There’s been so much written about changing political demographics since President Obama was reëlected last November that you could be forgiven for believing that we now live in a country called Liberal America, where the emerging majority of citizens are twenty-five years old, have a Hispanic mother and a Jewish father, reside in a big city, have doubtful employment prospects, spend most of their waking hours on social media, care intensely about pot legalization, and can’t fathom the fuss over gay marriage, while carrying a load of college debt they believe the federal government should force their lender to forgive. Over time, the forty-eight per cent of American voters who opposed Obama last year will somehow melt away or die off, and journalists will stop visiting those vast tracts of red America between the coasts, only to be reminded of its existence when a ban on assault weapons dies in a Senate committee. And as the prospect of perpetual defeat drives the Republican Party into the kind of public nervous breakdown that used to be the normal mode for post-election Democrats, it’s easy to think that Liberal America is the future.