Beyond 2020: the Deeper Story of American Politics in the Trump Era

While most people recognize that there is a racial divide in American politics, we pay less attention to the rural-urban split. Professor of political science Katherine Cramer explores this overlooked factor in American politics—rural consciousness. Like Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck, Katherine Cramer recognizes social identity as a major force. But she looks at things through a different lens. Taking an “interpretivist” approach, she examines the tools people use to understand politics. In all she made three rounds of visits to 27 sites. Her central finding? The people Cramer studies feel deep resentment of the professional class and of people in the cities.

Black Americans comprise the Democratic party’s most loyal base. That much is fairly well-known. They’re also “the most unified racial group in American electoral politics.” But what’s less known is that African Americans are also ideologically diverse. In recent history, 80% to 90% of African Americans have identified as Democrats and voted for Democratic candidates in presidential elections.

Nonetheless, a significant number of Black Americans consider themselves to be ideologically conservative. Plus, they show that presidential elections aren’t the only instances of Black political unity that matter. In the Alabama senate race of 2017, for example, African American voters were pivotal to Doug Jones’s success. They comprised 29% of the electorate, and 96% supported the former civil rights attorney. Furthermore, what is even less known and examined, are the very compelling historical and social forces that combined to make it so. In this critically praised and well-researched book, Ismail White and Chryl Laird correct this critical oversight in unprecedented depth.

Ted Johnson, Doctor of Law and Policy, senior fellow at Brennan Center for Justice, and former speechwriter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has researched and written about Black voting behavior for years. In this New York Times essay, he also examines the seeming disconnect between the ideological diversity and political unity of African Americans. As a child of the south, raised in the Black church, as well as an academic, he knows this territory well. And so he begins with a personal story before diving into the data. As he shows, “surveys routinely show that Black Americans are scattered across the ideological spectrum despite overwhelmingly voting for Democrats.”

The key to that conundrum lies in a simple but powerful fact: “Our rights are always on the ballot.” Racism and political polarization have forged a flaw in the American system of democracy. It feeds on and provides political incentives for racial division.

Kristen Soltis Anderson is a conservative pollster, a political consultant, and a millennial. Her book tells the story of the road not taken in GOP politics. In 2015, she mapped out the political attitudes of millennials and how the Republican party can make the changes necessary to appeal to them. The party did not follow that road map, but it’s a great story about what could still be.

It’s one thing to identify the proximate factors behind Trump’s rise. The harder thing to do is answer why. What needs does he fulfill? How does this connect to currents that existed long before his administration or even his run? Sociologist Arlie Hochschild digs deeper into the thinking and feelings undergirding White America’s identity crisis, exploring the worldview and what she dubs “the deeper story.” Hochschild bases her conclusions on five years of participant observation. Between 2011 and 2016, she made ten trips into southwestern Louisiana. In that time, Hochschild interviewed a total of 60 people in the communities where they lived and worked. Two-thirds were tea party supporters. Through those conversations she explores “how life feels to people on the right—that is, in the emotion that underlies politics.”