The past week has presented a fascinating object lesson in the continued tension over the direction of foreign policy and national security in the MAGA era, on what matters and what doesn’t, and who matters and who doesn’t, when it comes to finding a true forward-looking Trump-Reagan fusion. I wrote about this in the context of reviewing the new book by Matt Kroenig and Dan Negrea, who wrote a Ukraine-focused piece for Foreign Policylast week. But that’s just writing, not voting — and this week brought votes that include more useful indicators of what’s going on.
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First, the most populist fringe of MAGA lost repeated and significant tests within the House, in opposition to the speaker they chose to elevate over Kevin McCarthy, who maintained his support from Donald Trump throughout. Trump never lifted a finger of serious objection to any of these foreign aid bills except to voice his repeated belief that Europe should pay more (they should, but many of them already are) and some handwaving of disagreement on TikTok’s forced divestment, which everyone knows isn’t driven by some deep-seeded ideological objection. The popularity of all these positions can be disputed, but they do generally represent the majority position of Republicans — and no one expects to suffer electorally for the votes they took on Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan or TikTok.
So what’s to be taken away from a very loud faction on the right just losing outright and the rest of the members in a very pro-Trump MAGA-driven House feeling free to vote the way they did? You can measure the real opposition on Ukraine not by the 112 Republican votes against aid, but actually as being around fifty-five members — the number of Republicans who voted against the Rule to advance the complicated package. Between the Rules votes, Ukraine, TikTok and FISA, these are areas where some of the populists may be taking positions that are less popular than they represent in their normal “the people versus the swamp” framing.
One way to look at it is a simple miscalculation on leverage — that with a border deal deemed impossible at this late stage of an election year, people who stuck to that line ended up forcing the conference to fold. Another is that developments with Israel, Iran and China have reset the foreign policy conversation in the past six months, drawing focus away from Ukraine and allowing Republicans to return to their hawkish standard. Republicans are most comfortable criticizing Democratic administrations for being too weak, and in each area this is what world events and the Biden administration allows them to do.
Overall, the conclusion reached in Washington this weekend will be seized upon by many people who declare themselves to be the greatest advocates for Donald Trump as indication that the Republican Party needs to be burned to the ground, or that Mike Johnson should be vacated, or that this is just the swamp reasserting itself. But that’s clearly not the case. Instead, it’s a sign that the GOP, which is now the party of Donald Trump, remains the party willing to spend significantly on the military when they believe it’s important, and unwilling to show a weak hand in defense of Israel or in opposition to China. And if Trump disagrees, he certainly never vocalized it. There’s a lesson in that, too.
One of the most important pieces of social science published in my lifetime is Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. I probably reference it at least once a week when speaking to reporters, students, or other social scientists. Its premise is simple: people aren’t joining stuff anymore—social clubs like the Elks, the Moose, the Boy Scouts, and bowling leagues. Putnam brings a tremendous amount of membership data to bear to support this conclusion.
Bowling Alone was published in 2000, and much of the data collected extended through the mid-1990s, which deeply shapes what Putnam perceives as the causal factors for this decline in American community. He attributes much of the blame to the rise of cable television, which seems quaint now. I have often said that if Putnam’s magnum opus were updated with data from the last 25 years, the title would have to change to "Tweeting Alone," "Netflixing Alone," or "Instagramming Alone." Everything that Putnam observed in the earlier data has only been amplified due to rapid advances in technology.
By the way, I see that in the data. There’s a growing number of people whom I have begun to call "the dropouts."They are looking at all the institutions that once consumed a huge part of American social life and saying, "I don’t need any of this." The breadcrumb in the data that started me down this road was the typical question about religion.
There are about eleven options listed, beginning with the usual suspects—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, etc.—followed by agnostic, and then atheist. But the last named option on the question is simply "nothing in particular." I call this the "meh" response when it comes to religion.
Campbell, Layman, and Green in Secular Surge argue that atheists and agnostics are secular people; they have rejected religion but replaced it with something else. "Nothing in particulars," however, have only completed half that mission—they walked away from religion but never managed to replace it with anything else. They aren’t secular—they are non-religious, defined by what they are not.
And this share of Americans is growing rapidly.
In 2008, just 14% of the sample said they were "nothing in particular." By 2013, that had reached 20%. It plateaued there for the next five years or so and then began to climb again. Now, in the most recent data, somewhere between 23-24% of all American adults just shrug their shoulders when asked about their faith. They don’t want to label themselves one way or another.
And, I think that sentiment—the "I’m done with traditional categories"—is becoming an epidemic in American society. Here’s what I mean by that. I took each religious group and calculated the share who described their political partisanship as either Independent or Other AND their political ideology as not sure. In other words, this is the share of people who won’t say they are Republicans, Democrats, Liberals, Moderates, or Conservatives. They just don’t want anything to do with that.
The "nothing in particulars" just leap off the screen here. Sixteen percent of them refuse to classify themselves in the traditional way on both partisanship and ideology. The next closest group is Muslims at 12%. Among the larger religious groups like Protestants, Catholics, Agnostics, and Atheists, it’s rare to find someone who doesn’t want to be classified. For each of these four groups, just 4% aren’t Republicans or Democrats and refuse to be labeled as liberals, conservatives, or moderates. That’s one-fourth the rate of the "nothing in particulars."
And here’s what is even more startling about this metric—it’s growing very quickly among "nothing in particulars."
In 2012, about 7.5% of "nothing in particulars" were done with the traditional partisan/ideological categories. But in 2022, that share had more than doubled to about 16%. This same phenomenon is occurring in the entire sample, but at a much slower rate. In 2012, about 3% of all adults were independent/other on partisanship and not sure about their political ideology. By 2022, it was 7.5%. So, it’s risen by about 4.5 points in the general population, but the increase among the "nothing in particulars" has been about 8.5 points. Remember, during this time period, the "nothing in particulars" rose in absolute percentage from 17% to 23%. So, both the numerator and the denominator are increasing.
“Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology.”
