Last weekend I wrote about how the landscape of 2021 is suddenly making Republicans play politics in “easy” mode, giving them back the kinds of problems that built Ronald Reagan’s majority in the 1970s and 1980s – soaring inflation, increasing violent crime. , a cold War rivalry (this time Chinese instead of Russian) and resistance to a culturally high-profile but exaggerated and self-deceiving left.
I also wrote that this state of affairs was probably temporary and defined the environment as we headed toward the 2022 midterms, but didn’t really catapult us permanently back to the 1980s world. In that case, it is fruitful to speculate about what the world after this strange Covid-mediated moment is for our two political coalitions – starting this weekend with the view from the Democratic perspective and continuing with the view from the GOP side next week.
If you’re a Democrat now, you can tell yourself a fairly optimistic story, even in the face of disastrous mid-term polls, about what the world looks like for your party after 2021. In this hopeful scenario, inflation is a challenge for a year, but not for a decade, and much of the simmering public discontent with the Biden administration reflects simple exhaustion with a Covid-era anomaly — an aberration that, with childhood vaccinations, will therapeutic drugs and widespread immunity, really and truly should be over by next year.
If that bias goes away, a number of related issues that are currently hurting Democrats could also create not only economic but cultural problems as well. The current education wars, for example, have clearly been fueled by school closures and masking policies, not just parental misgivings about new progressive curricula. So once Covid-era interventions are finally in the rearview mirror, the critical race theory debate may also fade somewhat.
For example, the optimistic Democrat may fool himself that after losing ground during the midterm, the Biden administration will have a better economy, plenty of popular domestic spending to take credit, a decline in the cultural war, and Republican opposition. trapped in her own extremists and likely to nominate Donald Trump for president again.
All of this would be enough to give Democrats back most of the political advantages they’ve lost in the past year and allow them to worry again about their structural disadvantages in the Electoral College, and how Trump could spark a constitutional crisis. when he loses narrowly a second time. These are hardly trivial concerns. But they’re a very different kind of concern, if you’re a Democrat, from the fear that Republicans could cruise to Reagan-esque majorities by 2024.
However, the more pessimistic scenario for Democrats is one in which most of these expectations come true and others as well – normalcy is restored, inflation is tamed, schools are open everywhere and masks are set aside, illegal border crossings are reduced and murder rates are falling, coming there are no major foreign crises in between – and it doesn’t help the party or its president as much as one might expect.
I’m calling this, to be provocative, the “rising Republican majority” scenario, where it turns out that of the two great political migrations of the Trump era – affluent suburbs becoming more democratic, white working class and then Latinos becoming more Republican – the first was temporary and provisional, and the second permanent and accelerating.
In this possible future, it will become apparent that Glenn Youngkin’s result in Virginia was a whistleblower — that there is a certain kind of suburban voter who will vote for a moderate-looking Democrat over the Trumpiest Republican, but will wave back to the GOP if as soon as there is an excuse to do so. Meanwhile, the signature Obama-Trump voter, whether he lives in rural white America or the Latino areas of Florida or Texas, will remain so culturally alienated from contemporary progressivism that there will be no easy way for Biden or any other democratic politician to win them back. And especially not the two obvious heirs of our aging president, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, who built their careers in deep blue terrains and embodied aspects of elite progressiveism that have questionable national appeal.
Which would mean liberals should expect the Flood after Biden – unless, of course, the Republican Party makes itself so utterly reprehensible that it sets all these advantages on fire and causes any emerging GOP majority to be stillborn.
This possibility presents Democrats with a strange political calculation, albeit one that they already faced somewhat in Trump’s first term. It may be that the things they (rightly) fear most about a Trumpian revival — all the paranoia and conspiracy that got us on Jan. 6 — are also the only things that, by telling the GOP’s suburban voters. alienate, keep the current Democratic coalition viable.
While without Trumpishness as a thief and bogeyman, the liberalism of the current era would be heading for a fate once anticipated for Republicans: a slow but steady ebb, surprising demographic pressure.