America Is Becoming a Different Country

A lengthy column in the New York Times looks at the changing attitudes and values of educated suburban residents versus the views and beliefs of the less educated and those living in rural and socially backward regions of the country.   This shift helps explain the flight of educated and suburban voters from the Republican Party and the growing impatience with and loss of respect for so-called "conservatives" who cling to racial and religious divisions and deem themselves "true Americans" while whining about blue states and liberals even though it is the blue states and liberal cities that are paying the taxes that support a form of federal welfare that props up many red states financially. Ironically, it is the liberals condemned by the right who support Universal ethical values while the falsely pious crowd into their church pews and demand rights for themselve while condemning others and seeking to impose their divicive beliefs on all.  Where it will all end is anyone's guess, but the divisions are unlikely to end in the near term.  One possiblility is that and at some point the progressive majority will revolt against the tyranny of the minority pushed by the Republican Party agenda even as the GOP seeks to further inflame the greivances of its shrinking base.  Here are column excerpts:

A highly charged ideological transition reflecting a “massive four-decade long shift in political values and attitudes among more educated people — a shift from concern with traditional materialist issues like redistribution to a concern for public goods like the environment and diversity” is a driving force in the battle between left and right, according to Richard Florida, an urbanologist at the University of Toronto.

This ideological transition has been accompanied by the concentration of liberal elites in urban centers, Florida continued in an email, brought on by the dramatic shift to a knowledge economy, which expresses itself on the left as “wokeness” and on the right as populism. I worry that the middle is dropping out of American politics. This is not just an economic or cultural or political phenomenon, it is inextricably geographic or spatial as different groups pack and cluster into different kinds of communities.

Recent decades have witnessed what Dennis Chong, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, describes in an email as “a demographic realignment of political tolerance in the U.S. that first became evident in the late 1980s-early 1990s.”

Before that, Chong pointed out, “the college educated, and younger generations, were among the most tolerant groups in the society of all forms of social and political nonconformity.” Since the 1990s, “these groups have become significantly less tolerant of hate speech pertaining to race, gender and social identities.”

Chong argued that “the expansion of equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities, women, L.G.B.T.Q. and other groups that have suffered discrimination has caused a re-evaluation of the harms of slurs and other derogatory expressions in professional and social life.”

In an Aug. 21 paper, “Cancel Culture: Myth or Reality?” Norris writes that “In postindustrial societies characterized by predominately liberal social cultures, like the U.S., Sweden, and UK, right-wing scholars were most likely to perceive that they faced an increasingly chilly climate.”

Eric Kaufmann, a political scientist at the University of London and the author of “Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities,” argued in a series of emails that the views of white liberals are shaped by their distinctive set of priorities. In contrast to white conservatives, Kaufmann wrote, “white liberals have low attachment to traditional collective identities (race, nation, religion) but as high attachment to moral values and political beliefs as conservatives. This makes the latter most salient for them.” According to Kaufmann, white liberals “have invested heavily in universalist ethical values.”

One of the less recognized factors underlying efforts by conservatives and liberals to enforce partisan orthodoxy lies in the pressure to maintain party loyalty at a time when the Democratic and Republicans are struggling to manage coalitions composed of voters with an ever-expanding number of diverse commitments — economic, cultural, racial — that often do not cohere.

It’s not too much to say that the social and cultural changes of the past four decades have been cataclysmic. The signs of it are everywhere. Donald Trump rode the coattails of these issues into office. Could he — or someone else who has been watching closely — do it again?