LEE KRAMER'S ROOM: With Views

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America’s Blue-Red Divide Is About to Get Starker

As the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority flexes its power, it will continue to find itself at odds with the priorities of America’s kaleidoscopically diverse generations born since 1980. Compared with older generations, Millennials and especially Gen Zers are more racially diverse and much more likely to identify as LGBTQ or to describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated. The Court majority has set itself on a course that will collide with the dominant views in those younger generations on a range of issues, whether voting or LGBTQ rights or climate change. In the CNN poll, more than three-fourths of adults younger than 35 opposed overturning Roe.

All of this means the 2020s could produce the same kind of confrontation that erupted in this country in the 1850s—over restrictions on the spread of slavery—and the 1930s, over the government’s role in managing the economy. In each of these cases, a Supreme Court appointed by an earlier political majority moved to block the priorities of an emerging majority coalition.

“I do not believe that this Court is building an America for everyone. They are building an America for a very select few, and this is just the opening salvo of what that’s going to look like,” Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the president of NextGen America, a group that organizes young people for progressive causes, told me. “The future is going to belong to America’s young people,” she added. “And we are not going to quit and give up on these issues without a righteous fight.”

Maybe the clearest message of Alito’s draft opinion is that the conservative Supreme Court majority is determined to give Ramirez, and the generations she embodies, exactly that kind of fight for years to come.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/05/roe-abortion-supreme-court-republican-divide/629768/