It's a tend that's only likely to continue, something pretty strongly evidenced by election results elsewhere in the advanced democracies. Without anything resembling a real political left existing in the US today, political trends are going to necessarily imitate the extreme identitarianism that has substituted itself for meaningful politics since at least 1947. When Taft-Hartley was enacted, the unions and civil society purged of the left, and left-wing organizations banned or proscribed, political struggle moved from the realm of multiracial, multiethnic, multinational class politics to hyper-individualized identity politics. The fact that this remains unchallenged even on the left is why you're going to see America increasingly resemble South Africa in terms of political coalitions and outcomes.
The Democratic Party may emerge as the majority party over the course of the next generation, but it won't do so as a 'progressive' party in the traditional sense. Much like the ANC, the Democrats will become (even moreso than they already are) a party with a progressive veneer enacting more and more pro-capitalist policies. The trend has existed within the Democratic Party since the 1960s (Kennedy was the first more or less post-New Deal president), and has gained steam as the traditional class coalition that underpinned the old Democratic Party collapsed and was replaced by a frankenstein coalition of ultra-rich financiers and tech magnates and the utterly destitute. As the Republicans play up their own identity politics (white, male, Christian, rural, and suburban identity politics), the Democrats will respond with their own and the coalitions will be increasingly racially, rather than socioeconomically, based.
I'd say we can expect the Republicans to start winning an overwhelming majority of the white vote at some point in the future. Granted, they already win a majority of it, but I'm talking about 2/3rds of it, which may very well doom the Democratic Party to another four decades in opposition, as was the case between the 1970s and now. Barring the re-emergence of a left committed to class politics, we will continue to slide down the identitarian rabbit hole, where politics is less about who should be commanding and controlling the economy (capitalists or the rest of us) and more about things like whether or not video games are anti-feminist, or whether or not the Democrats are planning 'white genocide' or whatever the lunatic far-right identitarians are going off on these days.
I agree 100%
