Opinion | The Right Is Winning the Battle for Hearts and Minds

“Instead of taking a knee to call for social justice,” Zitner and McGraw wrote,

N.F.L. players are doing the “Trump dance” in the end zone at football games. Mainstream entertainers, among them the country singer Carrie Underwood and the rapper Snoop Dogg, agreed to perform at events celebrating Donald Trump’s inauguration, something music stars largely shunned eight years ago.

A new generation of Trump-friendly comedians and wellness influencers is populating YouTube and other social media, while a snippet of audio featuring Barron and Melania Trump has become one of the hottest online memes, with celebrities such as Paris Hilton and brands, including Frontier Airlines, using it in their TikTok and Instagram posts.

“Every time I walk on campus, I see a few MAGA hats. That’s definitely new,” said Carson Carpenter, 19, a senior at Arizona State University. Conservatism, he said, ‘has really become intertwined in our pop culture. … It’s really showing that conservatism is cool now.”

On a separate front, Zitner and McGraw wrote,

Businesses are rolling back diversity efforts that gained urgency after the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020 led to a focus on racial inequities. Universities are adapting to the Supreme Court’s ban on considering race in admissions, and programs designed to help minority students are under legal attack, facing claims that they discriminate based on race. In some Republican-led states, officials feel newly empowered to press for Christian-theme curricula in the classroom.

Conservatives have long complained that free speech was censored on social media. This month Meta Platforms announced the end of fact-checking and restrictions on certain types of speech across Facebook and Instagram.

While the right has been and continues to be on the attack, the left has been on the defensive.

Musa al Gharbi, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook and the author of “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of the New Elite,” wrote by email in response to my inquiries:

The big story from 2010 on is not Republicans growing more effective at messaging but Democrats growing increasingly out of step with the median voter as they catered ever more around the preferences of knowledge economy professionals.

Knowledge economy professionals, according to al Gharbi, are those employed in higher education, the media, high tech, the law, health care, entertainment, advertising, human resources, information technology and other fields requiring B.A.s or advanced degrees.

“They tend to have systematically different political and moral preferences and priorities than most other Americans,” al Gharbi said, a theme he expanded on in a Nov. 6 Substack post, “Contextualizing the 2024 Election: It’s the (Knowledge) Economy, Stupid”:

Rather than viewing the gender divide, the ethnic shifts, the education divide, etc. as separate phenomena, it’s more insightful to understand them as facets of a more fundamental schism in American society. Namely: a divide between “symbolic capitalists” and those who feel unrepresented in our social order.

Two decades ago, al Gharbi wrote, the

sociologists Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks observed, “professionals have moved from being the most Republican class in the 1950s, to the second most Democratic class by the late 1980s and the most Democratic class in 1996.” The consolidation they noted at the turn of the century is even more pronounced today. And as these professionals have been consolidated into the Democratic Party, they’ve grown increasingly progressive, particularly on “cultural” issues (sexuality, race, gender, environmentalism), and especially relative to blue-collar workers.

Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time,” has a different but related take. In an email, he wrote: “Each time Democrats lose, they blame the nature of modern communication.” He added:

Since Trump was re-elected last November, they have lamented that left-of-center donors haven’t invested into creating progressives podcasts that could rival the influence of Joe Rogan (ignoring the fact that Rogan’s podcast never had such donors).

These arguments miss the forest for the trees. The reason Republicans have been more successful in spreading their message isn’t that they have bigger budgets or smarter staffers; it’s that they have been more adept at telling an aspirational story about the nature of the country — one that, as it turns out, a lot of citizens from all kinds of demographic backgrounds found to be convincing.

The truth is that Democrats are now in the midst of a deep epistemological crisis. They look at the country through simplistic categories, for example by assuming that it can be split into two rival blocks of whites and people of color. They talk about it in a linguistic register that most Americans find deeply alienating. Most of all, they continue to express themselves with extreme care, lest they inadvertently end up saying the “wrong” thing.

Among the most damaging developments for the left include the failure of elite universities, bastions of liberalism, to deal with antisemitic protests during Israel’s attacks on Gaza; with the current exodus of reporters, editors and subscribers at The Washington Post, a mainstay of liberal journalism; with the discrediting of academia’s commitment to free speech as a result of the disclosure of their cancellation of controversial speakers; with the relative absence of conservative professors in most fields and with the requirement that faculty members file annual mandatory diversity statements.

There are other factors at work. Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, replied by email to my inquiries, writing: “The main distinction is that liberals dominate traditional media and cultural industries but conservatives more successfully build alternative institutions that are self-consciously ideological and anti-establishment.”

Within this distinction, Grossmann wrote, he and his colleagues have found “there is a bigger audience for self-consciously conservative than liberal media due to perceptions that mainstream media is liberal.”