The Republican National Convention took place this week in Milwaukee, where Ohio Senator J. D. Vance was named Donald Trump’s running mate, a long-standing call for a federal abortion ban was dropped from the party’s platform, and Teamsters president Sean O’Brien spoke—the first time the head of the prominent union has addressed the RNC. As the recent assassination attempt against Trump and intense debate about the viability of President Biden’s campaign wreak political chaos, this week’s reading list collects pieces that help explain what these developments mean—for the GOP, for the forthcoming election, and for American democracy more broadly.
Reviewing the work of conservative policy advisor Oren Cass, economist Suresh Naidu scrutinizes the right’s newfound interest in workers, shedding light on the anti-elite, pro-worker rhetoric used by Vance and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. Historian Elizabeth Catte reads Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy against the grain of establishment praise, exposing the dangerous myth of racial determinism at its core. Historian Rachel Ida Buff asks why deep-blue Milwaukee agreed to host the RNC in the first place—and suspend hard-won policing reforms for its duration—in the face of staunch opposition from community leaders.
Meanwhile, Center for Progressive Reform policy director James Goodwin close reads Project 2025’s detailed playbook for a second Trump administration, and Robert Tsai and Calvin TerBeek uncover the long history of the sort of anti-immigration politics on such prominent display at the RNC this week—what they call “Trumpism before Trump.”
Finally, political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson lead a forum on the electoral realignments at work in the base of the Democratic Party, which has become increasingly reliant on affluent, highly educated, suburban voters—many of whom strongly oppose abortion bans, a key issue in the 2022 midterm elections. Though the forum was published earlier this year—with responses from former Bernie Sanders campaign advisor Heather Gautney, Working Families Party strategist Ted Fertik, historian Lily Geismer, organizer Dorian Warren, and many others—recent events have only raised the stakes of these electoral shifts.
