The divisions of the United States are caused by rapid demographic changes and associated pronounced alterations of cultural identity within a single lifetime. As an historical white majority transitions to the minority, the resulting culture war is regrettably being further enflamed by a rise of individualistic personality traits within society. This article discusses the two referenced changes within the country – in its demographic composition and the social psychology – since the Second World War and how, together, these developments challenge long-run governability.
In President Ronald Reagan’s indelible words, America is the ‘shining city on a hill’ of the post-Second World War era. But America’s historical successes have planted the seeds of the nation’s current problems. As a direct consequence of America becoming the hegemon and most-desirable migration destination globally following the Second World War, there have been fundamental changes of the nation’s demographics since the past half century to a degree no large, wealthy democracy has endured successfully, with an historically dominant ethnic group at this stage transitioning rapidly to becoming the political minority. This has brought a contemporary competition for the nation’s soul – undermining the sense of shared purpose crucial during the nation’s earlier rise.
As a direct consequence of America becoming the hegemon and most-desirable migration destination globally following the Second World War, there have been fundamental changes of the nation’s demographics since the past half century to a degree no large, wealthy democracy has endured successfully, with an historically dominant ethnic group at this stage transitioning rapidly to becoming the political minority.
While it is commonly supposed America is “a nation of immigrants”, the United States’ rise derived not from an international melting pot but as a nation of mainly comparatively racially-homogenous European migrants. As of 1960, 84% of even the foreign-born population of America arrived from either Europe or Canada. Divisions between groups of European ancestry formed the cleavages of early America but eased as the generations went by and language and cultural disparities of their European ancestries eroded. By the 1960 census, nearly 90% of Americans self-identified under a more-general “white, Caucasian” majority.
But more intractable changes resulted since 1965 – the year President Lyndon B. Johnson adopted the Immigration and Nationality Act, abolishing the National Origins Formula – which was earlier, to preserve racial homogeneity, the basis of American migration policy with preferences dating back to the 1920s favoring migration from northern and western Europe. The 1965 reform – partly responding to international and domestic pressures for America to lead by example in its perceived role following the war – removed de facto discrimination against southern and eastern Europeans, Asian migrants, as well as other non-northern Europeans.
Based on the immigration since the referenced reform and lesser fertility rates of the white majority (the 2010s representing the first decade since the 1790s during which the white majority registered absolute loss), America has undergone large-scale demographic changes since the 1960s. Unlike the earlier phases of migration from western Europe (arrivals via the romanticized image of Ellis Island), the new-age of migration has come from varying corners of the Global South and represented a fundamentally more diverse complexion. What was once a nearly 90% white, Caucasian American society as of 1960 – a composition that had stayed roughly unchanged during the century beforehand – changed rapidly to only 57.8% white, Caucasian by 2020. In 2019, for the first time, more than half of the population under an age of 16 identified as being a racial or ethnic minority. By the 2040s, the European Caucasian majority is forecast to form on the aggregate an ethnic minority – an historic shift within the span of a single lifetime.
The rapidity and scale of racial changes is the origin of today’s social strains
This historic ethnic shift has divided the country (Figure 1). A cross-section of older Americans, who in their own youths advocated for immigration and Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s and 70s when the country’s white, Christian identity was fairly unchallenged, have, after voting for said reforms making politically feasible the changes seen since, swung their personal opinions decades later radically to the right – advocating an opposite Trumpian sentiment, voicing a desire for a return to the whiter America of their earlier lives.
Today’s social rifts – cancel culture, the national anthem, the flag, MeToo – can be understood as attempts at reconciliation of an earlier understanding of national identity with what this identity is fast becoming. For many Americans of European ancestry, there is an apparent if unspoken existential crisis and a feeling of a loss of control of the country. In the 2016 elections, white working-class voters who argued discrimination against whites as being a serious problem, or who answered they believed they are strangers in their own country, were nearly twice as likely to vote for Donald J. Trump as those who did not. Two thirds of voters for Trump agreed “the 2016 election represented the last chance to stop America’s decline”.
Figure 1 – percentage of total population, white; Senate cloture motions filed (a proxy of political polarization)
White population figures incorporate Latino white Americans, source: U.S. Census Bureau. *Senate cloture motions are by two-year congressional periods: e.g., 2020 represents the 117th Congress (2019-20), 2010 the 111th Congress (2009-10), and so on, source: United States Senate.
A crisis of entitlement impedes resolution of the nation’s divides
The historic challenge of tackling America’s identity crisis and culture war is the more insurmountable because of concurrent changes of the country’s social psychology. As I argued for the London School of Economics, an increasing society-wide self-centeredness similarly deriving from the nation’s historical successes and years of comparative economic and political stability inhibits the resolution of today’s racial and identity challenges requiring shared sacrifice. A more heterogenous but simultaneously more entitled public of today fuels and inflames growing differences rather than seeking to identify the necessary common ground.
A more heterogenous but simultaneously more entitled public of today fuels and inflames growing differences rather than seeking to identify the necessary common ground.
A nationwide data set displayed twice as many American college students answering a majority of questions under a narcissistic direction by 2009 compared with as of 1982. One study comparing teenagers observed while only 12% of those aged 14-16 in the early 1950s agreed with a statement that “I am an important person”, 77% of boys and more than 80% of girls of the same cohort by 1989 agreed with this same statement. This exaggerated sense of self-value has accelerated since the 1990s. A recent study by the National Institutes of Health found nearly 10% of those in their twenties had experienced symptoms of clinical narcissism personality disorder, while only around 3% of persons aged above sixty-five had experienced such symptoms.
Such a crisis of entitlement and runaway individualism undermines the institutions binding society, linking to shallow values and materiality, as well as to lesser empathy and concern for and understanding of others. Such trends impair the long-run, collective decision-making required for building bridges necessary among a more diverse public.
Healing the divided country
Ironically, America’s contemporary crises derive directly as side-effects of the country’s earlier rise – the rapid ethnic changes alongside a more-vain public have seemingly evolved from the nation’s stability and prosperity. So, the question is whether the rise of any nation is so seemingly bound to result in inevitable challenges?
Under a more ethnically diverse body politic, “hunkering down” as conjectured famously by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam – as regards less societal solidarity and trust, and lesser faith in community – is typical. Nevertheless, history does present examples of societies undergoing such majority-minority transitions in which a society eventually reconciled a new understanding of its identity. Such reconciliation is possible especially were a government to support a process of broadening conceptions of identity beyond race and promote peaceful co-existence.
To reach such a new concept of the American patchwork, today’s heterogenous society needs to better understand one another, expand the notion of tribe but also collectively respect the history of the country. Groups – whether a rising minority or a declining majority – must alike be protected and not be made to feel threatened by the changes.
Healing a divided country could reintroduce the strong nation and symbol of hope the US can again represent – but this contemporary crisis might present the most difficult set of circumstances the nation has ever contended with.
About the author
Dennis Shen, CFA is an American economist based in Berlin, Germany.
Kommentarer