Politics

Jesse Walker | From the October 2024 issue

In the usual liberal account, President Donald Trump reawakened America's atavistic, bigoted side, driving both the Republican Party and the United States to the right. In the usual conservative retort, it's the left that became more extreme in the 2010s, adopting radical views on race and gender that meant a moderate could seem to be moving rightward while in fact he was standing still.

But there is a third possibility: that liberals spent the decade moving leftward on questions of race and sexual orientation—and so did conservatives. And while the so-called Great Awokening has cooled somewhat since Joe Biden succeeded Trump as president, Republicans may have quietly continued to trend leftward on racial issues.

To be clear: I am speaking of public opinion here, not public officials or public policy. And I don't dispute that explicit bigots became a lot noisier in the mid-'10s, or that they acquired more influence in certain circles.

But noisier and more typical are not the same thing. In a 2020 paper for Public Opinion Quarterly, the University of 
Pennsylvania political scientists Daniel Hopkins and Samantha Washington reported that from 2007 through 2018, antiblack and anti-Hispanic stereotypes declined among both white Democrats and white Republicans. It's just that the Democratic drop in these surveys was much larger, creating a wider gap even though both groups, on average, were moving in the same direction.

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A similar picture appeared when Ohio State political scientist Thomas Wood tried in 2017 to measure the relationship between Americans' presidential votes and how they scored on the "symbolic racism" or "racial resentment" scale, which Wood described as a way to uncover "racial attitudes among respondents who know that it's socially........

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