Geoff Kabaservice: I can’t neglect mentioning that in 2002 you published a bestseller co-authored with John Judis which a lot of listeners will have encountered, which is The Emerging Democratic Majority, which the New York Times later called “one of the most influential political books of the 21st century.” And the title of course was playing off of Kevin Phillips’ 1969 bestseller, The Emerging Republican Majority. That book was in part demographic projection, but it was also a strategy calling for the Republican Party to exploit tensions over civil rights and social change, basically, and attract voters in what he called “the Sunbelt” in the South and the West and weld them to the traditionally conservative areas of the Midwest. Out of curiosity, how do you assess the Phillips book in hindsight?

Ruy Teixeira: I think it was pretty prescient. I think he did a crackerjack job, and it certainly worked for quite a while. And I think he did ID a lot of the emerging trends that were reshaping politics. Eventually the analysis ran out of gas; the country was changing in ways that were actually going to make that strategy less useful and call it into question.

And in a sense, that’s what The Emerging Democratic Majority was about. It was about looking at the ways in which the country was changing — demographically, economically, ideologically — and basically making the argument that Democrats were a better match for those changes, and if they played their cards right they could take advantage of appealing to these emerging constituencies that were more oriented toward what we called in the book “progressive centrism.” And by doing that, they could accentuate the contradictions in the Republican coalition and start to move some of these voters in their direction and be able to build — maybe not an FDR-style realignment, but a durable advantage in the electorate.

I think we were right about a lot of things, but one thing we didn’t really… There were a couple of things we didn’t really understand at the time, even though in 2008, when Obama won such a solid victory and the Democrats looked like they were in the catbird seat, a lot of people thought, “Well, they did figure it out.” But one thing we didn’t really emphasize enough — it was in the book, but people totally ignored it — was the idea that you’ve got to have a very strong level of white working-class support. That doesn’t mean you have to carry them by a majority, but given the actual demographic nature of the United States and given the way certain voters were concentrated in certain states, it just was a case mathematically that you needed to have a pretty strong minority of this vote. And if that started going south on you, it did call the whole strategy into question.

So that was widely ignored, particularly after 2012, interestingly enough, despite the fact that if you take a serious look at the 2012 election, the reason Obama wins certainly isn’t just because the so-called “rising American electorate” turned out for us. It’s because he clawed back a lot of white working-class voters in the upper Midwest from the 2010 debacle by running against Romney as a populist and trying to capitalize on the auto bailout and all that. So that was a message that was not understood, that that was key to the Democrats’ victory in that election. And they just immediately forgot about it and continued putting their chips down on “the rising American electorate.” And then of course we get to Trump in 2016 where he basically rides white working-class voting shifts to the presidency, to everyone’s dismay. So that was one thing I think people didn’t understand about our analysis. If there was a sort of underpinning, it was that the Democrats had to retain the loyalties of a very significant segment of the white working-class voters.

But the other thing was we talked about progressive centrism. We thought Democrats were in a pretty good spot in terms of sort of promoting social tolerance, promoting anti-discrimination, trying to help lift up the most benighted among us. And America really was turning into much more tolerant, liberal society in that sense, and the whole anti-government fever to some extent had declined. Professionals were becoming increasingly influential as a part of the electorate and certainly culturally, and they were inclined toward at least a moderate government activism type of approach. They were public-spirited, public-oriented in a way that, say, managers weren’t, who more into the bottom line.

We had a whole analysis along those lines that suggested that if the Democrats could harness that progressive centrism with a sort of incremental approach to improving things and trying to be in that cultural sweet spot of being progressive but not alarming to traditionalists, that they would benefit over the long haul.

And as we saw in the teens, basically, I think that that totally comes apart. The Democrats really do move very sharply to the left on pretty much any even vaguely cultural issue you can name. We finally got a country where gay marriage was okay with everybody, and they said, “Nope, not enough. We’re going to move toward a society where your kids are taught gender fluidity in kindergarten and there can be 85 different genders and people should declare their pronouns. And oh, did I mention that you have white privilege? And you should probably examine and scrutinize your life very carefully because you are an oppressor.”

So this boutique kind of cultural leftism bled out of the universities into the wider cultural realm and basically took over the media, the advocacy groups, the foundations, the Democratic Party infrastructures. It was really quite remarkable and happened in a relatively short period of time. And certainly it had a big cohort component to it: the generations that came out of the universities in the 21st century have really been much more oriented in this direction. And they pushed it, and they found willing collaborators and older people and institutions and so on.

Anyway, that’s a long story and we try to break it down a lot in our new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? We try to put some meat on those bones of how that transformation happened. I try to explain it in various different areas and how that relates to the other big thing we say happened, which was a great divide between the college-educated and the non-college youth, particularly in certain areas of the country. It’s a lot about regional inequality, it’s a lot about the left-behinds in the country, it’s a lot about areas of the country dependent on farming, manufacturing, resource extraction, and so on: places outside of the post-industrial, cosmopolitan metropolitan areas, which now basically are the Democratic heartland, in that sort of way.

And these people became increasingly disenchanted with the Democrats, partly on economic grounds because of what happened in these areas and these communities where they did feel like they were left behind and looked down on. And then you wind up in the 21st century (particularly in the teens) with the Democratic Party, the former “party of the people” of the common man and woman, developing these seeming obsessions with things that just do not resonate at all in the lives of tens of millions of working-class people out there. It became less of a working-class party. It is no longer the party of the working class, just on strict nose-counting criteria. So that’s important.

Geoff Kabaservice: I think it’s actually important to point out to listeners that although you get a lot of grief from the Democratic left online, and although you do offer a lot of tough love toward your party, you are not an independent or a Never Trumper or anything like that. You’re an ardent Democrat. And I think back to a famous post that you and Peter Leyden made on Medium five years ago where you wrote that bipartisan cooperation had already become impossible at that time because of Republicans’ refusal to work with Democrats in good faith or compromise in any way — and this is of course before Trump. And you wrote that the Republican Party “over the last 40 years has maneuvered itself into a position where they are the bad guys on the wrong side of history.” And you added that the future of the country really depended on a Republican Party being thoroughly defeated, not just for a political cycle or two but for a generation or two. Have you had any reasons since 2018 to revise that opinion?

Ruy Teixeira: Yeah, I’ve definitely revised my opinion. I do think that neither party is really capable of any kind of solid realignment of American politics at this point. I really overestimated… I was in a space at that point where I was trying to figure out… I didn’t have a lot of faith in the Republican Party, obviously, but I was sort of hoping that the Democrats would concentrate on taking advantage of the contradictions in the Republican Party while keeping their wits about them and their sanity about them. That just didn’t seem to happen. Partly too… I wrote it with Peter Leyden and he was a little bit more sure that the Republicans were down for the count than I was. But as it turned out, I think just in many ways that was an overinterpretation of what was going on.

It was not too hard, and it was correct in many ways, to argue that the Republicans in their current iteration (and certainly in today’s iteration) have really lost track of what it is, what they need to be to be a successful conservative party. But it also became the case over time that the Democrats lost track of what it would take to be a successful and productive liberal party, and how to be the actual party of the ordinary America, which is their historical brand and where they’ve had the greatest success.

California’s a good example of that, because we had assumed when we were writing that California really was a bit of a blueprint for the future. But pretty much all the questions one might have raised about that at the time just became much worse over time. Pretty much every weakness the California Democratic Party had in its approach to politics and policy have just gotten way, way worse, and they haven’t really corrected themselves. So, yeah, I would no longer say California is much of a model for anything. And I think what we should be looking for is better behavior, better policy, and better politics out of both parties.

So I’m no longer so sure the job of all good people is to wish for the Democrats to drive the Republicans out of business. Not that that was likely to happen anyway, but you know what I mean? I don’t think they need to be defeated for a generation at this point. Really, we’re on a seesaw between the parties going back and forth, and what we need is for one party or the other to make a decisive move to the center and to reform themselves in such a way that they are going to be attractive to a solid majority of the American people in some sort of durable way.

Of course, we can’t leave out the possibility this could go on for a long time. It certainly could happen. We could have this sort of despicable, uncomfortable, everybody-hates-it equilibrium between the parties for another number of cycles. There’s no law that says it has to be resolved.

Geoff Kabaservice: We’ve had this kind of World War I trench warfare in politics, with neither side gaining any significant ground, going back really to 1992. But nonetheless, I guess the question is whether the thesis of The Liberal Patriot in some sense is that if the Democrats could distance themselves from the unpopular ideas and the ineffective political strategies of the progressives, would they fare better with the majority of moderate Americans?

Ruy Teixeira: Well, that’s certainly our view. If they were able to do that, they would be able to make a more convincing offer and restore their status as the party of American working class and a party that could command a durable majority. I don’t think it’s just cultural issues, though I think those are very important. I think it’s also a matter of economic strategy. I think that right now the Democrats are way too focused on climate issues, the green agenda, renewables Uber Alles. I don’t think this is actually a very productive economic strategy over the long run.

They’re now countenancing industrial policy, which I think is a good thing. But it’s one thing to countenance industrial policy, it’s another thing to be successful. They’ve shown they’re willing to spend money to try to invest in America, so to speak. But if you’re going to do that, you’ve still got to be able to build stuff. You’ve got to be able to make stuff happen. You’ve got to make the American economy hum. You’ve got to unleash the dynamism of American people, entrepreneurship. And I’m not seeing that, partly I think — and you could argue it’s a little bit related to the cultural stuff — because that is the kind of social policy, economic policy that the people who dominate the Democratic party are comfortable with: “Let’s spend a bunch of money and let’s assume good things will happen. But let’s not touch the regulatory and permitting structure and the general obstacles and bottlenecks that prevent us from actually doing stuff, because that would annoy a lot of the interest groups within the Democratic Party.” I think that has to change.

I think that those two things could change. And my third thing is, they could just become an aggressively patriotic party. But that was in my three-point plan to fix the Democrats. If they could do those three things — move to the center on cultural issues, promote an abundance agenda which includes the kinds of stuff I was just talking about, and embrace patriotism and liberal nationalism — I think they’d be more likely to be successful in the medium or long term than they are now, where I think they’re basically sort of stuck in exactly the kind of trench warfare and equilibrium we’ve been talking about.

They will win some elections, of course they will, especially if the other side is shooting itself in the foot. But I think their ability to build on the contradictions on the other side and actually form a durable majority and really get stuff done — which is what basically what political parties should be all about, is governing well — then I think it’s really going to be limited. And I think that Democrats at this point kid themselves that their problems are in the process of being solved because “Trump and the Republicans are so awful, and besides we did just spend a lot of money — did I mention that? And everything’s going to turn out great, trust us on this.” But I think they’re kidding themselves, I really do.

Geoff Kabaservice: So let’s go back to this question of the Democrats’ loss of the working class and particularly the white working class, although also increasingly minorities who are working class as well. Democratic representative Marcy Kaptur, who represents Ohio’s mostly working-class Ninth District and is the longest-serving female member of the House in American history, recently made a news splash when she pointed out the extent to which Democrats tend to represent the wealthier districts and Republicans tend to represent the poorer districts. And she had a two-page chart that showed the Republicans representing 152 of the 237 congressional seats where the district median income is below the national figure.

And you wrote a piece responding to this where you also pointed out that in 2022, Republicans carried the nationwide working-class House vote by 13 points. In 2020, Trump carried the nationwide working-class presidential vote by four points, and according to the States of Change project data carried the working class vote in 35 out of 50 states, which would seem to be a pretty good basis for a Republican Electoral College victory in the future. And yet the Democrats don’t seem particularly troubled by this. Why is that, Ruy?

Ruy Teixeira: I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. One is that over time they have basically associated their difficulties with the working-class vote as being a matter of white voters who are working-class. And as we all know, “White working-class voters who refuse to recognize their real interest and vote for the Democrats must be blinded by racism, xenophobia, misinformation, and all kinds of other bad stuff, and they really just don’t like this evolving multiracial, multicultural America. That’s the real problem. It’s status threat, it’s racial resentment, et cetera, et cetera.” So I think that’s one reason why they could lose more and more working-class votes over time and not worry about it too much. Or just basically, “We’re on the right side of history here,” to use that phrase, “and over time the white working class is declining and our people are growing and everything will be great.” So I think that was one aspect of it.

Another aspect of it then, which is related, is that they didn’t see that it might actually be possible — and this is where their whole theory starts falling apart — for non-white working-class people to start bailing out because they don’t feel the Democrats are really their party anymore. They’re uncomfortable with it. And that’s certainly been true about Hispanic working-class voters in particular. So that is moving, sort of undercutting that.

And then I think another thing is that if you’re getting at what’s really insulating them from feeling bothered about that, I think it’s really the movement of white college-educated voters in the suburbs in their direction. It wasn’t so long ago where Republicans reliably carried the white college-educated vote. That’s not true anymore. The Democrats now overall have an advantage. It’s been growing and if you look at certain states, it’s really pretty big now. And that has definitely served as a counterbalance to the loss of working-class votes.

So all of this happens gradually, and the character of the party changes over time, and before you know it, things are really different than they were before, and everybody is just comfortable with it. They figure this is just the way the world is. Now, let’s not forget the people who run the Democratic Party today, the people who advise it, their cultural and institutional support in America — these are all this kind of people. They’re all educated, primarily white (but not exclusively of course) liberal people. These are the people they’re comfortable with — their people. And they don’t think a lot about working-class people. And if they think about working-class people, it’s sort of in this primitive way: “Well, we’re doing stuff that’s in their interests, so the only possible reason why they might not vote for us is because they’re manipulated and misinformed by Fox News, and they’re sort of not with the evolving multicultural, multiracial America.”

And there’s the very short summary. It’s easy for them to write off the working-class voters they’ve lost, and it’s easy for them to feel comforted by the people like them who are increasingly becoming strong supporters of their party — and in a quantitative sense certainly are helping to make up for those working-class losses. But in the process, you’ve got this weird going from being a working-class party to being a party that’s dominated by college-educated and particularly college-educated liberals. There are now more white college-educated liberals in the Democratic voting pool than there are non-white working-class voters. So something’s going on here and it’s really making the Democratic Party a different party.

Geoff Kabaservice: A lot of people on the left criticize meritocracy now, and you generally defend it. But I think what you’re defending is merit as a principle, whereas some of what you actually are describing sounds a lot like a criticism of the “-ocracy” part of meritocracy.

Ruy Teixeira: That’s right. The problem with meritocracy isn’t merit as a criterion. It’s a problem with how merit is allocated, and where opportunities for merit are given, and where merit is in fact overridden by networks and so on that allow people who aren’t even very meritorious to act like they have merit and to be rewarded on that basis. Look, equal opportunity was always a great idea. It’s still a great idea. It’s still what Democrats should stand for. And so Democrats shouldn’t be watering down merit criteria. They should be figuring out how more people can have the opportunity to acquire merit, because we should have faith that ordinary people — black, brown, white, red, whatever — they all are capable of acquiring merit if you give them a hand up and give them the opportunities. That’s what America should be about.

The idea that we should allocate slots on the basis of skin color regardless of merit, or really watered-down criteria based on merit — people don’t like that. This is very popular now in the Democratic Party, but you can see, for example, in the polling on affirmative action: Latinos don’t support taking race into account in college. Even black people don’t. I mean, this is ridiculous. This is social policy being made by people who have a certain ideological mindset about the world and purporting to represent the views of people whose views they don’t even represent — because most people in America are pretty normal. They hold basic American values about how people should move ahead in society and how people should be rewarded.

Geoff Kabaservice: It’s worth pointing out that even in California affirmative action was rejected on a ballot initiative.

Ruy Teixeira: Yeah, 57-43.

Geoff Kabaservice: So as long as we’re taking a trip down memory lane here, in 2012 you wrote a review for The New Republic of Joan Walsh’s book What’s the Matter with White People?, which is largely an analysis of why the white working class had already at that time largely abandoned the Democrats and the old New Deal Coalition. And of course, that title was playing off of Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? And Walsh agreed with Frank that Republicans had used social and cultural issues to great effect to pry the white working class away from the Democrats. She also blamed what we would now call neoliberalism in both parties for the disappearance of the kind of middle-class jobs for less-skilled workers that had undergirded a lot of the old faith in government. But Walsh also felt that liberal Democrats even then had begun to vilify the white working class and paint them as what you called “a cartoon portrait of hopelessly racist and mean-spirited enemies of progress.”

Ruy Teixeira: That was good. Did I write that?

Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, you did. But it seemed like a lot of that would be confined to the university campuses and to the sort of progressive support system for the Democratic Party that you talked about. And it seemed possible at that time that you could imagine someone doing what Bill Clinton and his friends at the Democratic Leadership Council had done to reorient the Democratic Party back toward the center. That seems a lot less plausible now, not because there aren’t a whole lot of Bill Clinton-type politicians leading this kind of movement, not only because there isn’t a DLC or other kind of similar institutional infrastructure for that kind of centrist movement, but also because it doesn’t seem that there’s any way to actually restructure the universities and the philanthropies and the think tanks and all these other things toward some kind of new center. Does that analysis seem correct to you, or do you think that can be changed?

Ruy Teixeira: You’re bringing up a lot of interesting things there. When I was listening to you, it just sort of took me back to 2012 and the Obama election when I was at CAP and I wrote that review. And in some ways what I tried to do at CAP, and within orthodox Democratic circles for a long time before and after the 2012 election, was to get people to focus on the necessity of reaching white working-class voters; that you couldn’t mathematically have the kind of coalition you wanted unless you reached more of these voters and you would always be vulnerable to them moving away from you. And in fact, you’ve got to open your mind and try to understand the actual existing electorate of America.

It’s always a bad idea to write people off in a very simplistic way. There are reasons why they might have evolved certain views and certain political behaviors. There are economic factors, there are social factors, there are factors to do with how their communities have evolved. And we need to understand that. And this was part of the ongoing discussion I was having with people in and around the Democratic Party and the work that I was doing.

Fast-forward to leaving…. It was basically, at that point, “I can’t have that discussion. It is not happening. Nobody’s listening. They couldn’t care less about what I’m saying.” And actually, Joan Walsh is sort of an interesting example. I like Joan. I’m still friendly with her. But I do think that while she wrote that book in 2012, I think she has a different outlook today. She writes for The Nation, which is a sort of aggressively left-wing identitarian magazine now. And she herself speaks fairly dismissively of a lot of these voters, I think. And my feeling… I think the Trump thing really blew her mind. I mean, “Yeah, we shouldn’t look down on these white working-class voters. Yeah, we should try to reach them.” But then Trump happened, and I think it really messed with a lot of people’s heads. They just couldn’t wrap their minds around why anyone would vote for this guy. “And even though we might have been looking down at white working-class voters before too much, maybe now that they put Trump into office, maybe we’re sort of justified at this point. And anyway, maybe they’re just hopeless.” Certainly I think that was part of her thinking and the thinking of people like her.

So, yeah, the situation we’re in now is I think we do need a sort of alternative center of gravity within the Democratic Party, a sort of new DLC. And there are people who are working on this. I’m involved in some efforts that may bear fruit along these lines. But there certainly has to be a sort of well-defined alternative within the Democratic Party to what you might call left progressivism or woke progressivism, whatever you want to call it — because they’ve got hegemony. The AOCs don’t run the party, but their philosophy and approach to policy and politics is not too far from hegemonizing the Democratic Party. It certainly determines its image.

And moderates are just people who dissent from this or that particular political plank or this particular policy, but they don’t have their own point of view on things. They’re not a coherent alternative. I mean, there’s not a heartland Democrat that’s really trying to have a distinct faction and point of view that could help Democrats compete in a lot of the places they need to compete where they’re getting their clock cleaned — and that’s just places where they used to be doing well, like Ohio and Iowa.

What about places like North Dakota or Indiana or whatever? I mean, you got to have senators from these places, man. How are you going to win in these states unless there’s a permission structure, a factional structure that allows Democrats who have pretty moderate-to-conservative views on a lot of stuff to run as Democrats? In other words, Manchin would no longer necessarily be the most conservative Democrat. It would be great if there were ten other Democrats who were more conservative than Joe Manchin. Anyway, end of rant. But I think that that’s the direction that Democrats need to think about and to engage with. But we’re very far from that at the current time.

You can read the entire interview with Teixeira here.