Thomas Byrne Edsall (b. August 22, 1941) is an American journalist, author, and academic who has spent more than five decades explaining the structural forces that shape American politics. He writes about political realignment, racial conflict, economic inequality, demographic change, and partisan polarization, and he builds a working bridge between academic social science and daily political reporting. His work shifted attention in political journalism away from personalities and campaign tactics and toward coalitions, institutions, incentives, and long-term social change.
Edsall works as reporter, historian, political analyst, and translator of academic research at the same time. One question runs through his entire career: why do voters align themselves with particular political coalitions, and how do those coalitions change over time?
Born in Massachusetts, Edsall attended Brown University before earning a degree in political science from Boston University in 1966. He entered journalism during a turbulent period in modern American history, when the civil rights movement, urban unrest, antiwar activism, and the restructuring of the postwar economy were transforming the political landscape.
His intellectual framework took shape during fourteen years at The Baltimore Sun, where he worked from 1967 to 1981. Covering labor politics, municipal government, and social conflict, Edsall watched the New Deal coalition that had dominated American politics since Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945) come apart piece by piece. He paid close attention to the tensions emerging between organized labor and the expanding civil rights agenda.
His reporting on steelworkers at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point plant and members of Baltimore’s building-trades unions exposed growing resentment among many White working-class Democrats. Federal mandates on integration, affirmative action, school desegregation, and equal-employment policy collided with existing systems of union seniority and neighborhood stability. Edsall recognized earlier than most national observers that racial and economic interests were pulling segments of the Democratic coalition in different directions.
These years became the empirical foundation for his later work. The themes that define his career, race, class, coalition politics, and political realignment, emerged from this reporting rather than from academic theory. He learned politics on the shop floor and in the union hall before he learned it from the regression table.
When Edsall joined The Washington Post in 1981, he entered national political journalism at the start of the Reagan era. Over the next quarter-century he covered presidential campaigns, Congress, tax policy, lobbying, labor politics, welfare reform, and the growth of modern conservatism. He reported on every presidential election from 1968 onward and became known for combining traditional reporting with demographic and institutional analysis.
An important contribution from this period was his examination of campaign finance as an organizational system. Where other reporters treated money as a source of corruption, Edsall analyzed how political funding created durable structures of influence. He became an early national reporter on the rise of Political Action Committees, soft money networks, business lobbying organizations, and donor infrastructure.
His first major book, The New Politics of Inequality (1984), argued that widening economic inequality was reshaping the American political system. The book traced how business interests organized themselves during the 1970s and early 1980s to counter labor unions and influence public policy. Edsall showed that the Reagan revolution rested on more than ideological appeal. It drew strength from sophisticated organizational and financial networks built over the previous decade.
His most influential work arrived in 1991 with Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, written with his wife, the journalist Mary D. Edsall. The book became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and remains an essential account of late twentieth-century political realignment.
The Edsalls argued that the Democratic coalition fractured under the combined pressure of three developments: racial conflict, the expansion of rights-based politics, and tax resentment.
First, the rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s expanded legal protections for racial minorities, criminal defendants, welfare recipients, and other groups. These changes delivered major victories for equality and civil liberties. They also alienated many culturally conservative White voters who came to feel that the Democratic Party no longer spoke for them.
Second, inflation during the 1970s pushed many middle-income Americans into higher tax brackets through bracket creep. Tax reduction ceased to be a corporate or upper-class concern. It became a populist issue for millions of working- and middle-class voters who saw their tax payments as funding programs that benefited others more than themselves.
Republican strategists, the Edsalls argued, linked these grievances into a unified political narrative that connected race, welfare, taxation, crime, and government spending. The resulting coalition reshaped American politics for decades.
The central insight of Edsall’s work holds that political coalitions rarely organize around a single issue. Successful parties construct alliances by linking economic interests, cultural concerns, demographic identities, and moral narratives into coherent political projects. Race, taxes, and rights did not operate as separate issues in the elections of the 1970s and 1980s. They fused into one story about who pays and who benefits.
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, Edsall kept examining the organizational foundations of political power. In Building Red America (2006), he analyzed the growth of conservative institutions: think tanks, advocacy groups, donor networks, media organizations, and grassroots movements. He looked past political leaders and emphasized organizational capacity and long-term strategic planning. Movements win, in his account, when they build durable machinery, and the right built better machinery than the left for a generation.
After leaving The Washington Post in 2006, Edsall entered a second phase of his career that blended journalism and academia. He joined Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism as the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism. There he encouraged students to integrate political science, economics, sociology, psychology, and history into their reporting.
He also expanded his role as a public intellectual. In 2011 he began writing a weekly column for The New York Times that became a model of opinion journalism rooted in social-science research rather than partisan commentary.
Unlike most newspaper columnists, Edsall builds few arguments around personal opinion alone. His essays synthesize academic papers, survey data, demographic research, election studies, and interviews with scholars. Many columns function less as conventional opinion pieces than as extended reviews of emerging research in political science, sociology, economics, and psychology. He often quotes a dozen scholars in a single column, sets their findings against one another, and lets the reader watch the field argue with itself.
Through these columns he became a principal interpreter of academic social science for a general audience. His work draws on scholars who study polarization, identity formation, voting behavior, inequality, and institutional change.
Several themes dominate his later writing.
One is educational stratification. Edsall argues that the diploma divide has become a major cleavage in contemporary American politics. College-educated voters move toward the Democratic Party while voters without four-year degrees shift toward the Republican Party. The parties now sort by credential as much as by income, and this sorting rearranges the geography, culture, and moral language of both coalitions.
A second recurring theme is affective polarization. Drawing on contemporary political science, Edsall explores how partisan identity now functions as a social identity. Political opponents appear to each other less as people who hold mistaken views and more as members of rival tribes. Partisanship shapes whom Americans marry, where they live, and whom they trust.
A third theme is status anxiety. Edsall examines how demographic change, immigration, globalization, and cultural transformation generate perceptions of status loss among historically dominant groups. He treats these perceptions as important drivers of modern political behavior, and he returns to them again and again as he tries to explain the populist turn in both parties.
He also writes about the tensions created by meritocracy and elite sorting. As educational and professional elites concentrate in particular institutions, regions, and social networks, resentment toward those elites becomes a powerful political force. The meritocracy produces winners who cluster together, marry each other, and pass advantage to their children, and it produces losers who know it.
His 2012 book The Age of Austerity extended these concerns. The book argued that slower economic growth and fiscal constraints were intensifying competition among social groups and pushing American politics toward zero-sum conflict. Under such conditions, political fights become struggles over allocation rather than expansion. When the pie stops growing, the knives come out.
Throughout his career Edsall has stood between journalism and academia, at home in both and captive of neither. Admirers praise his ability to synthesize large bodies of social-scientific research and translate them into accessible political analysis. They regard him as a journalist who connects daily political developments to deeper structural trends.
Critics from both the left and the right challenge aspects of his work. Some progressive critics argue that his emphasis on White working-class backlash risks treating opposition to civil rights or welfare programs as an inevitable structural response rather than as a political outcome cultivated by elites and institutions. Some conservatives contend that his reliance on mainstream academic frameworks encourages explanations centered on status anxiety, demographic fear, or psychological reaction while giving short weight to ideological conviction, constitutional principle, or philosophical commitment.
Even his critics acknowledge his influence. Few journalists have done more to integrate political science into public discourse. Long before data-driven political analysis became fashionable, Edsall was studying voting patterns, coalition structures, demographic shifts, and institutional incentives.
Seen in historical perspective, his lasting contribution lies in helping create a style of political journalism that treats politics as a system rather than a spectacle. He explains how race, class, taxation, culture, inequality, demographics, institutions, and psychology interact to produce political outcomes. Through books, reporting, teaching, and commentary, he has become an essential chronicler of the forces that transformed American politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Thomas Byrne Edsall spent fifty years documenting what David Pinsof, David O. Sears, and Martie G. Haselton later theorized. Their paper “Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems” argues that political beliefs do not flow from values. They flow from alliance structures. Partisans choose allies based on similarity, transitivity, and interdependence, then generate patchwork narratives to support those allies in conflict. The narratives come after the alliances. Edsall built his career on the same insight before the theory had a name.
Consider what Alliance Theory treats as its paradigm case. Pinsof and his coauthors argue that the American alliance structure is a historical accident. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 drew racially conservative Southerners into the Republican Party. The pro-life evangelical movement of the 1970s fused Christian traditionalism with business conservatism, a pairing that emerged from no philosophical analysis and exists in few other countries. These are the realignments Edsall covered as they happened. Chain Reaction, the 1991 book he wrote with Mary D. Edsall, gives the granular history that Alliance Theory cites at the level of summary. Where the psychologists assert that alliances shifted, Edsall shows the shop stewards, the precinct returns, and the direct-mail consultants who shifted them.
Start with Sparrows Point. Edsall covered Bethlehem Steel workers and Baltimore building-trades men in the late 1960s and 1970s, and what he found reads like field data for the theory. These White union Democrats belonged to a coalition built on interdependence. The party delivered wages, pensions, and seniority systems, and the workers delivered votes. Then the party formed a new alliance with Black workers and their advocates, and federal mandates on integration and equal employment cut into the seniority systems that constituted the old bargain. In Pinsof’s terms, the transitivity of the coalition broke. The union men discovered that their ally had allied with their rival. The enemy of my friend forced a choice, and over twenty years millions of them chose to leave.
Watch the attributional pattern in what Edsall recorded. The steelworkers did not attribute their stalled wages and declining neighborhoods to automation, foreign competition, or their own decisions. They attributed their losses to external interference: federal judges, welfare programs, affirmative action. Alliance Theory predicts this. Worse-off people attribute their disadvantages to external causes, and they extend the same courtesy to their allies. Edsall heard the external attributions in the union halls of Baltimore four decades before survey researchers measured them in working-class White respondents who blame immigration, globalization, and reverse discrimination for their position.
Chain Reaction then shows the propaganda layer that Alliance Theory predicts must follow any realignment. The book’s central claim holds that Republican strategists linked race, welfare, taxes, crime, and government spending into a single narrative. Read through Pinsof, that narrative is not an ideology. It is a coordination device. It told the new coalition who its allies were (taxpayers, homeowners, the hardworking) and who its rivals were (welfare recipients, criminals, the bureaucrats who served them), and it wrapped the alliance in moral language about desert and responsibility. The moral language varied as needed. The same coalition that preached personal responsibility for the poor demanded protection for displaced steelworkers. Alliance Theory says the inconsistency is the signature of the form. Belief systems are collections of ad hoc justifications for heterogeneous alliances, and the more heterogeneous the allies, the more inconsistent the beliefs.
Edsall’s tax analysis fits the interdependence criterion with the same snugness. Bracket creep in the 1970s pushed middle-income voters into higher brackets, and they came to see their tax payments as transfers to another coalition’s clients. Interdependence ran in reverse. The voters concluded they were providing benefits to rivals rather than receiving benefits from allies, and they revolted. Pinsof writes that people support parties that advance their personal and group interests, creating interdependence with co-partisans. Edsall documented the moment when millions of Americans recalculated that interdependence and found it pointing the wrong way.
His later themes extend the mapping. The diploma divide that dominates his Times columns matches the elite split that Alliance Theory builds into its account of the current structure. Pinsof and his coauthors argue that expanding college enrollment produced an intellectual elite of knowledge workers while corporate consolidation enriched a business elite, and the two elites became status rivals. The upper class split on status while the lower class split on ethnicity, weakening the old link between class and party. Edsall tracks the same fracture from the journalistic side: professors, journalists, and professionals moving into one coalition, executives and small-business owners anchoring the other, each elite recruiting a different slice of the working class. His columns on educational sorting describe the recruitment in progress.
Affective polarization, his second great theme, restates the theory’s account of super-alliances. Two mega-coalitions have coalesced that stack partisan, religious, ethnic, regional, and cultural memberships. Once the stacking occurs, every conflict activates the whole alliance, and rivals appear as tribes rather than as people with mistaken views. Edsall reports the survey findings. Alliance Theory supplies the engine: humans evolved to track allies and rivals, and when all social identities point the same direction, the tracking system runs hot.
His third theme, status anxiety, sits less comfortably in the frame, and the friction instructs. Edsall often explains the populist turn through perceived status loss among historically dominant groups. Alliance Theory can absorb this as external attribution by the losers of globalization. But the theory also suggests a sharper reading of the explanation. Status anxiety, as a frame, attributes rival behavior to psychological reaction rather than to interest or judgment. It casts the other coalition’s voters as frightened men misreading their situation. Pinsof would call this an attributional bias applied to rivals: their politics flow from internal defect, ours from reasoned response. The academic literature Edsall draws on comes from scholars who belong, almost to a man, to the intellectual-elite coalition, and the frames they produce tend to flatter it. Conservative critics of Edsall have said this for years in cruder terms. Alliance Theory gives their complaint a formal structure.
This raises the question the frame demands: what alliance work does Edsall’s own career perform? His trajectory traces the migration his columns describe. He began among union men in Baltimore, moved to The Washington Post at the peak of its institutional power, and finished as a Columbia professor and Times columnist, quoting political scientists to an audience of the educated. He left the world of the building trades and joined the world of the knowledge workers, and his product, the translation of academic research for coalition readers, serves the intellectual elite’s claim to authority. The column tells Times readers that their side’s beliefs rest on data. That is mobilization, in Pinsof’s sense, however scrupulous the execution.
Yet Edsall makes an awkward propagandist, and the awkwardness measures him. He spends much of his column space telling his coalition what it does not want to hear. He warns Democrats that their cultural positions repel working-class voters. He credits Republican strategists with skill rather than mere malice. He quotes scholars who find that liberals dislike their rivals as intensely as conservatives dislike theirs, the symmetry finding at the heart of Alliance Theory. A pure coalition advocate suppresses such material. Edsall features it. The theory can still absorb this: a coalition benefits from one designated bearer of bad news, because accurate intelligence about rival strength helps allies win. On this reading Edsall serves his alliance as scout rather than cheerleader. The role still belongs to the alliance.
The deepest convergence between the journalist and the theory concerns the direction of causation. Edsall’s whole body of work shows beliefs trailing coalitions. The union men did not read Burke and become conservative. They watched their alliance break and then acquired the narrative that explained their new loyalties. The evangelicals did not derive supply-side economics from Scripture. They joined a coalition that included the Chamber of Commerce and learned to speak its language. Chain Reaction narrates values rhetoric arriving after alliance shifts, election after election. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton claim this sequence as their core prediction. Edsall’s archive is the longest-running confirmation in American journalism.
One difference remains, and it marks the boundary between the reporter and the theorist. Edsall sometimes grants values independent force. He treats the rights revolution as a moral achievement that produced backlash, which implies that some actors pursued principle and paid for it. Alliance Theory dissolves such claims. Principles are outputs, never inputs; the rights revolution was itself coalition warfare wrapped in moral language. Edsall never goes that far. He keeps a residue of the older view that ideas move men. Whether this residue reflects his judgment or his coalition’s self-image, the frame cannot say from inside. It can only note that the man who documented fifty years of beliefs following alliances still holds back from the conclusion his own evidence presses on him: that his beliefs, and his readers’ beliefs, follow the same law.
The Voice and the Set
Thomas Edsall writes like a man who distrusts his own eloquence. He builds his columns out of other people’s sentences. He emails a question to a dozen political scientists, prints their answers at length, and threads them together with spare connective tissue. The method makes him less a stylist than a switchboard, and that self-effacement is the style. Where other Times columnists perform, Edsall assembles. The reader hears Theda Skocpol (b. 1947), Ryan Enos, and Frances Lee before he hears Edsall, and Edsall wants it that way.
Theda Skocpol (b. 1947), Ryan Enos, and Frances Lee represent three distinct generations and methodologies within contemporary American political science, yet their structural world centers on the same baseline institutions: the department meeting, the peer-reviewed journal, and the dataset. The geography of this set runs through the historical architecture of Harvard University, the quantitative labs of the midwest, and the policy-adjacent corridors of Princeton and Washington. Its members do not write to change the minds of voters; they write to alter the frameworks of their peers, using institutional prestige and methodological precision as their primary tools of persuasion.
Skocpol stands as the set’s senior matriarch, an elder who built her reputation by challenging the behavioral orthodoxies of the 1970s. Her method is historical sociology, an approach that treats the state not as a passive reflection of societal inputs but as an autonomous actor with its own interests and capacities. In States and Social Revolutions (1979), she analyzed the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions to prove that structural crises within states, rather than mere ideological movements, determine historical outcomes. Her later work shifted inward to the American state, tracing the origins of social policy in Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (1992) and later documenting the mobilization of the right in her study of the Tea Party movement. Her career established a specific model of academic authority: long-form historical analysis paired with aggressive institutional leadership, including her tenure as dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Enos represents the quantitative and behavioral turn that followed, a world where political behavior is analyzed through the lens of geography, demography, and field experiments. Based at Harvard, his work examines how spatial context shapes political psychology. In The Space Between Us (2017), Enos used geographic data and field experiments to demonstrate how racial segregation and spatial proximity to outgroups alter political attitudes, voting behavior, and social cohesion. His method relies on things Skocpol’s early work did not: laboratory precision, randomized interventions, and massive spatial datasets. The authority he claims is the authority of the lab coat, where structural patterns are verified through statistical inference rather than historical narrative.
Lee occupies the institutionalist center, focusing her research on the mechanics of Congress and the structural drivers of partisan conflict. Currently a professor at Princeton, her work strips away the romanticism of legislative compromise to reveal the cold incentives of party competition. In Insecure Majorities (2016), she argued that the contemporary era of razor-thin congressional majorities has fundamentally altered legislative behavior. When control of the House or Senate is permanently up for grabs, parties prioritize messaging and partisan differentiation over governance, converting the legislative process into a perpetual campaign. Her method combines deep institutional knowledge with rigorous data tracking of roll-call votes and committee behavior.
What this set values is validity, causal identification, and institutional reach. They value the research design that can isolate a variable and the archive that can back a structural claim. Within their world, a theoretical breakthrough that shifts the citation index outranks any amount of popular media commentary, and public-facing writing is tolerated only when backed by a deep shelf of peer-reviewed data. They value autonomy from the political campaigns they study, maintaining an analytical distance that treats partisan fervor as data rather than conviction. Above all, they value the seminar table—the room where arguments are tested through forensic criticism and where reputations are maintained through the visible mastery of the literature.
The hero system of the academic set promises a specific type of immortality: the foundational concept that attaches your name to a syllabus for forty years. To have your book become a required text in graduate seminars across the country is the highest degree of canonization. Skocpol’s “bringing the state back in” is an immortality formula of this kind. Below the conceptual breakthrough sits the dataset that becomes standard infrastructure for other researchers, and below that sits the presidency of the American Political Science Association, an honor Skocpol achieved in 2002. The set’s heroes are those who stood up to methodological orthodoxy or who built new departments from scratch. Its secular saints are the authors of the “big books”—the texts that do not merely report findings but reset the boundaries of what is considered knowable.
The status games are quiet, archival, and relentless. Position tracks institutional affiliation first, and a chair at an Ivy League university or an elite private institution carries an invisible weight that no amount of public fame can match. The second game is the peer-review audit, played at hiring and tenure season, where entries are judged by their placement in the top-tier journals: the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. The third game is the citation count, a numerical scoreboard tracked through Google Scholar that measures a scholar’s structural footprint. The fourth game is the grant economy, where securing funding from the National Science Foundation or major foundations signals organizational dominance. Modesty is mandatory and institutionalized; an academic must present his findings as the humble result of data and design, and any scholar who claims personal genius or operates with overt showmanship loses standing among his peers.
The normative claims are confident and procedural. Objective analysis is possible and necessary, and the researcher must separate his personal politics from his empirical findings. Peer review is the sacred gatekeeper of truth, and work published outside its boundaries carries no authority. Institutions possess structural logics that shape human behavior regardless of individual intentions, and a political analysis that focuses entirely on personality or rhetoric is dismissed as superficial. The public interest is served not by advocacy, but by providing rigorous, verified knowledge about how power and governance actually operate.
The essentialist claims run beneath the methodology. The set believes in the born researcher—the type identifiable by a specific kind of intellectual stamina, a tolerance for coding errors, and an obsession with the archive. It believes institutions have durable natures that persist across historical eras, which is why Lee can read the dynamics of the 19th-century Congress into the 21st, and why Skocpol views state capacity as a long-term historical inheritance. It treats demographic and geographic categories as fixed inputs that yield predictable psychological outputs under pressure, an assumption that anchors Enos’s behavioral experiments.
The moral grammar organizes academic life with the clarity of a code. The mortal sins are data fabrication, plagiarism, and the ideological capture that distorts a research design to achieve a desired political outcome. The venial sins are the sloppy footnote, the missed citation, and the premature press release that shortcuts the peer-review process. Sins of the world are the anti-intellectual populist campaigns that threaten academic freedom and the bureaucratic overreach that chokes research in administration. Absolution comes through the erratum notice or the replication study that corrects the record, and redemption is offered to the scholar who responds to criticism by gathering more data. Purity talk pervades the department: a design is “clean” or “noisy,” an identification strategy is “robust” or “weak,” a finding is “significant” or “spurious.” The deepest rule of the grammar separates the scholar from the text. You may dissect a colleague’s life work over a two-hour seminar, showing its data to be flawed and its conclusions unfounded, but you must thank him for his presentation, take him to dinner afterward, and keep your voice level throughout. The set regards that cold civility as the boundary line between academic critique and personal conflict, a rule that preserves the university as an island of structural authority.
Edsall’s diction comes from the social sciences. He writes “racial resentment,” “negative partisanship,” “educational polarization,” “out-group hostility.” He treats these terms as tools rather than jargon, and he uses them without apology or definition padding. When he reaches for his own words, they run plain and blunt: voters “defect,” coalitions “crack,” parties “bleed” support. He keeps a reporter’s vocabulary under an academic’s subject matter. The mix gives his columns their texture. The quoted professors supply the abstraction, and Edsall supplies the verbs.
His sentence architecture differs from his Post reporting days. The columns favor long, subordinated sentences that stack qualifications, then snap shut with a short declarative line. He opens with a question more often than a claim. “Has the Democratic Party lost the working class for good?” The question structures the column as an inquiry rather than an argument, which lets him hold his own view back until the final paragraphs. When the view arrives, it tends toward pessimism delivered flat. No hand-wringing, no uplift. He ends columns on sentences that read like verdicts a judge regrets having to issue.
His rhetoric works through accumulation. He persuades by weight of testimony rather than by wit or aphorism. A typical column quotes eight to fifteen scholars, often at block length, and the cumulative effect resembles a deposition more than an essay. Critics call this clotted. Admirers call it honest. Either way it inverts the usual columnist’s bargain, where the writer’s personality carries the argument. Edsall’s personality shows in his curation, in which questions he asks and which answers he prints, and in a career-long preoccupation with the points where race, class, and party grind against each other.
He prefers email interviews, which suits both his method and his temperament. Email gives him exact quotes, time-stamped, that no one can dispute later, and it lets careful academics write careful answers. The choice tells you something about his epistemology. He wants the record clean.
His speaking manner matches the prose. In interviews and panel appearances he talks in a low, gravelly register, halting, with pauses while he searches for the accurate word rather than the impressive one. He mumbles at times. He self-deprecates about his age and his predictions. He answers questions he was not asked when the asked question strikes him as the wrong one. He shows no performer’s instinct, no radio polish, and audiences read the roughness as credibility. A man who sounded smoother might seem to be selling something. Edsall sounds like he is reporting back from somewhere he did not enjoy visiting, and that has been his persona for fifty years: the bearer of unwelcome demographic news, delivered without flourish, sourced to the hilt.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
If Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is right, Thomas Edsall becomes a strange figure: a man who has spent twenty years documenting Mearsheimer’s anthropology while refusing to accept it.
Consider what Edsall does. Every week he emails political scientists and psychologists, and every week they tell him some version of the same thing. Voters reason backward from group loyalty. Partisanship functions like ethnic identity. Policy preferences follow tribal attachment rather than produce it. Motivated reasoning beats deliberation. Racial and religious identity predict the vote better than economic interest. This is Mearsheimer’s picture of man, confirmed in study after study, column after column. Edsall has built the largest popular archive of evidence for the social, tribal, socialized human being in American journalism.
Yet the columns keep registering surprise. Each finding arrives as a fresh anomaly, a troubling new wrinkle, a challenge for Democrats. If Mearsheimer is right, nothing in this archive is anomalous. The anomaly is the baseline Edsall measures it against: the liberal individual who weighs arguments, updates on evidence, and votes his interests. Edsall keeps reporting the death of that creature without holding a funeral. The surprise is the tell. A man who accepted the social anthropology might stop being surprised.
The implications run deeper for his framing of the White working class. Edsall often reaches for pathology scales, racial resentment batteries, authoritarianism indexes. These instruments presume the autonomous liberal individual as the healthy norm and code group loyalty as deviation. Mearsheimer’s view inverts this. In-group preference, attachment to one’s society, willingness to sacrifice for fellow members, suspicion of outsiders: these are the human default, the survival strategy of the species. What the studies Edsall quotes call resentment, Mearsheimer might call ordinary group behavior under status threat. The moral coding flips. The pathology lives in the expectation that people should behave like atomized rights-bearers, since no one ever has.
His strategic advice suffers the same problem. The classic Edsall column ends by asking whether Democrats can win these voters back, usually through some mix of economic policy and rhetorical adjustment. If socialization and innate sentiment dominate reason, persuasion through argument and policy detail addresses the weakest of the three faculties. You cannot argue a man out of an identity he was infused with before he could think. The Democratic strategist’s faith in the well-crafted appeal is the liberal delusion brought home from foreign policy and applied to Ohio.
There is also the matter of Edsall himself. His method treats the academy as reason’s clearinghouse. He emails the professors, the professors cite the regressions, and the regressions stand in for thought. But on Mearsheimer’s account the academy is a society like any other, with its own long childhood, its own value infusion, its own sentiments dressed as conclusions. Edsall’s trust in his sources is a tribal practice. He defers to his clerisy the way a parishioner defers to his priest, and the deference feels like rationality from the inside, which is exactly what Mearsheimer’s account predicts it should feel like.
The irony is that early Edsall knew all this. Chain Reaction (1991), written with his wife Mary, treated American politics as group conflict over race, rights, and taxes, and it holds up because it never pretended voters were philosophers. If Mearsheimer is right, Edsall’s first major book got the anthropology correct, and the subsequent decades of columns amount to a long negotiation between what his data shows and what his commitments require. The data is Mearsheimerian. The hope is liberal. The column is the seam where they grind against each other, week after week, and that grinding might be the real subject of his life’s work.
