A really interesting conversation with a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat about the future of his party. Three things (really more) stood out:
Abortion isn’t the panacea the Ds believe it is.
Part of what’s hurting the party is the “sing from the same hymnal” problem. You can’t just be for climate justice. It’s trans justice. Racial justice. LGBTQIA++++. No microdeviationism.
Many minorities can’t stand this stuff. That’s why they’re moving right.
Ruy Teixeira, late of the Center for American Progress (he talks about leaving on the pod), co-founder of one of our favorite substacks, the Liberal Patriot, and now colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, answers the questions a lot of people who don’t live in New York or San Fran have been asking: What the Hell has happened to the Democratic Party?
What stands out is the North Korean/Marxist absolutism of the party: You need to sign up for everything, or you’re a racist/homophobe/fascist/scumbag. Weirdly, many people whose bible isn’t the New York Times feel this is… crap. They wonder what happened to the Left as the champion of the working class. They wonder why they have to have an electric car. They wonder why their party doesn’t care about illegal immigration. They wonder why inflation isn’t front and center. Or crime. Or education. And perhaps even more oddly, they wonder how it is that the party they’ve been told is anathema — the Grand Old Party — does seem to care about those things.
Ruy encapsulates it here:
Obama carried non-white working-class voters by 67 points in 2012. Biden carried them by only 48 points in 2020…. Biden only carries them by 16 points. That's a huge drop.
Of course, Ruy rightly says these problems are ultimately self-correcting. Lose a few elections, and the woke catechism starts to lose its luster. And it’s not as if the GOP is offering an unblemished alternative. But so far, there’s been precious little recognition that the elitism/woke problem of the Democratic Party is fatal to its long-term prospects. And as a result, there aren’t dozens lining up to run who will take the party in another direction.
Here’s the longer-term worry: We used to believe that the lefty looniness of the college campus would evanesce as grads grew older and moved into the real world. That’s not happening as much anymore. Ruy calls it institutional capture, and if you had any doubt that was real, check out that heinous hearing on antisemitism that lost one college president her job. Here’s his verdict, and if you clutch your head in your hands and despair for the future… well, join the club:
...when you look at institutions and institutional capture, I'm not so sure we reached the end of this road, really, and whether we're actually on much of a decline. I mean, I think a case can be made in some ways. If you look at newspaper mentions and stuff, some of it has changed a bit. There's some data on this. But I think it's very important what's happened to these institutions and who staffs them and the lack of pushback within these institutions... Not to say we're necessarily on the road to complete perdition, but we're not out of the woods yet by any stretch of the imagination.
HIGHLIGHTS
In the 2000s you wrote about the emerging Democratic majority — your new book is Where Have All the Democrats Gone? What happened?
RT: The crispest way to put it is when we wrote the book, we were looking at the shifting terrain of American politics at that time, and we looked at the rise of the non-white vote. We looked at the rise of professionals who were realigning to the Democratic Party. We looked at the changes in the voting patterns of women, particularly single, working and highly educated women. We looked at the rise of the more cosmopolitan post-industrial areas of the country, which are growing fast and which are also realigning to the Democrats. And we thought that... you could make a case that Democrats at that point were more consistent with the views and preferences of these rising constituencies. And if they could appeal to them and not go too far to the left or whatever, or just... We actually called it progressive centrism when we wrote the book, they could stick to that sweet spot. They could really form a potentially dominant coalition at least for a while.
But we had a very important caveat in the book, which quickly got forgotten, which was there are an awful lot of white working class voters in this country. Democrats have been losing, were losing altitude among those voters, and they couldn't really make this new political arithmetic work unless they kept that core, a significant core of that support, maybe 40% nationwide, closer to 45 or whatever in some of the Midwest states where white working class voters loom so large. We stressed that very carefully, but I think it quickly got forgotten, and especially it gets forgotten after Obama gets elected in 2008.
The triumphalism of the Obama years…
RT: The Democrats get hammered in 2010. A lot of that white working class support disappears. It's really a big driver of what happens in that election where they lose 63 seats. Obama comes back and wins in 2012 to some extent because he runs the sort of populist campaign against Mitt Romney. And he does bring back, again, some of these white working class voters, particularly in the upper Midwest. And he doesn't win that election without them. But everybody forgets this, immediately. Republican autopsy forgets it, and Democrats really forget it because it's kind of like, "Well, okay, this is great. We won two straight elections with Barack Obama. We're riding the crest of the wave. There are no problems here. We're just going to keep it locked, and certainly our coalition will grow over time." And that's where you get a lot of this really triumphal coalition of the ascendant demographics is destiny, kind of stuff.
And in the mid-2000s this begins to fray?
RT: In 2014, 2016 is when John and I really start rethinking our ideas and the way the Democrats are evolving doesn't seem likely it can keep this coalition together, at least in a big way. And we're back to a stalemate in American politics that'll kind of teeter back and forth between the parties as they fight over their various constituencies. And the Democrats, we thought at that point might even start losing non-white working class voters, which in fact did happen in the 2020 election where Biden did manage to squeak it out. But there was very significant attrition among non-white working class voters, particularly Hispanic working class voters where the Democratic advantage probably dropped by around 20 points nationwide.
So why did this happen?
RT: When we try to explain that in this book, we look at first the opening of the great divide between the working class and college educated voters and how they experienced the economy in the late part of the 20th century and how Democrats were viewed in many ways of being complicit in that due to trade deals and deregulation, the client of the union movement, which reduces the working class anchor of the Democratic Party. And then going into the 2000s we see, and I think I won't get much disagreement about this here, the embrace of the Democrats of a cultural radicalism, race, gender, immigration, crime. It really becomes quite a different party in terms of its professed priorities and almost culture around all these things. It's very alien to a lot of working class voters.
We include climate in that also as a culturized issue because most working-class voters are not in fact dying to run their whole house on renewables and buy an electric car and all this stuff.
That's really been forgotten in today's Democratic Party, which has moved away from the relative moderation of the Obama years and its cultural outlook and completely placed their bets on again, this rising American electorate and are very so influenced, we talk about this in the book, by this highly educated liberal part of the party that dominates what we call the shadow party, the NGOs, the activist groups, the advocates, the foundations, a lot of academia and a big part of the Democratic Party infrastructure itself. And a lot of the media very dominated by this cultural liberalism/radicalism and put a high priority on it in terms of their politics, pushed the Democratic Party in that direction, taking a really lax attitude toward crime, decriminalizing crime in some cases, quasi open borders, very bad.
Basically, biological sex doesn't matter anymore. Trans women are women. We should have puberty blockers and surgery available at the drop of a hat. The people mis-gender dysphoric children. And of course, we must go all in on the climate issue because it's an existential crisis and if we don't immediately transform the basis upon which our industrial society runs, we're all going to die. So none of this makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense as politics or substance, we believe. And I do think it's part of the reason why Democrats have been hemorrhaging our working class voters of all races in the recent past and brings us to this place we are where the historic party, the working class, ain't really no longer the party of the working class, at least in a strict quantitative sense. Republicans now get more working class voters overall than the Democrats.
So these progressive priors start to coalesce…
RT: I do think that we see this really starting to bite in the 2000s. And I think at that point, for example, it wasn't uncommon to have people write stories about some of the peculiar things that were happening on the campuses, and some of the odd perspectives some of our youngsters seem to have, and some of the histrionic stances they take on a lot of these issues. And some people would criticize that and say, "Ooh, that's not such a great idea," and the kind of standard reply was, "Oh, don't worry about it. It's just on the campuses. It'll stay there. They'll grow up. They'll come out into the work world," where a funny thing happened. They did go out into the work world and they took all these views with them and they started to occupy the lower reaches of a lot of these infrastructures. They basically pretty aggressively pushed those kinds of ideas, even as the people who actually ran these institutions were themselves probably moving in that direction.
And you have a sort of unfortunate situation where these younger cohorts start pushing the people who run these institutions to kind of meld all these progressive issues together into one massive blob of progressive commitments. I mean, if you believe in one thing about climate, you have to believe in this other thing about race, which means you have to believe this other thing about immigration, and those who resist these advanced ideas, it's really just showing that you're not with it, you're racist, you're xenophobic, you don't care about the climate, whatever. [Then there are] feedback loops with social media, which is a very important part I think, of how a lot of this stuff gets weaponized in the left of center institutional world, where it becomes actually something you pay a price for if you don't sort of sign up and don't signal your virtue on these various things.
This just gets worse in the teens. I mean, Black Lives Matter arises in 2013 to '14. We saw the way Hillary Clinton ran in 2016, which to some extent really was a response to what a lot of people in her base and her activists and supporters really wanted. And it really crests with the George Floyd summer of 2020 when things really go completely bonkers and everybody has to signal their 150% support for everything Black Lives Matter stands for. People start reading crazy books like White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist, and it becomes quite acceptable to say that anybody who doesn't sign on to all this completely is just in denial, they're racist, right? I mean, they're committing microaggressions on a daily basis. They have to confront their implicit bias.
And the woke agenda emerges as doctrine?
RT: Don't we all know now the United States is a white supremacist society, born in slavery, marinated in racism, and a dystopian hellhole for non-white people to this very day? I mean, this is kind of crazy stuff, I think, but this is the sort of thing in left-wing circles you had to nod along with, "Oh, yeah, right. Sure." I mean, who could argue with this lucid reasoning and the evidence behind it? I mean, really, it halves the IQ, a lot of people on the left where they feel they have to accept a lot of stuff that's basically clearly nonsense and sanction the people who don't and all sing from the same hymnal, and again, put all these issues together. You have to be for open borders. You have to be for decriminalizing crime and defunding the police. You have to be for defending the trans rights, where a lot of this stuff isn't really trans rights. These are policy issues, right? I mean, should we medicalize children of gender dysphoria? That's not a right. Nobody has a right to puberty blockers. It's a policy question.
But all of this stuff was sort of shoved to the side. I mean, this is all part of what it means to be on the left in today's world, and of course we see it coming up in the Gaza and Israel conflict as well, where this tsunami of pro-Palestinian and really intrinsically pro-Hamas sentiment starts arising and taking over a significant section of the Democratic Party. So, this radicalism, which spilled out of the campuses, occupied the lower and middle reaches of the infrastructure, captured a lot of the institutional leaders and donors and foundations, and then is amplified through social media, I think, is a really big part of the story, which in turn pushes the Democrats further in relying on a base of college-educated voters, particularly Liberal-ish college-educated voters.
What happens to the Dems if they lose the working class? Permanent minority status?
RT: That is a ticking time bomb for the Democrats, and as I said earlier, everybody knows in a sense about the movement of white working-class voters away from the Democratic Party, which many of the Democratic Party after 2016, and I wrote about that and it's part of what ultimately pushed me out of the Center for American Progress, is you shouldn't just think of all these voters as being deplorables, as being racist, and xenophobes.
There's reasons why they voted for a guy like Trump. There's reasons why they detest the elites of both the Democratic and Republican Party. There are things they're dissatisfied about. There are things that have happened to the communities they live in. So, we have to take this seriously and not just be dismissive, but I think Democrats could be complacent about that because they had in their mind this way of dismissing these voters. But now, I think we see these non-white working-class voters, Hispanic working-class voters, black working-class voters start to move away from the Democrats and entertain the idea of voting for Republicans, and that should be a wake-up call because their political arithmetic is not sustainable the more this goes on, and certainly it prevents them from any kind of spell of dominance.
The Catalyst data, for example, shows that... This is a big data firm that does really good work in terms of basic demographics. Obama carried non-white working-class voters by 67 points in 2012. Biden carried them by only 48 points in 2020. In the Times poll you're referring to, Biden only carries them by 16 points. That's a huge drop, and we see this in a lot of other polls that are coming out, as you were saying, Marc, this significant attrition among these Hispanic and black voters. And again, it's typically driven by working-class voters within those demographics. Hispanics, for example, in the same poll you alluded to, I think Biden has maybe an eight-point lead and they don't break it down by working class and not, but I'd be pretty sure that it's really compressed among these working-class Hispanics especially. So, that's remarkable. I mean, Democrats carried Hispanics by 25 points in 2020. If it's in the single digits or very low double digits, that's a huge swing, which will have implications for the election.
Will Dems will change tactics much between now and 2024?
RT: Probably not. I mean, it's getting a little late in the day. They're kind of locked into their current approach. Biden knows if he tries to do anything or say anything really different, the activist part of the party and social media will come down with a ton of bricks. Plus, a lot of people on his staff who staff the administration, they're not particularly moderate on a lot of this stuff, so they're like the Trojan horse inside the administration. So, I think, I'm not holding my breath in any big changes through 2024. We don't want to get too in the weeds on handicapping the horse race, but I think it's quite possible Biden might still squeak through. I think Trump is a very flawed candidate for many reasons, but he could also lose. He could easily lose.
How did the party of immigrants start to lose those same voters?
RT: One of the biggest mistakes Democrats made, I think, in terms of the Hispanic population was routinely starting to refer to them as people of color. That's not how Hispanics think of themselves. They think of themselves as Americans, as upwardly mobile Americans, as hardworking Americans, as people who want to get ahead in the world and uplift their family, and they want safe streets and good healthcare and all these other very concrete mundane things that they thought the Democrats were more on this side in terms of producing than the Republicans, hence their loyalty.
And crime?
RT: There's no doubt about it. People who live in poor black and poor Hispanic communities, which allegedly Democrats are so concerned about, they are a hundred percent for better policing for sure, but more police. They're extremely concerned about public safety. There's some data in this latest thing I wrote that show that for black, Hispanic, and Asian voters, their number two issue after inflation is crime and public safety. The thing they're most worried about if Biden wins the election is crime becoming even worse and public safety and homelessness becoming even worse.
The bizarre thing that's happened with Democrats is they won't even talk about law and order, I mean, like it's supposed to be a racist code word. I mean, this is insane. It's not racist to enforce the law. It's not racist to get criminals off the street. As you're pointing out, the very people who live in these communities want the criminals off the street, so who are you helping and who are you speaking for if you're acting like that's not important?
I mean, it is gobsmacking, the extent to which that there's disjuncture between how a lot of people on the left of the Democratic Party look at the crime issue and how ordinary working-class voters who live in these damn communities think about it.
So we’re missing a sister Souljah moment…
RT: My advocate is for a Chesa Boudin moment. His moment has probably passed, unfortunately. It would've been better to do it right after he was cashiered, but I thought that was a great opportunity. I mean, this putz gets thrown out by the voters of San Francisco. I mean, he represented everything that was in a sense wrong about Democrats' approach to crime. Why not have a Chesa Boudin moment say, "Chesa Boudin, the voters of San Francisco has spoken and we agree with them. This is not the way to approach the issues of crime and public safety. That's not what our party stands for. Chesa Boudin does not speak for us," blah, blah, blah. But it never happened.
Is abortion the silver bullet the Left claims it is?
RT: I think Democrats are certainly correct that on net, this is an issue that helps them. I mean, they are more or less on the right side of public opinion, which is supportive of a moderate pro-choice position, and there are elements of the Republican Party that are easily typecast. I mean, some of them really believe this, but of course they try to portray the whole party as being essentially for a full stop, no exceptions, ban and abortion, extremely unpopular. So, they've been able to run in this really well in a lot of elections, but there are a couple of reasons to be a little skeptical about this. One is that if you look, for example, the 2022 election, if you look at the electorate according to the exit polls, there was a 25 point majority in favor of some kind of pro-choice position, but Republicans won the house vote by three points. So, that's an awful lot of Republican pro-choice voters.
If you look at Kansas, which was the first sign that this was really going to play in a certain kind of way, the referendum that would've said there was no right to abortion in the state constitution in Kansas was defeated by I think 18 points or so. But Laura Kelly ran as a Democrat in the November election and only won by two points. So, obviously a ton of people who voted to defend abortion rights in a sense in Kansas also voted against Laura Kelly, and for a Republican.
So, the idea that you can translate support for abortion rights for some sort of pro-choice position and the automatic Democratic votes is just clearly not true. Even in Virginia, which was also taken to be an example of this, and this has not been publicized as much as it should, I mean, Republicans, they didn't managed to gain control of the state legislature, but they did carry every district up to Biden plus nine in terms of their candidates. So, again, the Democrats held the line and then a bit more in Virginia against the Youngkin push to take over the state legislature, but it was fundamentally a status quo election.
All of this is to say that abortion rights is a bit of thumb on the scales for Democrats, you could argue, but they're already down, right? So, the thumb is just pushing the scale back up a little bit, but it's not an anvil. It's not like if they drop abortion rights on one side of the scale, it sort of changes the whole calculus of everything, and they win every election and everything's great.
So Dems are out of touch on this one?
RT: Youngkin's 15-week limit with exceptions thereafter is actually not a crazy position. Consistent with what a lot of voters think, I don't think it really worked as well as they thought it would in that election, but it's not crazy. And we should always remember that, I mean, people are moderately pro-choice but are actually very leery about abortions after the first trimester, and then in the third trimester, they're just flat out against it. So, the real hardcore activist position on abortion rights, which obviously has a real presence to the Democratic Party is abortion at any time for any reason, at will. That is not the position of the median voter who is quite a bit more conservative on this issue. They want abortion rights in some form maintained, but they don't want a sort of at-will anytime kind of approach to abortion.
And then there is the disaster at the border…
RT: It's remarkable how low Biden's approval rating is in handling the border security. It's frequently measured in the '20s, and Republicans are massively preferred on which party can better handle immigration and border security. And there's a good reason for that, which is that since Biden administration came in and rescinded some of the Trump approaches, and just took a really different approach to border security and toward the immigration issue, in a sense, it sent a signal. Trump was a bad mean man at the border and we're going to be nice and open and friendly, and that signal was received through social media, amplified through a lot of other countries. Obviously, as you're pointing out, the cartels started playing a more active role and they realized they could game the system. You come here. You claim asylum. You get released into the United States. Your court cases in a year and a half, never show up for that.
There are a lot of different mechanisms by which these immigrants managed to get into the country and stay here, and obviously the priority of the Biden administration wasn't to put a stop to that and tighten up the system. It was rather to keep it as it was. Now, why is that? I guess, I don't buy there is some Machiavellian, "Well, the more of these people we let in, eventually when they get to be naturalized citizens or whatever, they'll vote for us and that'll be great." I think a lot of it has to do with the way immigration has been treated as an issue within the Democratic Party, within its shadow party, as we talk about in the book. I mean, there's tremendous pressure on the Biden administration from the left wing of the party and from the advocacy groups who are concerned with immigration to keep it locked in terms of having a very porous border, and to scream bloody murder if anything is tried or even alluded to that would tighten up the border.
And why is the Democratic party now turning on Jews?
RT: One caveat here. I mean, it's certainly not the case that everybody at the Democratic Party feels this way, but there is clearly a significant contingent who is inclined to look at this as righteous rebellion against the settler colonial state. What's that about? Well, I think what that's about is this gets back to something I was talking about earlier, with the melding of a wide range of seemingly unrelated progressive issues into one uber-commitment to client, to media, and drastic action on making the United States run in renewables, to relatively open borders, to decriminalizing crime, to defend trans rights above all else.
Part of that now too is Free Palestine, right? And if you are really down with the Free Palestine thing and Gaza is an open-air prison and Israel's a colonial settler state, it does, I think, push you in the direction of being sympathetic to Hamas or at least sort of their righteous rebellion, even if you don't like the leadership or whatever, but it puts you in a very vexed moral position toward a terrorist massacre like this, where you're in a way, wind up more excusing it than denouncing it. And I think that's now become part of the progressive catechism, is to be very not exactly okay with it, but real both sides-ism, Right? It's kind of like, "Well, of course they massacred 1400 people. On the other hand, look at how many people Israel is killing with its bombing, and besides, it's a colonial settler state."
One of my favorite pictures recently is a picture of Greta Thunberg, the famous climate activist, with a sign that says, "I stand with Gaza." Someone behind her is climate justice and Free Palestine. It's like, "What do these issues have to do with them? This is ridiculous." But I mean, it just shows to go you how closely linked in the mind of a lot of the activists and sort of the right-thinking people is on this set of issues and how it does lead them down the path toward being disturbingly tolerant toward an organization like Hamas, which I mean, these are some of the worst people in the world. They're theocratic fascists. What are you as a progressive doing, being tolerant at all of where they're coming from? So, this is pretty crazy.
An interesting thing about how it's affecting the Jewish community and a lot of Liberals who in general, whether they're Jewish or not, gone along with some of this kind of woke craziness is I think to some extent, they've been willing to look the other way. I don't want to annoy the kids. I don't want to sort of cause any waves here, and maybe I want to be on the right side of history, and maybe some of the stuff is going too far, but I guess I can suck it up and be with the program. I think for some people this is a bit of a deal-breaker. It's like, "Okay, I accepted all this other bullshit, but this, I can't accept. This is too much."
Other than Biden… what are their options?
RT: I think the bench is a bit thin for the Democrats at this point. Yeah. I mean, the three most obvious people who might step into the breach would be Kamala Harris, not a normie. Gavin Newsom, definitely not a normie, and also a terrible general election candidate, I think. I mean, everything people hate about California instantiated in one person doesn't seem like a good idea. J.B. Pritzker, clearly down the line, woke-ish Liberal governor of Illinois, I don't see him as being much of a normie. Now, Gretchen Whitmer, she's a little bit better, I think. Though, I think if you look carefully at her positions and a lot of the things she says, she's very careful not to ruffle the feathers of any of the people in the left wing of her party, though she does project at least a board normie image and doesn't say quite as many stupid things, but she wouldn't be my choice.
I'd be more interested in people like Josh Shapiro or Jared Polis or some other people who've been willing to say and do things that are a little bit different, that haven't been quite as willing to sign up with the latest woke madness. I think the bench is thin, but I think that parties do correct themselves when they receive signals eventually.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes
How the Democrats Lost the Working Class on Immigration (Teixeria and Judis, Wall Street Journal, November 6 2023)
The Eerie Complacency of the Democrats (Ruy Teixeria, Liberal Patriot, November 16 2023)
America's Electoral Future (Center for American Progress, 2018)
Biden loses ground with working-class Black, Latino voters (Axios, August 6, 2023)
2. Party affiliation among voters: 1992-2016 (Pew Research Center, September 16, 2016)
Democrats keep getting new warning signs about Black voter support (Politico, October 21, 2023)
Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump | PRRI/The Atlantic Report (PRRI, May 2017)
For victory in 2024, Democrats must win back the working class (The Hill, October 6, 2023)
Why non-white voters are abandoning the Democratic Party (The Economist, November 17, 2023)