Contemporary American Politics Research Articles

This article examines the political themes in Cavell’s philosophy through a reading of the film Gaslight in the context of contemporary American politics. It demonstrates how Cavell’s ideas offer valuable insights into gender politics, fascism, and propaganda in American society. The article proceeds in three sections, first reviewing Cavell’s ontology of film and genre to elucidate his claim that film embodies scepticism. Next, it analyses gaslighting in the film as an enactment of gendered politics of scepticism and explores Cavell’s resources for responding to it. Lastly, it investigates the political implications of gaslighting, particularly in light of its association with post-truth politics, using Cavell’s interpretation as a philosophical framework to understand instances like Donald Trump’s manipulation of America.

ABSTRACT: This article offers an analysis of contemporary American politics exploring white working-class Americans’ support for Donald Trump. The article draws on a definition of media organizations as people’s organizations or civil society groups and organizations from democratic populism’s political variant. The definition highlights the significant role that media organizations play in shaping political and social outcomes through choices media organizations make about how to present or frame information. The article contrasts political democratic populism as a general approach to the study of politics and the media with the approach from cultural studies drawing broadly on Marx. Michael Denning’s masterful account of the history of cultural studies provides the basis for discussion of the treatment of the media in cultural studies.

Recent research suggests that contemporary American society is marked by heightened hostile racial rhetoric, alongside increasing salience of White nationalists who justify an ideology of racial hierarchy with claims of biological superiority. Media coverage of such genetics research has often emphasized a deterministic (or causal) narrative by suggesting that specific genes directly increase negative outcomes and highlighting reported genetic differences between racial groups. Across two experimental studies, we examine the effect of the media's portrayal of scientific findings linking genes with negative health and behavioral outcomes on measures of racism. We find that deterministic genetic attributions for health and behavioral outcomes can lead to more negative racial out-group attitudes. Importantly, we also investigate potential interventions in the presentation of genetic science research. Our research has implications for understanding racial attitudes and racialized ideology in contemporary American politics, as well as for framing scientific communication in intergroup contexts.

This article explores two questions. What generates the political division over climate change policy in the United States? How is the division over climate change policy related to the broader polarization of contemporary American politics? I argue that the geographies of America’s dual economy—the knowledge economy and the carbon economy—and exposure to the climate crisis intersect to generate a new axis of conflict, which I call the carbon–climate cleavage. This cleavage produces political division over climate change and provides materialist elements that accompany the sociocultural factors that shape contemporary polarization. I demonstrate the existence of the cleavage and its impact using data on economic geography, political attitudes on climate change policy, and support for Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. The empirical analysis indicates that carbon economy communities oppose climate change policy and support Trump, while knowledge economy residents support climate change policy and oppose Trump.

Partisan sorting in residential environments is an enduring feature of contemporary American politics, but little research has examined partisan segregation individuals experience in activity spaces through their daily activities. Relying on advances in spatial computation and global positioning system data on everyday mobility flows collected from smartphones, we measure experienced partisan segregation in two ways: place-level partisan segregation based on the partisan composition of its daily visitors and community-level experienced partisan segregation based on the segregation level of places visited by its residents. We find that partisan segregation experienced in places varies across different geographic areas, location types, and time periods. Moreover, partisan segregation is distinct from experienced segregation by race and income. We also find that partisan segregation individuals experience is relatively lower when they visit places beyond their residential areas, but partisan segregation in residential space and activity space is strongly correlated. Residents living in predominantly black, liberal, low-income, non-immigrant, more public transit-dependent, and central city communities tend to experience a higher level of partisan segregation.

Reckoning with Slavery has several simultaneous goals: to foreground numeracy in the early modern articulation of racial difference, to rethink Western modernity as a product of Black erasure, and to center the commodification of African and African-descended people in the history of capitalism. At its core, though, the book seeks to provide an intellectual and social history of enslaved women as clear-eyed analysts of the system of economic extraction built on their childbearing capabilities. To follow the strategic choices that Black women made within hereditary slavery, then, is to witness the theorization of racial capitalism in real time.Writing with insight and subtlety, Jennifer Morgan knits together the disparate historiographies of “racial ideology, economics, and the political lives of enslaved people” (17). Morgan, who has been at the forefront of Black feminist scholarship of the early modern Atlantic since the publication of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004), carries forward many of the commitments of that original work, while also expanding the field of inquiry to range across the Portuguese, Spanish, and English empires. Readers familiar with the earlier work will notice other departures as well. If fantastical depictions of nursing West African mothers had previously undergirded European race-making, the focus here shifts to Africans’ supposed inability to calculate correctly. The quantifying tendencies gathering in European thought under the umbrella of “political arithmetic” lent themselves to theories of African deficiency and were then deployed to justify the enslavement that followed. Europe's “newly consolidating ideas about wealth, nationhood, and population” presumed the potential value of African women's future reproduction, positioning the Black womb as always already commodified and in the service of colonial ambitions (111). Morgan makes it impossible to unsee this fixation within European political economic writing, and in doing so she advances an argument for recognizing capitalism and anti-Black racism as mutually constitutive.Morgan further entangles capitalism and race-making by foregrounding kinship, which was central to the formulation of enslavement as a hereditary condition but also at the core of a legal regime of private property that facilitated the intergenerational transfer of wealth. Generations of white prosperity would come to hinge on generations of unborn Black children transformed from “kin to inventory” (107). As Europeans denied that the affective ties of kinship held any meaning for African people, they invented another arena for articulating racial difference and an intellectual rationale for shifting enslaved women's children “out of the conceptual landscape of families and onto the balance sheets of slave traders” (134). Here Morgan suggests that racialized slavery has shaped the modern boundaries of public and private. As constructed in the early modern West, the private family (insulated from state power and outside the market) relied on its juxtaposition to enslaved Black mothers and children classified by law as property, plunged into the market, and denied recognition as a family altogether. As with her discussion of political economy, Morgan convincingly charts a new genealogy for long-studied topics too often construed as having nothing to do with Atlantic slavery.Consistent with an “archival turn” within the field of slavery studies, Reckoning with Slavery contemplates the possibilities for excavating a social history of enslaved women from sources that were designed to erase them. Morgan pauses on the surprisingly small number of slave ship registers that recorded sex ratios: Shouldn't the precise numbers of men and women have been important to the captains, investors, and insurers who engineered the transatlantic commerce in human beings? Morgan suggests that the failure to record enslaved women must have been deliberate, especially in light of shipboard practices that very much recognized women as a distinctive category of captive cargo. By contrast, in the service of the broader ideological project of rendering Africans kinless and devoid of familial ties, shipboard recordkeeping chose not to see women. For historians seeking empirical certainty, then, “the very data through which specificity can be achieved are part of the technology that renders Africans and their descendants outside the scope of modernity” (43).Where did this leave enslaved women as they made their way onto New World plantations? African women arrived as “economic thinker[s]” familiar with gendered systems of exchange and valuation that structured internal commerce within West Africa and that were robust in Atlantic-facing ports (3). In other words, enslaved women had tools at their disposal for confronting the logic of commodification and for calculating risk as they contemplated rebellion and fugitivity, as well as the political alliances they might form and the children they might (or might not) bear. The book's final chapter on “enslavement, race making, and refusal” situates Black women within the “nascent political culture of the Black radical tradition” through their own theorizing and their resistive actions (208). Child-rearing occupied a crucial space in enslaved women's politics. How could it be otherwise for those whose relationships of kinship were someone else's relationships of property? Whether embracing the affective ties of motherhood or refusing to enrich their enslavers through reproductive labor, “women's fertility and fertility control under enslavement must be understood as a fundamental conduit for the production of an oppositional consciousness among the enslaved” (222).Reckoning with Slavery requires close reading: its arguments are as complex as they are ambitious and urgent. Morgan recognizes race and capitalism as historically situated and contingent phenomena, and their interactions are multidirectional and at times indeterminate. This perhaps leads to an overreliance on the word alchemy as shorthand for processes of historical change that we can see but not wholly grasp. The term is not meant to obfuscate, but it attests to the fundamental challenges of explaining how the modern world came into being within the crucible of Atlantic slavery. Indeed, this history has erupted to the surface of contemporary American politics, and as Morgan has written since her book's publication, the lamentable US Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson reproduces slavery's investment in the womb, as it intrudes on what is rightfully private and pits the state's interest in a hypothetical unborn child against actual living women's bodily autonomy.

AbstractIncreasing partisanship is a well‐studied feature of contemporary American politics, but how that partisanship is reflected in executive‐branch administration is relatively under‐examined. This article addresses this question in the context of centralized regulatory review, exploring existing theories of central clearance as a tool of ideological alignment or as a deregulatory mechanism. I first corroborate Haeder and Yackee's finding that ideological misalignment between the president and promulgating agencies does not affect review outcomes. Additionally, while Haeder and Yackee find that more liberal agencies' rules are changed more often, I instead find that the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is more likely to request changes under Democratic than under Republican presidents, complicating the possibility of OIRA review as a deregulatory mechanism. These results suggest the need for new theories of the role of regulatory review in the context of the administrative presidency.

Despite the multiplicity of institutions contributing to the decision-making process in the United States of America, they interact to crystallize positions regarding international and strategic situations. The formulation of the national security policy depends on a number of institutions that complement each other in order to achieve an advanced security situation. Thus, the decision reflects the process of interaction of the existing regulatory institutions. This is because the essence of the national security and achieving its requirements also stems from the existence of a coherent system of shared beliefs and principles in the American society. Besides, these elements are the bases for achieving security. Researing about Brent Scowcroft’s role in meeting the requiremnets of the united States’ national security, it has been found necessary to include two pivots to the study. The first pivot disscusses the requirements of achieving the national security of the United States of America, whereas the second pivot tackles Brent Scowcroft’s role, through the mechanisms of the national security council, in achieving the national security requirements in particular within the decision-making process in the history of the contemporary American political system. As for the type of the study, it is a historical study within the axis of contemporary American politics, while the methodology of the study came within the scientific analysis and according to the narrative and descriptive historical approach. This is because the research problem emphasizes the identification of the security and military requirements in order to achieve the integration of the national security of the United States. Finally, the conclusions have verified the National Security Adviser’s prominent role of during the Scowcroft era, in conductng partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the decision-making process. The latter has said to affect the overall foreign policy and achieve the national security requirements of the United States of America at the end of the last century.

ABSTRACT W.E.B. Du Bois’ theorization of the ‘wages of whiteness’ has factored prominently into recent scholarship examining the roots of Trumpism and resurgent right-wing movements in the United States. How might the ‘wages of whiteness’ shed light on contemporary anti-environmental politics? To provide insight into this question, I put Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America, as well as more recent work in whiteness studies, into conversation with environmental and social histories of the mid-nineteenth century frontier. I observe that struggles over access to and control over land and natural resources, and anger over exposure to polluted air and water, were central to class and racial formation during an historical period that continues to weigh heavily on contemporary American politics. I argue that understanding the origins and evolution of the natural wages of whiteness can help us develop strategies for combating anti-environmentalism and mobilizing in pursuit of environmental justice.

Polarization often happens asymmetrically. One political actor radicalizes, and the results reverberate through the political system. This is how the deep divisions in contemporary American politics arose: the Republican Party radicalized. Republican officeholders began to use extreme legislative tactics. Republican voters became animated by contempt for their political rivals and by the defense of their own social superiority. The party as a whole launched a wide-ranging campaign of voter suppression and its members endorsed violence in the face of electoral defeat. This paper is about how such asymmetric polarization affects everyone else’s obligations. My core claim is that two kinds of relationship – civic friendship and non-subordination – underpin critical democratic norms. Republican misbehavior has severed cross-partisan civic friendships. Their authoritarianism forfeits their claim to non-subordination. The former means that non-Republicans need not justify policy on public grounds. The latter undercuts Republicans’ claim to enjoy minority vetoes when out of power and it gives their rivals reason to disobey the laws that Republicans make when they are in power. More generally, when one political actor contravenes the proper norms of democratic politics, their opposition is not bound by those norms.

Studies conducted between the 1950s and 1970s found that the principles embodied in the First Amendment constituted a “clear norm” endorsed by large majorities of community leaders and virtually all legal practitioners and scholars. This consensus has since weakened under the strain of arguments that racist slurs, epithets, and other forms of expression that demean social identities are an intolerable affront to egalitarian values. Guided by the theory that norms are transmitted through social learning, we show that these developments have spurred a dramatic realignment in public tolerance of offensive expression about race, gender, and religious groups. Tolerance of such speech has declined overall, and its traditional relationships with ideology, education, and age have diminished or reversed. Speech subject to changing norms of tolerance ranges from polemic to scientific inquiry, the fringes to the mainstream of political discourse, and left to right, raising profound questions about the scope of permissible debate in contemporary American politics.

The Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline is one of the most polarised examples of contemporary American energy politics. The pipeline policy process has not been stable, so it should be analysed over time via a holistic, historical view of interacting dimensions. Robert Cox’s theoretical notions of the “materials–ideas–institutions” balance are drawn upon to understand how actors’ motivations behind policy development were re-shaped through temporal processes over nearly two decades. A critical feature identified is how such interacting dimensions became significant according to specific US presidential administrations: each, in turn, shifting the direction of decision-making around KXL. The article’s originality lies in operationalising the theory to give an alternative, dynamic explanation for policy motivations around the KXL while also establishing a novel theoretical lens to generally view such policy development.

The divide between college graduates and non-college graduates is an increasingly important political cleavage. In this paper, I document the rise of the diploma divide on the micro and macro levels. First, I use ANES and CES data to assess the relationships between educational attainment, partisanship, and vote choice. I find that post-2000, educational attainment is an increasingly strong predictor of partisanship and, in turn, vote choice. I demonstrate that differences in racial and culture war attitudes between college graduates and non-graduates drive the diploma divide. I then show that the increasing salience of education at the individual level has reshaped the macro-level political alignment. Between 2000 and 2020, the percentage of a county’s population with a BA is one of the strongest predictors of changes in vote share, with highly educated counties becoming more Democratic and less educated counties becoming more Republican. Finally, I demonstrate that county-level educational context conditions the effect of degree-holding on individual-level behavior. Having a college education is a stronger predictor of Democratic partisanship in counties where a larger proportion of the population holds a college degree. Overall, these results demonstrate the diploma divide is one of the dominant political cleavages in contemporary American politics.

Is the world getting too ridiculous for satire? If the news of the day all seems ridiculous, do acts of ridicule lose their point? On the contrary, James Caron makes a powerful argument about why and how satire remains relevant in the postmodern world and even in contemporary American politics. In Caron’s terms, satire’s continued relevance is best understood when satire is conceived not as political discourse per se but as a comic counterpart to political discourse, the “comic public sphere.” In other words, satire is a primarily aesthetic phenomenon but with a crucial political and social role to play in protecting communicative rationality within public discourse. It’s an argument that should be of interest to scholars in many fields, including political communications as well as literary studies. But in the course of developing this highly topical and interdisciplinary argument, Caron also develops terminological distinctions that could bring greater clarity to the book’s home field of humor studies—or, as it perhaps should be called in light of Caron’s definitions, the field of comic discourse studies.In his introduction, Caron begins with an intriguing example—the case of a protester being arrested for laughing at Jeff Sessions’s confirmation hearing for attorney general. Caron treats this event as a kind of quasi-official certification by the federal government of his book’s thesis, which he states with admirable concision and clarity: “Satire functions as comic political speech and signifies the presence of the comic public sphere” (2). Critically, by “comic public sphere,” Caron does not mean a subdivision of the set of rational discourses described by Habermas as the public sphere but instead “a parodic counterpart” to that classic public sphere. In drawing upon the ridiculous and the ludicrous, satire (especially postmodern satire) does not explicitly practice the distinctly rational discourse associated with the “public sphere,” and postmodern satire questions the possibility of a universal and transcendently objective rational discourse. Nevertheless, the comic public sphere asserts the norms of the classic public sphere by exposing and assaulting the degradation of reasoned discourse into “alternative facts,” conspiracy theories, and screeds. The comic public sphere reaches further back than the neoclassical public sphere, as Caron links satire to the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, or “speaking truth no matter the consequences” (2). Caron’s book goes on to explore how laughter and the comic may be particularly well suited to achieve parrhesia in a postmodern environment.Caron lays firm foundations for this argument in the three chapters of part 1, “Satire and the Public Sphere.” In Chapter 1, “Defining Satire,” Caron locates satire in a “particular neighborhood” within “The Comic,” with “The Comic” understood as “a general discourse of and about the domain of the laughable” (20), including both the ridiculous (which invites us to laugh at the objects of the discourse) and the ludicrous (which invites us to laugh with the objects of the discourse) (21). By playing with social codes, this discourse has “the potential for . . . critique (and possibly subversion)” (22). Satire’s “particular neighborhood” encompasses “those comic artifacts that actualize the potential and distill it within a laughter-provoking presentation” (22). More specifically, satire is a comic discourse structured by two paradoxes—it is both serious and nonserious and is both a transgressive act of verbal violence and an act that may encourage peaceful social change. The latter is particularly evident in the recent phenomenon of “truthiness satire,” mock news that criticizes fake news (23). Truthiness satire can work as “a reverse discourse, rescripting anti-public sphere discourse into comic public sphere discourse” (23).The definitions in chapter 1 are predicated on the continued relevance of Habermasian discourse theory in this postmodern era, for which Caron makes the case in Chapter 2, “The Comic Public Sphere.” Caron sees the Enlightenment values of the Habermasian public sphere as not wholly antithetical to postmodernism. For one thing, the Enlightenment and postmodernism share a commitment to the epistemic and social importance of dialogue. But today’s public discourses take place in different, often digital, public spaces, and so “digimodernism” mediates between the Enlightenment and postmodernism. Within the digital public sphere, postmodernism insists on skepticism about claims of a universal or monolithic truth, but it does not deny all truths. Satire proves to be an effective vehicle for postmodern skepticism—which, for Caron, tends to come from a particular political perspective. He finds that “satire today implies support for . . . the universalism of human rights supplemented by an insistence on respect for difference” (50). Stephen Colbert (in character as a conservative pundit) has said that “the truth has a well-known liberal bias,” and Caron seems to see an analogous (or perhaps concomitant) bias in satire.Colbert’s coinage, “truthiness,” comes to the fore in the book’s crucial third chapter, “Truthiness Satire and the Comic Public Sphere.” Near the beginning of this chapter, Caron makes a particularly instructive distinction between his own work and Geoffrey Baym’s pioneering work on “fake news” satirists like Colbert and Jon Stewart. Whereas Baym, a political communications scholar, sees Colbert and Stewart as neomodernist political communicators using satire to defend Enlightenment faith in truth against incursions by biased postmodern media, Caron sees them as postmodern comics who are skeptical about the feasibility of truly objective media but nevertheless ridicule the excesses of “truthy” media. Satire is first and foremost an aesthetic discourse, but it overlaps with political communication in that it can be used to advocate a programmatic agenda; he illustrates this point with a Venn diagram that could be a useful classroom heuristic.In part 2, “Doing Things with Satiric Words,” Caron gets down to cases of specific permutations and problems of satiric discourse within the contemporary political media environment. To do that, he makes extensive use of J. L. Austin’s seminal linguistic distinction between constative statements and performative speech acts: constative statements claim truth value, while performatives “do something” as opposed to simply “saying something” (85). In chapter 4, Caron makes an important distinction between his approach and Austin’s; whereas Austin marginalizes fictional and “nonserious” speech acts, describing them as “parasitic” on the constative, Caron elevates such “parasitic” speech acts and aims to show that satire can, contrary to Austin’s view, be simultaneously “parasitic” and “normal”—which is to say, both nonserious and serious, and both aesthetic and political.In chapter 5, part 1 of “Satire as Speech Act,” Caron sketches a taxonomy of satiric speech acts that “play with the news.” First, he distinguishes “locutionary” satires, “closest to actual news reporting” but garnished with comic elements (94), from illocutionary speech acts, which are “full-blown comic presentations.” He then addresses satires that shift from the illocutionary to the perlocutionary, comic presentations that lead up to explicit and direct advocacy or even activism, attempting a kind of focused persuasion that goes beyond metanoia. This last category, and especially the strong version of it that Caron dubs “satiractivism,” is further explored in chapter 6, part 2 of “Satire as Speech Act.”Chapter 7, “The Limits of Satiric Ridicule,” explores cases in which satire either fails to elicit laughter or degenerates into a noncomic polemic or “screed.” Chapter 8, “Satiric Intent and Audience Uptake,” goes further into the rhetorical dynamics of satire, asking to what extent satire is defined by the reaction of listeners and readers as opposed to the choices made by would-be satirists. This chapter focuses largely on the rhetoric of Donald Trump, “the buffoon president,” and investigates issues such as the dismissal of offensive statements as “jokes.” In his ninth and final chapter, Caron presents an admirably concise synopsis of his argument; this chapter might serve as a stand-alone reading for a class in which there isn’t time to engage with the book as a whole.Given its groundbreaking reimagining and redefining of satire as taking place in its own discursive realm, the comic public sphere, Caron’s book has only one thing working against it—its topicality. This book is so topical that, through no fault of Caron’s, some of its examples probably called out for updating almost as soon as it was published. For example, when discussing “#CancelColbert” as an attempt at satiractivism, Caron couldn’t anticipate all the subsequent attention to this hashtag in discussions of Cancel Culture. This kind of “datedness” is, of course, a good problem to have—it shows how deeply Caron has tapped into ongoing tendencies in media culture. But, beyond mere topicality, Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement should endure as an important, discerning account of the paradoxical nature of satire, especially in our postmodern media environment.

As national and international health agencies rushed to respond to the global spread of a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, commonly known as COVID-19), one challenge these organizations faced was the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories about the virus. Troublingly, much of the misinformation was couched in racialized language, particularly regarding the source of the virus and responsibility for its spread, fostering the development of related conspiracy theories. Media coverage of these conspiracy theories, particularly early on in the pandemic, had negative impacts on individuals' engagement in protective behaviors and concern with the spread of COVID-19. From extant work, racial resentment and white identity have been shown to be deeply woven into the fabric of contemporary American politics, affecting perceptions of public opinion even after accounting for social and political identities. While racial attitudes have been less studied in relation to conspiracy theory belief, we expect racial resentment and white identity to affect compliance with public health behaviors and COVID-19 conspiracy theory belief. Using observational and experimental survey data (N= 1,045), quota-sampled through Lucid Theorem (LT) in the spring of 2020, we demonstrate that framing the virus in racialized language alters endorsement of COVID-19 conspiracy theories, contingent upon levels of racial resentment and white identity and find that higher levels of conspiracy theory belief decreased compliance with preventative measures.

Affective polarization—the tendency of ordinary partisans to dislike and distrust those from the other party—is a defining feature of contemporary American politics. High levels of out-party animus stem, in part, from misperceptions of the other party’s voters. Specifically, individuals misestimate the ideological extremity and political engagement of typical out-partisans. When partisans are asked about “Democrats” or the “Republican Party,” they bring to mind stereotypes of engaged ideologues and, hence, express contempt for the other party. The reality, however, is that such individuals are the exception rather than the norm. We show that when partisans learn that reality, partisan animus falls sharply; partisans do not have much animus toward the typical member of the other party. Our results suggest antidotes for vitiating affective polarization but also complicate understandings of good citizenship.

The United States has a particularly decentralized form of federalism that provides important authority to multiple levels of government. This decentralization is typically seen as beneficial for democratic politics. But while federalism both constrains and enables democratic participation, we argue that it does so unevenly, and in ways that deepen inequalities in the processes of democracy. We propose four mechanisms by which the institutional decentralization of American federalism obstructs or reduces democratic accountability and equality: (1) inequality in venue selection, (2) information asymmetry, (3) an unequal exit threat, and (4) decentralized accountability. In contemporary American politics, these mechanisms both create and expand advantages for economic and political elites, while generating and deepening barriers to the full and equitable inclusion of less powerful groups in society, especially economically and racially marginalized Americans.

Abstract Polarization is a critical problem confronting American politics and society today. The history of the Netherlands serves as both a warning and an opportunity for the United States in its quest to solve pernicious partisanship. The eighteenth-century Dutch Republic demonstrates how continued division without compromise can easily lead to revolution and civil war. In contrast, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the Netherlands show how a pluralist political culture created a society of compromise and tolerance. This article suggests several ways in which the United States can start to create a similar society of E pluribus unum and mitigate some of the effects of polarization in contemporary American politics.

I am grateful to the participants in this symposium for engaging so thoughtfully with my book The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?1 I want to congratulate the editors of this new journal on launching a venue for fresh thinking about inequality and thank them for commissioning this symposium for the inaugural issue.I have learned a great deal from the essays gathered here and the rich array of challenges they offer. In considering my response, I am struck by the fact the none of the fifteen essays defends meritocracy against the principled objections that I (and many others) have raised against it. No one argues, at least not explicitly, that the successful deserve the rewards the market bestows on them, or that they would deserve such rewards if opportunities were truly equal. The essays focus instead on my diagnosis (i.e., my claim that meritocracy gives rise to grievances that fuel backlash against elites) and on the alternatives to meritocracy, as an ideal and as a political project, that I propose.I will address the challenges posed by my colleagues by identifying four themes that appear in the essays: (1) meritocracy and work, (2) meritocracy and race, (3) meritocracy and capitalism, and (4) meritocracy and liberalism. Organizing my reply according to these themes inevitably means that I am unable to address all of the arguments and insights contained in the essays. But I hope this thematic focus enables me to draw together and respond to some of the most important critical reflections the commentaries offer.Several of the essays raise probing questions about the dignity of work: what constitutes the dignity of work, does it offer a promising basis for an alternative political project, and if so, what would be required to achieve it? Kate Andrias finds my critique of meritocracy forceful and compelling and agrees that a politics focused on the dignity of work is a desirable alternative. But she observes that I do not adequately specify the policies that could achieve this, and that I neglect the ways that corporate interests have deliberately and systematically undermined unions and collective bargaining. In her essay, Andrias points out that the degradation of industrial work was “not an accidental byproduct of elites’ misplaced faith in education, technocracy, and market.”2 Beginning in the 1970s, she writes, “employers aggressively moved capital overseas and fissured employment relations, turning to subcontractors and independent contractors in a concerted effort to reduce labor costs, evade responsibility to their workers, and eliminate workers’ collective voice in their jobs.”3Workers fought back, but lost. Andrias makes the important point that the degradation of work is bound up with political power. Just as New Deal labor reforms were achieved through political struggle, any attempt to renew the dignity of work in our time will require organization, alliances, and a new struggle to wrest economic and political power from corporate interests and their political allies. I agree. Andrias’s account is a necessary elaboration of any project to renew the dignity of work. She is right to conclude that my book “leaves for other scholars—and for workers themselves—the task of understanding past and present struggles over the dignity of work and of elaborating what work with dignity could look like”4 today.Patricia A. Cain “needed no convincing” about the problems created by meritocracy and about the political pathologies it inflames. She considers it “abhorrent for any of us to think that we made it to the top because we deserve it”5 and offers a moving litany of instances of luck in her own life. But Cain is less convinced by the solutions I propose. She worries that my discussion of the dignity of work focuses more than it should on paid work. This raises an important point. Any attempt to strengthen social recognition of and esteem for those who make valuable contributions to the common good must look beyond paid labor, which neglects some of the most valuable work of all—raising and caring for children and families, as well as the many forms of public service and civic participation that make for flourishing neighborhoods and communities.Cain also worries that I may be too ready to accept the underpayment of essential workers and want simply to bolster their confidence in the importance of their work. This is a misreading. The dignity of work is not only or mainly a subjective matter of individual morale; it requires that the economy be reconfigured in a way that confers material support and social esteem that honor the value of the contributions people make. For sanitation workers and home health care workers, this includes appropriate pay, health benefits, sick leave, pensions, and the like. For those who care for their children and families outside the framework of the labor market, this may include material support of other kinds (e.g., child subsidies or tax credits, publicly funded health care, education).Cain comments that, as much as she believes we need a stronger safety net, The Tyranny of Merit convinced her “that a safety net is not enough,”6 that we also need to find ways of recognizing people’s contributions to the common good. In different ways, Deborah L. Rhode and Daniel Hemel are less convinced by this idea.I should say, first of all, that reading Rhode’s generous commentary is a poignant experience, knowing that she completed it shortly before her untimely death. Deborah was a prolific and pathbreaking scholar in legal ethics who, by the force of her arguments and her example, broke down barriers in legal academia and the legal profession. Her essay in this symposium, like her forthcoming book Ambition: What For?,7 displays her fierce opposition to inequality and the attitudes that sustain it. In her essay, Rhode writes that, although she agrees with my critique of meritocracy, she thinks meritocratic ideals are so deeply engrained that we should seek practical, “cost-effective strategies for promoting a more equitable future.” She proposes reducing child poverty and providing quality childcare and preschool programs, investing in underfunded public schools and vocational education, reducing preferences that favor white and wealthy students in college admissions, and generally shoring up the safety net for the least well-off.I am certainly in favor of these policies. But I do not believe they constitute a sufficient response to inequalities of recognition and esteem. This is why I emphasize contributive justice and the dignity of work. Hemel strenuously disagrees. He is wary of a politics that affirms the dignity of work, fearing that it leads to punitive work requirements for welfare, as in President Clinton’s welfare reform. As Hemel acknowledges, I reject this approach. In fact, I criticize the punitive conception of individual responsibility that led many conservatives and some liberals (including Clinton) to condition public assistance on showing that those in need are needy “through no fault of their own.” This way of thinking reflects the meritocratic tendency to parse the distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.8Hemel argues, more broadly, that our dignity should not be tied to what we produce or contribute but simply to our humanity. We should “construct an economic agenda oriented around the widely shared intuition that all human beings are worthy of our respect and our concern—regardless of … the salaries they command, or the marketable goods and services they produce.”9 He favors a universal basic income as the best expression of respect for human dignity and for the sake of respecting “individuals’ own allocative choices.”10I am ambivalent about a universal basic income. The best argument in its favor is that it helps low-income citizens meet their basic needs. But it is no substitute for policies ensuring food security, health care, housing, education, and decent public services. Nor can it substitute for work (paid and unpaid) as a system of mutual contribution and recognition.Some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs promote a universal basic income in hopes of buying off resistance to the world without work they imagine their robots and algorithms will bring.11 Hemel does not make his proposal in this spirit. But respecting “individuals’ own allocative choices” is not enough to draw us together as citizens engaged in a common life. It is a consumerist ethic that misses the importance of contributive justice. In practice, work often fails as a source of social recognition and esteem. But this is not a reason to give up on the dignity of work; it is a reason to empower workers and to enlarge the rewards and esteem accorded those whose contributions are undervalued by the market.Several of the essays pose questions about how race figures in my critique of meritocracy. Echoing Frederick Douglass’s rhetorical question “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?,” Ifeoma Ajunwa asks, “What, to the Black American, is the meritocracy?”12 She notes that one aim of The Tyranny of Merit is to diagnose the populist backlash that led to Trump’s election, and she finds my diagnosis compelling. But she also reads the book “as reflecting the debates around affirmative action and as offering an indirect explanation for our societal acquiescence to continued racial inequality in the United States.”13Ajunwa elaborates her reading, which I fully accept, by observing that meritocratic arguments have animated the most prominent objection to affirmative action in college admissions. Those who oppose considering race as a factor in admissions often argue that doing so violates the right of applicants to be considered according to merit. This argument asserts that applicants should be considered on the basis of academic promise alone, and that those with the highest grades and SAT scores deserve to be admitted. But this argument is flawed in two ways. First, grades and SAT scores reflect differences in family background and educational opportunity, including differences of class and race. Second, even if these metrics were true measures of academic promise, and even if everyone had an equal chance to achieve them, those admitted would still be mistaken in believing they deserved to win admission, and that those turned away deserved to be rejected. Believing that admission is earned as a matter of individual merit makes it hard for the winners to acknowledge an obligation to redress historic (and continuing) injustices of race and class, especially if this means accepting that their success is not wholly their own doing, but is instead the result of various sources of luck and good fortune.Khiara M. Bridges offers another important example of how individualistic notions of merit entrench inequality: by leading us to neglect structural explanations of poverty. She agrees with my “basic diagnosis of our social and political malaise: the winners in our society have wrongly concluded that they are self-made [and] that those who have not succeeded have only themselves to blame.”14 And she shows how the mistaken notion that the winners are self-made supports a morally blinkered view of poverty. Rather than acknowledge and address the structural, systemic sources of poverty—policies that replace middle-skill, middle-wage jobs with low-skill, low-wage jobs; a system of public-school finance that produces good schools for wealthy kids and underfunded schools for poor kids; a racialized system of criminal justice that leads to mass incarceration—Americans tend to believe that poverty is the fault of the poor.Drawing on her book The Poverty of Privacy Rights,15 Bridges argues that the appeal of the individualistic account of poverty is that it enables the winners to interpret their success as their own doing. Structural accounts of poverty, by contrast, would threaten the self-satisfaction of the successful: “That our achievements may not be entirely earned—but may have been gifted to us, in some important sense, by forces outside of our control—is a discomfiting reality that many people, even progressive ones, may reject.”16Bridges’s analysis helps us see how our failure to address the structural sources of poverty is connected to the meritocratic conception of success. Moreover, she shows that this way of thinking about success is found not only among conservative critics of the welfare state, but also among many liberals. This is a powerful illustration of the main argument of The Tyranny of Merit.Notwithstanding this agreement, Bridges takes me to task for what she calls my “underestimation of the significance of race in the story of Trump’s rise to power.”17 My book acknowledges, of course, that many voters were attracted by Trump’s racist appeals. My argument is simply that racism is not the whole story. Focusing only on the “basket of deplorables” account of Trump’s triumph misses something important: mainstream elites of both political parties were tone deaf to the anger and resentment of white working-class voters, who had been left behind by four decades of neoliberal globalization, deregulation, wage stagnation, inequality, and diminished social esteem. For meritocratic elites, attributing the disaffection of white working voters entirely to racism is a way of letting themselves off the hook. It spares them the need to reflect critically on how their globalization project, and its meritocratic way of flattering the winners, produced the inequalities and indignities that paved the way to Trump.Bridges is no apologist for meritocratic elites. But she thinks I am too sympathetic to the plight of the white working class. In a rhetorical flourish, she describes The Tyranny of Merit as “a love letter of sorts”18 to the people who supported Trump and brought democracy to the brink. I would put it differently. My book is not a love letter to Trump supporters; it is tough love for liberals. It brings liberals the hard news that their rhetoric of rising and offer of individual mobility through higher education is an inadequate response to the inequalities their policies produced. It is also self-serving, for reasons Bridges analyzes well.I do think it is important to try to understand the economic and cultural grievances of white working-class voters. A number of recent works do this well, without excusing the racist sentiments with which these grievances are often entangled: Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in a Strange Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,19 Katherine J. Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,20 and Joan C. Williams’s White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.21 These studies in sympathetic understanding can help us imagine ways of addressing the legitimate grievances that fuel authoritarian populist backlash, a danger that has not disappeared with the departure of Trump.Camille Gear Rich and Omar Noureldin also fault me for failing to take adequate account of race, although in a different domain. Their focus is not my analysis of the forces that led to Trump’s election, but rather my account of how we conceive the value of work. I do not “reckon with how America’s race and gender history and current racial strife fundamentally shape our valuation and recognition of work. … True escape from the ‘tyranny of merit’ requires an inquiry into how race and gender shape the meaning of merit.”22Rich and Noureldin observe that “work’s value, historically, has been tethered to the race and gender of those who perform it.”23 This has a direct bearing, they suggest, on my proposed solution, which is to focus less on arming people for meritocratic competition and more on affirming the dignity of work. Putting the dignity of work at the center of public discourse, I argue, requires rejecting the assumption that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good; we should not outsource to markets the moral question of what counts as a truly valuable contribution. Instead, we should reclaim this question for democratic deliberation.Rich and Noureldin are sympathetic to this project, but they argue that it requires a more direct engagement with the decisive roles of race and gender than I have offered. “Although Sandel gestures generally at race being a relevant social consideration, he has not fully reckoned with how it shapes his proposed solution. … What he misses is how gender and racial bias have fundamentally structured our understanding of normal wage work, dignified conditions, and social status.”24Rich and Noureldin point out that the COVID pandemic revealed to many Americanshow our understanding of merit, deservingness, and value continue to be shaped by unfair race and gender considerations. … The pandemic ushered in a great cultural and social reckoning about how the sometimes invisible low-status service work performed by female Black and brown bodies, in fact, has extraordinary value and often does not occur in spaces that affirm dignity.25Elevating and acknowledging “the socially valuable labor performed by Black and brown women will be critical if we are to dismantle traditional status hierarchies that shape our views about merit.”26I agree with this analysis and see it as an important aspect of any articulation of the dignity of work. The frontline workers we celebrated as “essential workers” during the pandemic had little choice but to expose themselves to risk, performing jobs for pay hardly commensurate with the “essential” contributions they were making. In New York City, seventy-five percent of frontline workers are people of color.27 Nationally, women of color predominate in jobs, such as childcare and home healthcare, that are poorly paid and that exposed them to substantial COVID risk. Nearly one-third of nursing assistants and home healthcare workers are Black women. Nearly forty percent of childcare workers are people of color, many of them women.28 Not surprisingly, people of color bore a disproportionate share of COVID deaths. Among African Americans, the COVID death rate was forty-four percent higher than among whites.29Against this background of racial and gender inequality, heaping praise on frontline workers for their sacrifice and devotion can be fatuous and insulting. As Rich and Noureldin observe, “these workers were represented as patriotically desiring to go out and save us all,”30 even as they were not being provided with basic protective gear. Reading their essay brought to mind a statement of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who described a “nightmare” he had early in the pandemic:What if the essential workers don’t show up? You have to have food, you have to have transportation, the lights have to be on, someone has to pick up the garbage, the hospitals have to run. … What if they said, “You don’t pay me enough to put my life in danger? I’m not doing it.” They showed up. They didn’t show up for a paycheck. … They showed up out of their honor, out of their values, out of their dignity. That’s why they showed up.31The pandemic made vivid the gap between the contributions of essential workers, especially women and people of color, and the way we honor and reward them. It scrambled our conception of whose contributions matter most. The surge in public support for the Black Lives Matter movement that occurred in the midst of the pandemic may reflect this. As Rich and Noureldin suggest, many now seemed to recognize “that Black and brown people who worked to keep society functioning through service jobs required more from their fellow citizens in the form of dignity. This was a proposition that exceeded market logic and exceeded their role as workers.”32Whether this proposition leads to a more just valuation of the work performed by women and people of color remains to be seen. But Rich and Noureldin help us see that social value and market value do not necessarily align, especially when markets are embedded in racial and gender hierarchies. How to value work is fundamentally a political question.The Tyranny of Merit offers an interpretation of our political condition. Like all interpretations, it has a normative bent. It explains and criticizes, both at the same time. It shows how meritocratic ways of thinking about success have gone hand in hand with the neoliberal version of capitalism that has unfolded in recent decades, and how meritocratic attitudes toward success have rationalized the inequalities this capitalism has produced. It also argues that meritocracy is a flawed ideal and that understanding its defects can help us understand the political backlash against mainstream parties and credentialed elites.Some contributors to this symposium argue that I misidentify the beliefs that animate the populist backlash. Others take issue with my account of the dignity of work and do not see it as a promising political project. But a few contributors raise a different kind of objection—that I wrongly focus on political discourse, attitudes, and rhetoric rather than on material interests.Robert L. Tsai sees a tension between two different criticisms of merit running throughout the book—criticism of “unequal material conditions” and criticism of “status-based consequences of a meritocratic ethic.”33 He thinks that most of the time, I do my best “not to choose between these two kinds of injuries.”34Tsai is right that I do not choose between them. The reason is that, in a market-driven, meritocratic society, material inequalities are bound up with status inequalities. Tsai wants to sort out the causal connection between the two: does income inequality give rise to meritocratic justifications, or does meritocracy encourage and entrench income inequality? My answer is both. Meritocratic attitudes and economic inequalities are mutually reinforcing. In recent decades, they have become a package deal. Any serious attempt to reduce inequalities of income and wealth would need to challenge the notion that the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor. And any serious attempt to diminish the hold of the meritocratic success ethic would need to reconfigure the economy, not only through redistribution but also by making money matter less. This would require, among other things, the creation of class-mixing public spaces and institutions (possibly including universal national service) that would draw the affluent from their privatized isolation into the common life of democratic citizenship.35Mark Kelman offers another version of materialist critique. He redescribes the anger and resentment of white working-class men as “negative feelings” that are “superstructural” and simply “derivative of underlying economic conditions.”36 He prefers a “materialist” account of white men’s support for Trump to an “idealistic” account of resentment. According to Kelman’s materialist account of politics, viewing Trump supporters as angry and resentful, whether for reasons of elite condescension, white supremacy, cultural exclusion, or lost privileged status, misses their fundamentally economic motivations.Even if purely materialist considerations could explain white working-class voters’ support for Trump in 2016, it is hard to see how materialist motivations could explain their continued support for him in 2020 (after it became clear that his policies did little if anything to improve their economic condition). And it is implausible, to say the least, to think that the Trump supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol were motivated only by “materialist” considerations, rather than by a toxic brew of ideas, attitudes, and beliefs. The chilling iconography of the Confederate flag inside the Capitol building and a gallows and noose outside it left little doubt that this was something darker than a protest against wage stagnation.Daria Roithmayr does not dismiss the significance of political rhetoric or insist on the distinction between materialist and idealist explanation. But she argues that I “misdiagnose the problem as meritocracy rather than neoliberal capitalism.”37 The core problem is “capitalism and … job loss. Meritocracy is just the sideshow.”38I think this distinction is too sharply drawn. Meritocracy and neoliberal capitalism today are integrally connected; meritocracy rationalizes and entrenches the inequalities neoliberal capitalism produces. I do not claim that this connection is necessary, as a matter of abstract logic. But for the past four decades, the market faith and the meritocratic faith have emerged together, dialectically, as the defining project of mainstream American politics. Neoliberal capitalism made some people rich and others poor, but meritocracy created the divide between winners and losers. And it is this divide, not income inequality alone, that gives rise to the demoralization, resentment, and humiliation that Trump and other authoritarian populists are able to exploit.One of the most telling signs of this demoralization is what the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair.”39 They coined this term to describe the mounting incidence of death caused by suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholic liver disease. Among white men and women aged 45 to 54, deaths of despair increased threefold from 1990–2017.40What might account for this grim epidemic? A revealing clue can be found in the educational background of those most vulnerable to it. Case and Deaton discovered that “the increase in deaths of despair was almost all among those without a bachelor’s degree. Those with a four-year degree are mostly exempt.”41 Here then is another advantage of the well-credentialed. By 2017, men without a college diploma were three times more likely than college graduates to die deaths of despair.42Those who attribute white working-class unhappiness to material privation might suspect that the underlying cause of deaths of despair is poverty, not humiliation and the loss of social esteem. But Case and Deaton have found that the dramatic increase in deaths of despair is not explained by an increase in poverty. Something more than material deprivation is inciting the despair, something distinctive to the plight of people struggling to make their way in a meritocratic society without the credentials it honors and rewards: “A four-year degree has become the key marker of social status, as if there were a requirement for nongraduates to wear a circular scarlet badge bearing the letters BA crossed through by a diagonal red line.”43Roithmayr insists that Case and Deaton “attribute these deaths to the flaws in capitalism”44 and that “[t]hey say little about meritocratic rhetoric or even humiliation at the hands of elites as an underlying cause.”45 In fact, however, the demoralization a meritocracy inflicts on those without a college degree is central to their account. In explaining deaths of despair, they repeatedly cite Michael Young’s critique of meritocracy, as well as the more recent critiques that Daniel Markovits and I have offered.46 For example, they write that “there is a dark side” to meritocracy “that was long ago predicted by Michael Young, … who invented the term in 1958 and who saw meritocracy as leading to social calamity.”47The elite can sometimes be smug about their accomplishments, attributing them to their own merit, and dismissive of those without degrees, who had their chance but blew it. The less educated are devalued or even disrespected, are encouraged to think of themselves as losers, and may feel that the system is rigged against them. When the fruits of success are as large as they are today, so are the penalties of failing the tests of meritocracy.48Unlike Roithmayr, Case and Deaton do not see a clear separation between the damaging effects of neoliberal capitalism and the demoralizing effects of meritocracy: “Being left behind financially is a key part of the story, but it is only the beginning. When we use the term deaths of despair, the despair is much broader, and much worse, than just material deprivation.”49If Case and Deaton are right, as I believe they are, meritocracy is not a “sideshow” but at the heart of the problem. Contending with inequality requires both reconfiguring the economy and reconsidering the harsh ethic of success that divides us into winners and losers.Several of the commentaries take up, from different points of view, the relation of meritocracy to liberalism. Jennifer Hochschild illuminates the complex ways that meritocratic arguments find expression in politics. She begins by identifying the audience the book seeks to challenge, even if against the current: well-educated elites, especially liberals and Democrats, who alienated many working-class supporters of the Democratic Party by embracing a meritocratic solution to the inequality and wage stagnation their neoliberal economic policies produced. Hochschild rightly points out that “meritocracy is the province of neither left nor right,”50 but can be found, in different versions, across the political spectrum. And not all Democrats see a fair meritocracy as the primary answer to inequality; Bernie Sanders (and, for the most part, Elizabeth Warren) did not embrace the rhetoric of rising, but contended directly with inequalities of income, wealth, and power.Although she does not put it in quite these terms, Hochschild’s analysis suggests that one way of distinguishing liberals from progressives in contemporary American politics is that liberals see individual upward mobility as the answer to inequality (hence, their emphasis on perfecting equality of opportunity), whereas progressives address inequality by proposing structural reform of the economy. Hochschild also raises the important question whether, in the long-standing struggle against inequality, meritocracy has switched sides. An ethic that began its career

It is a special honor to publish our work alongside rigorous critiques from Dorothy Sue Cobble, Kristoffer Smemo, Eric Schickler, and Devin Caughey. We are grateful for the opportunity to debate our research in the pages of Labor with such an esteemed and interdisciplinary group of labor historians and political scientists. In this memo we will restate our argument, address three common concerns raised by the commentators, respond to specific questions from individual commentators, and reflect on the potential implications of our argument for contemporary American politics.Our article, “Rewarded by Friends and Punished by Enemies,” argues that the CIO's political action committee (CIO-PAC) contributed to an ongoing anti-labor backlash from the Republican Party. The CIO-PAC was founded in 1943 and quickly formed a de facto alliance with the Democratic Party. Although the CIO-PAC repeatedly claimed to be nonpartisan, 94 percent of its endorsements in 1944 went to Democrats. While the CIO-PAC's partisan political engagement helped to attract prolabor support from Democratic members of Congress, it simultaneously pushed the Republican Party further toward anti-labor legislation.The CIO-PAC's opposite effects on the two parties meant that CIO power was associated with increasing polarization; the difference between Democratic and Republican voting on congressional labor legislation was small in districts and states where the CIO was weak, but this difference grew as CIO strength increased. The result was that Republicans were most likely to support anti-labor legislation, such as the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, when they represented constituencies in which the CIO was at its strongest. As Schickler and Caughey note, this dynamic cannot be explained by most theories of representation, which would expect Republican support for unions to increase with the strength of the CIO in their constituency. In other words, the CIO faced its fiercest enemies in places where we might otherwise expect it to have attracted friends.This polarizing effect of the CIO-PAC, as we stress throughout our article, was not the only cause of the passage of Taft-Hartley. Southern Democrats almost unanimously supported Taft-Hartley on the grounds that the CIO's efforts to unionize the South posed a threat to white supremacy. Around the country, public opposition to the CIO strike wave of 1945–46 encouraged many Democrats and Republicans to support Taft-Hartley. And the rising conservatism of the Republican Party, which had only increased since its late 1930s opposition to the New Deal, made Republicans more likely to support Taft-Hartley than Democrats were. Independent of these important dynamics, we assert that the CIO-PAC's political engagement further galvanized Republican opposition to organized labor in a way that may have contributed to the passage of Taft-Hartley.Our argument is therefore as nuanced as it is controversial, and we are excited to see it inspire difficult questions and critiques. Throughout the commentators’ excellent responses, three main issues were raised repeatedly. First, what was the relationship between the CIO-PAC and the anti-labor animus that motivated large parts of the Republican Party? If one caused the other, our commentators point out, then surely the 1943 creation of the CIO-PAC cannot explain a Republican anti-labor backlash that began in the 1930s. We believe that this common critique is based on a misunderstanding of our argument, and we welcome the opportunity to restate and clarify our claim that “the American labor movement's political strategy coevolved with the labor policy positions of the Republican and Democratic Parties.”Second, how did the CIO-PAC influence Republicans beyond our brief example of New York's 1944 Senate election? While our quantitative analysis does demonstrate a general relationship across the United States, we understand the desire for more qualitative evidence that the CIO-PAC's de facto alliance with the Democratic Party pushed the Republican Party in an anti-labor direction. Below, we briefly discuss how the CIO-PAC's 1946 decision not to endorse progressive, prolabor Republicans in Wisconsin and Minnesota likely contributed to the election of anti-labor Republicans (Joseph McCarthy and Edward John Thye), who voted in favor of Taft-Hartley the following year.Third, was the CIO-PAC responsible for the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947? Cobble suggests that we unfairly blame the CIO-PAC for the anti-labor conservatism of the Republican Party and the passage of Taft-Hartley—“mighty weights,” she writes, “for the CIO-PAC to bear.” Schickler and Caughey, similarly, write that our article suggests that the CIO-PAC “cost unions more than it gained them” and therefore represented a strategic mistake by the CIO. However, we have no intention of holding the CIO materially responsible for the passage of Taft-Hartley, which was ultimately the result of numerous crosscurrents in American political life. Our hope is merely to draw attention to important negative consequences of the CIO-PAC (increased Republican backlash) that have been overlooked in previous research. Whether or not this negative effect was outweighed by the positive effect of increased Democratic support requires additional research. Similarly, more investigation and debate is needed to determine whether or not an alternative political strategy existed by which the CIO could have captured the benefits of the CIO-PAC without suffering all of its negative consequences.We believe that the CIO's political strategy coevolved with the labor policy positions of the Democratic and Republican Parties. This means that (1) the CIO's decisions regarding the PAC were influenced by the labor policies advocated by the two parties and that (2) the CIO-PAC's informal alliance with the Democratic Party influenced the subsequent labor policy positions of both parties.Regarding the first point, our article clearly explains how the labor policies supported by Democrats and Republicans in the late 1930s and early 1940s influenced the CIO's decision to create a PAC and almost exclusively to endorse Democrats. The prolabor legislation supported by President Roosevelt and the Democratic Party during the New Deal of the 1930s made a CIO alliance with the Democrats an appealing option. As we note in the article, the roots of the CIO-PAC's alliance with Democrats can be traced back to the CIO's Non-Partisan League of 1936, a short-lived organization that campaigned for FDR's reelection after realizing that “a willing Roosevelt administration offered labor a chance for a new kind of political advocacy.”Just as Democratic support for prolabor policies attracted the CIO, growing Republican opposition to organized labor made a CIO alliance with the GOP all but impossible. As we note in our article, the CIO's 1942 report on the possibility of creating a political action committee concluded that unions “should not pretend that there is the slightest possibility of our achieving genuine influence in the Republican Party” given that “the Republican Party had reconstituted itself on anti–New Deal grounds, making it an unlikely partner.” We also explicitly noted that before the CIO-PAC, “the GOP joined forces with the business community in an increasingly aggressive backlash against the New Deal in the late 1930s and 1940s. This renewed alliance paved the way for an ideological assault on labor rights in the name of economic freedom.” In these ways, we agree with the commentators and the conventional wisdom that “the conservative counterreaction against labor was already well underway in Congress by the late 1930s, with overwhelming support from Republicans.” As we write, “Of course, the Republican Party's move toward anti-unionism was not solely driven by the CIO-PAC's informal alliance with the Democratic Party.”However, the Republican Party's general shift toward anti-labor policies before 1943 is only part of the story of Republican voting on Taft-Hartley in 1947. Most important, this rising conservatism cannot explain the variation that continued to exist among Republicans on questions of labor legislation. As Smemo discusses, the vote on Taft-Hartley exposed a rift within the Republican Party; while some “yearned to gut New Deal labor law,” other members of the GOP “could not imagine a direct confrontation with the organized labor movement.” Yes, the GOP was broadly moving to the right of the Democratic Party on labor issues, but many Republicans still voted against anti-labor legislation throughout the Eightieth Congress (1947–48).This is where the second part of our coevolutionary argument comes into play: the CIO-PAC's informal alliance with the Democratic Party influenced the subsequent voting behavior of both political parties. For Democrats, support for unions (voting against Taft-Hartley) increased with the strength of the CIO in their constituency. For Republicans, by contrast, support for unions decreased with the strength of the CIO in their constituency. As our interlocutors emphasize, the overall impact of the CIO-PAC on congressional voting was therefore to increase polarization between the two parties.Thus, we fully agree with Smemo that “the anti-labor reaction in Congress began shortly after the 1936 elections” and with Schickler and Caughey that “the CIO-PAC formed in 1943 largely in reaction to the consolidation of this new conservative bloc.” This earlier conservative backlash contributed to the large difference between Republican and Democratic voting on Taft-Hartley; model 4 in table 1 shows that Democrats, on average, were less likely than Republicans to support Taft-Hartley. However, such general partisan differences tell us nothing about why Democrats and Republicans voted similarly to one another in states and districts where the CIO was weak, but voted so disparately in places where the CIO was strongest. We can better understand this polarization, we argue, if we explore the ways in which the CIO-PAC made friends of Democrats and enemies of Republicans.Caughey and Schickler note that the core qualitative evidence for the mechanism presented in our article is an analysis of the New York Senate race in 1944, in which the Republican Party, confronting the CIO-backed Democrat Robert Wagner, decided not to nominate the relatively prolabor candidate Irving Ives in favor of avowed anti-communist Thomas Curran. The reasoning for this decision, we contend, was significantly rooted in the party's reaction to the presence of the CIO-PAC, which had made it difficult for prolabor Republicans to rely on traditional nonpartisan union support and had convinced party leaders to instead shift toward a more explicit anti-union (in this case, anti-communist) stance.As Caughey and Schickler point out, that was not the end of the story, nor did this particular moment signify a permanent break between Republicans and labor. Ives was nominated in 1946 and defeated former governor Herbert H. Lehman in the Republican wave of that year, signifying that the party as a whole was not quite ready to fully commit to a strategy of polarizing the electorate.Yet as Smemo's response to our article makes plain, this partial retreat from a stridently anti-labor platform did not necessarily imply a concomitant shift toward labor. Instead, it reflected a complicated negotiation among the factions of the Republican Party to take advantage of the splits in the labor movement as well as find a way to reconcile hardline business conservatism with the more accommodationist interests in the party. But this move almost inevitably involved shifting the priorities away from explicit alliance with the unions themselves and instead toward making labor legislation more favorable to management.1 After all, despite the endorsement of the AFL, Irving Ives did indeed vote for the Taft-Hartley Act. Similarly, Smemo points out that Ives's Fair Employment Practices Commission was “notoriously weak” and that he championed an “industrial pluralism to keep industrial unions subordinate to management”; by comparing Ives to Curran, our article may have overstated Ives's prolabor credentials.More broadly, however, Cobble points out that the class of 1946 included conservative Republican senators from states without a particularly strong CIO presence, some of whom (like Harry Cain and James Kem) would also vote for Taft-Hartley.2 We do not dispute that the Republican Party as a whole would have “jumped at the chance to eviscerate the Wagner Act in 1947.” What we contend is that in places where the CIO was strong, the Republican response to the PAC was particularly negative. For instance, twelve Republicans either won open seats or beat incumbent Democrats in the 1946 elections; of these, seven were in states with significant CIO membership. At the same time, rather than accommodating labor or moderating their party's pro-Taft-Hartley position, all seven voted for the bill.3 To conventional theories of interest group politics, such an outcome is very puzzling: it appeared that by 1946 in many of those states we would expect the CIO's voice to be loudest and most persuasive, strongly anti-labor Republicans were instead elected. While we agree that a general conservative backlash in public opinion (as well as Truman's more general unpopularity and the onset of the Cold War) partly explains this pattern, we contend that the threat posed by the CIO-PAC to Republicans seems to have played a key polarizing role.Take, as another example, the case of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who defeated the progressive incumbent Robert La Follette Jr. in the Wisconsin Republican primary in 1946 and went on to secure one of the state's Senate seats. Cobble is correct that Wisconsin was not the most favorable state for CIO political activism (although it was in the 70th percentile in terms of CIO density among US states) and that McCarthy's conservatism seems particularly ideological. However, the CIO was particularly active in the Wisconsin's urban centers and actively worked to undermine La Follette's campaign by attacking him for being insufficiently committed to the New Deal.Many historians have attributed the CIO's animosity toward La Follette to a communist faction of the union active in Milwaukee, which was ideologically opposed to his stance against the USSR. But historian David Oshinsky convincingly demonstrates that even “the anti-Communists” in the CIO “were committed firmly to the Democratic party and pictured La Follette's return to the GOP as the Waterloo for liberal unity in Wisconsin.”4 Thus, Howard McMurray, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, engaged in a calculated effort to appeal to CIO partisanship by tying La Follette—a consistent supporter of many of the New Deal labor efforts, even though lukewarm at times in his support for Roosevelt—to “‘calculated subversion’ of the liberal forces in Wisconsin.”5 Throughout the campaign, McMurray and the labor press worked in tandem to attack La Follette and shift the labor vote toward the Democrats, a strategy that largely reflected the national CIO-PAC's own priorities.Moreover, the attack was successful. La Follette's vote share plummeted in labor wards (particularly those with strong CIO presence) in cities like Kenosha and Milwaukee during the primary in 1946, while the Democrat's rose relative to 1940, when La Follette had last been on the ballot,6 even though the AFL had directly endorsed La Follette's candidacy. As the New York Times opined in 1946, “The CIO Political Action Committee forces contributed somewhat to Mr. La Follette's defeat,” as the CIO-PAC “urged the workers to vote in the Democratic primary.”7What lessons, then, might Joseph McCarthy have learned from La Follette's defeat at the hands of the CIO? Oshinsky notes that at the beginning of the Republican primary, “McCarthy employed a relatively moderate posture in relation to labor-management problems.”8 He even made a few appeals to the labor vote himself, arguing that “I do not blame labor for strikes and stoppages” and decrying industry leaders who had “not yet learned that labor unions are as much a part of the American way of life as industry itself,” pinning some of the disorder on them.9 As the campaign dragged on, however, and he witnessed the effect of the CIO-PAC's campaign against La Follette, McCarthy seems to have become increasingly convinced of the political benefits of tying labor directly to concerns about communism. Thus, he claimed that the union strategy of concerted labor action “played along with the Communists who know that their theories will grow best in an economy of industrial discord and strikes,” and he accused McMurray of being “little more than a megaphone . . . being used by the Communist-dominated Political Action Committee in Milwaukee.”10 In other words, though McCarthy was never particularly sympathetic to the interests of organized labor, it appears that he also saw no reason to make any real concessions to the demands of industrial unionism. Instead, he too went on the attack.Other progressive Republicans also suffered from the CIO's shift toward partisanship in the 1946 election, even when they avoided the direct ire of the PAC. Henrik Shipstead, a former member of the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota who had bolted to the Republicans in protest of Roosevelt's increasing internationalism in 1940, had long been considered a friend to labor and had been a key member of the state's burgeoning liberal coalition.11 In 1935, Shipstead had voted in favor of the Wagner Act. However, by 1946 the CIO had largely abandoned Shipstead for partisan reasons, paving the way for his conservative Republican rival, Governor Edward Thye, to secure the party's nomination and defeat Theodore Jorgenson in the general election. In his nationally syndicated column, respected journalist Thomas Stokes noted that despite the fact that “old-line labor” groups such as the “railway brotherhoods and the AFL” would back Shipstead in the state's primary, the CIO “probably will vote in the Democratic Farmer-Labor primary where there is a better fight for control among the CIO, left-wing and Irish Democratic elements.”12 In this case, the partisan shift induced by the CIO-PAC created less incentive for Republicans to cater to labor precisely because they increasingly realized that fewer industrial unionists were willing to participate in Republican politics at all.In other words, we agree with our interlocutors that the story did not end with Irving Ives's failed renomination in 1944. But the partisan dynamics unleashed by the CIO-PAC had a deep effect on a series of crucial Senate races in the following years and undoubtedly made it much easier—and, in some cases, desirable—for the Republican Party to shift even further away from an alliance with organized labor.It is worth noting that the McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) and Thye (R-Minnesota) examples also help to illustrate a slightly different mechanism through which the CIO-PAC may have contributed to the Republican backlash against organized labor. In both cases, the CIO-PAC withheld its support from progressive Republicans senators and helped to tilt the outcome of Republican primaries toward anti-labor candidates, both of whom went on to win general elections in 1946 and vote in favor of Taft-Hartley in 1947. If the CIO-PAC had supported prolabor Democrats while also endorsing prolabor Republicans such as La Follette and Shipstead, the composition of the Republican Party in 1947 may have been less anti-labor.At the very least, it is easy to imagine that CIO-PAC support for La Follette (R-Wisconsin) and Shipstead (R-Minnesota) could have secured their primary and general election victories, as well as two Senate votes against Taft-Hartley. We are therefore grateful to our commentators for pushing us to further explore the effect of the CIO-PAC on Republicans outside New York. There is ample room for new research on the 1946 election of anti-labor Republicans in Massachusetts, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Utah—five states in which the CIO was well organized yet Republicans won Senate campaigns and subsequently voted in favor of Taft-Hartley. Scholars should examine whether and, if so, how the CIO-PAC influenced Republican primaries and the subsequent labor policy positions of Republicans in these states.At the same time, although we argue that the CIO-PAC played an important and previously overlooked role in the politics of Taft-Hartley, we certainly do not contend that the CIO should be blamed for the entirety of the GOP backlash or the act's final passage in 1947. The argument we present in our article is more nuanced and less radical than the interpretation presented by our commentators. We wrote that the CIO-PAC “contributed to a backlash from the Republican Party that culminated in the passage of Taft-Hartley.” As explained above, we recognize that the Republican backlash against organized labor began before the CIO-PAC, hence our argument that the CIO-PAC merely contributed to a backlash. Similarly, we believe that it was this Republican backlash (with numerous causes, including but not limited to the CIO-PAC) that culminated in the passage of Taft-Hartley. To be clear, we do not believe that the creation of the CIO-PAC and its informal alliance led, on its own, to the GOP backlash or the passage of Taft-Hartley.That being said, we do argue that the partisan polarization associated with the CIO-PAC raises important and unresolved questions about the risks and rewards of electoral politics. The commentators offer fascinating cost-benefit analyses of the CIO-PAC's alliance with the Democratic Party and conclude that the CIO gained more from Democrats than it lost from Republicans. Cobble argues that the CIO-PAC “energized the left more than the right” and that “the ‘frontlash’ effect [from Democrats] of the CIO appears greater than the ‘backlash’ [from Republicans].” Similarly, Schickler and Caughey argue that “it was only because the CIO was so closely tied to the Democratic Party that it avoided anti-labor legislation as long as it did.” In these ways, the commentators appear to accept our main argument about the negative aspects of the CIO-PAC (i.e., it contributed to the Republican anti-labor backlash), while maintaining that these costs were clearly outweighed by the positive benefits.Perhaps. But we believe that the debate is not quite this simple. Even if the benefits of the CIO-PAC outweighed its costs, it remains possible that an alternative political strategy could have captured most of these benefits without suffering all of the same costs. As Schickler and Caughey note when discussing our finding that Republicans were increasingly anti-labor as CIO strength in their constituency increased, the only analogous dynamic in American political history is Key's “racial threat” hypothesis: that whites become increasingly racist when the local percentage of Blacks increases. Could the CIO have found a way to support prolabor candidates (even if most of them were Democrats) without triggering a backlash reminiscent of the South's defense of white supremacy? In other words, just because the benefits of the CIO-PAC outweighed its costs does not mean it was the best possible strategy.One possible alternative strategy was the AFL's nonpartisan political engagement—Gompers's famous call to “reward our friends and punish our enemies” regardless of their political party. Could the CIO have continued this nonpartisan tradition in a way that garnered the benefits of the CIO-PAC without suffering all of its negative costs? In our article, we offered two reasons to doubt the efficacy of the AFL's approach. First, a large secondary literature concludes that the AFL had little impact on the formation or passage of prolabor legislation during the early twentieth century.13 Second, our own analysis of congressional voting on the Wagner Act found that AFL union density was not associated with support or opposition from Democrats or Republicans. As we concluded, the AFL “neither garnered support nor inspired opposition from either party.”Cobble disagrees, however, and thereby opens space for exactly the kind of debate we hope our work will inspire. She argues that “the AFL turned to national politics with a vengeance” in the early twentieth century and “had some success” with the 1932 prolabor Norris-LaGuardia Act, thus “paving the way for the Wagner Act.” But if the AFL's nonpartisan politics contributed to such important legislative successes, perhaps the CIO could also have built support for prolabor legislation without forming a partisan alliance with the Democratic Party. Was there a political strategy between the AFL's nonpartisan politics and the CIO-PAC that could have garnered support from Democrats without simultaneously generating backlash from Republicans?Such a debate about the political strategy of the CIO would mirror a well-known debate about the CIO's economic strategy (e.g., strikes) during the 1940s. Seidman, Schickler and Caughey, and others have argued that the strike wave at the end of World War II led to a public backlash against the CIO that contributed to the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947.14 The CIO was too confrontational, the argument implies, and a less-aggressive strategy might have captured important economic gains without triggering the backlash that culminated in Taft-Hartley. In sharp contrast, Lichtenstein (2003) argues that organized labor's eventual decline was driven by a mistaken lack of CIO militancy during World War II. Rather than strike for social democracy and a better society when the opportunity arose, CIO leaders accepted a no-strike pledge in exchange for union security measures that secured the union shop and built large unions. In a narrow sense, this bargain may have benefited the CIO more than it cost them, but Lichtenstein suggests that an alternative strategy may have garnered many of the same benefits (or more) without suffering the same costs.Beyond the three common concerns discussed above, the commentators posed a number of questions that demand replies. This section reflects briefly on these additional issues.We were very pleased to read that Schickler and Caughey found our state- and district-level measures of CIO density to be both innovative and clever. They are correct that the only other data on district-level CIO membership comes from William Riker's 1948 doctoral thesis. Riker's data is available for only 159 congressional districts, whereas our approach generates estimates for 429 congressional districts. The two measures are relatively similar; for the 159 districts in Riker's data, the correlation with our measure of CIO density is 0.69.Our regression results are also similar when using Riker's data, despite the relative decrease in variation available (we code Riker's missing districts as 0). When we examine House voting on Taft-Hartley (replicating model 1 from table 1), we find a negative and statistically significant interaction term between Democrat and CIO. This means that the difference between Democratic and Republican voting on Taft-Hartley (partisan polarization) increased along with the district-level strength of the CIO. The main difference we find using the Riker data is that the constitutive effect of CIO is no longer positive and statistically significant. That is, when one uses the Riker data, CIO density is not associated with greater Republican support for Taft-Hartley.With this in mind, it is worth noting that our article may have set too high a bar for testing our argument about the CIO-PAC and the Republican backlash. Should we only conclude that the CIO-PAC had negative consequences if it led Republicans to support Taft-Hartley? What if the CIO-PAC only resulted in a neutral relationship between CIO density and Republican voting on Taft-Hartley? Even that null finding (as we mention above, using the Riker data) suggests that Republican members of Congress did not respond to the CIO in the way most theories of representation would predict; Republicans in districts with stronger CIO constituencies were no more likely to vote against Taft-Hartley then were Republicans in districts with weak CIO constituencies.Although Taft-Hartley was supported by the overwhelming majority of Republicans in Congress, divisions within the party continued to exist; thirty-one Republican members of the House and four Republican members of the Senate withheld their support from the final vote on Taft-Hartley. In his insightful commentary on the dialectical relationship between Taft-Hartley and the Republican Party, Smemo notes that this division between “old-guard” and “liberal” Republicans extended into the subsequent decades. Smemo explains that “while the GOP ‘old guard’ yearned to gut New Deal labor law, the party's ‘liberal’ wing could not imagine a direct confrontation with the organized labor movement.”With this welcome call for a longer time horizon, Smemo highlights the need for more research on the dynamic relationship between the CIO-PAC and the Republican Party. Our article demonstrates that in 1947 Republicans with strong CIO constituencies were more likely to support Taft-Hartley than Republicans with weak CIO constituencies. Did this relationship continue into the 1950s, driving a wedge between Republicans? By contrast, Smemo suggests that the divisions within the GOP may have been the exact opposite: it could be that “Republicans in heavily unionized states” were the least supportive of anti-labor legislation such as the right-to-work laws permitted by Taft-Hartley.Of course, answering this question will require further empirical research on congressional voting patterns in the 1950s.15 If the dynamic we highlight in our article holds during this period, then the polarizing effect of the CIO-PAC (attracting Democrats but repelling Republicans) may help to explain partisan polarization over a longer period of time. By contrast, if Smemo is correct that the relationship reversed in the 1950s (as Schickler and Coughey note that most theories of representation would expect), then this would represent a fascinating puzzle for future research.How did the CIO-PAC go from repelling Republicans in 1947 (similar to Key's “racial threat” hypothesis) to attracting them in the way we would expect organized interest groups to do? Did the CIO learn from 1947 (when many Republicans from strong CIO states voted in favor of Taft-Hartley) and recalibrate its political strategy in a way that maintained Democratic support without antagonizing Republicans? If so, understanding such strategic changes would further inform debates about the creation of the CIO-PAC and the passage of Taft-Hartley: Could the CIO have pursued such a political strategy earlier and thus avoided the passage of Taft-Hartley?Exploring the effects of the CIO-PAC on both the Democratic and Republican Parties, as well as the more general consequences of labor's shift away from nonpartisanship, is essential to understanding the historical development of electoral politics in the postwar United States. Taft-Hartley was not only a setback for labor; it also heralded a relatively novel political role for the unions as part and parcel of the Democratic coalition. Moreover, we believe it is crucial to situate organized labor and party leadership in a coevolutionary relationship. This reminds us that actions taken for one goal (exploiting opportunities within a party organization; mobilizing constituents in partisan rather than interest-based terms) can have inadvertent by-products (polarizing opponents and creating backlash). The serious and engaged responses of our interlocutors to our argument about the centrality of political strategy on the part of the CIO also reveals the methodological advantages of cross-disciplinary exchange and the value of exploring specific events to shed light on longer-term developmental trajectories.16Our work on the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947 may even hold lessons for contemporary American politics. Joe Biden's promise to be “the most pro-union president you've ever seen” is clearly meant to echo FDR and the New Deal, when organized labor first began its evolving alliance with the Democratic Party. Today as in the 1940s, the Democratic Party is clearly the one with which unions have the strongest support. Yet our research suggests that labor should be careful with its partisan commitments, mindful of the Republican Party inevitably returning to power in the coming years. And while today's GOP no longer contains anything like the progressive Republicans of the 1930s, there still may be some potential for Republicans to support organized labor.In 2020, five Republican members of the House of Representatives voted in favor of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, the most sweeping prolabor legislation debated in Congress in a generation. And while the ethno-nationalism of the Trump era proved disastrous for the increasingly diverse labor movement, there is potential for the party's populist faction to support labor unions moving forward. Oren Cass, a Republican strategist and self-styled “pro-union conservative,” frequently claims that several Republican senators share his view that “America needs a conservative labor movement.” Although labor unions would be justified in working hard to defeat most Republican senators, it is also easy to imagine that Cass's Senate allies could lose primaries to more-conservative Republicans who would then prove to be worse enemies of organized labor.Allying with one party can make the successful pursuit of prolabor policies subject to the same feast-or-famine dynamics characterizing other policy domains in contemporary American life. A robust labor movement must be capable of defending its gains regardless of who holds power in Washington. This may only be possible, however, if unions are willing to remain independent from a Democratic Party that itself has increasingly abandoned the language of class and solidarity among working people. Our story of the CIO-PAC and Taft-Hartley suggests that today's labor movement would be wise to find ways to embrace Democrats without alienating potential allies in the GOP.If such a balancing act proves difficult—as it did for the CIO-PAC in the 1940s—it may speak more to the constraints of the two-party system than to any failure on behalf of the labor movement. As Marx wrote, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Labor

Sep 1, 2021
Jonathan Obert + 1

Contemporary American Politics Research Articles

Related Topics

Articles published on Contemporary American Politics

A Moving Image of Scepticism: Cavell on Film, Gender, and Gaslighting

Media Frames in an Era of the Local

Scientific supremacy: How do genetic narratives relate to racism?

The dual economy, climate change, and the polarization of American politics

Human mobility patterns are associated with experienced partisan segregation in US metropolitan areas

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Presidential partisanship and regulatory review

The Counselor Brent Scowcroft and his Role in Achieving the Requirements of the American National Security

Anti-environmentalism and the natural ‘wages of whiteness’

The ethics of asymmetric politics

The Realignment of Political Tolerance in the United States

Explaining Contentious Energy Policy

TRENDS: Diploma divide: Educational attainment and the realignment of the American electorate

Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement

Racialized Pandemic: The Effect of Racial Attitudes on COVID-19 Conspiracy Theory Beliefs

(Mis)estimating Affective Polarization

American Federalism, Political Inequality, and Democratic Erosion

E Pluribus Unum

HOW MERITOCRACY FUELS INEQUALITY—PART II Reply to Critics

Authors’ Response

Lead the way for us