Over the eight years Barack Obama has served as president, public opinion in the United States has shifted decisively leftward. Think about it. When Obama came to office, he still hadn’t publicly supported same sex marriage. Last year, the White House was lit up in rainbow colors to celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage. Over the last year, bottom line-driven businesses have boycotted entire states over discriminatory policies against LGBT people. A law prohibiting transgender people from using the bathroom of their choice just cost North Carolina’s Pat McCrory the governorship. Undocumented immigrants have come out of hiding, banding together online to discuss their struggles. And in November, California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada all voted to make recreational marijuana legal.
So if left is quickly becoming the new center, how did Trump win? Some, including Trump’s own team, have chalked up his victory to an economic message that resonated with white, working class voters dismayed about the economy. But exit polls reveal Clinton actually won among voters whose top issue was the economy, and Trump’s own approach—curbing free trade chief among them—had more in common with Bernie Sanders than GOP orthodoxy. Another theory for Trump’s victory, one held by the dejected partygoers in the sketch, attributes his win to a far-right racist uprising.
But according to Paul Taylor, author of the book The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown, Trump’s election is less a sign of some new ideological shift as it is a backlash to a massive, leftward shift that is already underway. “The overall drift is toward more liberal views on a range of issues, but that doesn’t mean the whole country’s buying in,” he says.
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