Between the two of us, we’ve thought about American political history for a long time. It strikes us, if in different ways, that we’re living through a potential political realignment quite unlike the ones we’ve seen in earlier periods—and for which realignment itself might be too mild a word.
Not too long ago, many believed that an increasingly multiracial, multiethnic electorate would deliver victory after victory for Democrats. Demography was destiny, they said, most fervently around the time of Barack Obama, whose election supposedly showed that this rainbow future had arrived. It was always a bad idea, and how bad it was is glaringly apparent to us now—not least because Joe Biden’s non-white working-class support has tanked over recent years.
We’re sending this off to press three weeks after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance and the week after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump; assuming the candidates remain the same, however, we’ll see if, given the racial vitriol of much of his speechifying, Trump can make good on his claims that he’ll win the Latino vote and do better among black voters than previous Republicans. Either way, we’re in a vertiginous acceleration into something we’ve never seen before. We wanted to sit down and take stock of how we got here, where we are today, and where we might be headed—and how hard it is to acknowledge that, just maybe, nobody has any idea.
Rick Perlstein: Pundits have always been desperate to claim the arrival of permanent majorities in American politics, as if present trends somehow would go on forever—though the gaps between the parties in our first-past-the-post electoral system aren’t actually that great, even in the elections we call landslides. After the 1964 election, in which the Democrat Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator from Arizona, pundits had this knee-jerk, reductive reaction. “How could the Republicans think,” they said, “that the party has a future with this thing called conservatism when the census just showed that America is now an overwhelmingly urban country? Everyone knows that conservatism is the ideology of backwards, rural people.” It turned out the census was counting as urban any place over 2,500 people in population, and so conservatism lived on across much of America.
Democratic candidates think that they can do whatever they want, and you’ll still vote for them, so they can continue to ignore your demands.
A Republican named Richard Nixon took office in the very next election. While he was reelected in a landslide as dramatic as the one that happened in 1964, the Watergate scandal, which forced Nixon to resign in disgrace, made it seem like Democrats would again rule politics for a very long time. But Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter just a few years afterwards, and then came the Democrat Bill Clinton, whose presidency in some ways accepted the conservative principles of Reagan’s America: the virtues of the free market, the need for law and order, restrictive immigration policies. The historian Sean Wilentz, in his book of the same name, dates the “Age of Reagan” all the way to 2008.
Barack Obama became America’s first black president in 2008, carried into office because of his generational political talents, widespread frustration with unending war in the Middle East post-9/11, and a severe economic meltdown in the year leading up to the election. He won reelection in 2012, even though Republicans were confident that Mitt Romney would triumph. After Obama’s second victory, Democrats said, “How could the GOP think they have a future with this thing called conservatism when America is becoming a ‘majority-minority’ nation? Everyone knows conservatism is the ideology of white people.” Jonathan Chait, for instance, wrote, “the modern GOP . . . is staring down its own demographic extinction,” and concluded that this was why conservatism was suddenly becoming so nasty, as if this were a one-time thing.
Of course, as a historian, I wrote against this idea right away and have continued to do so. For one thing, pundits write the predictability of backlash out of the story: the feeling of dispossession is highly mobilizing for conservative ideology. But there was also this notion that somehow partisan identification is something written into ethnic groups’ DNA.
Geraldo Cadava: Which is kind of a surprising thing to believe. Politicians, journalists, pundits, heck, Americans in general, seek tension and drama and conflict in the stories they tell about American politics: culture wars, actual wars, friends and enemies, insiders and outsiders. A permanent majority would be a boring world for journalists, or anyone really, to inhabit! So why would they be so enamored with the idea? And why would they believe that the other party is going to roll over and play dead? After Goldwater lost, Nixon strategists were very clear-eyed about what had happened and what they needed to do differently in response. Partisans are, well, partisan! If they get their butts kicked in one election, they’re going to come back with something that they think will work better next time.
Another thing is that the whole idea of destiny—of permanent majorities—is absolute nonsense from the perspective of historians. The simplest definition of historical writing is that it explains change over time. What’s that legal disclaimer investment advisers have about past performance not being a guarantee of future results?
RP: Pundits are always wrong. It’s pretty astonishing. Even though the stories politicians, journalists, and pundits tell rely on tension and conflict, I have a theory about why elite media is, at the same time, perhaps contradictorily, desperate to find equilibria in American politics.
The key word here is elite. At some intuitive ideological level, they see themselves as gatekeepers of civility. This holds true for all kinds of elites, I should say: journalistic elites, governing elites, foreign policy elites. For people who are at the commanding heights of society, there’s an implicit terror of the cauldrons boiling just below society’s placid surface. Think about the sectional crisis of the nineteenth century, when the compromises that paper over what Lincoln called the instability of the “house divided” started to come undone. He believed that this nation could not remain half slave and half free. One elite response was the rise of my favorite party in American history, the Constitutional Union Party, whose campaign promise in 1860 was that they just wouldn’t talk about slavery. Problem solved! Or my favorite New York Times headline, from the day after the 1964 election: “White Backlash Doesn’t Develop.” Problem solved!
The majority-minority fantasy that one heard with Obama’s 2008 triumph was just the latest version of that: the notion that Obama had united all the nation’s racial conflicts in his very person. Credentialed technocratic experts of every ethnic extraction were in charge—again, gatekeepers of civility—and there wouldn’t even be enough resentful whites around to rock that boat, once the white population fell below 50 percent. Problem solved! We had overcome! Elites love that idea the most. You know: “national unity.”
Great Exceptions
GC: I’ve been increasingly thinking that the period between the civil rights movement and Obama’s eight years in office, culminating with Trump’s election, is a discrete period of American history—call it the end of the civil rights era. It’s like Jefferson Cowie’s idea about the period between the Great Depression and the 1970s as a “great exception,” when America seemed to be on a path to permanent progress when it came to economic democracy. This later period, from 1954 to 2016, was perhaps our great exception when it comes to progress toward multiracial democracy. I think that when people write history twenty, thirty years from now about the meaning of the 2016 election, they’ll talk about it as the end of this period where we told ourselves that we’re on a path to progress, and everything will be good—even if it wasn’t good for many who lived through it.
For people who are at the commanding heights of society, there’s an implicit terror of the cauldrons boiling just below society’s placid surface.
All these stories, even before Obama was elected, about how we are hurtling toward a more harmonious majority-minority future, were maybe how I was able to go to sleep at night during Trump’s presidency: this notion that it was a last gasp, the majority’s last stand—which is to say, they’re so angry because it’s about to actually happen. I started to tell myself, well, of course this transition was never going to be smooth. In fact, it would be violent; they’re not going to just cede power. But what has become clear is that the era that died in 2016 was an exception, and it was an illusion to think of Trump’s election as the last gasp, because this anger is the actual undercurrent of American history.
RP: Yes. Cowie’s argument is depressing but seems true: the midcentury moment of apparent unity toward a strong social-democratic, working-class-friendly New Deal was previously hindered by the depths of America’s ethnic and religious divisions, which only became less salient when immigration was almost entirely cut off with the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. And now we’re back to the 1920s—the tail end of the so-called Progressive Era, when government agents who sought to order American society through bureaucratization and professionalization depended on nativism, homophobia, eugenicist thinking about racial difference, and the criminalization of non-white Americans to bring their well-ordered society into existence.
GC: A hundred years ago, like today, minorities and immigrants—two separate groups that overlap but shouldn’t be confused as synonymous—didn’t always see themselves as coherent groups with aligned identities and interests. They haven’t spoken with a single voice. This is one problem with the thinking behind majority-minority futures. You can be a minority who wants to be part of the majority. The League of United Latin American Citizens, for example, was founded in 1929 in Corpus Christi, Texas. It was a group of largely Mexican American professionals who preached assimilation—not exactly as white, because they embraced their mixed-race status as Mexicans—but as Americans. Their members had to be American citizens, spoke English at their meetings, and the group adopted George Washington’s Prayer as their official prayer.
You can also be both the majority and the minority. I mean, my mom’s family is from Wales and Scotland, while my dad’s family is from the Philippines, Colombia, Panama, Mexico, and who knows where else. So, sure, call me Mexican American, which is what people assume when they hear my name and when I tell them that I’m from Tucson, Arizona, because that’s how most Hispanics from that part of the country identify. But I’m also Colombian, Panamanian, Filipino, all of it. Half Hispanic, but half not. So, when you think of someone’s ethnic identity and how it maps onto partisan politics, I think we just need to abandon any sense that any group should vote a certain way, in part because we’re always part of groups, but not fully; our relationship with the groups we belong to isn’t exclusive.
That’s fundamental to the Latino experience. Republicans and Democrats have argued that we’re natural Republicans and that we’re natural Democrats, but they’ve done so for their own political gain rather than as true statements of our character. We’ve always been both, and we’ve always been neither. Since the 1960s, most of us have voted for Democrats, but many of us every election have voted for Republicans. Moreover, the political beliefs of many of us were shaped more in Latin America than in the United States; only here do our beliefs get coded as liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, and only after years spent trying to become citizens—for those who do try to become citizens—do beliefs forged in Latin America but tweaked in this country have any effect on electoral politics. And of course, about half of us don’t participate in presidential elections; we have some of the lowest turnout rates of any American voters.
RP: We still sort of honor the “one drop” rule in some way when we say someone like you is “Hispanic.”
GC: Totally. Or Mexican, for that matter. It’s not that I have a problem with you calling me Mexican American. I’ll be Mexican American, that’s fine. But I think people’s senses of themselves are not always that clean.
That being said, their senses of their interests are pretty well-defined. This despite the fact that when Latinos or any group votes in a way that seems to defy expectations about them, they’re often told that they’re “voting against their own interests.” This is how Latino Republicans get dismissed as just a few individuals—the whitest, the richest, the most religious, those who don’t go to college—who’ve strayed from the flock. But they have a very good idea of what their interests are. They’re just not your interests as you see them.
RP: And then there’s also the supply side of the question, when politicians, entrepreneurially, try to say, “Hey guys, this is your interest, and I’m representing it! I’m your guy! Those other guys want to take you for granted.” Which is an old story too. The Republicans tried that very hard with African Americans. I write in Reaganland about how hard the Republicans worked to recruit Jesse Jackson, for instance. He was open to their entreaties, even giving the keynote address at a 1978 Republican National Committee meeting, basically chastising Democrats for taking black voters for granted. In fact, Republicans have tried to recruit different minority groups at different moments. A Mexican American treasurer of the United States, Katherine Ortega, was the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention in 1984. Jack Kemp was seen as someone who wanted to build a big-tent Republican Party. Pat Buchanan, not so much. In the George W. Bush era, they seemed to be working very hard to recruit Hispanic and Arab American voters before 9/11. Bush did especially well with Hispanics, his brother spoke fluent Spanish—
GC: Yeah, and Grandpa Bush infamously referred to Jeb’s kids as “the little brown ones.” And then, after the Republicans lost the 2012 presidential election, they did an “autopsy” of their defeat. The result saw the most powerful people in the Republican Party sharing a consensus that they needed to become an inclusive Republican Party, which meant opening their arms to Latinos, LGBTQ voters, black voters, Asian Americans, Native Americans. Otherwise, they said, we’re all going to get our asses kicked in 2016. And that’s why I think that so many of us—those of us who still believed that our country was hurtling toward a multiracial democracy—in 2014 and 2015 expected someone like Marco Rubio to be a leading candidate for the Republican nomination going into 2016. It seems now like our delusions about majority-minority futures extended to the Republican Party as well.
Taken for Granted
RP: But the Republicans didn’t do that, and they didn’t get their ass kicked. They do see themselves as trying to become a big-tent party, but not in the same way that Kemp imagined it, as a party that rejected xenophobia and homophobia and other phobias, that largely embraced the Democrats’ view of identity politics. Now, extraordinarily enough, Trump seems to be making gains with non-white voters. What happened? What are they doing? What does this mean?
GC: I wish I could give a succinct answer to this question that would make it immediately clear to readers what is going on. But the truth is that there are many different explanations. You know, there has been a lot of speculation about how Latinos are drawn to strongman figures like Donald Trump based on their experience of—
RP: Machismo!
GC: And caudillismo. These Latin American strongmen, known as caudillos, like, gosh, Pancho Villa in Mexico, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Carlos Castillo Armas in Guatemala, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, even Fidel Castro in Cuba—and you can’t always place these leaders on the left or the right. And maybe there’s something to that. I mean, we know for sure that Trump’s greatest gains among Latinos have been with non-college-educated males. I’ve always been a little bit wary of the strongman theory, though, because it seems to suggest that it’s in our DNA that Latinos are drawn to authoritarian leaders. Also, a lot of our recently elected officials are Latinas, so it’s not like we’re interested only in voting for men.
The feeling of dispossession is highly mobilizing for conservative ideology.
Another theory that’s been floated reminds me of Reagan’s quote: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” Latinos who before 2016 might have seen themselves as moderates, standing in the center of the American political spectrum, or somewhere slightly to the right of center, or even as not fully tuned-in to American politics—who maybe voted for Obama in 2008 or 2012 but then voted for Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020—have argued that the Democratic Party has become too beholden to the left and has gone off the rails. Democrats today are “too woke.” They’ve called for defunding the police, they’re obsessed with racial justice, they’re beholden to teachers’ unions and reject charter schools, they believe in open borders, and they want to live in a godless nation, with no protections for the unborn. None of it is quite true. Imagine telling someone fighting for immigrants’ rights that the Democratic Party has moved too far to the left. But these are the ideas that Republicans rely on to hammer Democrats. Many Latinos, meanwhile, may think they’ve always stood pat in the middle, even when they’ve moved to the right.
RP: What about this idea, akin to what you heard from Jesse Jackson in the 1970s, that Democrats take Hispanics or Mexican Americans or Puerto Rican Americans or Dominicans for granted?
GC: Absolutely! Taking voters for granted also stems from the lazy thinking in the idea that demography is destiny. Democratic candidates think that they can do whatever they want, and you’ll still vote for them, so they can continue to ignore your demands. For what it’s worth, I think that uncritical loyalty to any party is silly. Shouldn’t parties and their candidates continuously be fighting to convince voters that they stand for them, and then back up their words with action? Isn’t that how you earn trust and then votes? In the 1950s and 1960s, the first period I write about in my book The Hispanic Republican, the small number of Mexican American Republicans who really started this movement in California and Arizona, their main argument was, you know, “You have been blindly loyal to the Democratic Party ever since FDR came into office, and, yeah, he put more food on your table and helped pull you out of the Depression. But in the years since, what you have you gotten for that loyalty?” They were saying, “Democrats come around every four years looking for your vote, and then when the election’s over, they ignore you for four more years.” Their movement wouldn’t pay off until the Nixon years, but it represented the beginning of a Latino-driven Republican movement to loosen the grip the Democratic Party had had on Latino voters for a generation.
RP: Reagan had a line like that to black voters, that the Democrats just want to put you on a plantation and ignore you.
GC: Ouch, but, yeah, totally. It’s a pretty basic question: What has your loyalty gotten you? And now, many Latinos who’ve voted for Democrats are asking that same question. Democrats talk about comprehensive immigration reform all the time, they say. Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s immigration policies haven’t always looked all that different than his predecessor’s. So, instead of talking about what they are and are not doing on immigration—or inflation, for that matter—Biden’s campaign ads targeting Latinos focus on Trump’s threat to democracy and his racist remarks about the blood of immigrants poisoning the country. Ugly stuff, but not the same as a positive statement about Biden’s own accomplishments.
So yeah, I think taking Latinos for granted is a big part of it. The Biden campaign doesn’t seem to be taking Latinos for granted this time, but we’ll see if their efforts pay off. I’ve also talked to many Latino Republicans who say that Donald Trump has brought about changes within the Republican Party that they are drawn to; namely, he proved that you didn’t have to kowtow to the Democratic Party’s rhetoric on immigration in order to appeal to Latinos, since Latino Americans also support immigration restrictions. This, in addition to Trump’s active courting of Latino evangelicals, business owners, and charter school proponents. Today, many Latino Republicans reflect on the George W. Bush years, when they thought that a Republican could actually win the Latino vote. As you mentioned earlier, Bush was supposed to be the answer for the Republican Party. But now Latino Republicans tell me that Bush was “Republican lite.”
It’s been shown over and over again that immigration is not the most important issue to Latinos. These same Latino Republicans that I was telling you about who look at Bush as Republican lite also argue that the Democrats fundamentally misunderstand Latinos’ views of immigration. Latin American immigrants don’t want to come to the United States to be lumped together as part of a minority group called “Latinos,” they say. Instead, they want to come to the United States to get jobs, be self-sufficient, provide for their families, ensure that their children get the best education possible, perhaps open a business or buy a home. For many Latin American immigrants, the United States is still a land of opportunity. Whether or not they get here and find that all those dreams are ephemeral, they don’t really exist, whatever, that’s still the belief. That’s still the reason motivating their move to the United States.
RP: Can you also speak to Democrats’ theories that Trump and the Republicans’ have been cunningly manipulating Spanish-language media like Univision? Or Radio Mambí in Miami in 2020? When Univision interviewed Trump last fall, there was an uproar about the network’s alleged right turn. And apparently Spanish-language radio has been airing a bunch of QAnon-adjacent content?
GC: Yeah, Democrats have been kind of busting their ass to appeal to Latinos based on the idea that Republicans and their allies are spreaders of disinformation. Whenever and wherever disinformation is happening, we should combat it, for sure. I do think there’s a risk, though, that conservative talking points get dismissed as disinformation even when they’re really just articulations of a different political viewpoint. I also worry that an overemphasis on disinformation makes it seem like Latinos are uniquely likely to believe anything they hear, which can also play into racist stereotypes about Latinos as gullible, unthinking, uncritical consumers of information.
RP: Then there’s the classic story of how an ethnic group becomes more conservative—or, in some historians’ terms, more “white”: they’re climbing up the class ladder, and they begin focusing on keeping what they have, partaking in the politics of homeownership. Valuing “stability”—a phrase we might classify as a racial dog whistle if a Republican politician said it. I have a story about that. I parked my car in the wrong place. It got towed. I had to go to the impound lot on Clark Street in Chicago. We struck up a conversation with the guy behind the counter. He made it clear that he liked Trump—“even though I’m Mexican,” he said, because “this immigration thing is out of control.” And then he said, “Did you know that they’re giving these migrants $9,000 the minute they come here?”
GC: I’ve heard that same figure, but I don’t know where it comes from.
RP: Maybe there was some study that found it costs $9,000 to administer the processing of each migrant. Those are the conspiratorial leaps you hear all the time studying right-wing politics. There was the idea that a law passed in the 1950s to fund mental health facilities in Alaska was really to build mental hospitals to lock up conservatives, like they did with dissidents in Siberia. It’s a conspiracy theory based on scraps of real information and also real anxieties. And here’s this guy, who maybe owns this lot, or maybe he’s a manager, or maybe he’s making $20 an hour, $15 an hour. But he was very seduced by a traditional politics of grievance: the government is taking care of those other people and leaving him behind. A story in a book written someday called How Mexican Americans Became White, which is an old story. One of the points David Roediger makes in The Wages of Whiteness is that, basically, the way the dumped-upon Irish in places like nineteenth century Philadelphia “became white”—how they proved they belonged in the dominant group—was by doing the most American thing of all, which is beat up on black people, the dumpees of last resort.
It’s Complicated
GC: Yes, black people are often the most stigmatized by Latinos as well, which is particularly painful for Afro-Latinos, who don’t feel themselves to be fully accepted either by Latinos or African Americans. I want to return to immigration. Republicans talk about electrified border fences and alligator moats, and how they’d shoot migrants dead if they thought they could get away with it. But conservative Latinos haven’t given up on recruiting Latin American immigrants to join their party. When I was interviewing the chair of the Republican Party in El Paso, who is a Mexican American guy, he talked to me about how he personally shows up at every single naturalization ceremony in town and hands out pamphlets about what the Republican Party stands for. To me, that was a clear signal that Republicans also think they can win support from immigrants who naturalize. They don’t believe that all immigrants are ready to become loyal Democrats, but they do draw a line between citizens and the undocumented, which is why they recently rebranded 2020’s “Latinos for Trump” campaign as “Latino Americans for Trump.”
We have to kick up dust and ask new questions in order to understand this new era.
RP: Still, it’s interesting how many Republicans presume Democrats only want immigrants to get more people in the country who will vote for Democrats, and that they’re only coming here for the $9,000 checks, and all the free stuff, and they can’t assimilate like their people did. It’s so defeatist. Cubans, many of whom are refugees from communism, have been overwhelmingly Republican. There doesn’t seem to be much discourse that these refugees from communist Venezuela might be potential Republicans. They insist Biden is letting in zillions of Venezuelans because he thinks they’re automatic Democrats.
GC: Yeah, isn’t that crazy? I mean, they’re not “natural Democrats.” Venezuelans, Colombians are very open to Trump and appeals from the Republican Party. But what many non-Latino Republicans have always done, in contrast with the individual from El Paso whom I just mentioned, is paint immigrants with the same broad brush. When it comes to Latin Americans, they’re all, somehow, undocumented Mexicans! Even if immigrants might be ready to line up behind them, Republicans sometimes just can’t help getting in their own way.
You know, Trump would say, after Hurricane Maria, when there were all these conversations about Puerto Rican statehood, Show me that we can get two Republican senators, and we’ll bring in Puerto Rico as a state. There’s a Republican fear that if Puerto Rico became a state, there would be two more Democratic senators. But Puerto Rican conservatives don’t think that’s true. They think that if Puerto Rico becomes a state they would have a fighting chance of electing Republican senators to represent the island—
RP: But—they send their rapists! Didn’t you hear that?
GC: Yeah, like I said, the Republicans can’t help but trip all over themselves with their racism.
RP: Right, so a lot of people will read this and tear their hair out and say, “How is this not an impediment to a person with a Spanish surname? How could they say, ‘this is the party for me’?”
GC: Well, every time Trump would say something, Democrats would respond with something like, “This is outrageous! I can’t believe it! This person is so beyond the pale, how are we even entertaining his ideas?” But I think Democrats’ outrage about the things that come out of Trump’s mouth has gotten them nowhere. And while Trump was saying all of his ridiculous things about Mexican immigrants, he was, or his surrogates were, visiting evangelical churches, visiting Latino business groups to tell them how he was slashing financial regulations, how homeownership rates and median income among Latinos were up and rates of unemployment were down.
It was almost a split screen, where Trump would say crazy shit about Mexicans at the same time that he would put in a sincere effort to win Latino voters. And I think that, unfortunately, Democrats only paid attention to all of the outrageous stuff he said in front of a camera, while ignoring the effort he was actually putting in to appeal to Latinos. Something that’s pretty prevalent among a lot of Trump supporters—not just Latinos, but certainly many Latinos—is their willingness to excuse a lot of his words by saying that he’s the person who most represents their values, when it comes to the economy, education and charter schools, and “religious liberty.” Those with partisan identities that have baked over time also just find it unimaginable that they could ever vote for a Democrat. Now, it’s certainly always struck me as curious that many Latino evangelicals think that Trump is their mouthpiece given all of his personal failings.
RP: Cyrus was a pagan, though, and was sent by God to save the Jews.
GC: Exactly right. He chooses the vessel.
RP: It gets back to this fact that people are complicated. And the whole demographic inevitability thing is—well, the word we use is reductionist. People would love to believe that the world is this simple.
GC: When in fact everything’s up in the air. Journalists and think tank types have begun to question some of their fundamental assumptions. The fact that they’ve done so is a source of some dissatisfaction for many on the left, in part because it’s uncomfortable to have some of their core tenets about the relationship between race, class, and politics called into question. But the only way out is through; we have to kick up dust and ask new questions in order to understand this new era. I think we also need to do this in a way that doesn’t overcorrect, or pull a one-eighty, by simply saying, “Oh, Latinos are now conservative,” or, “What was left is now right,” and vice versa; it won’t do us any good to simply replace the old characters with new ones.