From The Comments: Reading The Future

In response to a question laid out in Matt Yglesias’ mailbox:

Do you think that the racial depolarization of voting patterns will change the ideology of either party, and if so, in what way?

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Just wanted to highlight some relevant dynamics here first.

One is that whenever a subset of a population is politically exiled or leaves, the remaining population's "political center of gravity" shifts away from the side that left. This is *a* factor in why Cuba has remained stable for so long.

Another observation is that infusions of new converts can have highly variable "incubation periods" for them to affect their new home party. The Trumpists remade their party in a short five years, but the Black Democrats took 40 years (1920s to 1960s) to remake theirs.

I think the new wave of Republicans of color is going to resemble the latter more than the former. They aren't going to rock the boat, because they LIKE this boat. They won't start changing decorations until after the honeymoon is over, and they actually start trying to make a home in their new party -- they'll find resistance to anyone actually handing them any levers of power, and just like the Black Democrats, they're going to settle in and overcome that resistance, not run crying back to a party they've given up on.

Notably, I think this will also mean that the GOP will actually take LONGER to abandon Trumpism than it otherwise would have. The converts will bring their fervor, stretching out the timeline, and lending ammunition to defending the GOP as "not the real racists".

On the other side, I think the most obvious effect is that those remaining

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on the left will double down on wokeness, even as wokeism's popularity continues to ebb. But they won't actually win that struggle, though, and it *won't* tear the party apart. Again, like with the exiles, most of those who hate wokeness have already left. Most of the remaining Dems and suburbanite converts at least see some redeeming value in it, even if they ultimately disagree with it.

Also, the party is still united in its hatred for Trumpism/illiberalism. It's the entire coalition's raison d'etre. Thus, their electoral imperative will remain "hold onto our slim advantage in the suburbs", by means of centrism. As much as the left hates the center, they'll accept that the party simply has to remain a bimodal coalition for the time being. And the Democratic Party will indeed remain so until the GOP finally abandons Trumpism.

Finally, unlike the new generation of Republicans of color, the Never Trump exiles are already seeking to remake the centrist wing of the Democratic Party in their image. And they'll probably win, because most centrist Democrats whose names don't rhyme with "Spabigail Hamburglar" are generally incompetent wimps, while the Never Trumpers have hardcore sons-of-bitches like Charlie Sykes and Tim Miller coming over from the right-wing media and consultant spheres, joining hands with fusty old libs like Will Saletan, all of them busily laying the media and institutional groundwork for a new generation of Democratic center-right ideology. These are the people who made the GOP's right-wing media so dangerous, and they're FULLY committed to whipping the Democratic center into shape.

They're also in the process of remaking their own identities to match their new home, discovering in themselves a liberal progressivism that - as recently as two decades ago - they'd assumed was irrelevant because Buckley's and Reagan's conservatism had all the answers. These guys are leaning HEAVILY on themes of Lincoln and the founding of the GOP, and may soon come to see the Democratic Party as an opportunity to start over again, remaking the republic in the image that Lincoln never got the chance to -- especially if the left childishly refuses to grow up and take the reins of power in the party. Their ideology is dramatically different from the left's, but I think that within the next 5 years, they'll achieve a synthesis with supply-side progressives like Ezra, Matt, and Noah Smith.

And while I'm a biased source here, my gut tells me that within the next 10-20 years after that, this ideology will have achieved a majority both within the party and across the country. I suspect it'll be the ideology that finally breaks the decades of evenly-matched gridlock, and dominates the country for decades in the same way that FDR's New Deal coalition did.

1. Remember, the Hoteps and other new Republicans of color had more in common with the FAR LEFT than with the center. The GOP's racial depolarization isn't a case of swing-voter moderates responding to usual swing-voter issues like crime, it's a case of extremists horseshoe-ing over to the other extreme.