Trump’s Re-election Defines a New Era of American Politics

The Obama-Romney race in 2012 was the last in a familiar pattern in U.S. politics, which has since become defined by Donald Trump’s conservative populism.

When Barack Obama won re-election in 2012, it seemed to mark the beginning of a new era of Democratic dominance, one propelled by the rise of a new generation of young, secular and nonwhite voters.

With hindsight, the 2012 election looks more like the end of an era: the final triumph of the social movements of the 1960s over the once-dominant Reagan Republicans.

Instead, it’s the three Trump elections — in 2016, 2020 and 2024 — that look as if they have the makings of a new era of politics, one defined by Donald J. Trump’s brand of conservative populism.

Whether you call it a realignment or not, American politics hasn’t been the same since Mr. Trump won his party’s nomination. The two parties clash over areas of former consensus, even as they reach détente on issues that defined the polarizing 2004 and 2012 elections. It can be disorienting for anyone who came of age before Mr. Trump. It can even feel like American politics has been turned upside down.

Until Mr. Trump, there was a lot about American politics that you could take for granted. The meaning of the two parties seemed clear. Republicans represented Reagan’s three-legged stool of small-government fiscal conservatism, the religious right and foreign policy hawks. Democrats represented the working class, change and the causes of liberal activists.

Every four years, the two parties mostly litigated the same fights over the same issues. They rehashed arguments over war and diplomacy; entitlement spending and tax cuts; “family values” and the social movements of the 1960s; or trade and free enterprise versus labor and protecting jobs. It led to predictable demographic divides and recurring, long-term electoral trends.

That all changed when Mr. Trump came down the escalator. On some issues, it can even seem as if the parties have switched places. Today, Mr. Trump champions the working class, rails against elites, strives to protect American jobs and criticizes traditional U.S. foreign policy, all while Democrats defend the establishment, norms and the old foreign policy consensus.

Longstanding areas of bipartisan consensus have suddenly become fiercely contested. Immigration, free trade, America’s postwar alliances and even America’s support for democracy at home and abroad have all become defining conflicts between the two parties during the Trump era, rather than areas of agreement. Yet at the same time, the two parties seem to have reached a truce on the most bitter fights of the Bush-Obama era, like the war in Iraq, Social Security and same-sex marriage.

Much of the Republican Party’s old establishment — like the Cheneys, the Romneys, Paul Ryan — is now without a home. At the same time, many former Obama supporters, from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Elon Musk, suddenly find themselves near the center of Trump world.

This new partisan conflict has led to very different electoral coalitions. In 2016, Mr. Trump made enormous gains among white voters without a college degree, including in Northern states, where Republicans had not been able to sustain breakthroughs. Since then, he has made even larger gains among young, Black, Hispanic and Asian voters — and did so by representing everything Democrats thought these groups opposed.

After three Trump elections, the partisan gap between white and nonwhite voters is now smaller than at any time since the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The partisan generation gap has fallen by two-thirds. Perhaps most strikingly, the old class divide between rich and poor and capital and labor has seemingly vanished.

The exit polls found Mr. Trump losing voters making over $100,000 a year, while winning among voters making less — including those making less than $50,000. If anything, 20th-century fights are emerging as plausible areas of bipartisan consensus, with Republicans seemingly receptive to labor and spending on infrastructure, while Democrats seem more open to deregulation and supply-side remedies to problems like housing and energy.

In place of the old class conflict, there’s a new educational divide. Before Mr. Trump, people voted about the same way with or without a degree. Now, the gap between voters with or without a degree is as large as the income gap was back in 2012 — and all the way back to the dawn of survey research.

In some cases, Trump-era electoral shifts can be interpreted as an acceleration of longer-term trends; in other cases, they’re new developments. Either way, these trends have brought American politics to a very different place.

The ‘R’ word

Whether all of this counts as a “realignment” depends on how one defines the term. A realignment usually means one party obtains a significant political advantage for decades. By this measure, the Trump elections plainly fall short. Republicans barely hold any meaningful advantage; even if they do, it’s not at all clear whether it will even last four years.

Nonetheless, the Trump elections have two features of a realignment: They changed the basic political conflict between the two parties, and they led to corresponding changes in the two coalitions. These changes aren’t minor and they’re not just because of the singular force of Mr. Trump, either. Like previous realignments, it is part of a broader political change occurring across Western democracies, where the remnants of the old industrial political order is being supplanted by something different.

In country after country, the parties of the old industrial left, like Labour in Britain or the Socialists in France, have bled working-class support to a new kind of conservative populism, driven by a new set of issues, like immigration, trade and national sovereignty.

These issues don’t fit on the old left-right ideological spectrum. In fact, many right-wing parties now embrace the welfare state. In each case, however, populist conservatives argue that elites have used democratic and transnational institutions to advance their own interests and causes at the expense of ordinary people. These political movements have thus far struggled to build lasting political majorities, but their critique has nonetheless been the most potent message in politics.

The parties of the center-left, on the other hand, increasingly depend on the support of a new class of affluent college graduates. These parties may still yearn to champion the working class, but this hasn’t been their animating force for decades. Instead, they draw their energy from idealistic, college-educated progressive activists, whose cultural and economic views often alienate working-class voters. Even when these parties do aim to help working-class voters, their policies don’t pack an electoral punch. Instead, their electoral fortunes depend on forming coalitions with classically liberal but traditional conservatives, who oppose the populist right on trade, immigration, foreign policy and democracy.

The transition away from industrial-era class politics has been ongoing since the 1950s and 1960s, when postwar affluence and an expanded safety net mostly satisfied a century of demands from industrial labor. Soon thereafter, the rise of a new generation of college-educated youth activists helped bring a new set of issues to the fore — from civil rights and women’s rights to Vietnam — that helped shatter the New Deal coalition.

This was the last great upheaval in American politics. In a sense, everything one could take for granted about politics before Mr. Trump came into place by this time or soon thereafter. The parties were redefined; even the legs of Reagan’s three-legged stool can be recast as opposition to the 1960s cultural revolution, the antiwar movement and the Great Society. The fallout set the next five decades of electoral fights and trends into motion.

In hindsight, Mr. Obama’s victory over Mr. Romney was the culmination of this era. For one last election, Democrats and Republicans took up their usual positions and relitigated the fights of the era. In the end, Mr. Obama won by a modest margin, but it nonetheless seemed to offer a decisive verdict on the era as a whole: Liberals won.

By 2012, America was a multiracial, secular, liberal-leaning society. Less than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act, America had elected a Black liberal president. It would soon, it was presumed, elect a female president. Same-sex marriage was popular, and it would soon be the law of the land. Marijuana was next. In just a few years, demographic shifts promised to turn Mr. Obama’s modest victory into a lasting Democratic majority.

This liberal triumph in the culture war came against the backdrop of the financial crisis and the war in Iraq, which simultaneously dealt enormous blows to the Reagan-era consensus for smaller government, deregulation and a neoconservative foreign policy. With Mr. Obama’s victory, the dominant post-1960s conservative political coalition was finished.

Four years later, Mr. Trump destroyed what remained of Reagan’s three-legged stool and redefined the Republican Party around a new set of issues. He seized the mantles of populism, change and the working class, by campaigning on newer issues: trade and China, immigration, energy and the excesses of a newly dominant college-educated, liberal, “politically correct” or “woke” left. In the end, the Democrats lost their core message and voters who they imagined were part of their base.

While Republicans didn’t win in a realignment-like electoral landslide, Mr. Trump’s conservative populism won the policy debate decisively enough. On border security, domestic energy production, trade, China or deregulation, Democrats are moving toward the core of Mr. Trump’s agenda. The two major exceptions — abortion and democracy — were Republican self-inflicted wounds, wounds that at once prevented a more decisive Republican victory and obscured the extent that conservative populism had seized the center of American politics.

Whether you call it a realignment or not, it’s a new era of politics.