The Long Game

In the last few days, Betsy DeVos and Jeff Sessions have been confirmed to their respective posts in the cabinet. I expect Tom Price will follow shortly. With that, the most charged and explosive debates in the staffing of the Trump administration will have concluded. The Democrats have made a show of their resistance. They have said much that, in my opinion, needed to be said. But their efforts were never going to bear serious fruit. Procedural changes in the Senate from several years ago make blocking most nominees nearly impossible for a minority party. With the conclusion of this phase and the travel and immigration bans locked in court battles that will probably play out over months, we seem to be nearing the end of the beginning for the Trump administration.

The long term landscape for the next few years is settling. In general, Trump has support from men, working class and rural whites and middle class whites without a college degree. College educated suburban whites, nonwhites, and women disapprove of him.* There are two things about that description that immediately stand out to me. The first, unsurprisingly, is that it tracks very closely to the relative power bases of Trump and Clinton during the campaign. The second, which I think is the most overlooked aspect of why Clinton was beaten, is that the groups who support Trump have a great deal more in common than those who oppose him. Racially, religiously, culturally, economically, Trump's opposition is much more diffuse than his support.

That condition presents obvious long term challenges for those opposing Mr Trump. A culturally homogeneous group of people is similarly affected by each policy and reacts accordingly with unity, as much as any large group of people can. They approach issues with a similar mindset formed by similar experiences. Diverse groups of people have a diversity of interests, and each new policy presents a new problem for maneuvering those differing interests to maintain a unified front. Without that melding, the opposition is unable to present as forcefully as the support.

There is a particular cleavage that gives me some pause - that disconnect between the white, suburban, educated middle class and the nonwhite population. These groups have a variety of competing interests, and the potential for division is already to be found at this early stage. The media focus has been largely on the controversies surrounding the immigration orders and cabinet secretaries, but the public at large remains primarily concerned about the economy. Trump's approval rating among whites for his handling of the economy is significantly higher than his general approval rating. That difference is located mostly among the educated middle class, whose notions of decency are offended by the immigration orders, but who also welcome ideas of tax reform and deregulation. There is no similar issue-to-issue difference in his approval rating among nonwhites. 

If Trump is able to shift the national discussion to claim he is materially improving the standards of living for the white middle class, he will be able to co-opt a significant fraction of his current opposition. If, on the other hand, the Democratic Party becomes too preoccupied with the interests of that faction, it will lose touch with the base of nonwhite voters who make up a majority of its support. One of the principal reasons Secretary Clinton lost was a decline in turnout among black voters in cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia. The 2016 Democratic campaign in general, from Bernie to Hillary and everywhere in between, was inadequate in its representation of the voices and concerns of the nonwhite population. It may have been too much to ask for that community to come out in the same numbers as for President Obama, but if nonwhites had felt genuinely represented by the structure and process - and not just the promises - of the Clinton campaign, there would be no President Trump.

How is the trap to be avoided then? The answer lies, as ever, not in the decisions of the party but the decisions of the people. Now is the time for intense and deep coordination among activist groups opposed to the president to cross racial lines with the express intent of working out long term strategy and maintaining a unified front. In particular, it is past time for nonwhites to be actively and proportionally represented in the construction of an alternative platform.

Beyond that, though, nonwhites will never be truly represented in our policy until they are represented directly in our leadership. The most lasting lesson intersectional theory has taught us is that there is no one black experience or female experience, or any one experience for any one dimension of identity. As a result, even a good-natured focus on issues relating to nonwhite communities will be woefully incomplete without the actual experiences of nonwhite people involved in the making of all policy. Ultimately that is how the opposition sustains itself without being divided. If it does not commit to embracing its diversity at every level from activism to policy, it will be at risk from specialized appeals to its constituent parts.

* The polls I'm referencing specifically in this post are the most recent approval polls from the Economist/YouGov and Quinnipiac, but the qualitative conclusions are present in every recent poll I have seen that provide demographic breakdowns for their surveys.