Washington Post’s Deputy Opinion Editor James Hohmann interviewed Ruy Teixeira last month in “a wide-ranging discussion about the Democrats, the DSA, working-class voters, the culture wars, the 2026 midterms, the 2028 election, and plenty more.” Welcomstack.org is providing a transcript of their discussion, a stub of which appears below:
James Hohmann: Ruy Teixeira, great to have you here. You wrote one of the most influential political science books of the 21st century, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Here we are, a quarter century later. I guess just to start our conversation, have socialists taken over the Democratic Party? Are socialists hijacking the Democratic Party?
Ruy Teixeira: I wouldn’t say they’re hijacking it or really taking it over. I actually just wrote a piece on this…which was titled, “DSA: Vanguard of the Radial Professionals.” I think that’s what they are. Professional-class people have been taking over the Democratic Party for a long time—they’ve been hegemonizing it.
They’ve also become more radical as they become more influential, and I think the DSA is a logical terminus of that. I think these radical professionals have been further radicalized by the Trump administration, by their view of the Democratic establishment as feckless and failing to stand up to Trump, failing to do what they were supposed to do.
That puts the DSA in a good position to absorb all these people, which they are. Obviously, they are having some success. They may have as many as ten House members, by my count, in the next Congress. And as people endlessly say, they’ve got the energy. Whether they actually have the votes in the big, big country sense of America is another question, a very different question. But clearly, they’ve got energy within the Democratic ranks.
So my view is that is true, and it’s going to continue for a while. They’ve caught the imagination of a lot of these young, radical professionals who loom large in a lot of blue areas of the country. I think the main thing that will do is not so much that they’ll take over—run the DNC, be the arbiters of what rolls forward in the Democratic Party—but they are going to make it even harder for the Democrats to correct some of their brand problems that we saw emerging in a big way in the 2024 election.
How does a party lose two out of three times to Donald Trump? Well, start with the idea that they’re out of step with big sections of the American voting population, particularly working-class voters, who just don’t share the cultural priorities and some other things that the Democratic Party stands for. How easy is it going to be now to backtrack on those or to move to the center? Because the DSA people—famously, they’re for whatever they mean by “socialism”—they also deeply believe in every single culturally radical stance that the Democratic Party has become associated with in the last 10 or 15 years.
Defund the police, trans rights, open borders, abolish ICE.
Right. Race, immigration, climate, you name it. Famously, their ridiculous program calls for not only eliminating the Electoral College but eliminating the Senate.
And the presidency.
And the presidency. And the Supreme Court [will be] subservient to Congress. I think this is maybe a little bit unconstitutional, James, but it doesn’t seem to stop them. So they are pretty radical.
Now, I think some of them try to pass themselves off, like Mamdani does, as, “I just want to fix the potholes. I’m a sewer socialist.” Famously, I think it was Milat Kiros in Colorado who was asked about some of this—you know, “Socialism just means you’re for garbage collection, and we just care about healthcare.” So this is an attempt to sane-wash their fundamentally very radical positions, both in economics and on cultural issues.
Let’s hypothesize that the Democratic Party needs to move to the center to do better over the medium to long term with working-class voters and [vanquish] a right-populist Republican Party. Obviously, [the DSA] now stands in the way. Instead, politicians are being crowded to the left to not be totally outflanked by the DSA and to respond to the so-called energy in the party.
We already see it happening with some relatively moderate Democratic politicians who refuse to denounce the DSA. They just say, “Well, you know, kids will be kids. They’re just for healthcare in a different way. We’re a big tent.” But these people are nuts, many of them. And they stand for a number of things that are anathema to the median voter in America.
So if you aspire to be the working majority in American politics, you don’t want the DSA identified with your party. You want it disidentified as much as possible. As Karl Rove correctly argued today in the Wall Street Journal, you need a Sister Souljah moment where you disassociate the Democrats from the kinds of things the DSA stands for. Just say it loud and say it proud. But it’s the reverse. People are walking on eggshells when they’re asked about the DSA today.
I think that’s quite remarkable, and frankly I don’t expect it to change for a while.
“You mean when Kamala Harris ran on border security, spoke warmly of guns, etc.?”
You mean the Kamala that said she wouldn’t change a single thing Biden did?
“On immigration, social spending, trans rights and so on, he has moved well to the right of where he used to be. ”
It has been proven ad nauseam that Democrats have moved to the left on the issues more than the country as a whole and that progressives, leftists and liberals have moved more than key voting populations like Black and Hispanic Democrats.
“Harris, as noted, ran the most conservative Democratic campaign since 2004 or 1996.”
Read the Jacobin piece published today that disproves this.
It also describes how Transgender sports, abolish the Police and abolish ICE drag down the Democratic party.
Those are the 3 keys issues.
Jacobin’s study says Teixeira is sort of wrong on climate/energy.
I think the study has the single methodological flaw of being a simulation, but it is better than your catch all argument about moderation on any issue being a wrong strategy because moderates have been wiped out.
Your catch all argument (and the way you present it via ad hominems) is based on a mix of the some of the most common logical fallacies:
– Straw man: Misrepresenting or exaggerating an opponent’s argument to make it easier to attack.
– Hasty generalization: Drawing a broad conclusion from a small, isolated, or unrepresentative sample.
– False cause (Post hoc): Assuming that because event B happened after event A, event A must have caused event B.
– Circular reasoning (Begging the question): Including the conclusion of an argument within the premise used to support it.
– False dilemma: Presenting only two choices or outcomes in a complex situation where many other options exist.
This is probably why you insist on non-stop repetition, just like Trump.
First, Biden pioneered that right turn his administration took by offering a fairly conservative immigration deal. The Republicans rejected it and the voters either didn’t care or preferred non-compromise. Factor that into your argument of Harris saying she wouldn’t change anything.
Second, despite your implication to the contrary, this isn’t just over one election, either. It’s been a quarter century of moderates of both parties steadily losing ground in elected office. Examples include half the Democratic Party caving on the Iraq War in 2002 and still having one of the worst midterms for an opposition, moderate Republicans distancing themselves from Bush in his second-term collapse and still getting hit extra hard in ’06 and ’08, The destruction of the Blue Dogs, etc. The time for situation excuses is over.
Let me put it another way. The Democratic Party was formed in 1848. Name a cycle before 2014 that conservative Dems came out of with less than quadruple their current strength. You can’t. It’s quickly gone from unheard of to the default. No, I’m not believing that “woke” had longer coattails than George McGovern and Walter Mondale. One state each.
Besides, how can this possibly be about the left when the destruction of the center has been one of the very few bipartisan concepts left? The right didn’t get that primary-happy until 2010. The aforementioned blue tsunamis that closed out the Bush era had already reduced non-conservative Republicans to a rump. Casualties included Norm Coleman, Chris Shays, Nancy Johnson, Jim Talent, and Lincoln Chafee. How did a wokelash get them beat in favor of Democrats? And in any cases, progressive Democrats at that?
Polarization killed the middle, plain and simple.
Biden promised too late to have Republicans close the border for him because he didn’t want to. Voters understood what happened.
I really wish your arguments could dispense with the intellectual dishonesty, because they are not really necessary to make your actual point.
Yes polarization killed the middle. Nobody disputes that the result was this.
What people still are trying to understand is how and why it happened and the implications for future strategy.
Your argument is that whatever it wasn’t doesn’t matter a lot because moderates couldn’t save themselves.
Your examples focus almost exclusively on moderates somehow being in the drivers’ seat most of the time.
The Iraq war is a good example because Republicans were able to punish the whole part for that other “half” that didn’t “cave”.
The Jacobin piece tries to explain how there are also costs to moderation. Not all moderation moves are the same.
What the piece doesn’t explain enough (as almost all analysis of this type also fail to do) is the interaction between individual messaging (either by specific candidates or in a vacuum as these studies usually prove voters) and the voters’ perceptions of the party brand historically and at any given moment.
It is very interesting that polarization among Democrats has actually intensified during Trump. Democrat incumbents are being taken out in primaries now.
Previous moderate Democrats were taken out by general elections (including midterms).
You are committing logical fallacies, the one of composition and confusing causation with correlation, by focusing on moderate Democrat losses during general elections.
Of course moderate Democrats would lose in these because the effect of polarization and gerrymandering is that those were the seats most exposed to the consequences of Republicans hardening their opposition to the national Democrat brand.
Politics is increasingly not all local. But in the US all elections are local (even the presidential one), so the consequences of polarization are expressed in districts and states as opposed to in party lists as happens in proportional representation systems.
If moderation didn’t matter at all nowadays, why is it that some of the most polarizing Democrats from the farther left immediately moderate once they become viable candidates even in some of the bluest parts of the country?
Why do people choose to disavow DSA’s national agenda for example?
It’s rather ironic that I’m being called a liar by someone who is throwing in caveats to explain the decline of moderates a quarter-century into this decline. What you go out of your way to not understand is that there’s a point where details cease to matter.
And nobody disputes that polarization killed the center? BS! How many have ignored non-primary defeats moderates have suffered, the implication being that it’s all about primary coups that circumvent the will of the people? And the talk about “enduring majorities” still being the norm, ignoring that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan never had a Republican Congress, is a clear pretext to throw out the center’s worst generation by far!
To give you a specific example of what I’m saying, Jonathan Chait and Nick Catoggio have both implied that almost any Democratic Senate candidate would be kicking the crap out of Mike Rogers in a state Donald Trump won twice. In reality, more generic Dem Haley Stevens was polling in a dogfight with Rogers as well. If Abdul El-Sayed loses, I totally expect how Stevens was looking to do against Rogers had she won the primary to be ignored by a lot more pundits. Have you seen anything to suggest that I’m jumping to conclusions?
Have moderates been running their parties? OK, if you’re admitting that they need that to do well, that’s both a big admission and a cope. Again, the two biggest Republican presidential landslides (1972 and 1984) were coattail-free. Bill Clinton’s victories were even more devoid of coattails. Despite would-be Medicare killer Newt Gingrich’s famously high profile in 1996.
Why do Democratic pols sometimes moderate? Because of the ghost of Clinton. There seems to be a lot of people up above who, despite contemporary test results, believe that a more moderate party would create all kinds of possibilities?
Are they right but activists won’t let them create those possibilities? Once again, the fate of the Blue Dogs is the proof. Don’t forget that the Republican establishment twice tried to stop Donald Trump because it believed him to be unelectable. Among other things, he was outspent badly in the primaries of 2016 and 2024. Time to stop assuming the big shots always know what they’re doing.
I’m not trying to explain the decline of moderates. That is a straw man argument completely unrelated to my points.
The fact that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan never had a Republican Congress proves that enduring majorities are possible…
The rest of what you wrote is also almost completely unrelated to what I wrote about or your examples are next to irrelevant.
I don’t support most “centrist” pundits like Chait. So irrelevant.
There are 200 thousand Muslim voters in Michigan. I think this is very much a sui generis case where identity politics has played a bigger role than ideology. I don’t read too much into it either way.
People didn’t try to stop Trump because he was unelectable. This argument completely rewrites history. In the context of the 2016 primaries Trump was very much a sui generis candidates that was a moderate on some issues and an ultra radical on others. Electability was not the main reason he was opposed by the GOP establishment.
“Primary coups that circumvent the will of the people”…yes this argument is often conflated with hypothetical counterfactuals, like would Mamdani have won against Kathryn Garcia in the NYC Mayoral primary. But this argument is not central or indispensable to the main point in this context: Democratic primary voters have continued to move to the left of general election voters.
Have Democratic primary voters convinced Democrat general election voters on many issues? Yes, this is also true, so there is no circumvention.
Democrats are now more ideologically coherent that they used to be, just like what happened to Republicans decades before.
The question is whether the new ideological coherence is a good fit with the very few general election swing voters that remain. This is not a “detail that has ceased to matter”.
“I think the main thing that will do is not so much that they’ll take over—run the DNC, be the arbiters of what rolls forward in the Democratic Party—but they are going to make it even harder for the Democrats to correct some of their brand problems that we saw emerging in a big way in the 2024 election.”
You mean when Kamala Harris ran on border security, spoke warmly of guns, etc.? And how Teixeira was infinitely more accepting of this view of her campaign until election night? Then it was Ruy Teixeira is a flip-flopper, part 3783. He was a self-identified progressive in the 2000’s and 2010’s. On immigration, social spending, trans rights and so on, he has moved well to the right of where he used to be. So, he has no deserved benefit of doubt here.
Some will say that it’s about the message, not the messenger. Harris, as noted, ran the most conservative Democratic campaign since 2004 or 1996. I’ve heard that how differently she ran in 2020 (both for President and Vice President), along with failing to condemn “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means that it doesn’t count. There were also excuses for moderate Republicans getting wiped out in the late 2000’s, the Blue Dogs suffering the same fate in the Obama era, and the less Trumpy of Republicans. There’s been an excuse every time. Sooner or later the excuses get to the point where could never have possibly been as important as the consistent need for them.
And on a more personal note, there’s the gargantuan double standard. Although the likes of Teixeira plea for a none but the most generous take on how moderate candidates do these days, they had the nerve to demand that the left can its principles after a Republican victory that followed three straight successful cycles for Democrats. To call that unfair and hypocritical would be like saying that moderates have only experienced a small setback since the turn of the century.