“The American political scene,” wrote Perry Anderson in 2013, “is conventionally depicted in high colour.” According to conventional—that is, liberal—observers in the Bush and Obama years, America “cartwheeled from brutish reaction under one ruler, presiding over disaster at home and abroad, to the most inspiring hope of progress since the New Deal.” Within the broad band of liberal opinion, some mourned the growing divide between thoughtful Democrats and extremist Republicans, while others cheered the rise of “marginalized identities” and the emergence of a new multiracial majority: “the tints change by the light in which they are seen.”
A decade later, in rather dimmer light, American politics retains its chromatic intensity. The iridescence of the Bush–Obama era, with its hurricanes and rainbows, has given way to heavier hues—lurid, fat, and flat, like Donald Trump’s red tie—in which walls are built and capitols are stormed, presidents are prosecuted and made immune from prosecution, and democracy is saved at the ballot box or doomed to die in darkness. Still, color—red and blue; black, brown, and white; the painted bronze and pallid gray of our gerontocratic rulers—remains at the forefront.
“For a steadier view of U.S. politics,” Anderson argued, “line is more reliable than colour.” As he traced the deep contours of the early twenty-first century, some basic continuities emerged: Bush and Obama both pumped the economy with tax cuts and spending, combined new health benefits with new industry giveaways, and wielded vast defense budgets to squeeze civil liberties and beef up executive power. Character and aesthetics aside, the differences between the trust-fund cowboy and the Harvard philosophe were matters of degree, not kind.
Amid the color of an election year, it is easy to forget the parallel strands of continuity that reach across the Trump–Biden era. In contrast to their predecessors, both presidents rejected international trade deals and crafted new forms of economic protection, whether through tariffs, subsidies, or targeted investment. Although Bush and Obama both flirted with what was once called entitlement reform, Trump and Biden now present themselves as adamantine defenders of Social Security and Medicare, each accusing the other of secretly aiming to cut those programs.
In response to COVID-19, both Trump and Biden flooded the economy with historic gobs of cash, marking the end of the neoliberal era, according to some observers. On immigration, a sharp divide softened over time, with some recent convergence on limiting access to asylum and boosting border security. Both presidents, finally, made the containment of China a chief foreign-policy objective, while working fruitlessly to “stabilize” the Middle East through an ever-deeper, ever-bloodier network of alliances with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States.
Line reveals what color obscures. The purpose of such an exercise is not to reproduce the juvenile conclusion that there is no difference between the two major parties. Between Republicans and Democrats today, there are many meaningful points of contrast on issues ranging from the war in Ukraine to climate policy. Yet the real struggle between red and blue bears little resemblance to the flamboyant melodrama narrated by partisans, in which each side fights to defend humanity against a barbarian horde. Shaped above all by a profound shift in class coalitions, today’s party combat is both real and riddled with contradiction; its tangled lines, as well as its garish colors, deserve a closer look.
The sociologist Michael Mann is one of the world’s most distinguished thinkers in line. His multivolume history, The Sources of Social Power, traces civilization’s development from ancient Mesopotamia to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Mann arranges social power into four broad categories: the ideological (that is, norms, values, and claims to meaning); economic (circuits of production, exchange, and consumption); military (the concentrated mobilization of violence); and political (the formal organization of the state).
Mann’s theoretical system is clunky in the manner of all such systems, and yet it is both viscerally persuasive and usefully adaptable. It was not designed to assess domestic party politics. But as Republicans and Democrats have come to inhabit separate, hermetic social worlds—and to see themselves at the helm of distinct civilizations—Mann’s system can help us to map the contested terrain between them.
In the domain of economic power, surely the most important category in modern capitalist societies, the ground is moving under our feet. Although the United States never had a true party of labor, for most of the twentieth century the Democrats fulfilled that function, winning the overwhelming support of trade unions and a heavy majority of blue-collar workers. Republicans, meanwhile, remained the obvious party of business, representing the ruling class from the golf clubs of Connecticut to the cattle ranches of Colorado. Both coalitions, of course, contained multitudes. Nevertheless, this basic sociological division framed party politics from the New Deal to the end of the century.
This legacy still looms over national politics today, but each party’s base of socioeconomic power has been dramatically reconstructed. To begin at the very top: In 2020, about a quarter of America’s billionaires donated to Biden, while just 14 percent gave to Trump. Democrats received roughly twice as much “dark money” as Republicans (most of it from ultrarich donors) and spent some $3 billion more than their opponents.
This summer, with the Biden campaign in disarray, Trump won a fistful of high-profile endorsements from outspoken tycoons such as Elon Musk. But Democrats have retained their own deep bench of billionaires and other large donors, who have helped them build a sturdy cash advantage in this cycle’s tightest congressional races. Under Kamala Harris, who raised $200 million in her first week as the likely nominee, they remain favorites in the overall money contest.
The safest conclusion is that the top tier of America’s economic aristocracy is divided but leans liberal. Even this may underrate the Democratic advantage, though, since the most dynamic sectors of the economy—situated in deep-blue metropolitan areas—tilt sharply in their direction. For all the hubbub about a MAGA takeover of Silicon Valley, donors in the internet industry have given, as I write this, 82 percent of their political contributions to Democrats this year; in the software industry, the number is 72 percent. Before Biden quit the race in July, the growing chances of another Trump presidency—with potentially harsh consequences for U.S.–China trade and chip technology—handed Big Tech stocks their worst week in two years. The accession of Kamala Harris, meanwhile, produced a “blue rally” on the Nasdaq.
Wall Street itself remains fragmented, but the days of a Republican-leaning financial elite are long gone. Since 2020, venture-capital donors have made 75 percent of their contributions to Democrats, while hedge-fund donors have given 68 percent. Big Pharma leans blue, as does Big Law. In the same period, donors at the Big Three management-consulting firms—McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group—have given 95 percent of their combined contributions to Democrats.
Republicans still reign supreme in fossil fuels, fast food, and agribusiness, while Democrats retain their bases in organized labor, education, and the public sector. But these are familiar arrangements. What is new and pressing today is that the commanding heights of the twenty-first-century knowledge economy—in technology, finance, and health care—are now chiefly the terrain of metropolitan liberals.
Corporate elites have taken part in this big shift, but much of it has been driven by the migration of the educated professional class to the Democrats. Twenty years ago, college graduates gave equal support to George W. Bush and John Kerry, while voters without degrees favored Bush by just six percentage points. This year, Harris leads Trump by twenty-two points among voters with bachelor’s degrees, and trails among those without degrees by sixteen.
This huge swing—accounting for literally tens of millions of voters—dwarfs any other demographic change in the party coalitions over the same period. The so-called diploma divide is also a fundamental marker of class. In our economy, Americans with only bachelor’s degrees earn better wages than those with only high school diplomas (a gap of about $30,000 a year), own far more wealth (on average, college graduates hold about $1.4 million more per household), and can expect to live more than eight years longer. With educated professionals leading the way, high-income voters now lean Democratic for the first time in U.S. history. At the same time, according to recent polling, voters in households earning less than $100,000 now seem to favor Republicans.
This great political re-sorting remains incomplete. The long tail of the twentieth century lives on tenaciously in both parties, with Republicans still mesmerized by tax cuts (even as they benefit blue-state millionaires) and Democrats still more supportive of labor unions (even as they boost red-state workers). Yet national politics already bears the imprint of the new party coalitions. Trump has halted the Republican war on “entitlements” for a good reason—his downscale voters cannot afford to surrender Social Security or Medicare. For Democrats, meanwhile, economic redistribution has long since fallen behind other issues, including abortion, gun control, climate change, and the rule of law.
In the realm of ideology, Republicans have long complained, accurately enough, about liberal institutional power. For longer than half a century, the means of cultural production have belonged to Democrats: Hollywood and the entertainment industry; print and broadcast media; book publishing; and virtually the whole system of education, from K–12 schools to the universities. Here as elsewhere, the further up the prestige ladder one travels, the more intense the liberal preference: at Harvard, for instance, 95 percent of donations since 2020 have gone to Democrats. This formidable array of institutional power has been buttressed, in recent years, by the fast-growing world of nonprofit foundations and philanthropies.
Meanwhile, the traditional nexus of conservative ideological power—organized religion—grows weaker every year. Just a generation ago, roughly 70 percent of Americans were members of houses of worship; these days, the number is 45 percent and sinking. Today, just 30 percent of adults attend regular religious services.
These unequal trends have combined to produce a historic progressive victory in the national culture war. Since the Nineties, when both parties opposed gay marriage and denounced hip-hop, liberals have gained ground on almost every cultural front—including many questions once not even on the menu, such as the observation of Juneteenth, the legalization of marijuana, and the availability of gender-affirming care.
Among Republicans today, the mood has recoiled from the evangelical confidence in a Moral Majority to a rearguard action against the “Great Awokening.” As the campus battles over anti-Semitism have shown, the right is much more likely to adopt dominant progressive framings—e.g., an emphasis on the “lived experience” of identity groups—than to put forward alternative paradigms. Defending a plan to cut international student visas, even the rugged MAGA propagandist Steve Bannon cites a need to increase the “Hispanic and black population in Silicon Valley.” This is what liberal ideological victory looks like.
The rise of social media, meanwhile, has only accelerated the march of secularization, pluralism, inclusivity, and cultural openness—on the right as much as the left. In an era when so-called Christian nationalists do not even go to church and the Republican standard-bearer is a defiant felon, it makes sense that right-wing media is less concerned with family values than the political meme du jour. Media curiosity about odd-duck “neotraditional” intellectuals should not disguise the way the broader Republican coalition under Trump has moved from ideological conservatism to something much more chaotic that at times approaches an open embrace of transgression.
Mann’s third site of social power, military force, is traditionally the domain of the right. Yet the relationship between the security state and the Republican Party is perhaps at its lowest ebb since World War II.
In the White House, Trump avoided major foreign wars but was embroiled in a bruising feud with the Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. By the end of Trump’s term, it had spilled over in the president’s unprecedented public attack on his own generals. The “top people in the Pentagon,” Trump said, disliked him “because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”
Though Trump also boasted about his “colossal rebuilding of the American armed forces,” he did no such thing. As the Wall Street Journal recently complained, average military budgets—measured by share of gross domestic product—were considerably lower under Trump than under Obama, not to mention George W. Bush.
What really concerns defense hawks, however, is the strategic posture of Trump’s Republican Party. Earlier this year, the MAGA faction in Congress held up military aid to Ukraine for months. Though confused and self-contradictory as ever, Trump now appears to favor a land-for-peace deal with Russia, a prospect that is anathema to the bipartisan security establishment. Mike Pence spoke for all right-wing hawks when he lamented that Trump Republicans have abandoned “the traditional conservative position of American leadership on the world stage,” instead embracing “a new and dangerous form of isolationism.”
It would be glib to say that the security state is now painted blue. But Democrats in the Trump era have doubled down on their commitment to maintaining the primacy of American power across the globe. In the worldwide struggle between a U.S.-led “Liberal Alliance” and a Moscow–Pyongyang–Tehran “Axis of Resistance,” as sketched out by Jonathan Ranch in the pages of The Atlantic, there is only one American political party capable of picking up the gauntlet, and it is not the Republicans. With their ranks swelled by old-school neoconservatives—frantic anti-Trump columnists like Bill Kristol and quieter figures like Victoria Nuland, Dick Cheney’s former aide whom Biden appointed as an undersecretary of state—Democrats probably have a deeper base within the deep state than at any time since the Cold War.
With their increased sway in the economic, ideological, and military spheres, American liberals today hold a redoubtable position in the national power matrix. This is one good reason, among many, to doubt whether the 2024 election will usher in a right-wing millennium, never mind a fascist dictatorship. It also helps explain why partisan combat is so hysterically fraught, since the realm in which liberal control remains most elusive is the political.
Much of this owes to the antimajoritarian structure of the U.S. Constitution. Narrow Democratic majorities in the national popular vote have often failed to overcome the rural bias of the Senate or the Electoral College, let alone the entrenchment of right-wing power on the Supreme Court.
Yet the stubborn fact of Republican political power has another source, too. With conservatives losing ground in other key social spheres, electoral competition has remained the rare venue where conservatives can hold their own. It is no coincidence that virtually all active right-wing maneuvers in the culture war, from Florida to Texas, are fueled not by growing influence over hearts, minds, or institutions, but by raw legislative majorities.
In truth, the great reshuffling of class and party has lowered the ceiling on the Democratic coalition: its new social base, adults with bachelor’s degrees, makes up less than 40 percent of voters. With the class divide eroding older race-based party allegiances, Democrats are losing Latino and African-American support. Though liberals still inveigh against voting restrictions, disengaged and erratic voters, who struggle to clear these hurdles, now tend to vote Republican—so much so that Pennsylvania’s new automatic voter-registration system, implemented by Democratic governor Josh Shapiro last year, may help Trump in November.
The chief irony is this: the same bourgeois virtues that have helped Democrats to dominate the technology sector and the education system, and to make new inroads into the security state, have become liabilities in mass political combat. An emphasis on process over outcome, policy over message, expertise over instinct, clean form over messy substance, and moral clarity over tactical intelligence: these are the characteristics of a class that has successfully indicted Trump for eighty-eight felonies but has failed to develop an effective political argument against him. These are the same inclinations that, in the liberal orbit, present every electoral cycle as a death battle with fascism—even as the “anti-fascist” forces lack direction, savvy, and often, it appears, a basic interest in winning the most votes. For all the talk of preserving democracy, this is not a combination well suited to democratic political power.
