How Liberalism Went to Die on the Texas-Arkansas Border

New York Times

15 hours ago

Few communities in America prospered as much as Texarkana during President Joe Biden's four years in the White House, and few communities were more ungrateful than the voters of that region, which is anchored around twin cities spread across the Texas-Arkansas border.
In 2024, in spite of economic growth under a Democratic president at rates unheard-of in decades, residents of Texarkana turned around and cast a higher percentage of their ballots for Trump than ever before.
Texarkana serves as a case study in the uphill struggle of the Democratic Party to win — and win back — working class support.
When the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 selected Texarkana as an 'energy community,' the region became eligible for the Energy Community Tax Credit Bonus.
'Renewable energy projects in the area have seen such a significant boom that Texarkana College now offers dedicated courses in solar panel installation,' Zikai Li, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago writes in a paper that was published last month, 'Unrequited Love: Estimating the Electoral Effect of a Place-based Green Subsidy with a 2D Regression Discontinuity Design.'
The selection of Texarkana laid the groundwork for the announcement in March 2023 by the TexAmericas Center, owner and operator of a 12,000-acre Texarkana industrial park, that it planned to dedicate 400 acres for the development of 'green energy data centers, suitable for major companies looking to expand and enhance data storage capabilities.'
That was followed by the U.S. Department of Energy's announcement in September 2024 of a $225 million award 'to TerraVolta Resources LLC to support the creation of a more than $1 billion lithium production facility' in the Texarkana region. The Biden-backed Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided the funds to begin construction of the facility that officials estimate 'will have a production capacity of at least 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate annually, sufficient for about 500,000 electric vehicles per year in support of domestic production of advanced batteries and battery materials nationwide.'
The steady 'greening' of the Texarkana economy during the Biden administration was accompanied by positive economic trends in the region.
During the four years from January 2021 to January 2025 — the years of Biden's presidency — the unemployment rate in the Texarkana metropolitan area fell from 6.8 percent to 4.2 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The metro region's gross domestic products had experienced sluggish growth from 2010 ($5.04 billion) through 2020 ($5.8 billion). After Biden took office, however, the region's GDP shot up, reaching $7.2 billion in 2023, the most recent figure available at the Federal Reserve.
If Democrats thought all these favorable developments would pay off on Election Day, they were grievously disappointed.
On Aug. 8 of this year, John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, wrote on the blog Good Authority, 'Throughout Joe Biden's presidency, there was a notion that a politician can win votes by delivering benefits to voters — also known as 'deliverism.' '
In practice, the Biden administration's deliverism strategy failed to deliver politically, both across the nation and especially — and emblematically — in Texarkana.
In 2020, Texarkana, which is made up of Miller County, Arkansas and Bowie County, Texas, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, 72.3 percent to 27.7 for Joe Biden, a 44.6-point spread. In 2024, despite the growth of green industry and economic improvement during the Biden years, Trump beat Kamala Harris in the Texarkana counties by an even larger margin, 75.4 percent to 24.6 percent, an immense 50.8-point spread.
These voting patterns show how durable Trump's core support is despite his limitations and his falling poll numbers. Trump's striking staying power among a substantial minority of voters raises the possibility that if Trump can pull off his party's re-redistricting campaigns in Texas, Florida, Indiana and Ohio and secure a Republican House victory in 2026, he may be able to continue to tear apart the nation's democratic fabric, trashing due process, ethical norms, free speech, academic autonomy, the safety net and whatever he turns his attention to next.
I asked a range of experts on democracy and its discontents to explore how — and why — America has reached this point.
Their views vary widely, but their comments suggest that the forces driving this discontent include the confluence of economic stagnation in rural and exurban America, the volatile interaction of racial hostility and opposition to immigration, the failure of the left to fill certain community and spiritual needs, the growing elitism of the Democratic Party, and Trump's continuing ability to tap and direct the accumulating resentments of white and minority Americans.
Has a deep commitment to democratic values and procedures become what amounts to a so-called luxury belief held by relatively comfortable well-educated elites while devalued or less prioritized by those in the bottom half of the income distribution?
Has a large segment of the population become deaf to Democratic appeals, reflexively dismissive of liberal proposals and policy initiatives?
Has that same segment of the population become so deeply enamored of Trump that it will prove permanently blind to his flaws?
Let's start with Susan Stokes, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. She wrote by email that inequality
is harmful, politically, but not because it undermines liberal values. A sense of being left behind in a society where many people are fabulously wealthy and others have comforts and opportunities that one lacks does fuel a loss of confidence in institutions.
Income inequality can also encourage partisan polarization. Let me stress that inequality has these effects directly but they are amplified by the rhetoric of ambitious politicians who find it easier to stoke distrust and mutual hatred among the public when there are big gaps between the wealthy and even the affluent, and the rest.
In a December 2024 article, 'Income Inequality and the Erosion of Democracy in the 21st Century,' Stokes and Eli G. Rau, a political scientist at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, conducted a cross-national survey that showed that
Income inequality is a strong and highly robust predictor of democratic erosion. This basic result is stunningly robust. In all, we find a consistent, positive association between income or wealth gaps and democratic erosion across more than 100 distinct statistical models.
Two social theorists at Harvard, Robert Putnam, the author of 'Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,' and Michael Sandel, the author of 'Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy,' both focus heavily on cultural developments in explaining contemporary American politics.
In an email, Putnam argued that
The master trend of the last half century in the United States has been growing social isolation. A second fundamental trend has been the increasing divergence between university educated folks (who have experienced only modestly increasing social isolation) and the working class (who have experienced massively increasing social isolation). A third important historical trend has thus been the increasing importance of class disparities relative to racial and ethnic disparities, although the latter remain important.
The main political consequences of growing social isolation, Putnam continued, 'have been authoritarian populism and polarization. Thus, the lack of social capital, especially bridging social capital, to use my jargon, has led to Trumpism.'
What, Putnam asked,
lies upstream (causally speaking) of all these trends? Most fundamentally, I believe, are changes in moral norms, especially the basic norm that 'I am my brother's keeper.'
Thus, although I am a liberal and progressive Democrat, I agree with communitarian conservatives about the importance of community and shared values, especially shared morality (and to some extent religious values).
There are other factors in declining support for liberalism and democracy, Putnam wrote:
Cancel culture on the part of some on the left has been problematic and has perhaps contributed to declining support for liberalism.
Rising inequality does make it difficult to maintain support for democracy. Indeed, as argued above, a secondary explanation for the rise of Trumpism is the fact that increasing social isolation has been concentrated among the working class. Thus, widely shared economic growth is essential for liberal democracy.
While Putnam wrote that he
might quibble with the term 'luxury good,' I agree that support for liberal democracy has remained much stronger among the well-educated than among those lower in the socio-economic hierarchy. However, I emphasize that the issue involves not merely economic well-being but also respect and 'recognition.' Though I was and remain a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton, her use of the term 'deplorables' exemplified this issue.
I asked Sandel where he stands in the debate over the viability of liberalism and the strength of the nation's commitment to basic democratic values, and he replied by email:
I have written about these questions in 'The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?,' and in 'Democracy's Discontent, a New Edition for Our Perilous Times.' I attach an electronic copy of the epilogue to the new edition, which argues that the failures of neoliberalism and meritocracy over the past four decades paved the way to Trump.
In 'Democracy's Discontent,' Sandel argues that Trump's election 'was a symptom of frayed social bonds and a damaged democratic condition' that has developed under both Democratic and Republican administrations:
For decades, the divide between winners and losers has been deepening — poisoning our politics, setting us apart. Since the 1980s and 1990s, governing elites carried out a neoliberal globalization project that brought massive gains for those at the top but job loss and stagnant wages for most working people.
During the financial crisis of 2008, Sandel continued, 'the government spent billions to bail out the banks but left ordinary homeowners to fend for themselves. Anger at the bailout and the offshoring of jobs to low-wage countries fueled populist protest across the political spectrum.'
Sandel, unlike many on the left, sees legitimate grounds for Brexit in England and for the election of Donald Trump:
In 2016, Britain's vote to leave the European Union shocked well-credentialed metropolitan political elites, as did Trump's election several months later. Brexit and the border wall both symbolized a backlash against a market-driven, technocratic mode of governing that has produced job loss, wage stagnation, increasing inequality and the galling sense among working people that elites looked down on them. The votes for Brexit and for Trump were anguished attempts to reassert national sovereignty and pride.
Intimations of the disempowering effects of global capitalism gave way to the blunt recognition that the system was rigged in favor of big corporations and the wealthy.
To further explicate his view, Sandel cited a series of conversations he had with Thomas Piketty, the French economist, portions of which were published in The Times earlier this year.
Sandel: 'One of the greatest political vulnerabilities of social democratic parties is that they have allowed the right to monopolize some of the most potent political sentiments, namely patriotism, community and belonging.'
Plus:
We talked about dignity and recognition. People who lived in hollowed-out industrial towns suffered not only wage stagnation or job loss, but also the sense that the rest of the society, or those who governed it, didn't care about them as fellow citizens, didn't recognize them or respect them or care about their dignity.
It seems to me that we can't ignore the politics of recognition. That is a kind of­ politics of identity — and we need to articulate it and, in articulating it, we have to recognize and name grievances.
This commentary reflects the tension between cultural and economic analyses of the predicaments of American democrats as well as the reinforcing influences of economics and culture on each other.
Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T. who won a Nobel Prize last year, argued that liberalism is caught in a bind of its own creation. In an email, Acemoglu wrote:
Liberal democracy promised shared prosperity, high-quality public services and 'voice,' and has failed in all of these in the postindustrial era. A lot of this was because of digital technologies, but the rise of postindustrial politics dominated by college-educated elites played an important role as well.
Much of the blame, Acemoglu continued,
goes to the college-educated left that turned its back on foundational ideas of liberalism and embraced cultural politics, identity politics, and social engineering. Right-wing provocateurs and talk show hosts played a very important role in exaggerating the failings of the left, but this doesn't deny that the left scored own goals here.
Acemoglu is relentless in his critique of the elite left. I asked him whether conservatives who argue that the liberal focus on individual autonomy and freedom fails to fill a legitimate need for community and shared values. He replied:
Yes, they have a point, and there is nothing in liberalism that needs to deny community. This too is a postindustrial phenomenon, partly driven by the takeover of center-left parties and the narrative of liberalism by the college-educated, urban elites.
William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has spent much of his career exploring the strengths and weaknesses of democracy, has a book coming out in September, 'Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech.' He summarized the main arguments of the book in 'Liberalism Without Illusions,' an essay in the summer edition of 'Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.' Galston contends that much of contemporary politics is shaped by a struggle between competing forces in human nature:
Rational self-interest does not always drive human events; the passions matter, and evil is real. Economics isn't everything, or even the 'base' of everything. Culture and religion have retained — and will not lose — their independent power to shape understanding and motivate action.
Nor does history guarantee the victory of liberal democracy over its adversaries; nothing does, because it always remains possible to mobilize the dark side of our nature against efforts to create a better world. Human beings can, and often do, destroy what they have built. History has no side and no end.
For Galston, opposition to liberal democracy is inescapable for a number of reasons.
First, 'Because liberal democracy restrains majorities and gives even small minorities a say, it slows the achievement of goals that majorities support.'
Second, 'liberal democracy requires tolerance for minority views and ways of life to which many citizens are deeply opposed.'
Third, liberal democracy requires toleration of views some see as 'false and even dangerous' and requires acceptance of 'those who hold these views as their equals for civic purposes.'
Fourth, liberal democracy requires acceptance of 'the necessity of compromise,' prompting discontent among 'those who prefer purity to compromise.'
At the same time, Galston writes, proponents of democratic liberalism often fall victim 'to the unforced and avoidable errors of understanding that have weakened the ability of the system's defenders to resist its adversaries. These illusions fall into three groups — myopia, parochialism, and naïveté.'
Liberal myopia, in Galston's view, often finds expression in 'the belief, especially pervasive among elites, that economic issues are the real issues and that cultural issues are diversionary, deliberately heightened by unscrupulous leaders to gain support for their anti-liberal agendas.'
This posture leaves liberalism vulnerable to populists and autocrats who 'advance their cause by battling their liberal adversaries on the terrain of culture, invoking traditional gender roles and moving issues such as homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and transgender identity to the front lines of the struggle.'
Liberal parochialism, in turn, is reflected in the belief, most common among elites, Galston continues, 'in transnationalism, whether concrete ('citizens of Europe') or diffuse (the 'international community,' or even 'citizens of the world'). From this perspective, national boundaries and loyalties are regarded as forms of irrationality.'
Politically, proponents of transnationalism are often unaware of the fact that their beliefs are in conflict with the reality that 'most people in advanced democracies as well as in 'developing' nations value particular attachments — to local communities and to the nation, to friends and family and compatriots.'
Of all the liberal illusions, Galston writes, 'naïveté about the course of human events and the possibilities of human nature is the most damaging.'
What does this suggest?
First and foremost that liberal democracy in the United States is fragile, in weakened condition, lacking any guarantee that it will prevail in competition with the ascendant forces of autocracy.
Trump keeps prodding and testing the nation's institutional bastions, specifically the ones that support freedom and democratic governance — the Constitution, Congress, the Supreme Court, lower courts, universities, law firms, alliances with foreign democracies, the political opposition to dictatorships in other countries — even as many of those institutions are bending or breaking to his will.
There are fewer and fewer grounds for optimism.
Galston puts it well when he writes:
History has no side, and regression to past horrors is always possible. Despite the hopes evoked by the end of the Cold War, neither Russia nor China democratized, the global spread of democracy reversed, religious zeal resurfaced, the cost of globalization became evident, nationalist passions intensified, and the spread of cultural liberalism generated a backlash. These developments have blindsided liberals, who had come to regard the movement toward tolerance at home and internationalism abroad as irreversible.
One thing we can safely say in reaction to current events is that neither movement is irreversible.
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