Yoni Appelbaum on Changing Demographics in the US

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And we turn now to America’s deeply polarized politics. “The Atlantic” is devoting its December issue to a special report called “How to Stop a Civil War,” look at a country they say is coming apart. Yoni Appelbaum is a senior editor of the magazine. And his article “How America Ends” explores the democratic — demographic shift changing the country’s very fabric and its impact on politics today. And he’s joining our Hari Sreenivasan to discuss a cautionary tale for these times.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: So, “The Atlantic” has a package of stories right now on newsstands about how to avoid a civil war. And your piece focuses on a demographic shift. And it’s not just about the racial shift that’s happening in the country come to 2042. What is the transition that’s under way?

YONI APPELBAUM, “THE ATLANTIC”: Well, we have been a white Christian nation since our founding. We are no longer a white Christian nation. That is, a majority of Americans are no longer both white and Christian. Within a couple of decades, a majority of Americans won’t be white. It’s hard to think of many developed democracies that have ever seen the majority population slide into the minority. And most of the examples are right here in the United States in our own past.

SREENIVASAN: And how does this shift affect what is happening in our day- to-day lives, the increased polarity that we’re seeing today?

APPELBAUM: It poses are really stark choice. Those who have been in the majority have the option of making that majority more capacious, reaching out to new groups, to immigrants, to moderate voters, trying to enlarge the definition of what it means to belong to America’s cultural majority. That’s how at many points in the past previous cultural majorities have survived these sorts of transitions. There’s another choice. And at some moments in the American past, that’s the choice that’s been embraced. That is just running away from democracy. If people no longer believe that they can win elections, they have the option of deciding to pursue other means of power in order to maintain control.

SREENIVASAN: Now, this is not the first demographic shift. You go — at great lengths, you point out that there have been previous ones. Why are you so concerned about this one? There was a shift before the Civil War. There was one in the teens and ’20s. What’s so different about this?

APPELBAUM: You know, when I started thinking about how does one stop a civil war, my first instinct was just dismiss the question out of hand. We’re not about to fix bayonets and go charging at each other. We’re not on the verge of civil war. And then, the more I thought about that question, the more concerned I grew, because it could get so much worse, because, at moments of previous demographic transition, things have gotten a lot worse than they are now. We tend to regard this moment in political time as the worst crisis the nation has ever faced. Far from it. But I don’t intend to offer that as reassurance, but, rather, as a source of some alarm. At past moments, we have gone through considerable upheaval along the way. The Civil War, the actual Civil War, left three-quarters-of-a-million Americans dead. Nobody wants to go back to something like that. And then so the question becomes, how do you navigate these sorts of transitions without watching political violence erupt?

SREENIVASAN: So, at the end of the Civil War, you also point out that there were ways that the South tried to maintain control, even though there was going to be a moment here where they had to reckon with the fact that they were going to be on the losing side of this. But that didn’t stop segregation. That didn’t stop slave ownership. That just changed dimensions.

APPELBAUM: You know, after the Civil War, we have a brief decade of Reconstruction, when we’re trying to forge a more inclusive republic, one which offers co-equal citizenship to African Americans. And that proceeds, but it proceeds at the expense of those who have traditionally exercised power in the South. And there is what is effectively an extraordinarily bloody counter-revolution in the South that historians call Redemption, a period in which Southern whites decided they were not going to abide by the result of democratic elections. They were going to fix those elections. There were violent coups in places like Wilmington, North Carolina, against democratically elected governments. We saw the Jim Crow laws come in and various ballot access restrictions that effectively disenfranchised Southern black voters. There was a decision by the traditional majority not to extend a full and co-equal citizenship and not to embrace the demographic future that they were facing. And that was perhaps one of the sorriest chapters in American history. It’s evidence that things can go backwards. The arc does not invariably lead to greater enlargement of rights. It can lead to the repression of rights and liberties. And that, in turn, counsels a degree of vigilance.

SREENIVASAN: What responsibility does the left have in this? I mean, it seems that the polarity between the parties increases as counter-reactions to one another, right? So does the right become more conservative or more far right because they see something from the left that is a greater threat to them, and vice versa?

APPELBAUM: Yes, you can get stuck really easily in a downward spiral. But what I should say is that many political scientists who have looked at this have seen the center-right as the really decisive force for democratic stability. That was a little bit surprising for me. I might have thought that the virulence of extremist movements would play a greater and more decisive role. In fact, not. If you have a robust center-right, it can negotiate compromises between those who have traditionally exercised power in society and those who are trying to seize the reins of power. As long as those who have been in positions of power feel that there’s a robust center-right that can defend their interests, that can guarantee them a future in the renegotiated society, they will stick with democracy. As the center-right falters, it’s precisely the faltering of the center- right that opens up the opportunity for the far right and the far left. And so, in a weird way, the responsibility lies with the mainstream Republican Party, the party that was pushing after 2012 to enlarge its appeal, and then buckled in the face of Donald Trump.

SREENIVASAN: So did it fail then or did it fail before that? I mean, we had the Tea Party emerge. That could be seen as a failure of the center-right?

APPELBAUM: Well, I think you can look at the last several decades of Western democracy and see broad failures that voters are out of patience with. No longer do new generations have reason or confidence for believing that their lives will be better than their parents’. That’s a fairly profound failure. The United States has been embroiled in two decades of wars without end. That’s a fairly profound failure. We made massive bets on free trade that led to highly concentrated pain and highly diffuse gains. That was a concentrated failure, too. And when you add up these failures, there’s all kinds of reasons why voters might be losing patience and faith in the center, whether on the right or the left. So there’s a variety of reasons that the center-right has failed. I think what I would really want to drive home is that we need the center- right to succeed. So, whatever the reasons for its failure, it needs to address them, and it needs to become robust and to regain its confidence if we’re going to see democratic stability reemerge.

SREENIVASAN: Now, I mean, we’re about a year away, a little less. What is the likelihood that the center-right can regain itself that fast or even really in the next four years?

APPELBAUM: Well, the 2020 election may be a turning point. You can watch the Republican Party come out of that chastened, humbled and determined to recapture the things that had made it appeal to so many Americans in the first place. Or you could watch the Republican Party stumble out of the 2020 election convinced that voters were not open to its message, that it needs a champion like Donald Trump, whether because he wins or whether because he loses, but that only through that kind of countermajoritarian impulse, only through suppressing votes, rather than seeking to woo them, can it maintain its grip on power. And so, just like after 2012, the Republican Party faced a choice and faced that choice again in 2016. It’s going to face a choice after 2020. And that choice will matter, not just to Republican voters, but to all Americans.

SREENIVASAN: Is — so, how — if they want to take that high road, so to speak and say, let’s try to reimagine a Republican Party that is a bigger tent, let’s go ahead and absorb the edges, how do they do that?

APPELBAUM: It’s not a high road. It’s narrow, calculated self-interest. And I think that’s actually one reason why it could happen. What they need to do is to do exactly what they themselves said they needed to do in 2012, to identify the kinds of principles that many Americans find tremendously appealing. Many immigrant groups find the values that the Republican Party champions tremendously more appealing than the values that the Democratic Party typically champions. There is no reason that the Republican Party couldn’t reach out to them, except that they find themselves repelled by its appeals to identity.

SREENIVASAN: So, if identity is such a big part of this now, what happens if the president does not win, and his supporters, their angst doesn’t go away? Do they feel like they have to now get into some sort of a fight for survival?

APPELBAUM: Maybe. But often, when these coalitions have lost or let slip their grip on power, what they have discovered is that they wake up, and it’s just another day, that many of the dire prophecies of doom that they had listened to were false prophecies, that they can adjust rather rapidly, and succeed and thrive in a nation that enlarges liberty and welcomes more citizens. And this has been a persistent theme. The South, in many ways, froze in its development during the years of Jim Crow, and then thrived and prospered when the civil rights movement finally brought a greater measure of justice. It turned out that it was often poor Southern whites who had the most to lose through those racist and repressive policies, and that they had a lot to gain by being part of a society that was more equal. I think that’s probably the case now.

SREENIVASAN: But despair wins. I mean, painting everything as an existential crisis, a zero sum game, wins over the idea that you’re talking about, as saying, hey, let’s go ahead and help people understand our point of view, our world view. It’s just much easier to say, if we lose this guys, it’s all over. You got to stick with me on this.

APPELBAUM: Sometimes, it does. But Donald Trump garnered three million fewer votes than his opponent in 2016. I look back at earlier episodes, like Woodrow Wilson, who gave us the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids, a great repression of civil liberties, slammed the doors shut immigration, re-segregated the federal civil service. And he had a very particular vision of America as a country for white men. That was the vision of the Democratic Party. And it was a contested vision within the Democratic Party. And it was eight short years until the Democratic Party nominated a very different sort of candidate, Al Smith, a Catholic governor, who came in giving a great speech denouncing lynching in the South, and rebuilt that party to appeal to immigrants and to appeal to the newly enfranchised women, who suddenly had the right to vote. And the Democrats successfully competed for their support. And so you can see a party which gives into its counsel of fear, and then is still capable of remaking itself. And Smith paved the way for FDR and one of the great uninterrupted sweeps of partisan dominance in American history. But the Democrats didn’t get there by embracing their fear. That’s where they were in the short term. What enabled their long-term success was enlarging their appeal.

SREENIVASAN: But what’s at the core of the ethno-national kind of surge that’s happening right now? Because even when it comes to when we say a white voter, what is white has changed over time. I mean, who was considered white in 1900 was a much smaller group of people than who we consider white today.

APPELBAUM: Yes. And that’s actually one of the things that ought to give us all a little bit of hope in a moment like this. The boundaries of that cultural majority have been continually renegotiated. If we were at first a nation largely settled by the English, English became British, British became Northern European, Northern European became undifferentiated European, and so on, right? There is nothing fixed about our identities. We’re perfectly capable of renegotiating them. And just as in the past, the things that have seemed to us like barriers that couldn’t be breached, like identities that couldn’t be erased, have become simply American, that can happen again today. There is no reason that new immigrants cannot uphold the same values that have always defined America. In fact, my experience of new immigrants to this country is that they are among the most fervent patriots I have ever met. They come here precisely because they want to embrace this nation’s values. That message, I think, is a powerful one. And we have seen it reshape the politics of this country as people have been able to see these new groups as fully and co-equally American, and it can again.

SREENIVASAN: Whether it’s through the eyes of those new immigrants or the ones, the Americans, that have been here for a long time, one of the things that might be distressing is, wait a minute, what happened to one person, one vote? And whether it’s through gerrymandering, whether it’s through kind of all the kind of different machines that we have at play, you don’t necessarily feel like your pull on the lever is necessarily making that difference, right? Are we destined for a future where the majority does not necessarily rule?

APPELBAUM: We have got that future right now. That future is our present, right, where the candidate who garnered fewer popular votes sits in the Oval Office. The Democrats have got more popular votes in most recent elections, and yet most justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by Republicans. So that future is, in some sense, a description of America’s reality. And it’s purposeful. The institutions of the United States were designed in order to safeguard the interests of rural voters in some ways.

SREENIVASAN: We also have structures in place that have very long consequences. I mean, whether President Trump leaves in one year or five, the number of federal justices he’s been able to appoint will outlast him. The Supreme Court justices will outlast him. So, in a way, sometimes, these changes are almost generational in nature. It might take 20 years or 30 years for a different crop of people to have different influences on our policies.

APPELBAUM: President Trump has had a profound impact on the federal bureaucracy, on the federal judiciary. But most of the judges he’s appointed are perfectly well-qualified for the benches on which they sit. I’m not particularly alarmed by his efforts to reshape the federal judiciary. What we need is a nation that abides by the rule of law and is responsive to the interests of voters. So, the things that alarm me are not his appointments. They are, rather, the efforts by his administration, by some state-level Republican Parties district the franchise, to deter people from voting, rather than inviting more participation, to gerrymander districts, rather than trying to set up elections that are responsive to the will of voters. The elements of our system that are supposed to be democratic, that are supposed to be responsive to the changing opinions of voters need to remain that way. And then the other elements of the system that are intended to give it a degree of status can function properly. It’s when no part of the system is responsive to the will of voters that we got into trouble.

SREENIVASAN: It seems like what you’re describing now is what the South tried to do, to fight the math, that these efforts might be successful in the short-term, but you just can’t fight the shift of where the country’s heading.

APPELBAUM: The South made a fatal mistake on the eve of the Civil War. It passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which was a piece of legislation that said, we’re not going to abide by states’ rights. We’re going to use the coercive power of the federal government to reach into local communities to seize people we don’t think have the legal right to be there, and to leverage the police, the courts, local officials in order to bring those people back out of those communities and into bondage. It was a fateful overreach, because it drove home the message to many Americans that they couldn’t simply look away at what was happening in the South. But, more than that, it was a fateful mistake, because the South had given up on moral suasion. Rather than trying to have the argument about the justice of slavery, they simply went for coercive authority. They tried to win by power what they could not win by rhetoric or by argument. And whenever a political movement does that, it may achieve some degree of short-term success, but it tends to radicalize its opponents, it tends to energize them, and it tends to sow the seeds of its ultimate defeat.

SREENIVASAN: So, why the title of your piece? Was it hyperbolic. Was it literal? Was it — what are you trying to say?

APPELBAUM: I don’t know how America ends. I hope it doesn’t end yet. But I wanted people think about that question, because it is the question we should be posing to ourselves. We should be aware that this experiment can end, that it’s not inevitable, that there’s nothing about it which is self-corrective or self-sustaining, that it requires our active efforts and participation. And we should look back at those moments when it came close to ending to understand how it was that a great democratic experiment was jeopardized, and then also how it was that it managed to right itself, and how Americans in those earlier areas rallied to the standard of greater justice and greater freedom and righted the ship.

SREENIVASAN: Yoni Appelbaum, thanks again.

APPELBAUM: Thank you.