Millions of gallons of ink and untold pixels have been spilled dissecting the realignment of American politics since Donald Trump descended the golden elevator to throw his hat into the ring nine years ago, so it’s always surprising when someone has a new take. Douglas Ollivant has done just that in a long essay on his Substack titled “Institutions, Politics, and Realignment.”
[Interstitial update: because many commenters seem to have missed it, Ollivant is seeking to understand the realignment, not the core/base of the parties. He’s not trying to explain longtime Republicans who happily vote for Trump but rather folks who voted for Obama but now support Trump—as well as those of us who voted for Romney and have voted for Trump’s three Democratic opponents.]
As a preface, I know Doug a little bit, having interacted with him at various events a few times going back to the aughts. He’s a fellow national security professional, albeit one of greater distinction (retired Army officer, political science PhD, former West Point professor, former NSC senior official, think tanker, etc.). Politically, I’d rate him as center-left, with a long affiliation with the New America Foundation.
His setup begins, interestingly enough, with a reference to the iconic Black Jeopardy sketch from November 2016:
In this hilarious but deeply insightful sketch, Tom Hanks portrays “Doug,” a MAGA-hat wearing (and very white) rural American man. As the sketch progresses, Doug shocks the host and contestants of Black Jeopardy by consistently having the “correct” responses. Doug convincingly illustrates the deep commonalities that he—representing the rural white underclass—has with the contestants from the urban black underclass. Most fundamentally, they share a distrust of institutions—the questions cover violations of privacy, election fixing, suspicion of the government, the informal economy, and a preference for lottery scratch cards, rather than contributing to a 401K.
This sketch prepares us, in a way no essay could, for the realignment we are seeing unfold in American politics. The political class has been in a mad scramble, since November of 2016, to explain what the “Trump phenomenon” means and how it came about. The American body politic is in a major partisan realignment, with both parties trading significant blocks of voters at the ballot box.
Ollivant’s thesis:
I believe the best way to understand this realignment is by observing how Americans—individually and in groups—think about their relationships to major American institutions. While this model has some limitations, and legacy attachments are often relevant, it seems to have great explanatory power.
Simply put, the Democrats have become the party of the institutions. Meanwhile, the Republicans now exist in a realm somewhere between suspicion of, and outright hostility to, the institutions. I believe this simple litmus test is our most salient political divide. That institutions are key is an important nuance. Other observers have nominated education or class, and these are obviously closely correlated with one’s connection to the institutions and can therefore be useful ways to think about the changing political scene. But these variables are proxies for this institutional relationship and fail to explain some phenomena.
Note that by nominating institutions as the most salient litmus test, he’s not denying the importance of race or class. He just believes it explains the realignment more than those or any other single variable.
By “the institutions” I mean the main power centers in American society and its economy. So media and academia are near the top, but followed by the various branches of executive power that have frequent interaction—federal police agencies, the IRS, the NIH, CPS, the intelligence agencies. Large firms also count as “institutions,”—“Big Law”, tech firms, big pharma, big agriculture, finance and banks and the “military industrial complex” (though of course this last still has major Republican ties). The military and law enforcement are the exceptions (though not totally exempt) that prove this rule.
There are two interrelated but clearly distinct questions about the institutions that will drive your partisan alignment. First, are these institutions working for you? Are you benefiting from the operation of these institutions, in a way you can see and feel? And second, do you trust the institutions, independent of whether you are getting a good deal from them?
While I haven’t couched it in terms of institutions before, I’ve contended from the beginning that attributing the rise of the Tea Party mostly to race (Barrack Obama’s election) or astroturfing (the organizing efforts of the Koch Brothers) elides something more fundamental. The elite, bipartisan consensus—began under George W. Bush and continued under Obama—to bail out the financial institutions that created the crisis created genuine outrage that damaged both parties.
Because they were the out party, it was much more obvious with the GOP. While Mitt Romney was able to hold off the crazies for another presidential cycle, we saw a backlash against Establishment Republicans in 2010 and beyond. Obama’s personal popularity held the Democrats together but we saw the Occupy Wall Street movement and the rise of populist leaders like Elizabeth Warren and, especially, Bernie Sanders. There was a sense among blue-collar workers, regardless of race or ideology, that the Establishment simply did not care about them.
Ollivant sees it a bit differently:
[I]f the institutions are benefiting you and you believe in them, you are likely a Democrat. If the institutions are not serving you well, and therefore you have lost faith in them, you are likely a Republican.
If he’s assessed this correctly it is, indeed, quite a realignment:
For those under 40, it is difficult to communicate just how dramatic a shift this is in American Politics. If we were to take 1980, for example, as our start point, virtually all the institutions would be aligned with the Republicans—academia, unions, and the pieces of government Reagan would describe as the “welfare state” notably excepted. But to be part of the elite mainstream social fabric was, for the most part, to be a Republican. It was “morning in America.”
Conversely, to be countercultural, to have distrust of established institutions, was to be of the left, to be a Democrat. After all, it was the left that wanted to “Rage Against the Machine.”
In some ways, this is counterintuitive. Going back to at least the New Deal era, Democrats have been the party of expanded national governmental power and Republicans were in opposition to that. But, yes, conservatives are, almost by definition, trying to preserve the major institutions of society: the Constitution, the military, the police, and the church.
But this is simply not the case anymore and realignment appears to be very visibly underway. Just to do one data point, let us look at Johnson County, Kansas, the county outside of Kansas City that contains the professional elite of eastern Kansas. In 1980, it voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan, 63% for Reagan to only 26.8 for incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter. In 2020, however, the county voted for Joe Biden, albeit not overwhelmingly (though perhaps overwhelming for Kansas), but with a clear shift, 52.7% to only 44.5% for Donald Trump. Realignments take time and there are lags. The same voters who were 40 in 1980 and voted for Reagan turned 80 in 2020, and are unlikely to shift partisan alignment at that point in their lives. But their younger counterparts in more junior cohorts, have likely shifted. The 40 year old who holds in 2020 the same job that the Reagan voter did in 1980, was likely a Biden voter. The partisan position of those with loyalty to the institutions has largely reversed itself.
So the professional class—those in the institutions and with loyalty to the institutions—has moved from being a Republican voting demographic to a Democratic one. And empirical data clearly supports this, as above. But the flip side of the movement by the professional class is the equal and opposite reaction from the working classes. Ruy Texiera—a Democratic party strategist—has been warning his fellow partisans for some time now about the dangers of the Democrats becoming “a Brahmin Left party, beloved by the educated but increasingly viewed with suspicion by the working classes of all races.”
Given the overlap, the differences between the “institutions” and “class” explanations are subtle.
[T]he data seems to support the thesis that the institutions have become Democratic strongholds. In more or less ranked order, the Biden contributions came from professors, social workers, therapists, lawyers, librarians, deans, scientists, teachers, doctors, pharmacists, designers, bankers, IT professionals, finance professionals, nurses, accountants, engineers, CEOs.
In other words, the members and representatives of the institutions.
Contrast this with the contributors to the Trump campaign. Housewives, the disabled, carpenters, electricians, truckers, mechanics, plumbers, builders, police, drivers, construction and maintenance workers. In the main (the police perhaps being the exception that proves the rule), a group largely outside what we view as mainstream institutions. These are tradesmen/women, manual laborers, and hourly workers.
It would be an oversimplication to define this as the upper middle class versus the lower middle class, but only slightly. If thinking in terms of pure income, then doubtless there are plumbers and electricians whose net earnings exceed those of some therapists, for example. But in the main, we see a group of salaried professionals arrayed against a similar grouping of hourly blue collar workers.
And while it is dangerous to extrapolate from your data, I think it is relatively safe to believe that underneath the group of fairly well-to-do tradesmen who have the funds to contribute to a political campaign exists a camp of more marginalized workers. Those who no longer have disposable income for political campaigns will be the least well-served by the institutions and therefore will be part of this realignment.
Of course, there has always existed a large group of marginalized workers who don’t have the disposable income to donate to political campaigns. And they’ve never been particularly well served by our institutions, aside from maybe labor unions.
There are still a small number of blue-collar professions where a robust middle class lifestyle is possible. At the high end, an offshore oil and gas supervisor making over $200K annually with his home in low cost-of-living Mississippi, Louisiana, or East Texas is definitely living a top 1% lifestyle. While perhaps not at that end, UAW workers at the “Big Three” automakers, union electricians, experienced HVAC repairmen, and other specialized tradesmen may crest $100K annual compensation. But these jobs are far from the average and often hard to acquire. Far more typical is work at a small, family-owned, non-union assembly plant or in services or retail at just above minimum wage. This has meant deep economic insecurity, inability to provide, loss of housing, and a continual sense of living on the edge for many families without the education to enter the middle class. Frontline’s recent episode “Two American Families” powerfully illustrates what this has meant for these laboring classes, black and white.
The industries in which a respectable middle-class salary is achievable has also shrunk considerably. If we look back to 1980 as a starting point, a high-school graduate could support a family on a single salary in a wide variety of industries: timber, steel, family farming, mining, fishing. But the timber wars (with both Canadians and conservationists), the farm crisis, the steel crisis, the collapse of the fisheries, and coal decline left a very narrow range of possibilities for the former blue collar middle class.
So returning to the institutions as the fundamental divide, those in the group moving into the realigning Republican party tend not to be a member of an institution, and is therefore suspicious of the institutions. And in fact, that suspicion may grow to the point where the value and orientation of the institutions itself is questioned. This isn’t irrational. Why should one give trust and loyalty to institutions that do nothing—at least visibly—for you? Or worse yet, distort natural forces and keep you poor and marginalized?
That this group—which is expanding—feels marginalized and poorly served by our institutions is certainly understandable. And, to the extent that they placed their trust in the Democratic Party and feel that it now serves the interests of the management and professional class, it makes sense that they’re shifting to the only other viable American party.
But, of course, that party had long been seen as, well, serving the interests of the management and professional class.
Here the theory starts to explain some otherwise curious facts. Why the new Right questions the media (hint: it’s an institution). Why the new Right questions the utility of the professional government bureaucracy (it’s an institution, and more critically, one filled with Democratic partisans that will resist the policies of the new Right). Why the new Right is hostile to established higher education. Why there is deep suspicion of the financial system. Of the judicial establishment. The new Right that is moving into the Republican party—often displacing long-established demographics—has no tie to these institutions (save perhaps hostile ones—court summons, rejection letters, and bill collectors) and therefore carries deep suspicion of their motives. Further, their elites—while by definition generally well-educated and with financial resources—will tend to be outside the institutions, having made comfortable lives in a relatively independent manner. Think small business owners, heirs of family car dealerships, ranchers (and yes, commercial building developers). And given the data above, demonstrating that those inside the institutions are uniformly opposed to the political interests of those outside the institutions (at least as they understand them), then the suspicion of the institutions is not irrational.
Understanding the role of institutions as a fundamental divide explains otherwise curious happenings. The movement of the Cheneys (both former vice president Dick and daughter/former Congresswoman Liz) from the Republicans to the Democrats is on the surface curious. But when you think of the divide between the institutions, it makes much more sense. The Cheneys are just as much products of the institutions as are (e.g.) the Clintons. So of course they now belong in the same party, differing positions in the 90s and 00s notwithstanding. Likewise other prominent defectors. The closer one’s interests to the major institutions, the more one shares their views, their interests, their priorities. Again, exceptions abound. Politics is not an exact science. But thinking about this division in this way does seem to add clarity to the current political scene. And to loop back to culture for a moment, this helps understand why the folk-rock anthem “Fast Car,” that when first recorded in 1988 was clearly associated with the black urban underclass, would experience a revival in 2023 as a country ballad directed at the white rural underclass. Same isolation and despair; different political refuge.
It also neatly explains why the #NeverTrump movement began among Republican national security professionals who place loyalty to institutional rules and norms above domestic policy goals. Not only were our priorities simply different from the overwhelming mass of the party but we’re more protected from the economic vagaries plaguing the working class. We simply have more to lose in a Trump presidency.
The obvious question this viewpoint raises is the relationship of the trend to the emergence of President Donald Trump as the spokesman for the realigning party. Put simply, how much did President Trump cause this new bifurcation, or how much did this bifurcation cause Trump?
I suspect the answer is somewhere in-between, that President Trump’s harnessing of this divide accelerated it. This political division pre-dates the emergence of the Trump phenomenon, I believe. This is particularly true if you believe 2008 to be the polarizing moment. But President Trump’s genius as a political entrepreneur was to see this emerging divide in a way no other figure did—save perhaps Bernie Sanders, who was less well-positioned to exploit it. President Trump recognized and earned the loyalty—often fanatical loyalty—of this otherwise isolated demographic. Further, he recognized, whether consciously or not, that this demographic was likely to grow in size as a voting block as income inequality accelerated. This looked—and looks—like a long-term winning strategy.
I’m reminded of Adalai Stevenson’s quip in response to being told “Every thinking person in America” would be voting for him: “I’m afraid that won’t do — I need a majority.”
That a New York property developer would emerge as the spokesman for this disempowered class is at one level bewildering, but at another fully understandable. Peasant revolts are usually led by counter-elites. And while President Trump is of power and money, he is not from an institution and has usually stood in opposition to them. Land developers are often seen as disreputable. Thought of this way, this emergence is very understandable, particularly given the former President’s ability to speak to the masses in their own dialect so to speak, perfected in reality television, but first developed on the margins of professional wrestling and on construction sites throughout New York and New Jersey.
The addition of Robert F Kennedy, Jr, and Tulsi Gabbard into Donald Trump’s orbit fits nearly with this theory (likewise Vivek and Elon). Each of these figures is also defined by opposition to mainstream institutions—food and pharma in the former case, the defense industrial complex and transgenderism in the second—and by their positioning of themselves as change agents.
l think this is right, if only partially. While Trump doubtless won over some significant number of those who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, most of them are still in the Democratic orbit.
But I think this is entirely right:
Accepting this viewpoint also explains diverging opinions in the two parties on the “threat to Democracy.” It has become a trope of those in the institutions that “Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy.” By this they mean, I think, that Trump is a threat to the institutions, which they see as a bulwark of democracy.
However, for the new Right, the threat to democracy comes from the institutions themselves, which are the problem. So President Trump’s defenders would turn his opponent’s rhetoric on its head and reply to Democrats that while Trump is indeed a threat to “their democracy,” the one that serves the interests of Democratic partisans in the institutions, what is in the larger good for democracy is a round of creative destruction of these same institutions. In this view, the institutions that those inside them most value require fundamental reform, from their mid-20th century orientation to one that serves the early 21st. Again, this thought is anathema to those whom the current institutional arrangements are conveniently serving.
In the wee hours of November 9, 2016, when it became clear that Trump had won, I cited Michael Moore’s “The Biggest F- You in Human History” speech. While Trump obviously won a whole lot of “normal” Republican voters, there was also a substantial “burn it all down” contingent. That faction remains with him.
Ollivant shares my rough sense of the origins of the shift but traces the throughline in a useful way:
If we were to identify one moment when the old order really cascaded into the new, the 2008 financial crisis would have to be it. The 2008 financial bailout, which gave out billions of dollars while holding no one responsible, had the approval of not only the sitting President, George W. Bush, but also that of both candidates to succeed him, John McCain and Barrack Obama. In Angelo Codevilla’s telling in his 2010 The Ruling Class, “When this majority [of 80% disapproval of the proposed policy] discovered that virtually no one with a national voice or in a position of power in either party would take their objections seriously…they realized that America’s rulers had become a self-contained, self-referential class.” Finding that those responsible for the pain the 2008 crisis inflicted on the working classes would not only not face criminal charges and prison, but would retain their taxpayer-underwritten bonuses, was—I suspect—a seminal moment for many. Ten million American families lost their homes to foreclosure during the subprime crisis. While now extrapolating, that this anger would drive a movement to look for a party that equally excluded the institutions that backed the Bushes, McCains and Obamas is hardly a huge leap.
Then packed on top of 2008 has come a series of events, or at least gradual reorientations, that have changed the view of the institutions. While the version in most heads is probably not literary, there is an impressive literature from mainstream publishers that has likely “trickled down.” Think of Chris Van Tulleken on the processed food industry, or Chris Leonard on the role of the Federal Reserve in increasing income inequality, or Gretchen Morgenson on the “plunderers” of private equity, or Patrick Radden Keefe on the “Empire of Pain” created by the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. While ironically these authors (who are mostly institutionalists themselves!) may be perfectly happy with most other institutions, and just pointing out an abuse in one, when taken as a whole, it can be read as a critique of the entire universe of institutions.
Then in the more popular sphere, think of the tarnishing of academia by several rounds of plagiarism scandals among fairly major figures, beginning with the former Harvard President. For the intelligence community, think of the 51 former members who signed a letter, organized by the Biden campaign, claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story “makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role.” On the intersection of Covid and journalism, think of headlines such as “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins,” when the lab-leak theory he was promoting is now generally seen as the most probable explanation (though we will likely never know).
All these incidents, calling deep doubt on the functioning of mainstream institutions are themselves rather, well, mainstream. This is not lizard people, Q-Anon, or a global conspiracy of Satanists or Freemasons or Opus Dei or Jews or the Trilateral Commission or whomever. These are instead fairly straightforward cases that call into question whether there are fundamental issues at the roots of many major institutions. These critiques, taken together, then question the functioning of the larger system of institutions as a whole.
Again, Ollivant is almost certainly, like me, an institutionalist who will vote against Trump a third straight time. But he points to good reasons why there is so much cynicism about our institutions. (And this elides all manner of scandals among elected leaders, the decades-long pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church, the backlash against the Iraq War, and so many other issues.)
Commenters will rightly note that this all elides the efforts by the right-wing infotainment complex to amplify scandals to generate outrage. But it’s fair to point out that they have a lot to work with in that regard.
If we accept this vision of the two parties becoming reoriented around institutions, a few observations emerge. First, this new orientation will create new islands of political homelessness. On the left, what happens to the long-term fraction of the left that is inherently anti-institutional? Think of publications such as Dissent and The Nation. These small outlets often carry powerful critiques of the institutions (see, e.g. The Nation’s recent expose on the collusion of “Big Agriculture” and powerful NGOs to force GMO seeds on the global south). But while these organs have always been minority voices in the Democratic coalition, it is hard to see them not becoming further and further marginalized over time as the counterculture becomes more and more a right-leaning phenomenon.
Similarly, on the right, what happens to those who are fully supportive of the current institutional arrangements? We could call this fraction “Nikki Haley Republicans.” What of those who view themselves as deeply conservative, but are deeply embedded in the institutional structure and doing quite nicely in them, if perhaps having to regularly self-censor. This fraction may contain a sizeable portion of what we might think of as the “professional right,” the think tanks that have generally served as the institutionalized opposition—think of the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation, the Acton Institute. None of these can be plausibly viewed as hostile to current institutional arrangements. Where do they fit along this new political cleavage? (hint: the endorsement of Kamala Harris by many individuals in these institutions is probably a good indicator)
Heritage, in particular, has largely been taken over by the New Right. But AEI and Hoover scholars are, indeed, largely homeless in terms of political party. My guess is that, unless the Republican Party suddenly reverts to its pre-Trump ideology—and it likely won’t, if Ollivant’s analysis is correct—benefactors will dry up, as it makes little sense to Republican foreign policy think tanks whose ideas are ignored by Republican foreign policymakers and whose scholars are won’t staff Republican administrations.
Second, what is the positive agenda of the new Right? What they are against is obvious—the current institutional arrangements. But what are they for? One can see this question playing out in the coalition surrounding itself around Donald Trump. Aside from much stronger enforcement of borders and immigration policies, what a Trump administration will do is unclear. There are persons with deeply incompatible policies who are equally close to the Trump inner circle. Now granted, this is a post-election question, and it is in no one’s interest to highlight tensions in their coalition before coming to power.
A fair question, indeed. While the criticism that Harris, like Biden before her, campaigns too much on the dangers Trump poses to American democracy and not enough on how she will govern is legitimate, the fact of the matter is that Democrats have a policy agenda they would like to enact. There are large swaths of it that I don’t like, but it’s an agenda nonetheless. Outside of immigration and rolling back transgender rights, there’s not much of a countervailing agenda on the GOP side.
There’s a whole lot more to the essay but the rest is more predictive. I commend it to you, along with the discursive footnotes.
