The Divide Grows Deeper and Deeper: "... Working-class Republican constituents are angry that globalization and automation have upended their jobs and their communities. They resent the cultural elites' disparagement of them and their country's past, while the bicoastal liberals want to shake the foundations of a system that has given them opportunities and wealth. How does this make any sense?".

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

HAS the Republican Party ever seen anything like the likes of Donald Trump? In his first presidential debate with Joe Biden, he appeared not scripted, buttoned down, or carefully prepared as his Republican predecessors often were at such events. Trump was his usual self--a blustering, pugnacious, interrupting, and red-faced presence. This was not a man whose manner fit the well-mannered Republicans of the past.

Trump may own country clubs, but he acts as if he just bellied up to the bar in some neighborhood pub. His in-your-face manner does not fit the party's mold. Republican voters of elections past were far more comfortable with Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Mitt Romney, polite and respectful in public.

In particular, the contrast between Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, and Donald Trump has not come about by accident. Trump represents a Republican Party that has been evolving since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. Many white working-class voters in 1968 were voting on cultural issues in response to a growing freewheeling counterculture.

Given the economic dislocations they have suffered since the 2008-09 Great Recession, there now is strong economic dimension to their resentments. Many of these voters, rooted in the manufacturing economy of an older America, feel angry and left out. If their president acts like a barroom brawler, they may identify completely. Trump reflects their anger and disdain for the bicoastal liberal elites. Consequently, he has accelerated blue-collar voters becoming the core constituency of the Republican Party.

In the 2016 election, Trump won the battleground states by gathering historic margins in formerly Democratic counties, mainly working class and rural. The margin was necessary to balance against Republican defections in the prosperous suburbs. For example, the four affluent suburban counties around Philadelphia voted 61% for George H.W. Bush in 1988. In 2016, Trump received 41% in those counties.

No matter the outcome of this year's election, the changing nature of both parties' constituency serves to deepen our political divisions. Since these divisions are both cultural and economic, legislative compromises will not bridge them easily.

The political center is eroding. The middle class once had been the crucial main piece of that center. A robust middle class helped to steer our politics away from extremes. When a candidate seemed to...