovered

I may be an extreme case, but we all are nonconformist to some degree. Nurturing your difference or dissent from your own group is difficult; appreciating the individuality of those in other tribes is even harder. It takes effort and imagination, openness to dissent, even an occasional embrace of blasphemy.

we also need mutual forgiveness. It doesn’t matter if you believe, as I do, that the right bears the bulk of the historical blame. No tribal conflict has ever been unwound without magnanimity. Yitzhak Rabin had it, but it was not enough. Nelson Mandela had it, and it was

But this requires, of course, first recognizing our own tribal thinking. So much of our debates are now an easy either/or rather than a complicated both/and. In our tribal certainties, we often distort what we actually believe in the quiet of our hearts, and fail to see what aspects of truth the other tribe may grasp.

Not all resistance to mass immigration or multiculturalism is mere racism or bigotry; and not every complaint about racism and sexism is baseless. Many older white Americans are not so much full of hate as full of fear.

The actual solutions to our problems are to be found in the current no-man’s-land that lies between the two tribes. Reentering it with empiricism and moderation to find different compromises for different issues is the only way out of our increasingly dangerous impasse.

All of this runs deeply against the grain. It’s counterintuitive. It’s emotionally unpleasant. It fights against our very DNA. Compared with bathing in the affirming balm of a tribe, it’s deeply unsatisfying. But no one ever claimed that living in a republic was going to be easy — if we really want to keep it.

the mistake is to ignore where the belief in Democratic disrespect actually comes from and to assume that Democrats have it in their power to banish it.

Where does it come from? An entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them.

The right has a gigantic media apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the chorus at every opportunity.

The message is pounded home over and over: They hate you and everything you stand for.

Let’s take, for instance, Barack Obama. Can you think of another president who spent more time reaching out to the other side and showing respect for them? You might or might not like his policies, but nobody tried harder to be respectful than Obama.

it absolutely can determine how conservatives — including those Trump voters — view what happens on a day-to-day basis in the political world, including efforts by Democrats to reach out to them.

such controversies are rarely created out of what a Democratic politician actually said. They flow from whether it can be twisted around and repeated endlessly to make them look disrespectful.

We see this again and again: Democrats bend over backward to show conservative white voters respect, only to see some remark taken out of context and their entire agenda characterized as stealing from hard-working white people to give undeserved benefits to shiftless minorities.

So when we say that, what exactly are we asking Democrats to do? It can only be one of two things. Either Democrats are supposed to abandon their values and change their policies, despite the fact that many of those policies provide enormous help to the very people who say Democrats look down on them, or they’re supposed to take symbolic steps to demonstrate their respect, which always fail anyway

In the world Republicans have constructed, a Democrat who wants to give you health care and a higher wage is disrespectful, while a Republican who opposes those things but engages in a vigorous round of campaign race-baiting is respectful.

The person who’s holding you back isn’t the politician who just voted to give a trillion-dollar tax break to the wealthy and corporations, it’s an east coast college professor who said something condescending on Twitter.

o what are Democrats to do? The answer is simple: This is a game they cannot win, so they have to stop playing. Know at the outset that no matter what you say or do, Republicans will cry that you’re disrespecting good heartland voters.

Advocate for what you believe in and explain why it actually helps people.

Finally — and this is critical — never stop telling voters how Republicans are screwing them over. The two successful Democratic presidents of recent years were both called liberal elitists, and they countered by relentlessly hammering the GOP over its advocacy for the wealthy. And it worked.

The four Toss-up races are all seats with Republican incumbents.

Democrats are also benefiting from not having to play much defense this cycle. Of the dozen Democrats up for reelection this year, only the two running for reelection in states Trump carried in 2016 -- Alabama Sen. Doug Jones and Michigan Sen. Gary Peters -- face competitive contests, according to Inside Elections.

In the wake of Ginsburg's death and McConnell's commitment to giving Trump's nominee a vote, there's even more attention on Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Recent public polling suggests Harrison's spending could be paying off, too. He was tied with Graham at 48% among likely voters in a Quinnipiac University poll earlier this month, which followed another tied-up Quinnipiac poll of registered voters last month.

Of the 35 Senate seats up for grabs in November, 23 are held by Republicans and 12 by Democrats. For the 2020 cycle, CNN is featuring race ratings for Senate and House contests from Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales, who is a CNN contributor.

For Republicans, the path back to the majority would start with the 30 districts held by Democrats that Trump carried on his way to the presidency four years ago.

Inside Elections currently rates 205 seats as safe for Democrats, which would put the party just 13 seats away from keeping control of the chamber. There are 164 seats that are Safe Republican, leaving a universe of 65 seats in play -- 37 held by Republicans and 28 by Democrats.

Only 10 seats are rated Toss-up, the most competitive designation, with seven held by Republicans and three by Democrats.

Hillary Clinton won this South Florida district in 2016, but the Cuban-American community's embrace of Trump could move it away from Democrats. Freshman Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who unseated GOP Rep. Carlos Curbelo in the 2018 midterms, is no longer in a Tilt Democratic race. Her campaign against Miami Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez, himself a Cuban American with a high profile, is now a Toss-up.

The other four ratings changes, however, are all in Democrats' favor. A tightening presidential race in Arkansas' 2nd District, which backed Trump by 10 points in 2016, could help Democrats unseat GOP Rep. French Hill. His race shifted from Likely Republican to Lean Republican.

Although it's not at all like the suburban seats described above, Maine's 2nd District also shifted in Democrats' favor. Trump's 2016 victory here earned him an electoral vote, but he's not expected to do nearly as well in the White working class district against Biden as he did against Clinton.

During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.

China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.

There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.

China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.

The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China’s success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.

Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in “special economic zones,” while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.

Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.

American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party’s strategy “an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency.”

The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise

At the same time, the party invested in education, expanding access to schools and universities, and all but eliminating illiteracy

mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined.

In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world. For many parents, though, even that is not enough. Because of new wealth, a traditional emphasis on education as a path to social mobility and the state’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, most students also enroll in after-school tutoring programs — a market worth $125 billion, according to one study, or as much as half the government’s annual military budget.

party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant

The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.

These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “China created a unique hybrid,” she said, “an autocracy with democratic characteristics.”

They were rewarded with soaring tax revenues and opportunities to enrich their friends, their relatives and themselves. A wave of officials abandoned the state and went into business. Over time, the party elite amassed great wealth, which cemented its support for the privatization of much of the economy it once controlled.

The private sector now produces more than 60 percent of the nation’s economic output, employs over 80 percent of workers in cities and towns, and generates 90 percent of new jobs

the bureaucrats stay out of the way. “I basically don’t see them even once a year,” said James Ni, chairman and founder of Mlily, a mattress manufacturer in eastern China. “I’m creating jobs, generating tax revenue. Why should they bother me?”

even as he wraps himself in Deng’s legacy, Mr. Xi has set himself apart in an important way: Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by “hostile foreign forces.

China tapped into a wave of globalization sweeping the world and emerged as the world’s factory. China’s embrace of the internet, within limits, helped make it a leader in technology. And foreign advice helped China reshape its banks, build a legal system and create modern corporations.

It was a remarkable act of reinvention, one that eluded the Soviets. In both China and the Soviet Union, vast Stalinist bureaucracies had smothered economic growth, with officials who wielded unchecked power resisting change that threatened their privileges.

Mr. Lin was part of a torrent of investment from ethnic Chinese enclaves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond that washed over China — and gave it a leg up on other developing countries

The timing worked out for China, which opened up just as Taiwan was outgrowing its place in the global manufacturing chain. China benefited from Taiwan’s money, but also its managerial experience, technology and relationships with customers around the world. In effect, Taiwan jump-started capitalism in China and plugged it into the global economy.

Before long, the government in Taiwan began to worry about relying so much on its onetime enemy and tried to shift investment elsewhere. But the mainland was too cheap, too close and, with a common language and heritage, too familiar.

Now Taiwan finds itself increasingly dependent on a much more powerful China, which is pushing ever harder for unification, and the island’s future is uncertain

Many in Washington predicted that trade would bring political change. It did, but not in China. “Opening up” ended up strengthening the party’s hold on power rather than weakening it. The shock of China’s rise as an export colossus, however, was felt in factory towns around the world.

In the United States, economists say at least two million jobs disappeared as a result, many in districts that ended up voting for President Trump.

The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was the closest the party ever came to political liberalization after Mao’s death, and the crackdown that followed was the furthest it went in the other direction, toward repression and control. After the massacre, the economy stalled and retrenchment seemed certain. Yet three years later, Deng used a tour of southern China to wrestle the party back to “reform and opening up” once more. Many who had left the government, like Mr. Feng, suddenly found themselves leading the nation’s transformation from the outside, as its first generation of private entrepreneurs.

The fear is that Mr. Xi is attempting to rewrite the recipe behind China’s rise, replacing selective repression with something more severe.

The internet is an example of how it has benefited by striking a balance. The party let the nation go online with barely an inkling of what that might mean, then reaped the economic benefits while controlling the spread of information that could hurt it.

“The basic problem is, who is growth for?” said Mr. Xu, the retired official who wrote the Moganshan report. “We haven’t solved this problem.”

“The cost of censorship is quite limited compared to the great value created by the internet,” said Chen Tong, an industry pioneer. “We still get the information we need for economic progress.”

China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.

Washington is maneuvering to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, warning that a Chinese spending spree on global infrastructure comes with strings attached.

both left and right in America have portrayed China as the champion of an alternative global order, one that embraces autocratic values and undermines fair competition. It is a rare consensus for the United States, which is deeply divided about so much else, including how it has wielded power abroad in recent decades — and how it should do so now.

Mr. Xi, on the other hand, has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Some in his corner have been itching to take on the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and see the Trump administration’s policies as proof of what they have always suspected — that America is determined to keep China down.

there is also widespread anxiety over the new acrimony, because the United States has long inspired admiration and envy in China, and because of a gnawing sense that the party’s formula for success may be faltering.

Prosperity has brought rising expectations in China; the public wants more than just economic growth. It wants cleaner air, safer food and medicine, better health care and schools, less corruption and greater equality. The party is struggling to deliver, and tweaks to the report cards it uses to measure the performance of officials hardly seem enough.

Now, many companies assign hundreds of employees to censorship duties — and China has become a giant on the global internet landscape.

Mr. Xi himself has acknowledged that the party must adapt, declaring that the nation is entering a “new era” requiring new methods. But his prescription has largely been a throwback to repression, including vast internment camps targeting Muslim ethnic minorities. “Opening up” has been replaced by an outward push, with huge loans that critics describe as predatory and other efforts to gain influence — or interfere — in the politics of other countries. At home, experimentation is out while political orthodoxy and discipline are in.

n effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture — and that to survive and surpass the United States it must

Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump’s America is in retreat while China’s moment is just beginning

The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.

There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation’s long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction.

In other words, he appears to have less use for the “opening up” part of Deng’s slogan.

Now Mr. Xi is steering the party toward repression again, tightening its grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands and setting himself up to rule for life by abolishing the presidential term limit. Will the party loosen up again, as it did a few years after Tiananmen, or is this a more permanent shift? If it is, what will it mean for the Chinese economic miracle?

The question now is whether it can sustain this model with the United States as an adversary rather than a partner.

MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders.

He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism.

Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.

He realized that he and a fellow political scientist, the University of North Carolina's Jonathan Weiler, had essentially predicted Trump's rise back in 2009, when they discovered something that would turn out to be far more significant than they then realized.

That year, Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.

This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which "activated" authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.

What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator

According to Stenner's theory, there is a certain subset of people who hold latent authoritarian tendencies. These tendencies can be triggered or "activated" by the perception of physical threats or by destabilizing social change, leading those individuals to desire policies and leaders that we might more colloquially call authoritarian

What we found is a phenomenon that explains, with remarkable clarity, the rise of Donald Trump — but that is also much larger than him, shedding new light on some of the biggest political stories of the past decade. Trump, it turns out, is just the symptom. The rise of American authoritarianism is transforming the Republican Party and the dynamics of national politics, with profound consequences likely to extend well beyond this election.

a small but respected niche of academic research has been laboring over a question, part political science and part psychology, that had captivated political scientists since the rise of the Nazis.

How do people come to adopt, in such large numbers and so rapidly, extreme political views that seem to coincide with fear of minorities and with the desire for a strongman leader?

They believe that authoritarians aren't "activated" — they've always held their authoritarian preferences — but that they only come to express those preferences once they feel threatened by social change or some kind of threat from outsiders.

a button is pushed that says, "In case of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant."

Authoritarians prioritize social order and hierarchies, which bring a sense of control to a chaotic world. Challenges to that order — diversity, influx of outsiders, breakdown of the old order — are experienced as personally threatening because they risk upending the status quo order they equate with basic security.

. The country is becoming more diverse, which means that many white Americans are confronting race in a way they have never had to before.

If you were to read every word these theorists ever wrote on authoritarians, and then try to design a hypothetical candidate to match their predictions of what would appeal to authoritarian voters, the result would look a lot like Donald Trump.

But political scientists say this theory explains much more than just Donald Trump, placing him within larger trends in American politics: polarization, the rightward shift of the Republican Party, and the rise within that party of a dissident faction challenging GOP orthodoxies and upending American politics. More than that, authoritarianism reveals the connections between several seemingly disparate stories about American politics. And it suggest that a combination of demographic, economic, and political forces, by awakening this authoritarian class of voters that has coalesced around Trump, have created what is essentially a new political party within the GOP — a phenomenon that broke into public view with the 2016 election but will persist long after it has ended.

This study of authoritarianism began shortly after World War II, as political scientists and psychologists in the US and Europe tried to figure out how the Nazis had managed to win such wide public support for such an extreme and hateful ideology.

Feldman, a professor at SUNY Stonybrook, believed authoritarianism could be an important factor in American politics in ways that had nothing to do with fascism, but that it could only reliably be measured by unlinking it from specific political preferences.

Feldman developed what has since become widely accepted as the definitive measurement of authoritarianism: four simple questions that appear to ask about parenting but are in fact designed to reveal how highly the respondent values hierarchy, order, and conformity over other values. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?

Trump's rise. And, like them, I wanted to find out what the rise of authoritarian politics meant for American politics. Was Trump just the start of something bigger?

In the 1960s, the Republican Party had reinvented itself as the party of law, order, and traditional values — a position that naturally appealed to order- and tradition-focused authoritarians. Over the decades that followed, authoritarians increasingly gravitated toward the GOP, where their concentration gave them more and more influence over time.

Stenner argued that many authoritarians might be latent — that they might not necessarily support authoritarian leaders or policies until their authoritarianism had been "activated."

This activation could come from feeling threatened by social changes such as evolving social norms or increasing diversity, or any other change that they believe will profoundly alter the social order they want to protect. In response, previously more moderate individuals would come to support leaders and policies we might now call Trump-esque.

Ever since, political scientists who study authoritarianism have accumulated a wealth of data on who exhibits those tendencies and on how they align with everything from demographic profiles to policy preferences.

People do not support extreme policies and strongman leaders just out of an affirmative desire for authoritarianism, but rather as a response to experiencing certain kinds of threats.

when non-authoritarians feel sufficiently scared, they also start to behave, politically, like authoritarians.

a distinction between physical threats such as terrorism, which could lead non-authoritarians to behave like authoritarians, and more abstract social threats, such as eroding social norms or demographic changes, which do not have that effect. That distinction would turn out to be important, but it also meant that in times when many Americans perceived imminent physical threats, the population of authoritarians could seem to swell rapidly.

Together, those three insights added up to one terrifying theory: that if social change and physical threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a strongman leader and the extreme policies necessary, in their view, to meet the rising threats.

This theory would seem to predict the rise of an American political constituency that looks an awful lot like the support base that has emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, to propel Donald Trump from sideshow loser of the 2012 GOP primary to runaway frontrunner in 2016.

If this rise in American authoritarianism is so powerful as to drive Trump's ascent, then how else might it be shaping American politics? And what effect could it have even after the 2016 race has ended?

The second set asked standard election-season questions on preferred candidates and party affiliation. The third set tested voters' fears of a series of physical threats, ranging from ISIS and Russia to viruses and car accidents. The fourth set tested policy preferences, in an attempt to see how authoritarianism might lead voters to support particular policies.

If the research were right, then we'd expect people who scored highly on authoritarianism to express outsize fear of "outsider" threats such as ISIS or foreign governments versus other threats. We also expected that non-authoritarians who expressed high levels of fear would be more likely to support Trump. This would speak to physical fears as triggering a kind of authoritarian upsurge, which would in turn lead to Trump support.

We asked people to rate a series of social changes — both actual and hypothetical — on a scale of "very good" to "very bad" for the country. These included same-sex marriage, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and American Muslims building more mosques in US cities.

If the theory about social change provoking stress amongst authoritarians turned out to be correct, then authoritarians would be more likely to rate the changes as bad for the country.

Authoritarianism was the best single predictor of support for Trump, although having a high school education also came close.

people in this 44 percent only vote or otherwise act as authoritarians once triggered by some perceived threat, physical or social. But that latency is part of how, over the past few decades, authoritarians have quietly become a powerful political constituency without anyone realizing it.

More than 65 percent of people who scored highest on the authoritarianism questions were GOP voters. More than 55 percent of surveyed Republicans scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians.

People whose scores were most non-authoritarian — meaning they always chose the non-authoritarian parenting answer — were almost 75 percent Democrats.

this is not a story about how Republicans are from Mars and Democrats are from Venus. It's a story of polarization that increased over time.

Democrats, by contrast, have positioned themselves as the party of civil rights, equality, and social progress — in other words, as the party of social change, a position that not only fails to attract but actively repels change-averse authoritarians.

Over the next several decades, Hetherington explained to me, this led authoritarians to naturally "sort" themselves into the Republican Party.

It is not for nothing that our poll found that more than half of the Republican respondents score as authoritarian.

Our results found that 44 percent of white respondents nationwide scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians, with 19 percent as "very high." That's actually not unusual, and lines up with previous national surveys that found that the authoritarian disposition is far from rare1.

among Republicans, very high/high authoritarianism is very predictive of support for Trump." Trump has 42 percent support among Republicans but, according to our survey, a full 52 percent support among very high authoritarians.

Trump support was much lower among Republicans who scored low on authoritarianism: only 38 percent.

But that's still awfully high. So what could explain Trump's support among non-authoritarians? I suspected the answer might lie at least partly in Hetherington and Suhay's research on how fear affects non-authoritarian voters,

Authoritarians, we found in our survey, tend to most fear threats that come from abroad, such as ISIS or Russia or Iran. These are threats, the researchers point out, to which people can put a face; a scary terrorist or an Iranian ayatollah. Non-authoritarians were much less afraid of those threats. For instance, 73 percent of very high-scoring authoritarians believed that terrorist organizations like ISIS posed a "very high risk" to them, but only 45 percent of very low-scoring authoritarians did. Domestic threats like car accidents, by contrast, were much less frightening to authoritarians.

A subgroup of non-authoritarians were very afraid of threats like Iran or ISIS. And the more fear of these threats they expressed, the more likely they were to support Trump.

that non-authoritarians who are sufficiently frightened of physical threats such as terrorism could essentially be scared into acting like authoritarians.

That's important, because for years now, Republican politicians and Republican-leaning media such as Fox News have been telling viewers nonstop that the world is a terrifying place and that President Obama isn't doing enough to keep Americans safe.

Republican voters have been continually exposed to messages warning of physical dangers. As the perception of physical threat has risen, this fear appears to have led a number of non-authoritarians to vote like authoritarians — to support Trump.

But when establishment candidates such as Marco Rubio try to match Trump's rhetoric on ISIS or on American Muslims, they may end up deepening the fear that can only lead voters back to Trump.

pushing authoritarians to these extremes: the threat of social change.

This could come in the form of evolving social norms, such as the erosion of traditional gender roles or evolving standards in how to discuss sexual orientation. It could come in the form of rising diversity, whether that means demographic changes from immigration or merely changes in the colors of the faces on TV. Or it could be any changes, political or economic, that disrupt social hierarchies.

What these changes have in common is that, to authoritarians, they threaten to take away the status quo as they know it — familiar, orderly, secure — and replace it with something that feels scary because it is different and destabilizing, but also sometimes because it upends their own place in societ

Authoritarians were significantly more likely to rate almost all of the actual and hypothetical social issues we asked about as "bad" or "very bad" for the country.

an astonishing 44 percent of authoritarians believe same-sex marriage is harmful to the country. Twenty-eight percent rated same-sex marriage as "very bad" for America, and another 16 percent said that it’s "bad." Only about 35 percent of high-scoring authoritarians said same-sex marriage was "good" or "very good" for the country.

Non-authoritarians tended to rate same-sex marriage as "good" or "very good" for the country.

The fact that authoritarians and non-authoritarians split over something as seemingly personal and nonthreatening as same-sex marriage is crucial for understanding how authoritarianism can be triggered by even a social change as minor as expanding marriage rights.

A whopping 56.5 percent of very high-scoring authoritarians said it was either "bad" or "very bad" for the country when Muslims built more mosques. Only 14 percent of that group said more mosques would be "good" or "very good."

The literature on authoritarianism suggests this is not just simple Islamophobia, but rather reflects a broader phenomenon wherein authoritarians feel threatened by people they identify as "outsiders" and by the possibility of changes to the status quo makeup of their communities.

This would help explain why authoritarians seem so prone to reject not just one specific kind of outsider or social change, such as Muslims or same-sex couples or Hispanic migrants, but rather to reject all of them.

Working-class communities have come under tremendous economic strain since the recession. And white people are also facing the loss of the privileged position that they previously were able to take for granted. Whites are now projected to become a minority group over the next few decades, owing to migration and other factors. The president is a black man, and nonwhite faces are growing more common in popular culture. Nonwhite groups are raising increasingly prominent political demands, and often those demands coincide with issues such as policing that also speak to authoritarian concerns.

the loss of working-class jobs in this country is a real and important issue, no matter how one feels about fading white privilege — but that is not the point.

mportant political phenomenon we identify as right-wing populism, or white working-class populism, seems to line up, with almost astonishing precision, with the research on how authoritarianism is both caused and expressed.

It all depends, he said, on whether a particular group of people has been made into an outgroup or not — whether they had been identified as a dangerous other.

Since September 2001, some media outlets and politicians have painted Muslims as the other and as dangerous to America. Authoritarians, by nature, are more susceptible to these messages, and thus more likely to come to oppose the presence of mosques in their communities.

, it helps explain how Trump's supporters have come to so quickly embrace such extreme policies targeting these outgroups: mass deportation of millions of people, a ban on foreign Muslims visiting the US. When you think about those policy preferences as driven by authoritarianism, in which social threats are perceived as especially dangerous and as demanding extreme responses, rather than the sudden emergence of specific bigotries, this starts to make a lot more sense.

authoritarians are their own distinct constituency: effectively a new political party within the GOP.

Authoritarians generally and Trump voters specifically, we found, were highly likely to support five policies: Using military force over diplomacy against countries that threaten the United States Changing the Constitution to bar citizenship for children of illegal immigrants Imposing extra airport checks on passengers who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent in order to curb terrorism Requiring all citizens to carry a national ID card at all times to show to a police officer on request, to curb terrorism Allowing the federal government to scan all phone calls for calls to any number linked to terrorism

What these policies share in common is an outsize fear of threats, physical and social, and, more than that, a desire to meet those threats with severe government action — with policies that are authoritarian not just in style but in actuality

The real divide is over how far to go in responding. And the party establishment is simply unwilling to call for such explicitly authoritarian policies.

There was no clear correlation between authoritarianism and support for tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 per year, for example. And the same was true of support for international trade agreements.

he way he reduces everything to black-and-white extremes of strong versus weak, greatest versus worst. His simple, direct promises that he can solve problems that other politicians are too weak to manage.

That's why it's a benefit rather than a liability for Trump when he says Mexicans are rapists or speaks gleefully of massacring Muslims with pig-blood-tainted bullets: He is sending a signal to his authoritarian supporters that he won't let "political correctness" hold him back from attacking the outgroups they fear.

Rather, it was that authoritarians, as a growing presence in the GOP, are a real constituency that exists independently of Trump — and will persist as a force in American politics regardless of the fate of his candidacy.

If Trump loses the election, that will not remove the threats and social changes that trigger the "action side" of authoritarianism. The authoritarians will still be there. They will still look for candidates who will give them the strong, punitive leadership they desire.

ust look at where the Tea Party has left the Republican establishment. The Tea Party delivered the House to the GOP in 2010, but ultimately left the party in an unresolved civil war. Tea Party candidates have challenged moderates and centrists, leaving the GOP caucus divided and chaotic.

Authoritarians may be a slight majority within the GOP, and thus able to force their will within the party, but they are too few and their views too unpopular to win a national election on their own.

the rise of authoritarianism as a force within American politics means we may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians.

It will become more difficult for Republican candidates to win the presidency because the candidates who can win the nomination by appealing to authoritarian primary voters will struggle to court mainstream voters in the general election. They will have less trouble with local and congressional elections, but that might just mean more legislative gridlock as the GOP caucus struggles to balance the demands of authoritarian and mainstream legislators. The authoritarian base will drag the party further to the right on social issues, and will simultaneously erode support for traditionally conservative economic policies.

Norms around gender, sexuality, and race will continue evolving. Movements like Black Lives Matter will continue chipping away at the country's legacy of institutionalized discrimination, pursuing the kind of social change and reordering of society that authoritarians find so threatening.

The chaos in the Middle East, which allows groups like ISIS to flourish and sends millions of refugees spilling into other countries, shows no sign of improving. Longer term, if current demographic trends continue, white Americans will cease to be a majority over the coming decades.

t will be a GOP that continues to perform well in congressional and local elections, but whose divisions leave the party caucus divided to the point of barely functioning, and perhaps eventually unable to win the White House.

For decades, the Republican Party has been winning over authoritarians by implicitly promising to stand firm against the tide of social change, and to be the party of force and power rather than the party of negotiation and compromise. But now it may be discovering that its strategy has worked too well — and threatens to tear the party apart.

The other factor in Labour’s defeat in 2019 and on Thursday was Boris Johnson’s ability to get a deal on Brexit and his  move leftward on economic policy.

The young activists also espoused controversial views on family and gender

Prior to the 2019 election, an ad hoc group, the Labour Committee for Trans Rights, called for the expulsion from the party of two longstanding feminist organizations that restricted membership in their rape shelters to biological women

But Labour’s equivocal stand on Brexit and its identification with the cultural views of young, urban, college-educated activists overrode any appeal that its economic platform might have had.

In a post-election study, Paula Surridge, Matthew Goodwin, Oliver Heath, and David Cutts found the that support for Brexit was “strongly associated with cultural values.”  These values “cut across the traditional left-right divide” and undermined Labour’s historic identification with the economic left. 

After the election, trade unionist Paul Embery, a member of the group, wrote in his book Despised, “Labour today has virtually nothing to say to the small town and post-industrial Britain, the kind of places out there in the provinces which were once its mainstay.  It is no longer the ‘people’s party’, but the party for the woke, the Toytown revolutionary and Twitter.”

At the pre-election Labour Conference in Brighton in September 2019, which I attended, speakers called on Britain to provide reparations to make amends for its imperial past and even condemned Britain for global warming — presumably, by initiating the industrial revolution.

Democrats’ identification with these kind of views played a role in Democratic losses in Congressional races in 2020.

Johnson’s success with the vaccine and his budget boosted his popularity and laid the basis for the Tories’ success in Thursday’s election.

Starmer tried to distance Labour from Momentum, Corbyn, and the cultural left.  He declared that he was “proud to be patriotic” and advised Labour officials to display the Union Jack at their appearances.  He opposed the demand to expel the feminist groups and called on the party to “put family first.”  But as Thursday’s results showed, the damage was already done.  Barring a major misstep by Johnson and the Tories, Labour could be out of power for the rest of the decade.

the Democrats’ success in 2020 could prove fleeting.  In 2020, they were blessed with a candidate who was able to stem, and in a few instances slightly reverse, the flight of working class voters in middle America from the Democratic Party. That was critical to Biden’s success in a state like Pennsylvania.

But Biden is a 78-year-old relic who in his person and in his emphasis on economics reflects an older labor-oriented Democratic party that is being replaced by a party preoccupied with culture and identity.

Many of the young Democrats elevate racial issues above those of class — framing what could be universal appeals to national betterment in racial terms; they want to increase immigration and grant citizenship to unauthorized immigrants, but appear indifferent to securing America’s borders

they justifiably champion the rights of transgender women —  biological men who identify as women — to be free from discrimination in employment or housing, but dismiss concerns that a blanket identification of sex with declared gender could threaten rights specific to biological women;

and as homicides rise, and as justifiable protests against police brutality turned into mayhem and looting, they have advocated defunding  rather than reforming the police.

Johnson, who replaced May in July 2019,  made none of those mistakes. He got parliament to endorse the outlines of a Brexit deal, and he pledged to increase funding for the NHS and to initiate an industrial policy to “level up” Britain’s deindustrialized regions. Johnson’s politics hit the sweet spot in the British electorate: social democratic on economics, but conservative (although not in the American sense of the religious right) on social and cultural policy.  That’s the magic formula that allowed the Tories to lay siege to Labour’s Red Wall.

Democrats in 2020 were also blessed with a perfect opponent in Donald Trump.  Trump’s bigotry and corruption turned off far more voters than it attracted.

If Trump continues to be the poster-boy for the Republican Party, Democrats will benefit in 2022 and 2024, but if he recedes, and his most ardent followers fade into the background, the Democrats could suffer defeat in Congressional elections and in the presidential election of 2024

After nearly three decades supporting Republican presidential candidates -- the last Democrat Georgia supported was Bill Clinton in 1992 -- its vote for Biden seemed like a surprise, but it came after a remarkable grassroots campaign to get new voters to the polls and years of demographic shifts that have created a more diverse population.

Barack Obama turned two previously red southern states blue in 2008. But while Virginia has stayed in the Democratic column in each successive presidential election and now seems as reliably blue as any other US state, North Carolina veered back to Republicans, although it has remained at the top of Democrats' target list.

The outcome of the twin Senate runoffs in Georgia on January 5 will hold some indication and test the turnout operation Stacey Abrams undertook with her organization The New Georgia Project after she narrowly lost the 2018 governor's race there.

"We have seen dramatic turnout among communities that typically are not at the top of mind for candidates. We have seen them be engaged, be encouraged and we have seen them turn out," Abrams told CNN on Election Day in November.

What we have seen in the last decade is that in statewide elections in Georgia is that Democrats have been increasing their margins. They've been garnering more votes. They've been narrowing the gap between them and the Republican Party. So if they were going to continue on that trajectory, it was only a matter of time before Democrats were going to pass Republicans in terms of the vote. Winning the presidential election is only one data point, so I can't, I can't create a trend just yet with respect to that. What I suspect we're entering into is an era of increased competition where I'm expecting that we're going to continue to see very narrow margins between Democratic and Republican candidates in statewide elections, where Democrats win some elections and Republicans some elections.

Southern whites were a firm part of the New Deal coalition and that starts to change after the Civil Rights Movement. It didn't happen overnight. It took a long period of time. It culminated in the 2000s, at the beginning of the decade, with Sonny Perdue's gubernatorial victory and a change in party of the control in the state House of Representatives. And then it culminated by the 2010s at the end of the decade, when all of the statewide offices were won by Republican candidates.

We also have to credit the effort of both the Democratic Party and outside groups in reaching out to likely Democratic voters, getting them registered to vote and then getting them educated and mobilized so that they actually turn out to vote.

What we've seen happen in the last 20 years in the state is, one: the size of the African American vote makes up 30% of registered voters in the state. Given the fact that they are 90% Democratic in their voting behaviors, that means they make up the majority of Democratic voters in the state.But you can't win with 90% of 30% of the population, so you need a nontrivial number of White voters. And unlike neighboring states, Georgia is in a position where Democrats can get 30% of White voters.Georgia, unlike South Carolina or Alabama or Mississippi, has a very fast-growing Asian American and Hispanic population.While the Black electorate grew in the 2000s, the growth has been the most Asian American and Hispanic voters in the 2010s. They were 3% of all of registered voters in 2012, they were 6% of registered voters in this election cycle, and they also break Democratic. And if you get everybody to turn out to vote, you can put a winning electoral coalition together of African American, Asian American, Hispanic and liberal White voters.

Atlanta being a financial hub, a tech hub, a hub for the arts.

Atlanta is attracting well educated professional types of voters who are more Democratic in their orientation

In particular, Georgia is more Democratic now because it's got growing populations of color who are predisposed to be Democratic in orientation.This is not to say that 20 or 40 or 50 years from now that these populations are still going to be Democratic in orientation. A lot can change.

in general Democrats now enter the political arena as the party of wealth.

Traditionally, “the right,” for better and for worse, is the party of large property holdings, of bosses and managers and cultural guardians, of dominant belief systems (religious and secular), and of elite education institutions that set the boundaries of what knowledge and lore are proper to pass on to tomorrow’s generations. If America has such a party today, it is not the Republicans.

Biden’s most loyal followers by occupation included professors (94 percent), librarians (93 percent), therapists (92 percent), and lawyers (88 percent)

Trump got homemakers (96 percent), welders (84 percent), HVAC professionals (82 percent), farmers (75 percent), and custodians (59 percent)

They are also the party of education and prestige. On the eve of November’s election, Bloomberg News analyzed which employees gave the most to Donald Trump and which the most to Joe Biden. Biden swept the commanding heights of the economy. He got 97 percent of the contributions at Google and Facebook, 96 percent at Harvard, 91 percent at the consultants Deloitte, and (back here on planet Earth) 90 percent at the New York City Department of Education

Krein doubts whether anything that could be described as Trumpism happened at all. The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993 was renegotiated to American workers’ advantage, but that did not lead to the renaissance of manufacturing that candidate Trump had tirelessly promised in 2016. The wages of the lowest-paid workers went up, but that may be due to minimum-wage hikes enacted in dozens of states and cities.

“It feels to me like the party’s getting pushed into it,” said Julius Krein, an investor who publishes the quarterly review American Affairs, in an interview this winter. “Donors, especially, don’t want it to be a working-class party. And certainly the old guard not only doesn’t think of itself as such, but is quite hostile to that, and to any policy that could possibly lead in that direction. But it’s getting pushed there because all the elite are going to the Democrats.”

Trump’s administration worked out well for American workers, at least up until Covid hit in the spring of 2020. Unemployment was under 4 percent for most of 2018 and 2019. The good times reached even those to whom prosperity had historically been slowest to arrive. Unemployment among Black men, a whisker under 20 percent in March 2010, had fallen to around 5 percent in November 2019. According to The Economist, gains were concentrated in professions where workers had heretofore faced competition from immigrant labor, such as housekeepers and maintenance workers

the economic hand that Trump had to play in last fall’s elections was stronger than almost anyone outside of the working class understood, and the results—at least in terms of the swing-state popular vote—correspondingly closer.

There is a philosophical disagreement about how one gives the working class more power. To boil it down to the basics, Democrats believe in more unions and Republicans believe in less immigration.

Krein is generally skeptical of the Republican Party’s traditional economic policies. “Contrary to the pervasive mythology of entrepreneurialism and creativity,” he writes, “it is glaringly obvious to today’s professional elite that the neoliberal economy is allocating capital, and especially talent, very poorly.

the extraordinary 2017 tax cuts, the only significant piece of domestic legislation passed in Trump’s four years. A supply-side piñata without precedent, it encouraged the corporate “buybacks” that can spur stock prices (padding executive bonuses) but can destabilize corporate finances (increasing the likelihood of layoffs in a downturn)—quite the opposite of what Trump had seemed to promise on the campaign trail.

Now Rubio has a simpler message: These are my people. I will fight for them. It beats the perennial Republican approach of theorizing about incentives and the capital gains tax.

Among Senate Republicans, it is Rubio who has laid the biggest bet on working people. He has a lot of ideas. He has urged fighting stock buybacks, reauthorizing Small Business Administration loan programs, and limiting Covid aid to universities with endowments of more than $10 billion

The core of his agenda, said Rubio, “is the availability of good-paying jobs that allow people to raise families, to retire with dignity, to live in safe and stable communities—that’s where life is lived.”

Hawley does often sound like a throwback. He criticizes the sexual revolution, the “woke mob,” and those who propose to rechristen military bases named after Confederate generals. In this sense, his appeal to the working class is less direct than Rubio’s. He is using, in classic Reagan fashion, the correlation between working-class status and conservative cultural attitudes to win over voters without making class appeals at all.

In 2008, two young thinkers, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, wrote a book called Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. The authors warn that “Sam’s Club Republicans”—cheekily named after a Walmart-owned chain of cut-price warehouse stores where few urban Democrats had ever set foot—were losing ground. And these voters were beginning to notice that their party wasn’t doing anything for them. The old Republican entrepreneurial rhetoric of unleashing this and untrammeling that was ceasing to resonate. Worse, it now served the other party’s base.If Grand New Party was the first call to arms in the remaking of the party, it went largely unheeded

Until recently, few congressional Democrats have been inclined to do battle with the tech companies, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren being among the conspicuous exceptions.

Tom Cotton, a Harvard-educated Republican lawyer from tiny Yell County, Arkansas, is trying to use China the way Hawley uses Big Tech

When the public compares the two parties on the question of protecting the working class, it is still Democrats who come out on top—but not by a lot.

In early December, Hawley and Bernie Sanders staggered their speeches, swapping floor time back and forth, in hopes of rallying the chamber to deliver Covid aid in $1,200 direct payments to parents. It was eyebrow-raising, Senate staffers said, because such moments require close staff coordination, and each senator pledged solidarity to the other. “I’m proud to yield the floor to him,” said Sanders of Hawley. “I’m delighted to join with Senator Sanders,” Hawley responded, adding: “Working families should be first on our to-do list, not last.”

The most closely attended-to conservative voice on this issue is Oren Cass, a former Mitt Romney adviser who heads American Compass, a conservative think tank that calls for “widely shared economic development.

Nearly all the Republicans loosely aligning themselves with working-class interests listen to Cass, and it’s partly because he has a theory about the economic history of this century and how it led to our present predicament.

As Cass sees it, the weakness of structures has been explained by the work of M.I.T. economist David Autor, who has given us a new understanding of how labor markets work under globalization.

A “China shock” wiped out a good deal of manufacturing employment after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, Autor has shown. “Skill-biased technical change” drove college-educated workers’ compensation up and that of the noncollege-educated down

The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton gathered similar evidence of the collapse of labor markets and the rise of regional inequality in their 2020 book on opioids, suicide, and life expectancy, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.

J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, a book that is often read as an X-ray of how eastern Ohio and other parts of Appalachia were struggling as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were vying for the presidency in 2016

the embrace of this coming-of-age saga as an all-purpose explanation of Trump’s new pitch to the working class was misguided, for Vance was already in his thirties when it was published. “The story that he is telling,” Cass insisted, “is of what was going on in the late ’90s, during what we think of as the go-go years, the boom years, the very best years.”

Indeed, an interesting general question arises to challenge Republicans about the 1980s and 1990s—were the policies arrived at outright wrong?

“If you talked to Republicans and gave them truth serum,” one congressional political adviser admitted, “a majority would say we had it wrong for decades on immigration and trade. We were too quick to look just at the lower price of goods and how that ultimately helped people, and didn’t spend enough time looking at people who were directly hurt by factories being closed and lower wages.”

Cass’s central insight is: Tight labor markets are good. That is how unions work to drive up wages, and if conservatives want higher wages, they will need to overcome their “foolish orthodoxy” on the matter.

At the same time, you can’t believe unions are good and say any amount of immigration is fine. Limiting immigration raises wages—which is a key reason that the postwar labor movement supported immigration restrictions

From a supply-and-demand perspective, mass immigration does the same thing as offshoring and de-unionizing: It exposes workers with American labor protections and lifestyle expectations to competition from workers without them

Republicans’ rapport with the working class may turn out to be more natural than it now appears. They won’t have to “come up with” policies for helping the workers, still less to “reinvent” themselves as a working-class party

they will follow the logic of the situation to embrace the sort of policies Democrats followed when they were the party of the workers and the Republicans the party of the bosses.

From aiming to register hundreds of thousands of new voters to earlier and better on-the-ground canvassing, and from investing millions of dollars in recruiting local organizers to more finely focused outreach efforts on a sizable Hispanic and African American communities, Democrats are going all out to reverse the notion that Florida is unassailable Trump country

There was a great sense of dissatisfaction amongst a lot of Democratic voters after the primary. A lot of them stayed home, a lot of them voted for Trump as a protest, so you look at the turnout and adjust it for population growth, it’s one of the lowest turnouts we’ve ever had

We can’t make that mistake again. Vote for who you want in the primary, but come together afterwards

party leaders agree it will take more than just the unquestioned loyalty of existing supporters to turn Florida blue. New voters are needed, lots of them, and in May the party announced a “monumental” $2m investment to register 200,000 statewide before the 2020 election

Florida is one of the seven key battleground states targeted by Democrats nationally as part of their Organizing Corps 2020 campaign launched earlier this year

In Palm Beach county we have passed 400,000 Democrats for the first time ever. We are out-registering the Republicans and pulling away. And that’s a blue county. The Republicans are making an effort there

For those already knocking on Floridians’ doors, the key issues are clear. “The first thing is healthcare, then affordable housing and jobs and the economy,” said Melanie McRae, a Miami-based electoral field organizer for New Florida Majority, an independent political action and advocacy group that works mostly with “marginalized and excluded” communities.

A study published in April by the Miami Urban Future Initiative, a collaboration between Florida International University and urban researchers at the Creative Class Group, found that there were stark racial dimensions to the city’s high rate of poverty.

14.3% of Miami residents lived in poverty, affecting African Americans at two and a half times the rate of white Americans and Hispanics at twice the rate of whites.

McRae, who organizes small teams of canvassers knocking on up to 100 doors a day in Miami’s ethnically diverse neighborhoods, stresses that her organization is non-partisan. “We are not the Democratic party, we are not politicians, so we don’t come to ask for your vote. We’re here year-round motivating, educating and advocating for a better Florida,” she said.

many of New Florida Majority’s ideals – including racial and social equality, criminal justice reform, care of the environment and tackling the climate crisis – are shared by most Democrats and will be huge motivating factors for voters in next year’s election

What I’m getting from voters is anger, disgust, a little bit of hopelessness, which we’re trying to use as fuel to get them out,” she said. “We’re not preparing for 2020. 2020 is already here.”

Educating voters so they know the issues is going to be critical. Healthcare is number one for Floridians and Republicans are attempting to wipe out the Affordable Care Act. The environment is another huge issue where Democrats are full of positive change, while the Trump administration wants to have offshore drilling off Florida.

Ultimately, as in so many recent elections, the result in Florida is going to be a simple numbers game. The party that engages and recruits more supporters will carry off the state’s 29 electoral college votes, and with them probably the White House.

Second, the assumption that people will vote as a bloc according to their ethnic or racial identity is simplistic.

despite Trump’s xenophobia and racism, a larger share of Latinos and black men voted for him this year than they did in 2016.

Democrats also lost Texas again. During the campaign, the Democrats had targeted their appeal to Latinos by emphasizing Trump’s mistreatment of immigrants entering illegally from Mexico and Central America. But Mexican-Americans along the border supported Donald Trump because their jobs and wages are being undercut by the newer immigrants.

Republicans of course have been the major promoters of policies that have beneftted investors at the expense of workers. But, shamelessly and cleverly, they have diverted white working class anger toward minorities, protecting the country’s elites.

The Republicans’ trap for the Democrats White skin is still privileged in the United States of America and the Republican Party has increasingly pandered to racism. Democrats, for both moral and political reasons, must strongly support racial justice.

But in an overwhelmingly white society, they cannot attract the necessary sustained political support with a message focused on generalized white guilt.

Thus, for example, a majority of whites supported the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality towards Blacks. But the support dropped sharply when demands rose for whites to pay reparations for past oppression of Blacks.

National polls showed that Latino-American voters thought jobs and health care, not immigration, were the most important issues for them.

After all, several decades of stagnant wages, precarious employment and the erosion of upward mobility have left most whites in the United States today who must work for a living no longer feeling very “privileged.

Economic class trumps racial affiliation Most Latinos and black Americans are working class — like the majority of whites. And the data shows the economic problems of minorities are now more likely a function of their class than their race or ethnicity.

Thus, the central issue of income and wealth inequality is not the privilege of “whites” any longer. Rather, it is the privilege of “rich whites.

As economist Adolph Reed, an African American, puts it: If you say to those white people in the bottom 50% (i.e., people who have basically no wealth at all) that the basic inequality in the United States is between black and white, they know you are wrong. More tellingly, if you say the same thing to the black people in the bottom 50% (i.e., people who have even less than no wealth at all), they also know you are wrong. It’s not all the white people who have the money; it’s the top 10% of (mainly) whites.

An engine of inequality Thomas Piketty and others have shown that modern capitalism has become an engine for the expansion of inequality between capital and labor. Thus, in the absence of substantial reform, incomes and opportunities for most working Americans — whatever the color of their skin — will continue to shrink.

Trump succeeded in part because large numbers of white working people felt abandoned by Democrats. Over the last few decades, the Democratic Party’s establishment forged an alliance with Wall Street financiers who are liberal on social issues — such as racial discrimination, immigration and abortion — but very conservative on economics.

One bizarre result was that throughout the campaign, voters saw the plutocrat Trump as better at creating jobs and prosperity than Biden.

Have Democrats really learned the lesson? Biden’s less elitist style helped him with enough white workers to win three key Midwestern states that Hillary Clinton had lost. Still, had Donald Trump shown a minimum of competence in responding to the COVID 19 crisis, he could well have been re-elected.

Republicans forcing the Democrats’ hands Because Republicans will do everything they can to make the Biden presidency a failure, the Democrats’ disparate factions have to unite behind him in a “popular front” against the authoritarian right. This may be hard for many on the Party’s left, but they have no choice. If Biden fails, they fail.

Conclusion The election gave us some clues to where U.S. democracy might be headed, but the question remains unanswered: Can Biden and the Democrats restore enough security and prosperity to the American working class to finally eradicate the neofascist political pandemic?

Democratic and Republican Parties looked a lot different in 1952, when the American National Election Studies—surveys of voters conducted before and after presidential elections—were in their infancy. The Republicans, to some extent, were still regarded as the party of Lincoln, even though they had shifted their focus to courting southern white voters, causing black people to leave the party. Meanwhile, the Democrats were the party of a coalition that pushed for social services—the party of the New Deal. There were far fewer college-educated Americans at the time, but the white Americans who did have degrees tended to vote Republican, and those who didn't sided with the Democrats by a significant margin.

“The shift in whites without a college degree away from the Democratic Party begins as the Democratic Party becomes identified as the party of civil rights,” starting in the 1960s, Robby P. Jones, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, told me. Disaffected white southern Democrats, in particular, fled in droves.

in 2008, the election of Barack Obama, a black man, signaled that the Democrats were becoming the party of progressive racial politics. “Obama’s presidency simplifies the politics of race,” Michael Tesler, an associate professor of political science at UC Irvine, says. “If you were a low-educated white, you were much more likely to know about the partisan differences on race [after Obama] than you were before.”

In the 2016 election, 48 percent of college-educated white voters voted for Trump, compared with 66 percent of non-college-educated white voters. A Marist poll in October of this year found that 55 percent of non-college-educated white voters approved of the job Trump was doing, compared with just 39 percent of college-educated white voters.

Every year, on its American Values Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asks Americans whether they “think American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the better, or has it mostly changed for the worse?” Fifty percent of Americans say that it’s gotten better in this year’s poll, and 47 percent say that it has gotten worse.

for white voters, the answer to that question is split by education level. Fifty-eight percent of college-educated whites this year say that America has gotten better since 1950, while 57 percent of non-college-educated whites say that it’s gotten worse

When President Trump says “Make America great again,” the again is instructive. He’s capitalizing on the nostalgia that non-college-educated white voters have for America’s past. “That harkening back to a supposed golden age where things were better has a really, really strong appeal for whites without a college degree,” Jones said.

David N. Smith, a professor at the University of Kansas, came to a similar conclusion when he and Eric Hanley took a dive into the 2016 American National Election Survey. They found that demographic data such as education are important predictors of which party someone votes for. But “when you bring the attitudes variables into account as well, what emerges is that attitudes loom even larger than demographics,” he told me.

When researchers control for voter attitudes on race in addition to white voters’ education level, Tesler says, the diploma divide disappears. No other factor, he says, explains the education gap as well—not economic anxiety, ideology, income, or gender.

That nostalgia, however, is for a time when black Americans and other minority groups had significantly fewer civil rights. And a Republican rhetoric that centers a longing for an era of white prosperity, rife with racist violence against black people, is why it’s impossible to understand the diploma divide without accounting for racial resentment

Here’s how he put it: If you look at white people who voted for Trump—both those with college degrees and those without—and identify everybody with a high level of resentment toward minorities, women, and Muslims, as well as those who want an arrogant, assertive leader, there’s almost no one left. The vast majority of Trump voters share those sentiments, the researchers found, regardless of education level

“Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party is complete, and the former ‘fringe’ has become so thoroughly intertwined with the ‘establishment’ that the two are virtually indistinguishable.”

The growing diploma divide is less a result of non-college-educated white voters becoming Republicans, and more of college-educated white voters finding that they can’t fully support the party anymore. “What's happened since 2016 is that the low-educated whites have kind of plateaued in their support for the Republicans,” Tesler says. “But you've seen this trend increase [of] high-educated whites [moving] towards the Democrats.”

Over time, those who supported Ted Cruz, who called Trump a “sniveling coward” during the campaign, and those who supported Marco Rubio, who called him a “con man,” tended to come around to Trump.

the voters that stand out, Smith said, are those who initially supported John Kasich. “They, in many instances, agree with Trump on policy issues, but the best data indicates that they are uncomfortable with him personally,” he said. “There are key aspects of his rhetorical style, of his governing style, that they don't like.”

Hidden in that gap is a threat to higher education itself. Last year, Pew issued a sobering survey. “Republicans have soured on higher education,” the survey declared, and it threw people into a frenzy.

Sixty-seven percent of Republicans, the survey found, had “some” to “little” confidence in colleges as institutions. A number of factors contribute to this distrust, the rising cost of tuition and the perception of a liberal bent at colleges among them. And if one major party believes that higher education is an engine of liberal indoctrination

Decades of funding cuts by state governments have already hit the institutions hard. And these cuts, in turn, have driven an increase in tuition costs and more animosity toward higher education. As Michael Grunwald recently wrote in Politico, “The next big Republican culture war will be a war on college.”

Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."

Clinton was referring to the GOP grooming Gabbard, not Russians.

Gabbard reacted by tweeting that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that sickened the Democratic Party for so long."

Trump attacked Clinton for the suggestion earlier this week, and said Clinton and other Democrats claim everyone opposed to them is a Russian agent.

ratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday that she will not run for re-election for her U.S. representative seat, saying she wants to focus on trying to secure her party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump.Gabbard, who represents Hawaii, made the announcement in a video and email to supporters."I believe that I can best serve the people of Hawaii and our country as your president and commander-in-chief," Gabbard said in the video.Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.Sign UpThis site is protected by recaptcha Privacy Policy | Terms of Service She also expressed gratitude to the people of Hawaii for her nearly seven years in Congress.In January, Hawaii state Sen. Kai Kahele, a Democrat, said he would run for Gabbard's seat, NBC affiliate KHNL of Honolulu reported.An Iowa Democratic caucus poll out this week put Gabbard at 3 percent, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the top three spots.She is in a crowded field of Democrats seeking the nomination to run for president. Another candidate, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, ended his long-shot presidential campaign Thursday.RecommendedvideovideoMcConnell: If the House impeaches Trump, Senate will hold trial 'until we finish'2020 Election2020 ElectionTim Ryan drops out of presidential raceHillary Clinton recently suggested that she believed Republicans were grooming one of the Democrats for a third-party candidacy. Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."

“I’m still very bullish on 2020. I think Trump’s going to have a very difficult time winning re-election,” said the former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe.

Money money money!

“I think someone who’s not worried about the money is crazy. Trump’s sitting on $100m right now and we’re nowhere close to having a nominee and they will be able to raise money but we’re still so fractured,”

“I don’t think it’s going to be hard to raise all the money you need but that early advantage is not inconsequential given that this is coming down to a few voters in a few states,” Emanuel said.

$20m on more than 218,000 Facebook ads. And Democrats have noticed.

Incumbency

But Trump is a divisive figure, to put it mildly. Democrats point to their gains in suburban districts across the country and flipping seven governor’s mansions in the 2018 midterm elections. They see that as a herald of Democratic competitiveness in Republican-leaning parts of the country. Democratic strategists hope fatigue from seemingly daily national crises will see reluctant moderates and swing voters vote Trump out of office.

Emanuel said the deciding issues will be the key aspects of the economy versus a set of issues Democrats have run and won on in recent years.

The most persistent source of Democratic handwringing is a traditional aspect of any presidential cycle: the months-long primary where fellow candidates turn on each other. After months of relatively respectful campaigning, the knives are finally coming out just before the first vote in Iowa next week.

Running out of money – and a brokered convention?

Democrats worry a long, bloody primary could advantage Trump. It could also drain Democrats’ resources.

ppealing to swing voters A persistent fear throughout the Democratic primary has been picking a viable nominee. The 2020 Democratic primary has been full of ideological and policy debates over Medicare for All, immigration, a Green New Deal and whether a veteran or young charismatic leader can beat Trump.

“The thing that concerns me the absolute most right now is Bernie being the nominee,” a veteran Democratic strategist with ties to multiple candidates said.

The veteran Democratic strategist pointed to questions about where Warren stands on healthcare and Medicare for All. “I think Warren’s a problem. I think any candidate who would lose the healthcare debate to Trump is a problem. I think her stance is a problem. I think a lot of what’s ailing her is correctable. I think it’s not correctable with Bernie and he has no desire to correct it.”

the Republican Party and the conservative establishment is institutionally stronger than the Democratic Party, with an infrastructure that served as a bulwark through the 1960s and 70s

The right wing of the Republican Party has more disruptive potential than the left wing of the Democratic Party because it is more willing to go to extremes:

While, the rapid growth of well-financed and autonomous competitors threatens all existing power structures, the bulk of the costs are likely to fall on the Republican Party.

Republicans, in contrast to Democrats, prefer hierarchical, well-ordered organizations, and are much more willing to cede authority to those in power.

The Republican establishment has a full arsenal of weapons at its disposal, including endorsements, favored speaking engagements at key party gatherings, leverage over top consultants and a signaling process to show who has been anointed from on high.

The most powerful weapon of all was always the oversight exercised by party leaders over the flow of money to candidates

Unleashed by Citizens United, a handful of renegade billionaires made life miserable for Mitt Romney, the establishment candidate. More importantly, it only took four men — Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas and Macao casino mogul; Harold Simmons, a Dallas-based leveraged buyout specialist; Foster Friess, a conservative Christian and a successful investor; and William Dore, a Louisiana energy company C.E.O. – to stun traditional party power brokers during the first four months of 2012.

turned the primary process into an open contest, giving full voice to the more extreme wings dominated by the Tea Party and the evangelical right.

The newly empowered billionaires are positioned to challenge the Republican Party at its point of greatest vulnerability, during the primaries.

These new players, along with their super PACs, undermine the influence of the parties in another crucial way. Before Citizens United, the three major Republican Party committees exerted power because their financial preeminence gave them the final word on the award of contracts to pollsters, direct mail, voter contact, and media consultants – very few of whom were willing to alienate a key source of cash.

The ascendance of super PACs creates a separate and totally independent source of contracts for the community of political professionals. Super PACs and other independent groups already raise more than any of the political party committees and almost as much as either the Republican or Democratic Party committees raise in toto.

“Who is the Republican Party in the Citizens United age? If you had to point to the ‘Republican Party’ would you be more likely to point to Reince Preibus (and implicitly the R.N.C.) or Karl Rove (and Crossroads G.P.S.)? I think candidates might consider Rove more important.”