Seven reasons America is headed for a more conservative decade

But there's still no 1980s-style conservative movement to capitalize on the trends.

I still remember, twenty years ago, reading The Right Nation, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. Published after George W. Bush’s close victory in the presidential contest of 2004, the book argued that America is inherently a center-right society, oriented toward free enterprise and traditional Christian values, and that it would retain this essential character for the foreseeable future.

The book could hardly have been more mistimed. The year after it was published, Nancy Pelosi and the Dems retook the House; two years later, Barack Obama cruised to victory. The conservatism of George W. Bush turned out to be a last gasp rather than a new dawn; one by one, in the years following his ill-starred presidency, the pillars of his governing ideology collapsed. Gay marriage gained wide acceptance, and Christianity itself began to wane. Tax cuts and free trade went out of fashion, and financial deregulation was widely blamed for the crisis of 2008. Even Republicans turned against the Iraq War and the muscular interventionism of Reagan-era conservatism. The progressive policy responses to the Great Recession, and the progressive social movements of the 2010s, went on to reshape American society.

But there was a time when America really had been on a conservative track. If you went back to the mid-1970s, in the years following Richard Nixon’s resignation, and you declared that the country was headed for an increasingly conservative era, people might have laughed at you. But that’s exactly what happened.

If you want a complete narrative on how the reaction against the 1960s and the exhaustion of the 1970s fed into the conservative triumph of the 1980s, I heavily recommend Rick Perlstein’s series of books — Before the Storm (about Goldwater), Nixonland (about the 1960s and the fall of New Deal liberalism), The Invisible Bridge (about Watergate and confusion of the Ford years), and Reaganland (about the rise of Reaganite conservatism). Many of the throughlines are eerie parallels to the years since 2014 — protests and riots that started in Black communities and unleashed a storm of follow-on social movements, a dictatorially-minded President elected in a spasm of reaction, years of exhaustion and inflation.

The result of those years was the relatively conservative America I grew up in — the America of Reagan, Gingrich, and Bush, of deregulation and tax cuts, of the Christian Coalition and the pro-life movement, and so on. And although I don’t think the late 2020s or the 2030s are going to look quite like that, I do think we’re in for another period of conservatism on the march in America.

And I think this is true whether or not Trump wins the election later this year. I really hope Biden wins, but I predict that even if he does, the overall shift of American society will be to the right.

Here’s a list of seven reasons for that prediction.

1. The rightward drift of nonwhite voters

In the 2000s, the most powerful rebuttal to Micklethwait and Wooldridge was that they ignored America’s changing demographic composition. Some Democratic strategists argued that the massive influx of immigration — most of it Hispanic — would do for the U.S. exactly what it had seemingly done for California, and give the Democrats a permanent structural majority.

Obama’s victory in 2012 seemed to confirm that thesis, as Hispanic and Asian voters swung harder than ever toward the Dems. That prompted a ferocious backlash against immigration among Republicans (“Great Replacement” theory), and probably added to progressives’ sense that they could push farther than they otherwise would have dared.

But the pattern of American history is not on progressives’ side here. Previous immigrant groups — Italians, Irish, etc. — have usually started out voting strongly for the Democratic party, but shifted more Republican over time. Now it looks like that pattern may be repeating. Hispanic voters shifted a bit toward Trump in 2020. And John Burn-Murdoch and Nate Silver both have in-depth analyses of recent polling data showing a continued shift of Hispanic voters — and even some Black voters — toward the GOP. Here’s an eye-opening chart:

Source: Gallup via John Burn-Murdoch

Murdoch has many other pieces of data to back up the conclusion, and Silver has some poll aggregates that confirm the story.

Nor is this a case of Hispanic and Black leftists being angry at Biden over Israel. The nonwhite voters shifting toward the GOP almost all self-identify as conservatives:

Source: John Burn-Murdoch

And reporting from Axios, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other news outlets tells the same story: Many Hispanic voters, and some Black voters as well, are mad at Democrats about the economy and about social issues, and are giving the Republicans a second look.

In other words, what we’re seeing looks like the long-awaited fulfillment of Ronald Reagan’s prophecy — that the children and grandchildren of nonwhite immigrants would follow the same pattern as their white predecessors, and shift toward a more politically divided stance. Demographics might have given progressivism a boost in the 2010s, but that boost is already beginning to fade.

2. Dissatisfaction with DEI

One of the most important victories of the progressive social movements of the 2010s was the rise of DEI. In almost all universities, in many corporations and schools, and in the U.S. civil service, there are now agencies or departments dedicated to “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, or DEI. The methods used by these DEI agencies vary widely, and can include anything from training seminars to soft racial quotas for hiring and promotion, to efforts to help racially diverse coworkers get along better at work, to monitoring employees and students for signs of racism, etc.