Twenty years ago, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published a book called
The Energing Democratic Majority, which led a generation of Democrats to believe that Democratic dominance of American politics would soon just
happen, as a result of demographic changes and generational turnover. The promised Democratic majority never emerged, and now Teixeira is most often seen castigating Democrats in emails sent to Thomas Edsall, who publishes them in his
New York Times columns.
Now Teixeira has taken his I'm-a-Democrat-scolding-Democrats act to
National Review, in an
essay that's the magazine's current
cover story -- because, really, what could be better for a party struggling to survive a challenging midterm cycle than thousands of words of criticism from a Democratic-leaning thinker in the pages of Republicans' most widely respected magazine? I'm sure the essay will result in several Teixeira appearances on Fox News, or at least many references to his essay on the channel, because there's nothing Fox likes more than to say,
Even the liberal [insert name of prominent Democrat here] thinks what Democrats are doing is nuts.
(As if to send a signal to Fox that he's available, Teixeira says Democrats believe in the “Fox News fallacy,” which he defines as "the idea that, if Fox News and the like are criticizing the Democrats on an issue, the criticism must be unsound and the disputed policy should be defended at all costs." I'd say that more often the Democrats are inclined to overcorrect when they notice attacks from Fox. But Fox will like Teixeira's assessment of the situation.)
Teixeira might be right about some things -- but he ignores many of the reasons for the Democrats' struggles, and he invents problems where they don't exist.
He writes:
Democrats have failed to develop a party brand capable of unifying a dominant majority of Americans behind their political project. Indeed, the current Democratic brand suffers from several deficiencies that make it somewhere between uncompelling and toxic to many American voters who might otherwise be the party’s allies. I locate these deficiencies in three key areas: culture, economics, and patriotism.
He's right about Democrats failing to develop a party brand. I'd say it's because they're terrible at messaging, and because they overpromise and underdeliver -- on affordable health insurance and child care, student loans, climate change, voting rights, gun violence, and many other issues. But Teixeira thinks it's those evil lefties doing all the damage:
The cultural Left has managed to associate the Democratic Party with a series of views — on crime, immigration, policing, free speech, and, of course, race and gender — that are far from those of the median voter. That’s a success for the cultural Left but an electoral liability for the Democratic Party. From time to time, Democratic politicians, like Biden in his State of the Union address on March 1, try to dissociate themselves from unpopular ideas such as defunding the police, but the cultural Left within the party is still more deferred to than opposed or ignored.
"Defund the Police" is, of course, one of Teixeira's top concerns. But when the Democratic president of the United States says he wants to increase police funding
in a State of the Union address and that isn't seen as the party's main message, when (as Teixeira writes later) "Democratic politicians are running as fast as they can away from any hint of 'defund the police,'" when London Breed, the Democratic mayor of San Francisco, says (as Teixeira also notes) that “It’s time the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end. And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policies, and less tolerant of all the bullsh** that has destroyed our city,” then you have to ask why it's widely assumed that Democrats are tolerant of crime. I'd argue that there's a brutally efficient right-wing propaganda machine that seizes on anything that might upset Mr. and Mrs. Suburban America and amplifies it relentlessly, while Democrats lack a message machine of their own and are always playing defense, and doing so inadequately. But Teixeira says it's because we're all in thrall to the academic left, not just on "Defund the Police" but on race and gender and patriotism -- and, bizarrely, technology. (I'll get to that.)
Teixeira writes,
The Democrats have paid a considerable price for their militant identity politics, which lends the impression that the party is distracted by, or even focused on, issues of little relevance to most voters’ lives.
No -- what's led to this impression in many cases is
Republicans' obsession with culture war issues. It's Republicans, for instance, who are fixated on the issue of trans females in sports, even though, as the Republican governor of Utah
wrote when he vetoed a bill banning trans youths from participating in school sports,
● 75,000 high school kids participating in high school sports in Utah.
● 4 transgender kids playing high school sports in Utah.
● 1 transgender student playing girls sports.
● 86% of trans youth reporting suicidality.
● 56% of trans youth having attempted suicide
Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few.
(The Utah legislature
overrode his veto.)
Teixeira thinks Critical Race Theory is a problem for Democrats, of course.
The standard Democratic comeback to criticism about CRT in the schools is to say that any voters, including parents, who worry about CRT are manipulated by right-wing media into opposing proper teaching about the history of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and so on.
Voters’ worries about CRT cannot be bludgeoned away so easily. Parents are far more worried that their child is taught — no matter the name of the theory — to see everything through a racial lens than they are concerned that she is learning about historical instances and practices of racism.
Teixeira cites no statistics to back up this assertion. He overlooks data suggesting that the people most worked up about CRT in the schools
aren't parents of school-age children. A
Wall Street Journal poll he cites twice, noting poor marks for Democrats on crime and border security, actually shows Democrats
favored over Republicans on the issue of education.
And then, near the end, we get a bizarre digression from Teixeira on the subject of economics and technology.
First, he asserts that Build Back Better, the Democrats' centerpiece economic bill, "would have supported useful expansions of the notably stingy American welfare system, and ... would have supported useful public investments," but
None of that ... would have led to more productivity, higher growth, and an American economy less unequal across regions.
Teixeira offers no evidence to support this claim. In rebuttal, I've found a
report titled "The Build Back Better Agenda Boosts Productivity and Long-Term Economic Growth in Numerous Ways," which was published by the Center for American Progress, where one of the Senior Fellows is ...
Ruy Teixeira.
From there we're told that
much of the Democratic Left still regards with suspicion the goal of more and faster economic growth, preferring to focus on the unfairness of the current distribution of wealth.... The latter view has, on the left, led to the vogue for the idea of “degrowth.”
This is such a culturally salient "vogue" that I'd never heard of it before, but apparently it had a massive impact on the discussions D.C. Democrats were having in 2021.
Given such views, it is not surprising that growth does not rank high on the Democratic Left’s list of economic objectives. We saw that in the endless debate around Build Back Better, which was driven by the House’s Progressive Caucus. Almost none of the debate was about how well the bill, at whatever level of funding and with whatever programmatic commitments, would promote growth. That was dismissed as something only conservatives would care about.
I thought the primary concern of the Progressive Caucus was getting at least some decent policy past Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, but maybe I was misinformed.
And now we come to the Teixeira's nutty talk about technology.
Closely related to Democrats’ relative indifference to economic growth is their lack of optimism that a rapid advance and application of technology can produce an abundant future. More common is fear that a dystopian future might await us thanks to AI and other technologies. This is odd, given that almost everything ordinary people like about the modern world, including relatively high living standards, is traceable to technological advances and the knowledge embedded in them. From smartphones, flat-screen TVs, and the Internet to air and auto travel to central heating and air-conditioning to the medical devices and drugs that cure disease and extend life to electric lights and the mundane flush toilet, technology has dramatically transformed people’s lives for the better....
Doesn’t the Left want to make people happy? One has to wonder. They show more interest in figuring out what people should stop doing and consuming than in figuring out how people can have more to do and consume. They rarely discuss the idea of abundance, except to disparage it.
No, he's not finished.
If there is to be an abundant clean-energy future, not a degrowth one, it will depend on our ability to develop energy technologies beyond wind and solar. The same could be said about a wide range of other technological challenges that could underpin a future of abundance: AI and machine learning, CRISPR and mRNA biotechnology, advanced robotics and the Internet of things.
I'm just a humble blogger, and maybe I'm no expert on why Republicans are leading Democrats in midterm polling, but I'm pretty sure it's not because the GOP talks a lot about artificial intelligence, CRISPR, and smart toasters.
The GOP
doesn't talk about these things, or about any agenda other than pure revenge. The GOP mostly talks about how evil Democrats are, frequently portraying the words and deeds of radicals who aren't even Democrats (people who destroy property during lefty protests, for instance) as the responsibility of all Democrats, while Democrats don't portray the words and deeds
of radical, offputting members of the Republican Party as representative of the party as a whole. Teixeira may be right that many ordinary Americans are put off by aspects of the left, but we'll never have a proper test about right-wing excesses because Democrats seem allegric to the notion of drawing attention to them. And that, along with the plutocracy's ability to use all Republicans and some Democrats to block good legislation that would help people, is the real reason the Democratic Party is in trouble.
