America’s Blue-Red Divide Is About to Get Starker
The draft Supreme Court opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion presents a major setback for reproductive freedom in America and offers a potential jolt to the upcoming midterm elections. But it also illuminates another, deeper phenomenon in American politics: the urgency and ambition of the Republican drive to lock into law the cultural priorities of its preponderantly white, Christian, and older electoral coalition at a moment of rapid demographic change.
The fundamental divide in our politics today is between those voters and places most comfortable with the demographic and cultural changes remaking 21st-century America and those most hostile to them—what I’ve called the Democratic “coalition of transformation” and the Republican “coalition of restoration.” A decision overturning Roe v. Wade—especially on the sweeping grounds in Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that was leaked to Politico—would sharpen the confrontation between these two coalitions.
[Adam Serwer: Alito’s plan to repeal the 20th century]
Alito’s draft, if finalized, would place the GOP-appointed Supreme Court majority firmly on a collision course with the priorities and preferences of the racially and culturally diverse younger generations born since 1980, who now constitute a majority of all Americans and who overwhelmingly support abortion rights. It would amplify the already accelerating divergence in the basic civil rights and liberties available to red-state versus blue-state Americans—and not just regarding abortion. It would also solidify the transition toward a political system in which culture, not class, is the principal dividing line between the parties.
That last shift, which President Donald Trump hastened of the most culturally conservative white Americans, has fueled the increasing volatility and belligerence of modern politics—and it only stands to intensify. Lynn Vavreck, a political-science professor at UCLA, told me she believes that attitudes about cultural change and American identity have already emerged as the principal point of separation between the parties, displacing the New Deal economic issues that dominated for decades after the Great Depression and World War II. But Vavreck says a decision overturning will keep abortion and other social issues center stage and cement the transition toward a polarized politics focused on cultural differences.
