Risk Versus Security: The Real Fault Line Of American Politics

It's been more than 20 years since Thomas Frank's groundbreaking tome entitled "What's the Matter with Kansas?" that took a deep dive into the American working class's ongoing trend from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.  It was a head-scratcher for those on the left and center-left, myself included, trying to decipher why the demographic that had long been the core constituency of the Democratic Party kept warming up to Republicans more with each cycle.  Democrats spent the years ahead trying to modify their messaging to win some of these working-class voters back, but even at the peak of the Democratic insurgency at the sunset of the Bush years, they continued to lose large swaths of the white working class, particularly in Appalachia, the South, and the lower Midwest.

And then, of course, came the Donald Trump realignment of 2016 that consolidated the white working-class as a bedrock constituency of the Republican Party, growing their dominance with each cycle to the point that the Democratic Party of their ancestors was scarcely a consideration anywhere on the ballot for a decisive majority of the current working-class generation.  And the Republican Party's reach has officially crossed racial and ethnic lines with a rising tide of GOP support among working-class voters of color.  The thesis of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" could now apply to "What's the Matter with Paterson, New Jersey?" or "What's the Matter with the Rio Grande Valley?" as nonwhite, working-class voters in those jurisdictions are voting similarly to the residents of rural Kansas in 2004 when Frank's book came out.

There was never any question that cultural concerns led the way for so many working-class voters' divorce from the Democratic Party, a quarter century ago and still today, but I suspect another part of that disconnect that gets less analysis is that voters see the Democratic Party as having less leverage than it used to when it comes to generating better outcomes in working-class lives.  Obviously, the legacy of NAFTA and other questionable trade deals accelerated this perception, but even taking specific trade policy off the table, the overall shift of the economy in the last quarter of the 20th century all but ensured diminished strength for the farm and factory towns where the Democrats used to get most of their support.  With each shuttered factory, with each new year where the high school students graduating with honors left town with no intention of returning, and with each new Census report showing downwardly adjusted population signs, it became harder for residents of these communities to see how the Democratic Party's vision for the country would be able to deliver for them.

And as the Democrats' promise of economic security seemed increasingly dissonant from the situation on the ground, this demographic became more and more likely to base their voting habits on cultural issues.  Most people are pretty conservative, and people of working-class pedigrees tend to be even more conservative than the population at large.  They crave security in their lives, both in their culture and in their finances.  When the situation on the ground reduced the Democrats' leverage in offering them security, their votes were up for grabs.  

A generation ago, when Thomas Frank's book came out, the Democrats had yet to fully collapse among the working class largely because the Republicans were still peddling more economic risk than security.  The Bush-era GOP was at the forefront of lobbying for even more trade agreements, getting us involved in questionable foreign policy entanglements, and wanted to cut Medicare and privatize Social Security.  Enough working-class voters stuck with the Democratic Party, and thus kept it from fully melting down, because the risk versus security tug of war still came out in favor of the Democrats on economic policy over the Republican Party on cultural policy.

Enter Donald Trump in 2015.  In one fell swoop, he stole the Democrats' advantage on the three issues that were working best for them among working-class voters.  He was more aggressive than Democrats in opposing international trade policy.  He was more aggressive than Democrats in his opposition to American foreign policy intervention.  And he stated from the outset that he didn't plan to touch Social Security or Medicare, which was definitely not the Republican Party position up to that point.  At the same time, he embraced the same cultural conservatism embraced by a strong majority of working-class Americans.  Donald Trump was selling an agenda of both cultural security and economic security for the kinds of voters who wanted both, and it was no longer difficult for these voters to choose.  They shifted by double-digits to Trump in 2016 and have continued to grow these margins in subsequent cycles.

How did the Democratic Party, or at least the remaining Democratic party constituencies, respond to Trump consolidating "security voters"?  By embracing muscular and exponentially expanded cultural risk and foisting it upon the kinds of voters who were already abandoning them by the millions because they wanted more security and not more risk.  The left's backlash to Trump's first term centered around a cultural transformation that put security-minded voters on defense in the most aggressive possible ways.

Security-minded voters wanted tighter control of our borders and reduced prevalence of illegal immigration, and the left responded by calling for abolishing ICE and decriminalizing border crossings.

Security-minded voters wanted to de-emphasize racial and ethnic differences, and the left responded by demanding a "racial reckoning" that dwelled even more deeply on racial grievance.

Security-minded voters wanted opportunities for better lives for their sons and daughters, and the left responded by scolding them that their grandchildren's grandchildren should still be held responsible for the actions of their grandparents' grandparents.

Security-minded voters wanted grace for past mistakes in their own personal lives and for their families, and the left responded by deciding that people's entire lives should be judged based on a politically incorrect Halloween costume they wore in the 80s or having smacked a woman in the ass at a bar in the 90s, with their lifetime cancellations from polite society and losing their ability to be employed being the only acceptable responses.

Security-minded voters wanted as much continuity as possible in relations between men and women, and the left responded by insisting that gender falls on a spectrum and that biological men should be playing on their daughters' soccer teams. 

And security-minded voters were definitely not duped when unpopular solutions that imposed cultural risk on the majority in the past got repackaged with different language.  "Illegal border crossings" didn't gain support when they were rebranded as "asylum claims".  "Affirmative action" didn't win over converts when they started calling it "diversity, equity, and inclusion".  And soft-on-crime policies of the 70s were just as unpopular when justified on the grounds of "criminal justice reform" or "prosecutorial discretion" in the 2020s.

Obviously, people who crave cultural security are often on the wrong side of history and I'm not making excuses for bigotry and obtuseness, but when it comes to democratically decided elections, candidates for office have to recognize that most people do not welcome cultural change.  When voters do demand change, the majority of them are really seeking a "change" in the direction of more security for themselves, their families, and their communities.  It's a minority of voters whose pleas for "change" include an expanded degree of risk, either cultural or economic.

This puts the progressive party of any nation in a precarious position because cultural risk is required to expand rights and to evolve with the times.  So when someone bursts onto the scene peddling a security-minded agenda on both cultural and economic matters, as Trump did in 2016 and again in 2024, it's gonna be very hard for the progressive party to keep their troops from switching armies.  Democrats recognized this as 2024 progressed and attempted to modify their message, but the damage had been done and the cake was baked. 

With a combination of media fragmentation and astonishing levels of disengagement by swaths of the security-minded electorate, Donald Trump was able to obscure an agenda rife with an unprecedented degree of risk and sell it as security last year.  Security-minded voters allowed themselves to be convinced that the Democratic Party was a riskier bet than the guy who vowed to slash the federal government and impose supersized and wildly disruptive tariffs.  Trump made no secret that he intended to govern as an autocrat, but like so many other societies who handed the keys to their kingdoms to autocrats in the past, voters determined they were okay with authoritarianism in the interest of cultural and economic security.

Clearly, now that Trump has managed, in less than 100 days, to single-handedly induce a recession, endanger the retirement savings of millions, and put Medicaid and potentially other senior entitlements on the chopping block despite his promise not to, the voters who chose him on the grounds of security are poised for serious buyer's remorse, whether they're willing to admit it yet or not.  By default, the Democrats stand poised to poach voters motivated by security in subsequent cycles.  That's not to say they're going to for a number of reasons.

Primary among these reasons is that we're at the precipice of both the AI revolution and the last of the Baby Boomers retiring.  Voters picked the worst possible time for enabling Trump to take us over the cliff with a self-induced global economic crisis.  If Democrats had limited capacity to shape the economy in security voters' favor in the recent past, they're gonna have a vastly harder time in an era of scarcity and oligarchy.  As a result, the politics of culture is likely to continue to be salient on most security voters' radar, especially now that Trump has exposed just how severely cultural grievance can be leveraged and, likewise, how Biden has inadvertently exposed how little impact old-school initiatives directed toward winning over security-minded voters have in contemporary politics.

This feeds into the key question that fragmented Democrats are trying to figure out in the aftermath of their November 2024 annihilation.  Do they move to the center or to the left?  Certainly based on a conventional reading of American politics, or a conventional reading specific to the 2024 election for that matter, it would seem obvious that Democrats need to move to the center.  But the political center is not a space that satisfies the electoral majority's insatiable appetite for security.  With this in mind, I don't think it's at all clear which direction would best serve the Democrats' electoral interest, particularly in 2028.  It'll depend on how bad the Trump economy gets, how disruptive the AI revolution gets, and how far along our institutions' ongoing meltdown gets to its completion.  How many hundreds of additional rural and small-city hospitals will close their doors in response to our broken health care system?  How many people will be denied full homeowners' insurance coverage as climate change renders the risk pool model unsustainable?

Voters have shown us twice in the last decade that they're willing to take a bazooka to constitutional order if they believe it will deliver them greater security.  With it looking increasingly doubtful that Trump is gonna be able to deliver on that security, don't rule out the possibility that they'll swing radically the other direction just as quickly and just as comprehensively as they embraced right-wing authoritarianism.  I predicted in November that the future is autocracy, and I'm doubling down on that.  Don't expect an electorate that chose a bomb thrower who promised them security last time to suddenly decide upon a calculated centrist beholden to institutions as their salvation next time....expect them to throw their support toward a different kind of autocrat who promises security at any cost, with the caveat that that security has to come in the economic and cultural form.

The 2016 version of Bernie Sanders is a close approximation of what I think security voters will be most likely to respond to, one who either resists talking about cultural matters or actively takes the side of the risk-averse, while promising to do whatever it takes to stanch the considerable economic bleeding that has befallen working-class communities.  But whoever this figure ends up being can be expected to be much more sharp-elbowed in his or her approach than 2016 Bernie was, a new reality awakened by Trump's autocratic tendencies and voters' willingness to put up with it so long as the trains run on time.  

For all of the ink spilled and the bandwidth occupied litigating left versus right in American politics, it's the wrong calculus and the wrong spectrum.  The real fault line is risk versus security.  It always has been to some degree.  The appetite for security swung this country's otherwise right-leaning voters decisively to the left in 1932, and it will absolutely happen again when conditions are right.  With each passing week, it becomes easier to imagine that happening in the next Presidential cycle, but it will require the Democratic Party to settle on a platform that maximizes economic security and minimizes cultural risk, neither of which will be an easy task to even articulate let alone execute.

But even in the best-case scenario for Democrats, where voters respond to the upheaval of Trumpism 2.0 by handing Democrats huge victories in both 2026 and 2028, expect the Republicans to come roaring back with a vengeance in 2030.  Obviously, this is the conventional pattern of American politics anyway, but even the most astonishing degree of self-imposed wreckage by one of our political parties will be quickly forgiven by an electoral majority desperately craving an increasingly elusive measure of security in their lives.  A beleaguered population with an irrational expectation of security is going to be smacked in the forehead with a world offering them a rising tide of risk, and our political system is not gonna be equipped to handle it.  They will demand cultural and economic security and will get neither.