Getting the Right Right

May 16, 2025

By Jesse Smith

The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Mass Republican Radicalization, by George Hawley. De Gruyter, 2024, 184 pages, $42.99.

I am not, generally speaking, an admirer of Elon Musk's social media presence. I nonetheless confess to having been amused by an X posting of his. It featured a picture of a boy and his father sitting together. The boy complains, "Daddy, my leg hurts." To which the father replies: "The left one or the far-right?" 

The joke lands because it captures a real phenomenon. In the Trump era, academic and journalistic discourse often operates on the assumption that the modern political right is a hotbed of extremism—white supremacy, xenophobia, patriarchy, authoritarianism, and cultural resentment, with no regard for the norms or principles of liberal democracy. The terms "right," "far-right," and "radical right" are often used interchangeably. The naïve consumer of this discourse might be forgiven for assuming the modern Republican electorate has undergone a surge of radicalism in recent years, with formerly fringe views achieving mainstream status.

In The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Republican Radicalization, political scientist George Hawley demonstrates the surprising lack of evidence for any such surge. The main story behind rising right-wing extremism in the population is that there is no story. Whether it comes to policy preferences, cultural attitudes, or explicit endorsement of radical political engagement, the finding is the same: The Republicans of today do not hold extreme views on most matters, and do not look all that different from the Republicans of ten, or twenty, or thirty years ago. Though there have been real disruptive developments on the political right in recent years, mass ideological radicalization is not an adequate explanation for them.

Hawley makes his case by combining survey data and interviews with Republican voters to provide a sober-minded and systematic overview of modern Republicans as a whole. What is their demographic profile? Where do they fall on policy matters? How do they feel about America's various ethnic and cultural minorities? And finally, to what extent do they exhibit prejudiced, conspiratorial, violent, or otherwise extreme views? Furthermore, how have all of the above shifted over time? While in a few cases he identifies cause for concern, his overall verdict is that the GOP is what it has been for a long time, namely, a party of the center-right.

Still your father’s Republican Party (mostly)

Hawley begins with an analysis of the demographics of Republican voters. In general, he finds they conform to the stereotypes: The GOP is a party of rural residents, whites, the elderly, married people, and churchgoing Christians. This profile is not so very different from what it was a generation ago, and insofar as there have been shifts, most are minor. Republicans have made a few inroads with racial minorities, though they fare better among Latinos and Asians than African Americans. The GOP has gained strength in rural areas, though this is offset by lost ground in the suburbs. Prevalence of marriage and Christian identification among Republicans have seen gentle declines. Most of these trends do not jump off the page.

There is one major exception to this relative stability: Education. In 1990, nearly half of Republicans held a college degree, a proportion roughly on par with that of Democrats. By 2020, the percentage had sunk to about 30% among Republicans while clearing the 50% mark among Democrats. This speaks to a growing divide in class and culture between partisans, and portends a Republican Party likely to face a serious disadvantage in human capital moving forward, thus representing a real and consequential shift in political demography.

Aside from this key exception, however, the most relevant population shifts have not occurred among Republicans themselves so much as the society around them. The demographic groups that make up key GOP constituencies are in decline. Americans’ migratory patterns are typically out of the red country and into the blue city. White Americans are projected to become a minority of the population by mid-century. The large Boomer population will fade away, to be replaced by its more liberal children and grandchildren. Marriage has shifted later in life if it happens at all, and religious identification and practice have witnessed rapid declines in recent decades. The GOP has maintained competitiveness by capturing growing proportions of these shrinking populations, but this strategy has a natural ceiling and will ultimately prove unsustainable. In the meantime, however, the demographic profile of the Republican electorate has remained remarkably stable, even if larger population shifts have made it more distinctive.

Hawley then turns to the question of what Republicans want on matters of policy. Here again, his examination reveals few surprises. Compared to Democrats, GOP voters on average want lower taxes and less spending, less regulation related to firearms or the environment, and more restrictions on abortion. On these matters, Republicans are decidedly more conservative than their opposing partisans, but have not generally become any more right-wing over time. Furthermore, average gaps between Republicans and Democrats are often not massive, nor are Republican attitudes very extreme. For instance, when examining preferences for government spending in multiple areas on a scale of one (less spending) to seven (more spending) in 2020, Republicans averaged a bit above three, while Democrats fell between five and six. This is a meaningful difference, but it is not indicative of a GOP electorate wanting to strip the government of all its functions. On most issues, where gaps have grown over time, this has more to do with shifts among Democrats than Republicans.

There is one issue which saw major swings among Republicans over the 21st century, namely, that of gay rights and same-sex marriage. Notably, however, the shift occurred in the liberal direction. In 2004, about three quarters of Republicans opposed both same-sex marriage and civil unions while a quarter favored them. By 2020, this figure had reversed and then some. This is hardly the mark of a party conquered by reactionary and bigoted impulses.

What about cultural and racial attitudes among GOP voters? This area is the focus of many claims of Republican radicalism. As the story goes, rural white Christians, resentful of their declining population share and fearful of the loss of cultural dominance, have adopted a stance of aggressive nativism and white identity politics geared toward the marginalization of perceived cultural outsiders. So perhaps right-wing extremism can be detected, not in demographics or policy preferences, but in cultural stances more generally. Is such a contention supported by the data?

Here again, the story is much the same: Republicans may fall to the right of Democrats, but they are not especially extreme and have not radicalized over time. For instance, when asked whether they believe immigration should be increased, decreased, or kept the same, the average response from GOP voters in 2021 fell in between "Kept the same as it is" and "Decreased a little”—almost exactly where it was in 2004. With respect to race, while Republicans have shifted slightly over the course of the 21st century, it is in the liberal direction. White Republicans in particular feel somewhat warmer towards African-Americans, are less likely to endorse racial stereotypes, and report weaker feelings of white identity compared to years past. 

Of course, there is a more direct approach to assessing the prospect of Republican support for political extremism, namely, by asking them whether they support political extremism. Are they favorable toward political violence? Do they endorse bizarre conspiracy theories in large numbers? The evidence is once again thin. An overwhelming majority of both parties reject violence as a means to accomplish political goals. Support for the QAnon conspiracy theory is in single digits among Republicans, and seems to be a primarily online phenomenon. Among Hawley’s interviewees, antisemitic conspiracies did not come up at all.

Hawley warns that this does not mean there is no cause for concern. After all, as January 6 showed, it does not take very many genuine extremists to wreak major political havoc. Furthermore, there is one conspiracy theory that has gained a great deal of traction. A majority of GOP members report a belief that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, suggesting conspiracies wield more influence when trumpeted by more mainstream sources such as Fox News or, in this case, the President himself. While this widespread belief is a real concern, however, it does not seem to be explained by a surge in right-wing extremism, particularly when viewed in light of the other evidence presented.

By the end of the book, Hawley has assessed the prospect of mass Republican radicalization with impressive thoroughness, using multiple methods and from many angles, and come up mostly empty. The political turmoil of the past decade is unmistakably real, but requires a different diagnosis than that offered in much of modern partisan discourse.

The more things stay the same…

Still, it would be implausible to think there had been no meaningful changes (other than declining education) among the Republican electorate in the years from the pre-Trump era to the present, and Hawley does, indeed, identify some important shifts. However, they belong more to the realm of partisanship and populism than ideology. 

Republicans have become more likely than in the past to identify as conservative. On the surface, this might seem to indicate growing ideological polarization, but as we have seen, this shift does not  translate to matters of policy or cultural views. Many conservative-identifying Republicans also have only a fuzzy notion of what being conservative entails, and so do not present as ideologues. Self-identified conservatism thus seems not to signal strong ideological commitments, but rather to serve as a kind of identity intensifier. This is complemented by a corresponding aversion toward opposing partisans, as feeling thermometer data show a substantial drop in Republicans’ warmth toward both Democrats and liberals between 2000 and 2020 (a drop which, notably, is reciprocated). The perception of right-wing extremism may thus be explained in part by growing mutual antipathy, and a resulting vitriol of partisan rhetoric.

Republicans furthermore appear increasingly alienated from the mainstream of American society. Their trust in media and government, already low at the turn of the century, has plummeted toward the floor. If extremism is understood as exhibiting a statistical average near the lowest or highest possible value on a survey question, then mistrust of institutions is one area where GOP voters may be regarded as extreme. Republicans have further seen declines in feelings of political efficacy, that is, a sense that they are able to have a meaningful impact on political processes. While such alienation is not the same thing as radicalism, it promotes cynicism and a lack of investment in existing institutions which may create space for radicalism to gain a foothold. 

Thus, the picture Hawley paints is not entirely optimistic. GOP voters do exhibit high levels of partisan hostility and social alienation, and these can produce politically disruptive consequences. Obsession with ostensible right-wing extremism, however, is not only misguided but counterproductive. The more Republicans are characterized as extremists by liberals and Democrats, the more their partisan hostilities are fueled. The more mainstream institutions align themselves, explicitly or implicitly, with liberals and Democrats, the more Republicans become alienated from those institutions. Misdiagnosis of the political right’s ills thus has real stakes.

The world through violet-colored glasses

Throughout The Moderate Majority, as in his previous work, Hawley plays the role of the social scientist rather than the polemicist. His careful and systematic reporting of data, examination of each issue from many sides, and warranted caution on what we should and should not conclude from his results, lend an adult-in-the-room authority to his argument. On a topic that generates a great deal of heat, Hawley’s slim volume is intentional in shedding light.

Because he wisely chooses to stay above the fray, there is a key question Hawley mostly does not address: Why was this book necessary in the first place? Most of his data sources are publicly available and widely used. By his own admission, the quantitative analyses are not sophisticated. The finding of Republicans’ lack of radicalization has been sitting right there for any moderately competent data analyst to observe. What, then, has allowed the myth of mass right-wing extremism to achieve the status of general knowledge?

In 2017, there may have been some excuse for this perception. After all, the selection of Donald Trump in 2016 for the GOP frontrunner and then president did, indeed, seem to represent a radical break from politics up to that point. The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville lent plausibility to the prospect of a surge in white nationalism, antisemitic conspiracy, and all the rest. The raw shock of these events was in full force, and there had not been time to collect and analyze data and disseminate its findings in the early days of this strange new political era. In the heat of the moment and based on limited information, rising right-wing radicalism seemed a reasonable conclusion.

Now that we are nearly a decade in, however, the need for a new narrative should be apparent. Persistent attributions of Republican nativism and white supremacy reveal an explanatory sclerosis among the primarily left-leaning academics and journalists responsible for the shape of partisan discourse. In part, this reflects a refusal to separate scholarship and partisanship. If demonizing one’s political opponents competes with well-grounded explanation as a goal of scholarship and reporting, then explanatory shortcomings are more likely to be tolerated. In part, it reflects a lack of imagination—commentators ensconced in left-leaning professional environments simply do not know how to make sense of right-wing political commitments through any other lens than that of social exclusion and bigotry. But Hawley’s analysis points to another possibility. If progressive elites were to confront the fact that Republicans’ animating ire is directed primarily, not at racial minorities or immigrants, but at them, they may be forced to reflect on their own role in facilitating disturbing developments on the political right. Faced with this prospect, it is much more comfortable to retreat into the familiar frame of raging right-wing radicalism.

This stubborn stance is now reaping ill rewards. Progressive elites’ opponents have risen to power, and have shown a novel willingness to wield it against the institutions that have antagonized them, most prominently the academy. Universities naturally defend themselves on the grounds that their mission is the pursuit of truth, which can only be carried out if left unfettered by political entanglements. But their penchant for recycling nakedly partisan and poorly grounded theories of American politics renders this defense impotent. Given this state of affairs, The Moderate Majority provides a badly needed intervention. Hawley’s work deserves to be recognized as both a model and a fresh starting place for scholarly efforts to make sense of what is happening on the political right.  

Jesse Smith is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Benedictine College.