Guardian: Liberals risk becoming a permanent minority in America [View all]

From The Guardian:

What will liberalism do in the new, terrifying world the 2016 election has inaugurated? More than any other presidential election in a century, its outcome turned not on issues but on resentment and alienation. It was a vote in which anger overrode optimism, a corrosive sense of failure overrode hope and in which the very impracticality of a Donald Trump presidency proved one of his strongest drawing cards. He would not improve politics, his core supporters told interviewers. He would blow it up.

Liberals have urgent work to do to block the most reckless, punitive efforts of a Trump presidency. But liberalism must also come to terms with the fact that the base on which it has rested since the 1940s in this election fell almost completely apart. The effectiveness of the Republican party’s Southern Strategy of the late 1960s in peeling off southern white Americans was the beginning of the New Deal coalition’s breakup.

The desertion of the northern, white working class in the 2016 election, should it persist, would leave liberalism without a viable electoral base. Unless the Trump victory literally splits apart the Republican party, liberalism threatens to become a permanent minority of the educated, the bi-coastal, the urban, the nonwhite, and the poor. Despite changing demographics, national elections cannot be won on that basis alone.


Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/03/liberals-risk-becoming-permanent-minority-america