The Great Alignment

Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump

By: Alan I. Abramowitz

Narrated by: Paul Heitsch

Alan I. Abramowitz has emerged as a leading spokesman for the view that our current political divide is not confined to a small group of elites and activists but a key feature of the American social and cultural landscape. The polarization of the political and media elites, he argues, arose and persists because it accurately reflects the state of American society. Here, he goes further: The polarization is unique in modern US history. Today's party divide reflects an unprecedented alignment of many different divides: racial and ethnic, religious, ideological, and geographic.

Abramowitz tells how the partisan alignment arose out of the breakup of the old New Deal coalition; introduces the most important difference between our current era and past eras, the rise of "negative partisanship"; explains how this phenomenon paved the way for the Trump presidency; and examines why our polarization could even grow deeper. This statistically based analysis tells that racial anxiety is by far a better predictor of support for Donald Trump than any other factor, including economic discontent.

©2018 Alan I. Abramowitz (P)2018 Tantor

Great!

I learned a lot from this audio. The statistics and the details were amazing. This story is told from a historical point of view. Great stuff.

The beginning is far superior to the end

The book does a much better job with its history in the beginning than the culmination of the book. The author begins tracking the history of American electoral politics and takes chapters to also view the history through a slightly different lense, like through race, women, and gerrymandering, that gives a pretty decent picture of the structure of electoral politics. However, by the end it culminates in him chalking up the reason that republicans predominantly support Trump is because of the racis- oh I mean “racial resentment”. He explains the metric of how they came to that and all the questions are essentially a catch 22. Essentially, if you agree with affirmative action, or think that African Americans need to be treated differently than any other minority, then that must mean you have “racial resentment” as opposed to having a different opinion. It seems if that assertion is going to be made he probably should have spent at least a bit of time assessing the polls correlation to his premise. It does some work pinning down how much that is a factor in determining favorability toward a a particular party, but he even asserts that racism is now some covert thing being done and that there are new metrics to judge if someone is racis- sorry I mean full of “racial resentment”. Still not bad, it’s relatively short.