Doug Henwood's Blog, page 6

Fresh audio product: the Y2K era, S Korea’s political crisis

Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link):

January 9, 2025 Colette Shade, author of Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything, on culture at the turn of the millennium • Tim Shorrock discusses the political crisis in South Korea

Fresh audio product: best of 2024

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January 2, 2025 A look back at highlights of 2024. Three interviews on Israel’s many wars: Rashid Khalidi and Pankaj Mishra with a historical perspective, and Annelle Sheline adds a former insider’s view. Then, Aziz Rana on the awfulness of the US constitution, Anna Kornbluh with a cultural critique of immediacy, and Brooke Harrington on the offshore money-hiding racket. Concluding with a memorial to Jane McAlevey.

Fresh audio product: a couple of Joes, the unchanging Ivies

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December 26, 2024 Branko Marcetic, author of Yesterday’s Man, says farewell to Joe Biden (and takes some shots at Joe Scarborough too) • Santiago Pérez, co-author of this paper, on how little the class composition of elite college student bodies have changed

Fresh audio product: Syria, COP29

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December 19, 2024 Trita Parsi and Joshua Landis analyze what’s been going on in Syria • Tina Gerhardt reviews the annual UN climate conference, COP29, where little happened

Fresh audio product: right-wing populism, unrest in Georgia

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December 5, 2024 Larry Bartels, author of this article, on the roots of right-wing “populism” • Sopo Japaridze, co-author of this article, on the Georgian brouhaha

Fresh audio product: offshore wealth, “Marxist” gov in Sri Lanka?

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November 28, 2024 Brooke Harrington, author of Offshore, on how and where the mega-rich stash their cash • Mahendran Thiruvarangan on a new leftish government in Sri Lanka

Yet another parsing of the vote

If you listen to some liberals—I’m too discreet to name names, but you might know whom I have in mind—Trump’s election was the reflection of a resurgent hegemony of white patriarchy. These arguments are typically made without any supporting evidence, because there isn’t much of that. Here’s some complicating data drawn from exit polls (sources: 2016, 2020, 2024).

First, the swing between 2020 and 2024. The only demographic groups in the graph below to shift significantly towards the Democrat between 2020 and 2024 were over-65s and those with incomes over $100,000. Over-65s, often maligned as a bunch of wealth-hoarding reactionaries, went from favoring Trump by 5 points in 2020 to breaking even in 2024. (They favored Trump by 7 in 2016, though this isn’t graphed.) Over $100,000  voters went from favoring Trump by 12 in 2020 to favoring Harris by 5. (Data note: you’d need an income of $121,200 today to match one of $100,000 in November 2020, so this is only a rough comparison.) 

Viewed as swings, as in the graph below, the youngest voters shifted hard from D to R (by 11 points, to be precise), as did voters without a college degree (by 6 points). Latinos shifted even harder, especially men (19 points for them, though the 8-point shift among women wasn’t trivial). Whites of both sexes shifted some away from Trump, and white women, in small numbers, towards Harris.

Changes from 2016 are also interesting, and also not what you’d guess from the standard liberal whining. The share of white men voting for Trump fell by a percentage point in 2020 and again in 2024; white women were little changed. Black men shifted 8 points in Trump’s direction over those eight years; black women, moved 3 points towards Trump. The most striking changes were among Latina women, 13 points towards Trump, and especially Latino men, 23 points. Over half of Latino men, 55%, voted for Trump last week, just 5 points short of white men’s vote. The bottom two graphs show the moves towards and away from the Dems; those are close to mirror images, but since exit polls are rough estimates and there are always candidates other than the two biggies, the inversion isn’t perfect.

Obviously there’s still plenty of racism and patriarchy in the USA, and racists and patriarchs are an important part of the Trump base. It would be otherworldly to deny either. But to claim that some joint outbreak of both explains the election result requires ignoring some actual data. What needs to be explained are the shifts among formerly reliable Democratic voting blocs, notably the young, nonwhite, and lower income.

And the argument that demographic changes in the US—notably the decline of the white population share—would guarantee a Democratic majority in the coming decades now looks very wrong. Curiously, one of the analysts most associated with that argument is now a fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute.

Fresh audio product: Trump and the rest of the world, Trump and the cops

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November 14, 2024 Anatol Lieven tries to divine a Trump foreign policy out of unreliable rhetoric and early appointments • Alex Vitale tries similar on Trump and criminal justice

Fresh audio product: Trump, Israeli public opinion, the meaning of Ukraine

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November 7, 2024 DH comments on the Trump victory, especially the role of inflation • Dahlia Scheindlin on Israeli public opinion • James Foley and Vladimir Unkovski-Korica, authors of this article, on the role of Ukraine in the Western political imagination

Fresh audio product: right’s war on an Idaho college, Israel’s goals

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October 31, 2024 Laura Jedeed, author of this article, on the right’s war on North Idaho College • Mouin Rabbani on what’s driving Israel’s multiple wars, and on the state of the Axis of Resistance