Opinion This election is really about one big disagreement
“Some historians and political experts compare today to the era leading up to the Civil War and the 1960s. America is deeply split along ideological, regional and party lines. We’ve had numerous recent instances of political violence, including the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection; the attack against Nancy Pelosi’s husband while she was House speaker; and two different attempts to assassinate former president Donald Trump.
Others dismiss such comparisons, because America today does not seem to have a single issue at the center of its tensions, in the way that slavery divided the country in the mid-1800s and civil rights did a century later.
But there actually is a big, core, overarching point of conflict: culture and values. There are huge divides between the Republican and Democratic parties over issues such as abortion, immigration and race. These are fights about policy, but they are also part of a broader debate about what kinds of people and actions should be considered normal and acceptable.
The contest between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris seems so high-stakes and fraught because it is: One vision of American culture will prevail, and another will be defeated.
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The winning side won’t be able to impose its vision on the whole country, because the losing side will include tens of millions of people and will control about half of the states. But those who vote for the losing candidate are going to be extremely disheartened: America won’t be the country they thought it was — or could become.
Dozens of issues reflect this divide, but here some of the most obvious:
- Trump would try to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, block refugees from coming to the United States from some majority-Muslim countries and end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Harris wouldn’t do any of that and would probably continue President Joe Biden’s attempts to grant legal status to at least some of the undocumented.
- Harris will strongly defend abortion rights; Trump would likely further curtail them.
- Trump is proposing to ban the teaching of critical race theory and strongly opposes diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Harris would likely continue Biden’s push to reduce racial and gender disparities.
- Trump plans to enact numerous limits on gender-affirming health care; Harris would likely maintain Biden’s pro-transgender policies.
- Trump wants local police departments to restore “stop and frisk” tacticsand other more punitive practices. Harris would likely continue the Biden administration’s investigations of police departments that have been criticized for treating Black people in particular unfairly.
Broadly, Harris’s policies would give more power and autonomy to African Americans, immigrants, Muslims, transgender Americans, women and other groups that have historically been diminished. Trump policies would roll back benefits and protections for those groups and instead reflect the preferences of conservative White Christians.
You might not think of any of those issues individually as existential or ranking anywhere near slavery or Jim Crow. But the 2024 election combines those issues together, with Harris having the more liberal (or, in my view, more tolerant) stance on all of them. That adds up to a huge difference. If Trump is elected, the United States will have a president who is significantly more antiabortion, anti-transgender, anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative action than his opponent would have been.
The parties differ over economic issues, too. But disagreements about tax rates and regulations on corporations are not why so many Americans today can’t talk to their relatives about politics without it turning into a fight. For many Harris voters, respecting women means making sure women can easily get an abortion if they want. For many Trump voters, respecting women means ensuring people whose sex assigned at birth was female don’t have to share public bathrooms with people whose sex assigned at birth was male.
These differences are emotional and personal.
Until recently, the two parties were not so starkly polarized along these cultural lines. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush extolled the virtues of immigration; Bill Clinton, Biden and other Democrats expressed wariness about abortion. Even in 2016, transgender rights hadn’t yet fully emerged as another point of division between the parties.
Over the past decade, Trump on the right and social movements such #MeToo and Black Lives Matter on the left have supercharged existing cultural divides. And while the Republican Party has shifted on many issues, particularly in becoming more anti-immigration, Democrats have changed, too.
The stance now dominant in the Democratic Party, that women should be able to terminate their pregnancies without feeling any guilt or shame, even if they don’t have a health condition or some other unusually complicated circumstance, is fairly new. (Remember Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare” abortion mantra.) Democrats now define racism as not just individual acts of bigotry but also structures and systems that result in disparities between racial and ethnic groups. (I agree with the updated Democratic positions on these issues.)
And although these topics are sometimes dismissed as “culture wars” — as if people were disagreeing about which movies they liked — abortion, immigration and other such issues are very important and at times matters of life and death. ProPublica recently detailed the death of a Georgia woman after doctors there delayed certain procedures because they were wary of violating the state’s strict antiabortion laws. A country that restricts education about its long history of anti-Black racism is probably not one that is going to drastically reduce the number of Black people unjustly killed by the police.
I am not suggesting that all average voters are either uniformly liberal or conservative on these cultural issues. Harris is moving to the right on immigration (and Trump to the left on abortion) because there are millions of Americans who are either conflicted or have a mix of left and right positions on them.
But most politicians, interest groups, television networks (Fox and MSNBC) and other powerful forces in each party fully embrace their side’s cultural agenda. You aren’t going to hear skepticism about abortion rights on MSNBC or passionate defenses of transgender rights from Republican members of Congress. U.S. institutions are amplifying and reinforcing the cultural-partisan divide.
These big cultural differences mean that every national election in America really matters. I’m very worried about Trump winning because he is opposed to basic democratic norms, such as respecting election results. But I would still be pretty freaked out if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or another Republican who might honor the democratic process but also strongly advocates conservative cultural positions were the party’s nominee and tied with Harris in the key swing states, as Trump is now.
In my view, Harris voters are correct about LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, race and, more broadly, what kind of country America should be. I will be deeply unsettled if our side loses. I assume many conservatives feel the same.
This election feels so existential because it actually is.“
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