Prospecting for Conservative Stability: "Reversing the excesses of the 'woke' left and revenging imagined conspirational defeats may provide some satisfaction, but they will not sustain a winning coalition.".

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.
• Position: NATIONAL AFFAIRS

THE GROUND is shifting in American politics, and it is not easy to know when or if it will stabilize. Beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, blue-collar voters were the center of the Democratic Party coalition. College-educated upper-middle class voters belonged to the Republicans. In the era of American industrial dominance, economic issues generally defined voter allegiance. As you went down the income scale, you found more Democrats. Richard Nixon's crushing defeat of George McGovem in the 1972 presidential election indicated that Democratic association with the cultural left would cost the party working-class votes.

Subsequendy, in their successful presidential campaigns, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama put economic issues upfront and cultural issues on the back burner. In the decades following the Cold War, globalization brought economic growth and a rising standard of living across the international landscape, including to many previously impoverished countries.

The U.S. also experienced such growth with stable prices for decades. However, globalization had its casualties in the American heartland. The information economy enriched the college-educated, while deindustrialization devastated much of the working class in cities such as Youngstown, Ohio, and Bradford, Pa. Class resentment intensified as jobs disappeared overseas. Working people begrudged the privileged position of those benefiting from the global economy. The prosperous uppermiddle-class displayed little sympathy for those in the automobile and steel industries whose jobs had vanished and downright abhorrence for the extractive industries.

As white working-class voters moved away from the Democrats toward the Republican Party, Donald Trump, a wealdiy Manhattan hotel magnate and TV personality, became the unlikely figure to accelerate this shift of allegiances. He articulated their grievances in blunt, unvarnished terms those voters could understand. Whatever the judgment of Trump--and many are harsh--he remains an important figure in American politics. His candidacy and presidency have altered the face of the Republican Party, and the reaction has transformed me Democratic Party as well.

Trump welcomed working-class voters with open arms, repudiated NAFTA, supported tariffs, urged expanded energy exploration, denounced illegal immigration, and promised to restore manufacturing jobs. In the 2016 election, these voters provided margins in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and...