Thread by @LarryGlickman

⁦@Edsall⁩ starts this troubling piece with the puzzling premise that the “American electorate” has failed “to rise up in opposition to President Trump.”/1 nytimes.com/2020/01/22/opi…

Leaving aside the obvious fact that the “American electorate” won’t have a chance to vote on Trump himself until November, the electorate has handed Trump’s party sizable defeats in the elections of 2017-19./2
washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/…

I'm not a political psychologist but, as a historian, I question the claim that “we may have tipped the balance too far in favor of unconstrained diversity and complexity,” pushing the boundary beyond “many people’s capacity to tolerate it.”/3

While the percentage of immigrants in the current U.S. population is quiet high historically, it is at or below where it was between roughly 1880 and WWI. /4
migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-…

Of course that era of mass immigration did end with racialized immigration restriction laws in 1921 and 1924. Not sure, however, that we can pin the motivation for those laws on "people's ability to tolerate" diversity alone. /5

I'm also thinking about historical precedents for the following claim: "it is likely that rather less liberal democracy will ultimately make liberal democracy more secure." If I had to generalize, I would say that "less liberal democracy" doesn't usually yield good outcomes./6

I also think the literature on "asymmetric polarization" calls into question the claim that "the pressures to go to extremes," are “roughly symmetrical between left and right.” /7

In general, there seems to be a tension between claims about deep history and the political labels "conservative" and "liberal," which evolve and change meaning over time. /8

Which makes me suspicious of the following claim: speculation that "conservative orientations, particularly on topics such as immigration and race, are evolutionarily more primal is perfectly reasonable." /9

Similarly, the claim that "liberalism" is “an evolutionary luxury” that "can emerge in people when “negative stimuli becoming less prevalent and less deadly,” seems to suggest that the vexed category of "liberalism" is a stable, unchanging, undebated category. /10

The claim that "It is much easier to get a liberal to behave like a conservative than it is to get a conservative to behave like a liberal," would seem to be belied by the research of Free/Cantril that Americans are "operational liberals" and "philosophic conservatives."/11

See this great interview with my colleague @SuzanneMettler1 where she makes the point that conservatives can "sound pretty liberal" when asked concrete questions about government benefits. /12
vox.com/2018/8/17/1767…

@SuzanneMettler1 It is wrong to simplify complex periods (and in my work, I try to avoid doing so) but by and large the examples of the Great Depression and WWII challenge the generalized claim that "in troubled times" "liberals move to the right."/13

@SuzanneMettler1 Indeed, in those "troubled times" which were filled with anxiety and hardship, you could argue the opposite happened: that large sectors of the country moved to the left. /14