In 1992, before Bill Clinton became “our first black president,” before Newt Gingrich’s “Republican revolution,” before the advent of Barack Obama, I wrote a book about how race had come to dominate American politics.

I argued that the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

set in motion a realignment of the two parties. As whites began to feel the costs of the civil rights revolution — affirmative action, busing, urban violence — Republicans recognized the potential of race to catalytically interact with the broader rights revolution and the anti-tax movement to drive working and middle class voters out of the Democratic Party.

I also wrote about the political power of racial resentment:

Race gave new strength to themes that in the past had been secondary — themes always present in American politics, but which previously lacked, in themselves, mobilizing power. Race was central, Richard Nixon and key Republican strategists began to recognize, to the fundamental conservative strategy of establishing a new, noneconomic polarization of the electorate, a polarization isolating a liberal, activist, culturally permissive, rights-oriented and pro-black Democratic Party against those unwilling to pay the financial and social costs of this reconfigured social order.

The situation hasn’t changed much.

Heading into the 2020 election, President Trump is prepared for the second time in a row to run a racist campaign. He continues, for example, to denigrate, in virulent terms, immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

At the same time, Democrats are doubling down on a racially liberal political agenda, becoming more outspoken and more confrontational in their defense of diversity and multiculturalism. Two of the party’s top-tier candidates for president — Senator Cory Booker and Senator Kamala Harris — are African-American, one — Julián Castro — is Latino, and all of the current Democratic contenders unabashedly promote the rights of racial and ethnic minorities.

The continuing Democratic quandary is how to maximize essential minority turnout, and at the same time retain — or recruit — sufficient numbers of white working class voters to secure victory on Election Day.