AMONG THE 45th president’s many achievements has been his role as muse to a new literary genre: the redneck safari. Putting aside the numbers suggesting that Donald Trump’s victory was delivered by people who lived in the suburbs and were, on average, wealthier than those who voted for his opponent, scores of amateur anthropologists travelled to dilapidated parts of rural America with two questions in mind: who are these people? And why would they vote for that man?
There have been far fewer attempts made to treat Democrats as a foreign tribe, to eat their food and understand their folkways. Sociologists have written about the civil-rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement and the decline of unions, says Amy Binder, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego and author of a study of conservative students on campus. But not about liberals or Democrats as groups. That may be because they seem so unexotic to the people who do this kind of work. Americans with postgraduate degrees overwhelmingly vote Democratic. Academics are even more predictable in their allegiances. To see what is in front of one’s nose, George Orwell wrote, needs a constant struggle.
Any attempt to write a “Hillbilly Elegy” about liberal America quickly runs up against the problem that it is easier to generalise about Republican voters because the groups that make up the party are bigger and have more in common with each other, in terms of ideology and identity. Heavily Democratic areas include, for instance, white, wealthy, liberal Santa Monica in California—a land of electric scooters, poké restaurants and dogs with their own Instagram pages—and the more socially conservative, African-American heart of the Mississippi delta, one of the most concentrated areas of rural poverty in the country. Native American reservations lean Democratic, as do Hispanics in rural California, middle-class black professionals in suburban Atlanta and white college professors in Iowa. No single place can capture this variety. It is a good thing that the Democratic Party appeals to such a diverse bunch; it also makes it considerably harder to define who or what the party stands for.
New York’s 15th congressional district is the safest Democratic seat in the House of Representatives, according to the Cook Political Report, which analyses elections. That makes it to Democrats what rural Alabama is to Republicans. Hillary Clinton received 94% of the vote in this part of the Bronx, a result that was a few points down on Barack Obama’s practically Belarusian score of 97% four years earlier. NY-15 is urban but shares some of the characteristics of the Mississippi delta. Median household income is less than $30,000—half the nationwide number. The district contains pockets of concentrated poverty where half the residents spend at least 50% of their income on rent (the federal government considers anything over 30% to be untenable). Housing advocates report families doubling up, with several households in a space designed for one. Numbers from New York’s public schools corroborate this: 80,000 children educated by the city report having no fixed abode.
Because NY-15 is only a short subway ride away from the Guggenheim museum and some of the city’s most expensive housing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, property developers have been eyeing it up. An effort to rebrand the South Bronx, a name which still suggests bonfires in the streets to New Yorkers over 40, as SoBro or the Piano District, has alarmed many who live there. “This is ground zero for the conflict within the Democratic coalition between professionals and poor minorities,” says Ritchie Torres, a city councilman whose ward overlaps with the 15th congressional district. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won the Democratic primary in June in the 14th district next door, advocating a brand of democratic socialism that aims to take power away from the rich Democrats who dwell in lower Manhattan. Ms Ocasio-Cortez also argues for abolishing the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), which is charged with rounding up and deporting undocumented migrants—a position gaining popularity on the left of the party.
Bring up politics on the streets of the Bronx and you will be met with shrugs. Around Prospect Avenue, however, where public housing built in an eccentric neo-Tudor style nestles alongside Dominican bakeries, and stout women stand on the pavement selling books about God’s grace, most people have an opinion on the president. The owner of a long-standing soul-food joint brought up Mr Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un only an hour after a White House announcement on the subject.
Unlike upscale white Democrats, people in NY-15 do not often talk about themselves as liberals (used here in the American sense, which implies left-wing, rather than in the classical sense, which implies an enthusiasm for limited government). They also use different words when describing the president. College-educated Democrats say he is a racist; non-whites without a college degree more often say they find him disrespectful. This is not the only difference in how the liberal half and the non-liberal half of Democrats talk about politics. Those who describe themselves as liberals, who are more likely to be white and wealthier, are much more hostile to Mr Trump than other Democrats are. The Pew Research Centre reports that 99% of what it calls “solid liberals” disapprove of the president, a figure that drops to just 60% for “devout and diverse” Democrats, who tend to be non-white, poor and religious.
Liberal and non-liberal Democrats also have different ideas about the relationship between success and luck. There is a big difference in this between well-off members of each party. Wealthy Republicans are more likely to believe that, with hard work, anyone can become a millionaire, according to Pew. By contrast, three-quarters of upscale liberals say that hard work and determination do not guarantee success for most people. But there is also a difference here between rich, liberal Democrats and poor, non-liberal ones. On average, the less fortunate a Democrat is in dollar terms, the more likely he or she is to believe in the American dream. Wealthier Democrats tend not to believe that the dream exists.
Self-described liberals look much more favourably on government regulation than other Democrats do. They are also more internationally minded, embracing free trade and rejecting the notion that America should pay less attention to the world beyond its borders and concentrate on what is happening at home. They also have a set of feelings about the flag, about Muslims, immigrants, atheists and gay people that are not always shared by the half of all Democrats who do not describe themselves as liberal.
Rank-and-file Democrats share their enthusiasm for active government but are less united on cultural issues, where a sizeable minority hold on to the traditional values downplayed or even rejected by most party leaders, writes Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University. For example, in 2016 half of all white Democrats believed that to be truly American it is important to have been born in America, according to the American National Election Studies survey, a view more commonly associated with the president’s supporters.
The flowering of Democratic political activism that is taking place under Mr Trump is largely confined to the party’s liberal side. Half the “solid liberals” identified by the Pew Research Centre have given money to a political candidate or organisation in the past year. Jonathan Haidt’s work on political intuitions helps explain how the president enrages them. Mr Haidt argues that political reasoning is like riding an elephant. The jockey, who represents reason, may think he is in charge, but he sits on top of a more powerful beast, moral intuition, that goes where it will.
There is some complementary overlap here with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on fast and slow systems of thinking. Feelings about politics usually engage the fast, judgmental system rather than the slow, deliberative one. This is why, for voters, feelings about faith or the flag often overwhelm more deliberate thoughts about policies towards the deficit or single-payer health care. Republican elites have an emotional advantage here that is hard for Democrats to match, since they more often lean towards the view that politics is about policies.
Mr Haidt divides political morality into pairs of opposing instincts: loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, liberty and oppression, sanctity and degradation, care and harm, fairness and cheating. He and his colleagues devised an online morality test at YourMorals.Org based on these pairs that has been taken by more than 375,000 people. (Other studies have also found links between apolitical activities and either liberal or conservative thoughts. One of the weirder ones is between cleanliness and conservatism: people who have recently washed their hands are more likely to express conservative views.) Unlike conservatives, whose feelings seem spread evenly across all the positive values tested at YourMorals.Org, liberals focus overwhelmingly on just two of them: care and fairness. When the president calls countries “shitholes”, gang members “animals” or undocumented migrants “rapists”, the care and fairness alarms in the mind of a typical liberal light up.
Eiko Browning, a doctor in Denver, fits the description of the newly mobilised liberal. She volunteered for the Obama campaign while at university but did not do anything for the Clinton campaign in 2016. She now protests outside her congressman’s office near her home every Tuesday at midday. Some of these protests have been creative. At one point Dr Browning bought five dozen Easter eggs, labelled them with the names of what she calls “Russian collaborators” and hid them near the congressman’s office. “I got a call from his staff to say Easter eggs were not an appropriate form of communication.” Dr Browning has also started to give money to Democratic candidates: “Anybody who is any good gets $45 from me in honour of the 45th president,” she says.
“This will not look like a far-left reinvention of Tea Partiers…It will look like retired librarians rolling their eyes at the present state of affairs, and then taking charge.”
Tanya Luken, a chartered accountant who lives in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona is another first-time activist. Before Mr Trump won, she describes herself as “a good voter”. “There was one primary I didn’t vote in and I felt guilty for two months. But I’m Catholic so that comes with the territory.” She strains to be fair to the other side: “I know and respect a lot of Republicans, especially in Arizona. My closest friend is a conservative Republican. The things that I think are the worst about the president—those people don’t support them.” She also cares deeply about fairness as it applies to strangers: the tax bill signed by the president offended her idea of social justice. Activism has its frustrations. “We’re so busy accommodating everyone’s feelings that we don’t get anything done. I go to forums and we have to spend 45 minutes talking about our feelings,” she says. Nevertheless, politics has become so important to Ms Luken that she says she will leave the country if Mr Trump is re-elected in 2020.
A third and final specimen of the newly energised liberal is Stephanie Brook Chavez, who works in commercial insurance. Ms Chavez’s sense of fairness has also been stomped on by the president and his supporters. “My mind is boggled by what conservatives allow with this administration. I’m convinced with Obama that they just hated the black man. Look at what they used to say about him playing too much golf!” Ms Chavez, who moved to Colorado from Texas, has fallen out with old friends over politics. Discussions on Facebook that had nothing to do with the subject would turn ugly if she shared something political. Some called her a “libtard” or a “jezebel”.
All three of these women are members of Indivisible, one of many political organisations that sprang up as part of the self-styled resistance to Mr Trump. The group is dominated by what Dr Browning calls “a lot of suburban, pissed-off, educated women”. Theda Skocpol, a political scientist at Harvard, and Lara Putnam, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh, have done fieldwork on this group. “The metropolitan advocates to whom the national media turn to explain the ‘newly energised grassroots’ at times exaggerate the left-progressive focus of the activists under way and overestimate their own importance in co-ordinating it,” they write. “This will not look like a far-left reinvention of Tea Partiers or a continuation of Bernie 2016. It will look like retired librarians rolling their eyes at the present state of affairs, and then taking charge.”
They belong not just to the liberal half of the party, but to a particularly well-informed subset of the most educated, switched-on part. And even they are not particularly left-wing. “Most Americans are indifferent to or mystified by liberalism and conservatism as political ideas,” argue Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe in a recent book on the ideological innocence of American voters. Given this, it is far from obvious that the answer to the Democratic Party’s problem is to become ever more liberal. Democrats must find some other way to increase the size of their coalition, and many of them think that other thing has something to do with race.