In these divisive political times, there is one thing that both the Left and the Right share: their disdain for white liberals. Kevin M. Schultz, the 50-year-old chair of the history department at the University of Illinois Chicago, investigates the roots of this rallying cry in his new book, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals). For the Right, as Schultz documents, “owning the libs” has gone beyond a slogan to become a central — and effective — organizing strategy.

Reading your book, I was struck by how the Trump campaigns so faithfully followed Richard Nixon’s playbook in pitting one group against the other, which Nixon’s vice president famously called “positive polarization.” How exactly did Donald Trump go about exploiting the current contempt for liberals to seize power?

Trump took this 50-year-old playbook and became unabashed about putting it into play. And so owning the libs, or triggering the libs, or going after the libs, became a cornerstone of his 2016, his 2020, and his 2024 campaigns. Really, the only thing that brought together the disparate components of the Republican coalition was their hatred of liberals. I was just in Florida visiting my in-laws over spring break. All these gift shops in these beach towns have a whole Trump section, and half of the 20-plus T-shirts in the section are all about owning the libs. My favorite was “I Clean My Guns With Liberal Tears.” Right? I took a picture of that. It just sort of shocked me that this hatred of liberalism is really what animates the Trump base. In the book, I was able to use a lot of reporting done by great journalists who interviewed Trump supporters. And they said what the Left and the center of America don’t understand is that the more liberals get upset at the crazy things that Donald Trump does, the more confirmed the Trump people are that they’re doing something right. So the fact that he’s triggering the libs, which seems insane to people on the Left, is actually working to his great benefit.

That ties into a phenomenon you wrote about: a central contradiction of Americans’ views of liberals.

In general, a lot of Americans believe in what might be conceived of as liberal policies today — and these include a permissive freedom of individual choice, especially when it come to things like abortion — but also a little bit of government control over unregulated capitalism. So Americans love Social Security. Americans love Medicare. Medicaid is a wildly popular program. Americans love public education. But yet there’s no sense that it was a liberal tradition that built these kinds of things. And so I began wondering, Where is the middle of American life? Where is the middle of American politics? Why are there very few people who are able to successfully articulate this centrist position?

At what point in history was the word “liberal” considered a political asset, representing our dominant political ideology?

Before 1932, nobody in American political life used the word. And one of the things I’m proudest of is that I was able to locate the exact moment in the summer of 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt grabbed the word “liberal” out of thin air and used it to describe his New Deal policies. He did that because he knew that his opposition would otherwise label him a socialist. And the term had this very positive resonance because the New Deal philosophies carried over to the 1940s and 1950s, with the expansion of higher education, the expansion of public road systems, the government-financed housing loans. These all get subsumed under the label of a liberal form of government. Eleanor Roosevelt and others like her, they referred to liberalism not by any laws or specific policy but as a spirit of government that is going to enable individuals like you and me to have the maximum amount of freedom without hurting somebody else.

How did that quality of being a “spirit of government” make liberalism effective?

One of liberalism’s great strengths, which is also one of its weaknesses, is its ability to change and adapt to the circumstances of the time. A perfect example is the civil rights movement, when Black activists pointed out to the American population in general that during this fantastic expansion of the American middle class from, say, 1945 to 1965, Black people were not necessarily included, especially Black Southerners. And so could liberalism adapt and include Black people? And liberalism’s answer was yes. We then get the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Housing Rights Act of 1968. These were all major transformative federal laws that were put in place, at least in part, by white liberals.

So how did that willingness to adapt and change then make liberals vulnerable?

With the liberals focused on underrepresented minorities, the white working class began to feel like the interests of government were no longer focused on raising the white working class up to the middle class. Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, you got a lot of these people leaving the Democratic Party and voting Republican. Sometimes they’re called Reagan Democrats, sometimes now the white working class, but they constitute a large part of the MAGA population today.

When did the conservative attack against liberals begin?

William F. Buckley Jr., who is known as the patron saint of modern conservatism in American life, wrote a book in 1959 called Up From Liberalism. Which was, of course, a parallel to Booker T. Washington’s famous book Up From Slavery. So Buckley is paralleling liberalism and chattel slavery as sort of the same kind of thing. He spends 217 pages just ripping on American liberals, including Eleanor Roosevelt. This right-wing critique says that liberalism is really not a sturdy, strong foundation and it is eventually going to lead the United States to embrace communism. He thinks liberalism is going to make all these cultural concessions to leave behind both what we call today “family values” and the insistence on capitalism as the best way of organizing a national economy.

Your book talks about how the major Black thinkers and artists of that time, including many Chicago intellectuals, criticized white liberals as not being bold enough in advancing change. Specifically, you write about Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1960 poem “The Lovers of the Poor.”

It’s a masterful poem that is a critique of white liberals and their unwillingness to actually confront the problems of being Black in America. She talks about the white liberal women who go to the poor Black parts of Chicago and want to get their picture taken and want to be in the magazines and the newspapers and be recognized for doing good. But as soon as the photographers leave, they want to get out of there as soon as possible, and say, “Maybe we can send a check by post next time so that we don’t have to get our dresses dirty in the Black parts of town.”

Why does your book title focus on the “white liberal” and not just the “liberal”?

When I started writing the book, a lot of the Black Lives Matter protests were happening. And Ibram X. Kendi was very, very popular — and still continues to be very popular — for writing about antiracism. He writes that there’s the racists and then the antiracists, and in the middle are assimilationists, and these are the white liberals. And so basically, I saw him continuing this tradition begun by James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. It hadn’t gone anywhere.