Thomas Byrne Edsall - The Point of No Return: American Democracy at the Crossroads

THE POINT OF NO RETURN

The Point of No Return

American Democracy at the Crossroads

Thomas Byrne Edsall

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

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I dedicate this book to my wife, Mary; to my daughter, Alexandra; to her husband, Bob; and to my two grandchildren, Thomas Edsall Victor and Lydia Edsall Victor. Their love has sustained me.

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2. Nov. 16, 2016
3. May 4, 2016
4. March 1, 2016
5. April 27, 2016
6. Sept. 19, 2015
7. Jan. 6, 2016
8. Dec. 15, 2016
9. April 13, 2017
10. March 2, 2017
11. Oct. 19, 2017
12. May 4, 2017
13. June 22, 2017
14. Sept. 14, 2017
15. March 16, 2017
16. Jan. 11, 2018
17. Feb. 8, 2018
18. May 31, 2018
19. June 7, 2018
20. June 14, 2018
21. July 19, 2018
22. Oct. 18, 2018
23. July 26, 2018
24. Feb. 27, 2019
25. Sept. 11, 2019
26. Sept. 25, 2019
27. Oct. 9, 2019
28. Nov. 6, 2019
29. March 4, 2020
30. Oct. 28, 2020
31. Nov. 11, 2020
32. Nov. 18, 2020
33. Dec. 16, 2020
34. Jan. 28, 2021
35. Jan. 13, 2021
36. Feb. 17, 2021
37. May 5, 2021
38. May 26, 2021
39. June 23, 2021
40. July 7, 2021
41. Sept. 1, 2021
42. Sept. 22, 2021
43. Oct. 13, 2021
44. Oct. 27, 2021
45. Jan. 26, 2022

I have been lucky over the years to work with some legendary editorsBen Bradlee at the Washington Post, Bob Silvers at the New York Review of Books, Michael Kinsley and Frank Foer at The New Republic. I am deeply grateful to Nick Lemann, who in 2006 appointed me to the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Chair at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

I owe thanks as well to Elaine B. Gin and Reid Dobell for their invaluable assistance in preparing this manuscript.

First among equals, however, is my brilliant, erudite, talented, and tireless New York Times editor, Aaron Retica, who oversaw the columns in this volume. My debt to him is incalculable.

THE POINT OF NO RETURN

The years following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 saw the abandonment of the Democratic Party by the white American South. That partisan realignment led slowly but directly to the arrival of Donald Trump, a supremely dangerous manan enemy of racial justiceat the pinnacle of American power, where despite his narrow loss in 2020 he still lodges.

Many of the conflicts dividing Americans today have their roots in the civil rights movement and broader rights revolutions of the 1960s and 1970sand in the reactionary response to those revolutions. Progressive insurgencies granted full citizenship to African Americans, empowered previously marginalized populations, and diversified the Democratic Party. They also mandated legal and constitutional protections for women, ethnic and racial minorities, criminal defendants, the poor, homosexuals, the handicapped, and the mentally ill.

The strategy that Trump, ever the opportunist, adopted when he launched his bid for the presidency was the white supremacist position that had been unambiguously articulated nearly six decades earlier by archconservative National Review editor William F. Buckley in his August 1957 essay Why the South Must Prevail: The issue is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in the areas in which it does not predominate numerically. The sobering answer is Yes. Buckley argued that this is because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. The question, then, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. Buckleys answer: The National Review believes that the Souths premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened.

By the late 1960s it had become uncommon for people to explicitly express racially insensitive views. Buckley soon renounced his own editorial, and Republicans in general swiftly shifted to code words and phrases, such as law and order, the silent majority, and welfare queens.

Still, the rights revolutions had given political conservatives a powerful tool to mobilize votersespecially lower- and middle-income non-college-educated whites who felt the Democratic Party had abandoned them. In 1964 many of these Southern voters supported Barry Goldwater, who carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. By January 1976, Ronald Reagan picked up the racist mantle and regaled his Asheville, North Carolina, audience on the campaign trail with this oft-disputed anecdote: In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. In fact, Reagan added, her tax-free cash income alone has been running at $150,000 a year.

By the time of Reagans 1980 victory, the Republican Party had become the home of racial reaction.

Fueling the conservative response to the civil rights revolution of the mid-1960s was the onset of a surge in immigration to the United States following enactment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

According to the official House of Representatives description of the law, Congress erected a legal framework that prioritized highly skilled immigrants and opened the door for people with family already living in the United States. The popular bill passed the House, 318 to 95. The law capped the number of annual visas at 290,000, which included a restriction of 20,000 visas per country per year. But policymakers had vastly underestimated the number of immigrants who would take advantage of the family reunification clause.

In 1970, 4.7 percent of this countrys population was foreign born; by 2019, that had shot up to 13.7 percent. In actual numbers, there were 9.6 million immigrants in 1970; in 2019, there were 44.9 million, a 263 percent increase, with most of the new immigrants coming from Latin America, Asia, and Africa rather than the countries of northern, western, eastern, or southern Europe.