Ezra Klein interviewed Ruy Teixeira for the New York Times on February 1, 2024, long before Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee. But the interview is more about the Democratic Party, than the presidential race, specifically some of the party’s blind spots as identified by Teixeira. The Times is featuring the interview, which serves as a reminder that even more is at stake than selecting our next president. The transcript follows below. You can also listen to the interview on “The Ezra Klein Show” at: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, How to Listen

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

Ezra Klein

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

So last week on the show we had Simon Rosenberg giving the very optimistic case on the Democratic Party, the view that the Democratic Party is doing great, they are winning at a rate we have not seen since F.D.R., and that all of this panic about the state of the party, about its prospects in 2024, is misguided.

Today is the other argument, the argument the Democratic Party is not doing great. That, in fact, it’s doing quite badly. That it is losing something core to who it is, core to its soul, and it’s losing it because it is making bad strategic and even, as you’ll hear in his views, substantive decisions. So Ruy Teixeira is very well known in Democratic policy circles, longtime pollster and political strategist. And he wrote in 2002, alongside John Judis, a famous book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority.”

When this book comes out, things are looking real bad for Democrats. It’s the 9/11 era, George W. Bush is super popular. And here come Teixeira and Judis to say, actually things look pretty good for Democrats, that if you look at how the country is changing, the growth of nonwhite voters, the growth of the professional class, if you look at how those and other groups vote for Democrats, that just based on demographics you should expect the Democratic slice of the electorate to really grow. And if it grows, Democrats are going to begin winning.

Now it’s a weird time for that book to come out. George W. Bush wins again in 2004. But in 2008, reality begins to look a lot like what they’ve been describing. And then in 2012, when Obama wins on the back of huge, huge turnout among nonwhite voters, he has a share of the white electorate that is about what Dukakis had when he loses in 1988.

When Obama wins with that coalition, it really looks like Teixeira and Judis were right. And even the Republican Party seems to think so. It begins to think it has to moderate on immigration and put forward a kinder face. And then, of course, comes Donald Trump and upends us once again, wins when people think he cannot. And that sets off a set of soul-searching. What was wrong in the emerging Democratic majority? What did Teixeira and Judis get wrong? What did Democrats get wrong?

And so now they have a new book out called “Where Have All The Democrats Gone?” And this book’s fundamental argument is that most of what they said came to pass. But one thing happened that they had worried about in that book, and people didn’t really pick up on, which is that in order for that Democratic majority to happen, Democrats needed to keep the working class. And they, in particular, needed to at least hold down the ground they were losing with the white working class. And that did not happen — Democrats getting stomped among the white working class. There is some evidence of them losing at least some working-class Black and Hispanic voters, particularly men.

So the question is, why? It’s a question that Judis and Teixeira are trying to answer in the new book. You will hear in here that the view is both political and, I would say, substantive. Right? There’s an argument about what is good policy and also an argument about why that policy, why a much more moderate Democratic Party would be a more politically-effective one.

And so I wanted to offer this as the second way of thinking about the Democrats right now. That they have lost a constituency that, at their very soul, they are built to represent, and that they should be treating that as a real emergency. And then there’s the question of, what do you do about it? It’s a place where I think Ruy and I have some different views, but I was grateful that he joined me here.

Ruy Teixeira

Hey. Thanks for having me, Ezra.

Ezra Klein

So I want to begin with the older book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which gets published in 2002 and later takes on this status as a kind of artifact of a certain era of Democratic triumphalism. But it was helpful to me to remember that it was in 2002, which was a really bad time for the Democratic Party. So tell me what you were seeing then that made you write the book. What was the context for it? Because at that time it was counterintuitive.

Ruy Teixeira

The context in which John Judis and I wrote the book was looking at the way the United States had evolved away from the Reagan coalition through the Clinton years and the very early part of the 21st century. If you looked at how their political base was changing and how the country was changing, it was clear that Democrats were going to benefit from the sort of inevitable rise of the nonwhite population, which was heavily Democratic. We saw the realignment of professionals toward the Democrats. We saw dramatic shifts in the voting patterns of women, particularly single, highly-educated working women.

And we looked at the more sort of dynamic Metropolitan areas of the country that we called ideopolises, and it was clear they were realigning toward the Democrats. So you could put these sort of demographic, ideological, and economic changes together and say, well, it looks like the way the country’s changing overall is moving in a direction that’s consistent with what we called at the time Democrat’s “progressive centrism,” and if they played the cards right, could conceivably develop a dominant majority that might last for some time. Even though, of course, it didn’t mean they’d win every election or even the very next election after the book was published, which was 2002.

Roiling underneath the surface there, Ezra, was a caveat we had in the book about the white working class, because we were very careful to note that secular tendency of the white working class to move away from the Democratic Party was a problem, and the Democrats really needed to stop the bleeding there and keep a strong minority share of the white working class vote overall nationally, maybe around 40 in the key Rust Belt states that were heavily working-class, more like 45. And if they did that, they could build this coalition. But the political arithmetic would get vexed and difficult if the white working class continued to deteriorate in their support for Democrats.

Ezra Klein

You mentioned something there, which is the ideological trends of the time, like the professional class becoming more Democratic. That hadn’t always been true. So what did you see happening ideologically in the parties around that time that was shifting these coalitions?

Ruy Teixeira

Right. Well, the professionals part was really important in our analysis. And if you looked at professionals, not only were they becoming a much larger part of the US occupational structure and of the electorate and, of course, they vote way above their weight in terms of turnout, but they were moving in a direction in terms of their views on cultural issues which was quite liberal.

Then also professionals, by virtue to some extent of their position in society and their occupational structure, they tend to be more public-spirited. They tend to be more sympathetic to the role of government. And those views seemed to be strengthening as professionals became a larger part of the American electorate. And we thought that was really going to help the Democrats. And, in fact, that turned out to be true, in a strict quantitative sense. They did, in fact, realign heavily toward the Democrats. It really starts in the late ‘80s, kind of strengthens in the ‘90s, and goes forth in the 21st century to the point today where professionals, by and large, can almost be considered a base Democratic group.

Ezra Klein

So then tell me what happens on the way to the Democratic majority. So you have this new book called “Where Have All The Democrats Gone?” It just published in late 2023, and it’s a bit of an update. Why didn’t this durable Democratic coalition emerge?

Ruy Teixeira

Well, point number one is something that we foreshadowed in “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which was that the Democrats had a potential Achilles’ heel in their coalition in terms of the white working class. If that group started moving away smartly from the Democrats again, that would throw the whole thing into question. And that did, in fact, happen after Obama’s victory in 2008.

If you look at 2010 election where the Democrats get crushed to lose 63 seats, it’s a lot because white working-class voters bail out from the Democratic Party in lots of areas of the country, particularly the upper Midwest. 2012, Obama manages to get re-elected, and that was viewed or characterized as the return of the Obama coalition. But the part of the Obama coalition they missed is, he ran a kind of populist campaign against the plutocrat Mitt Romney, running on the auto-bailout and other things like that, and he really managed to grab back a lot of those white working-class voters in the upper Midwest. And if he hadn’t done that, he would have lost that election.

But the coalition of the ascendant kind of analysis that Democrats had been playing with becomes ever stronger. In fact, after 2012, in an odd sort of way, the Republicans even embraced it with their post-election autopsy. The Democrats were riding this demographic wave, it was going to wash over the country, and the Democrats were going to potentially be dominant.

But I think Trump —

Trump had a different opinion. He thought that, in fact, there was a wellspring of resentment among the working class in the United States that a politician like him could tap, and that the Democrats were going to have a lot of difficulty defending against, and that turned out to be the case.

So that’s part of what happened to the Democratic coalition. Another part of the Democratic coalition that is — I mean, the change that’s really still unfolding today that’s very important is, if you look at 2020, even though Biden did manage to squeak through in that election, not nearly as big a victory as they thought they’d get, he managed to hold what white working-class support they had, in fact, increase it a little bit. But what was really astonishing is the way Democrats lost nonwhite working-class voters, particularly Hispanics. There was big, big declines in their margins among these voters, declines that we’re still seeing today in the polling data.

So one way to think about 2020 and where we are today, is that racial polarization is declining but class polarization, educational polarization, is increasing. And that’s a problem for a party like the Democrats which purports to be the party of the working class.

Ezra Klein

Well let’s pick up on this question of the working class and how do we define it. At different times we’ve talked about the working class here, the white working class. What is your measure of the working class?

Ruy Teixeira

I use the standard definition at this point, which is those voters lacking a four-year college degree. There’s obviously different ways you could do it. If you’re going to use a more traditional definition, which is essentially impossible to operationalize in most polls, you would use blue-collar and low-level service workers as opposed to managerial and professional workers.

You could do it by income. There’s no right, scientific way to do this. But the way I typically do it is to look at the four-year degree and more, and less than a four-year degree. And that’s pretty standard at this point, and it’s certainly the easiest thing to operationalize in polls.

And it’s not like it’s without substantive value. I mean, we look at the economic and cultural trajectory of non-college as opposed to college folks, and they look very different. I mean, this has been a country, in the last 40 years, that has been much, much better to people with a four-year college degree than people who lack it. That’s very well-established in all the empirical data.

So it’s not like we’re making something up here. It does really capture a lot about people’s economic trajectories and the jobs they have and their position in the society.

Ezra Klein

One thing you do see is that, depending on which definition you choose, the situation looks a little bit different. So if you look at who wins college educated voters and who wins non-college voters in 2020 and 2016, Trump does. But if you look at who wins voters making less than $100,000, Biden does. And if you look at who wins voters making more than $100,000, Donald Trump does. And you can slice that even a little finer. You look at who wins voters making between $0 and $50,000, Biden. Between $50,000 and $100,000, Biden. And then above that it tends to tilt more towards Donald Trump.

So why do you prefer an educational definition here than an income definition? And what different things might the two tell us?

Ruy Teixeira

Well, one reason to do it is pretty practical. I mean, income categories are highly variable in terms of how they’re polled. And also income distributions shift over time simply because of inflation. So it’s not a very stable way to define the working class, in terms of income.

That said, I mean, we know that if you look at how Democrats are faring with the highest income voters, they do a lot better than they used to do among affluent voters, particularly affluent educated voters, which kind of is consistent with the idea that Democrats are no longer as much of a working-class party as they used to be.

Ezra Klein

One reason I ask this is, you can be measuring different things here that would point to different both problems and possibilities in the two parties. So if the issue is raw income, that tells you something about, say, material standards, the way people are living.

One thing about being college and non-college is it means different geographic patterns. It means you have been around other people in college, or maybe you haven’t been around people in college, right? That might be picking up in a more direct way a kind of cultural context that you have or have not gone through. We can look at, I think, which is often quite helpful to look at, rural and urban, which does map a little bit onto college, non-college. And urban voters have gone way Democratic and rural voters have shifted quite far to the right.

And so all of those, I think, are useful ways of thinking about something that might map on to this concept of class. But whether class is a thing about how much money people make or a thing about who they know and what their culture is in society or a thing about geographic dimensions and resentment, they all might lead you towards a different set of solutions. And so I’m curious how you think about that difficulty of reading what you’re seeing here.

Ruy Teixeira

Well, I mean, I’m always in favor of complicating stories and looking at more variables rather than fewer. So I think you’re getting at, to some extent, one reason why college-educated voters vote the way they do, especially people with professional degrees and feel so sympathetic to the Democrats, isn’t just because they’re relatively affluent and they think the Democrats defend their economic interests. Not at all. I mean, they feel very comfortable with the cultural set of the Democratic Party. Everybody they know thinks the same way. These are their values. These are how things have evolved in their minds in terms of how the country has gone, and they’re very happy to vote for the Democrats on that basis.

So I think all of those things are important to keep in mind — geography, income, levels of education, and so on — in trying to understand how people have evolved in the way they have. Why certain areas of the country are so populist and so sympathetic to Trump, and certain areas of the country basically think Trump is a great Satan and this is Weimar Germany in 1932. So all of those things are important to try to understand this roiling mess that American politics has become.

Ezra Klein

Tell me about your theory of the great divide.

Ruy Teixeira

OK. The great divide is this division that’s opened up between not only college-educated and non-college-educated voters over time in terms of how they experienced the economic development of the country in the late 20th century where college-educated voters became increasingly advantaged relative to non-college. Working-class voters experienced deindustrialization, the sort of decline of resource extraction areas in the country, and just a general sense the country was moving away from them, and the Democrats weren’t really defending their way of life. They were promoting trade deals and deregulating finance, and basically didn’t seem to have the back of these voters in the way they used to think the Democratic Party did.

So that great divide, in terms of the fates of different areas of the country and different educational strata and different types of workers, really affects people’s attitude toward the Democratic Party. There’s actually a very interesting paper by Suresh Naidu, et al., which basically describes the Democrats’ strategy after a certain point, and the late 20th century as being “compensate the losers” as opposed to necessarily providing prosperity for working-class people. And I think that was processed by a lot of working-class people as not being exactly what they had in mind.

Then fast forward to the 21st century. Democrats, I think, embrace what we call in the second part of the book, more of a “cultural radicalism” where views on immigration, race, crime, gender, and so on actually become quite a bit more left than they were, and they become the conventional wisdom of the Democratic Party, and out of the wheelhouse of a lot of working-class voters, which again accentuates this great divide we talked about in the first part of our book.

So I think all of these things move the Democrats in the direction of becoming what Thomas Piketty and his colleagues have called a “Brahmin Left” party, which is actually very common if you look across Western industrial societies. The mass parties of the left have shed working-class support and gained support among more educated and professional strata of the society, and have become more defined by their support among those groups.

So in a way, the great divide is all about, well, how did we get to the point where Democrats are no longer the party of the working class in a strict quantitative sense? And they are really more a party that’s dominated by professionals and educated elites. How did they become a Brahmin Left party, and what does that do to their potential for having a dominant majority coalition?

Our view is that it puts pretty serious limits on that. Doesn’t mean they can’t win elections. They do. But it does mean they have a lot of difficulty breaking through their ceiling and becoming a truly dominant party again.

Ezra Klein

I’m glad you brought up the Piketty research, because it does show that there are similar dynamics that seem to be structuring political coalitions across many different countries which have internally somewhat different contexts, right? All the parties aren’t the same. They don’t have the same historical bases of support. But there seems to be a movement towards these somewhat more educated, center-left coalitions facing down these somewhat less-educated, populist-right coalitions.

I’m very uncomfortable with this working-class, non-working class term here because I do think it’s very hard to say a party winning most voters making less money is not the party of the working class because we’ve decided on another definition. But take a sort of more-educated, less-educated cut as real here.

What is your theory, substantively, of why this is happening in a bunch of different places at the same time? Is it policy positions? Is it the actual consequences of governance? I mean, when you think about what leads to this new cut emerging, what is the story you tell?

Ruy Teixeira

Well, I think there’s a couple of different components to it. I mean, in an odd sort of way I think that me and John and people like us — we take more seriously than maybe some other commentators do who are on the left, that the neoliberal economic model, which dominated policymaking and the sort of economic development of these societies for many, many decades, it actually did do a lot of damage. [LAUGHS]

The Democrats also were trying to deal with the Reagan revolution and figuring out how to position themselves within that political space, economic space. At the time in the country there was a certain amount of consensus that government had done too much, spending money wasn’t the solution to economic problems, and Democrats needed to be responsive to those currents of public opinion. So they adopted what I think of, and I think a lot of people think of, as a softer version of neoliberalism.

Or again, back to Suresh Naidu, et al, you compensate the losers, you try to use some of the riches that are generated by this new economic model to compensate people who are losing out. You hope to bring down prices because people respond to that even if their overall economic trajectory in terms of wages and incomes and the kind of communities they live in may not be so great. At least they can buy a flat-screen TV. It really did reduce the faith in a lot of working-class voters that, in fact, the parties of the left were on their side and did have a plan for how the areas of the country they live in could be prosperous and how they could be provided with a maximum amount of economic mobility. I really think that made a big difference. So that’s a significant thing.

I think another thing gets at the cultural radicalism thing. Back in the day, when unions played a bigger role in a lot of these parties, and the traditional working class had more political weight within these parties, elites thought twice about what kind of issues they embraced on the cultural front. They were more circumspect. They wanted to have a more moderate face.

I think a lot of that’s gone out of the window at this point, and I think that the forces that dominate left parties today, including the Democratic Party in the United States, they’re much less worried about doing and saying things that seem kind of like out of the wheelhouse of working-class voters. They’re very concerned about being viewed as being on the right side of history by some of the more educated and activist and fervent supporters. And I think we definitely see that with the Democrats.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ezra Klein

All right. Let’s take these in turn. And I want to focus on the neoliberal explanation first, because I think this is the most common explanation for loss of working-class support in the Democratic Party in part because it also aligns with the views of a lot of people at the top of the Democratic Party. Weirdly, this is like a shadow version of your thesis, where they have more left economic views than the party has had over time.

But when I look at electoral performance of the party over time, this era that gets talked about as a neoliberal turn, is an era in many ways where the party does better after being in the wilderness for much of the ‘70s and ‘80s presidentially. It wins under Bill Clinton, who is considered the harbinger of neoliberal economics in the Democratic Party. A lot of people consider Barack Obama a neoliberal. I think at least he’s somewhat within that consensus still, but but he’s very effective as a national politician.

The Republican Party is quite far right on economics. I sometimes find it very strange to hear people argue, well, the Democratic Party became in certain ways more moderate economically, but the Republican Party was trying to privatize Social Security and cut taxes for rich people so the working class went over to them. It just seems like a weird way to imagine a voter’s mind working.

And the final thing that’s been on my mind about the sort of anti-neoliberal turn in political punditry over the past couple of years is, if you were to boil down what neoliberalism concerned itself with as an economic philosophy, the thing that it was really doing was holding down prices of goods. Right? It was opening up a lot of globalized trade, trying to turn a lot of things over to markets in ways that would make economies more efficient.

And the thing it really did, coming as it did after stagflation, was bring down prices. Inflation came down. Prices came down. Global trade made things a lot cheaper. We had Walmarts and televisions from China. And one thing we’ve seen very recently in American politics is, people hate high prices. They really hate them. And so on the one hand, they don’t like factories closing, but they don’t like paying more for goods.

And so I want to push a little bit here. It looks to me, when I look at electoral performance of a lot of the Democrats who won in this period were neoliberal, that when you had much more left figures run in more working-class states they did not win, in general. And that it’s a little hard then to also say the Republican Party, which was, again, quite far to the right economically during this whole period that you’re saying people trusted them more on prosperity, that if it was really happening was working-class or white working-class voters in Ohio were saying, oh, I can’t believe these Democrats are signing free trade deals. I mean, a lot of those free trade deals were authorized by Republican presidents.

So convince me this is not a kind of just-so story.

Ruy Teixeira

Well, a just-so story in terms of it’s like a single variable model?

Ezra Klein

I’m saying that — convince me it’s true. Right? Like, run the counterfactual for me. Who is the politician — look. American politics is — I don’t want to say a perfectly competitive market, to be very neoliberal about it. But there are many opportunities for different kinds of candidates to run. And I would say Mondale was less neoliberal than Bill Clinton, but Bill Clinton did much better than Walter Mondale.

I would say, if you look at Democrats who won governorships in this period, in general more, quote unquote, “neoliberal” candidates were doing pretty well. And so there’s something here at the heart of this story. I’m perfectly willing to believe neoliberalism, in particular ways as an economic philosophy, was bad. Right? Like, if you want to make a substantive case, that’s fine. But as a political case, it didn’t seem unsuccessful.

I mean, at the same time Democrats were becoming a competitive national party again, during this exact same period that is being located as a source of their failure. And that feels to me like a problem for the theory that I don’t often hear addressed.

Ruy Teixeira

Right. Well, of course, one thing Clinton did is he moved to the center on cultural issues, which was very important at the time and helped reestablish the Democrats as a more moderate party. I mean, look. Clinton never got a majority of the vote. It was Obama who did. I mean, there was a huge Perot vote in 1992 which is heavily working-class, indicating the dissatisfaction of a lot of these voters with the way things are going. So, soft neoliberalism beats hard neoliberalism. That’s one way to think about it.

And that was a pretty good model. I mean, a sort of reasonable electoral approach at the time. But Trump, in a way, blows that up because he basically discards a lot of the elements of hard Republican neoliberalism on deficits, on trade, on regulation, on a lot of other things. He basically says, this stuff is killing you. Bad trade deals. They don’t care about you here in the heartland. I do. I’m Trump. And I think the Republican Party is still recovering, or trying to adjust.

I mean, look at people like Oren Cass and American Compass, the American Affairs people, the Compact Magazine folks. There’s definitely intellectual currents in and around the Republican Party who want to move in a different direction and realize there has to be a sort of conservative common good economics as opposed to just back to the future and revive Reagan and stuff like that.

So I think we’re in a very fluid time between the parties, and both within the parties and between the parties, as both parties are trying to figure out how can we promulgate an economic model and make it popular that actually would benefit most people and that we actually get credit for if we tried to do it.

Ezra Klein

One way you might think of testing the thesis you have here is, what if Democrats elected a sort of president who was a throwback in important ways to the older Democratic Party? And that president’s economic philosophy was much less neoliberal than the party has traditionally been over the past 20 or 30 years, maybe a big return to industrial policy, a real focus on bringing back manufacturing jobs, a real focus on getting things built in the real world as opposed to using tax incentives to increase more digital activity.

And that fundamentally describes Joe Biden and their economic agenda. It’s been big infrastructure bills, huge amounts of industrial policy, huge incentives to try to bring semiconductor manufacturing to America. I don’t think it’s really arguable to say that Joe Biden hasn’t tried to push things towards industrial policy, towards “buy American,” towards in-sourcing, towards reviving American manufacturing, towards a bunch of the things that you’re saying are the big problem with the party.

And to the extent they message anything, they really do message that. This has been a Democratic Party that, in terms of what it has been trying to pass, its legacy is atypically physical. It’s not trying to build gigantic new social insurance programs, right? The thing they passed was not universal child care. They are trying to just pump money into building things in America. And to some degree it seems to be working. They’ve seen a very, very large increase in manufacturing jobs since taking office. We have not seen in that a big shift in working-class perceptions of the Democratic Party, their perceptions of them on economics where it looks like they’re going to — at least the white working class — is going to vote in 2024.

So if this is really amenable to policy, if having different policies can shift on this, why aren’t we seeing change?

Ruy Teixeira

Well the proof is in the pudding, is it not? I mean, you can promulgate a different policy approach. You could pass big bills. You can spend a lot of money, what Noah Smith calls “Checkism.” But in the end of the day, people will judge you and these policies by what they actually produce.

I mean, Noah Smith also argues that if you’re going to have an industrial policy, you have to do more. And I think you would agree with this, Ezra, in terms of making it easier to build stuff and get regulations and permitting out of the way that prevent you from doing things fast and effectively. And if we’re going to have a new economic model and make this industrial policy really work, we need a lot more changes than simply writing a bunch of checks. Voters judge you on the basis of the results they see and experience in their real life. And until and unless they see those changes and they judge them as positive, they will not give you credit just for passing a bunch of bills and saying you’re for something that seems sort of like industrial policy.

Ezra Klein

See, I think the place I’m pushing on in this part of the theory — because I think there’s a set of different dynamics on the cultural side — is, I’m a little less of a believer than I used to be that voters are judging you that closely on results. I do think the state of the macro-economy matters significantly for who gets elected and who doesn’t.

When you go back to 2010 and Democrats getting wiped out that year, I think that’s inseparable from the fact that unemployment was really, really high. And I think that 2022 was an unusually good election for Democrats. Inflation was high, which made a lot of people think it was going to be a bad election for them, but unemployment was low and the labor market was reasonably strong. And I think that is part of the foundation on which they were able to hold what they were able to hold.

But when I go back over this whole period, because you’re making — and many people make this argument — a sort of argument over decades, I actually do not see a strong economic record for the Republican Party. George H.W. Bush has a significant recession under his watch, ends up a one-term president.

Bill Clinton presides over an extremely strong economy. Then you have George W. Bush, presides over a large credit and housing bubble and financial bubble. By the end of his presidency the entire global economy is in tatters. That leads to Barack Obama, who manages a fairly — not perfect by any means, but compared to peer countries, fairly strong recovery.

In my view Trump is, in many ways, drafting off of trends you’re seeing for the last couple of years of the Obama presidency. Then — I don’t fully blame Donald Trump for this, because he did not cause a pandemic. But by the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, the economy is just a complete disaster-show again. Then we’re in Biden now and things seem back under control.

This idea that there is this strong one-to-one between what the parties are either backing, which is on the Republican side is very plutocratic policies during this entire period we’re talking about, or the results they are delivering, frankly, neither of them looks that good for the Republican Party. And that’s why I’m asking you about what is the actual evidence of this theory? Because if it is something that is amenable to a different economic policy, I want to see the country where that worked or the state where that worked or the period of time in American life recently in this kind of attentional and media sphere where that worked.

Because otherwise it has this problem that I think we often get in punditry — and I am a pundit and probably guilty of this many times myself — of people saying, well, if you only did the thing that I think would be better policy, you would definitely win more elections. But it’s always, I think, important to try to net that out in actual elections. So that’s my point of skepticism here, that it’s very hard for me to track economic performance and the movements of the voters you’re talking about, or actually what the two parties are economically supporting and the movements of the voters you’re talking about.

And so before we move on to maybe another set of explanations here, tell me why you think I’m wrong. Tell me why you think I’m underplaying this.

Ruy Teixeira

Well, you could almost be saying that economic results are irrelevant to what happens electorally. Why haven’t the Democrats completely cleaned the Republicans’ clock on the basis of their economic performance? And I think to understand that, we have to get back to some of the underlying trends that have affected working class voters in the United States and how they’ve experienced their lives, and how their communities have evolved and the resentments they have about the various political parties and what they stand for.

I mean, back to your thought experiment about, what if we had a president who practiced more industrial policy predistribution-type stuff, focused relentlessly on the fate and welfare of working-class voters all over the country, Black, white, and polka-dots, and actually produced for them. Would that be good for the Democrats electorally more so than what they’ve previously done? I would say, yes. I think the problem for this is, it takes a while. You know? [LAUGHS] I mean, Rome wasn’t built in a day. And neoliberalism, or whatever you want to call it, won’t be transformed in a day.

But I tend to believe if Democrats could produce rising incomes and wages for most working-class voters for many, many years and transformed the political economy of the United States into something pretty different and perceived as something pretty different than what they’ve experienced in the last several decades, do I think they’d benefit and be able to dominate a Republican Party whose economic policies are far less salubrious? Yes. I do think that’s, in fact, possible.

Ezra Klein

Give me an example here. Is there any country — my point is not that I think — good things are good and bad things are bad, so you should govern well because you should govern well. But I’ve become more, myself, skeptical of policy feedback loops I once believed in. But, so is there a peer country where you feel that the left party or center-left party is governed in the way you’re talking about?

Or separately, is there a state where the Democratic governor of the state has at least atmospherically — because governors only control so much — been the kind of leader you’re talking about and that has led to a shift in the trends among particularly white working, white non-college voters that you’re discussing? Right? We have a lot of examples of people trying different things. I’m curious if any of them, in your view, have worked?

Ruy Teixeira

Well, I think the short answer to that is, in a broad sense, no. I mean, we’ve been in this kind of position for a number of decades where the left parties have hemorrhaged working-class support and where the economic fate of a lot of areas of the countries in which they govern and the working classes in these countries have not done well relative, certainly, to the professional classes and the elites. And that’s affected everywhere.

I mean, if you look at the Western world today, right populist parties are on the march everywhere. I mean, there are some exceptions. The U.K. Labor Party is going to win, a lot because conservatives have been in power and they made a balls up of it. But, by and large, you look at the political trends across industrialized democracies, and I see a lot of the same things happening.

So I think this is an era in which left parties are going to have to experiment and figure out new ways of doing things and saying things and practicing policy. And I do believe that if they do that, in the end it will make a difference.

I mean, Ezra, you almost sound a little nihilistic here. I mean, it sort of doesn’t matter what people do. I mean, this policy feedback stuff is all a bunch of bunk. I mean, it’s kind of political warfare and trying to make salient the part of the other side that your voters don’t like. Hey, wait a minute. Isn’t that kind of what we’re doing today? Hey, that’s part of the point of the book that Judis and I wrote, is we are in a position where negative partisanship is huge and you really try to amplify the salience of something about the other side your voters don’t like. So I’d like to see us get out of that situation, and I’d like to see us establish a nice feedback loop between policy that works, and voting support and political power.

Ezra Klein

I do sound a little bit nihilistic. And I don’t know that I think of myself as a nihilist on this, but I do think of myself as somebody who — I mean, I wrote a book about political polarization. And one of the striking things to me about the research is how difficult it is to change people’s minds and how difficult it is to see in the data anywhere that a major policy has led to a major shift in voting patterns, anywhere that even major world events lead to sustained shifts in voting patterns.

Ruy Teixeira

You don’t think the New Deal would qualify?

Ezra Klein

I think that the New Deal is, at this point, an example leached of its power. Look, I take very seriously media environments, and I think in the New Deal era you’re dealing with such a different kind of media environment and such different kinds of parties, particularly given the way the Southern Democratic Party was a sort of authoritarian, conservative, racial hierarchy party that was just not going to go Republican ever in that period because Republicans had, in living memory, invaded that part of the country and overturned slavery and taken it in a very different direction than they wanted to go.

So I think the political dynamics of the New Deal, where you sort of have this four-party system of liberal Democrats and Dixiecrats and more liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans — I think it’s so different it’s actually functionally a different political system. It’s hard to map it on.

I’ll say one thing here, which is that it’s very much not my view that the decisions of parties and politicians don’t matter. It is my view that the feedback between policy and voters is very, very, very strange and complicated and hard to control, in part because things take a long time to pay off. And so people don’t get the rewards for things they did five or six years ago, because they’re already out of power by then.

But I want to use this to move a little bit to the other side of your theory which is, as you put it, “cultural radicalism,” which I actually do think has a certain amount of explanatory power.

So sort of walk me through that argument, that a lot of left-wing coalitions have become more culturally-liberal and more highly-educated.

Ruy Teixeira

I think one way to think about this is, what did Democrats historically stand for in terms of cultural issues. I mean, they historically stood for anti-discrimination, for tolerance, for equal opportunity, equal rights.

You know, this did not sit necessarily well with everybody in the country, but these were important things to fight for and built, in a sense, on a fundamental aspect of American values which is, yeah, in fact, we are all Americans. We’re in this together. Everyone should have equal rights to get ahead, prejudice is bad, discrimination is bad, racism is bad. I think these were good things to stand for and I think, ultimately, they connected pretty well to the way most Americans think about the world, particularly as it was evolving in the late 20th century.

We really see a change in that as we get into the 21st century. We see issues around race going beyond equal opportunity to equal outcomes, this whole equity obsession. We get people taking seriously the views of people like Ibram X. Kendi, where any disparity in outcomes is prima facie evidence of racism. This is not something that the Democratic Party 20 years ago would have taken very seriously.

We see the evolution of views around transgender issues as going way beyond the issue of discrimination to issues of, well, biological sex isn’t even really important. If a biological male says they’re a woman, then they are a woman. Gender affirming care should be available to children without too many questions asked, even though these are basically experimental treatments. Dylan Mulvaney gets invited to the White House.

I mean, all kinds of things happen in and around the Democratic Party that just don’t seem to have a lot to do with the way the Democratic Party has historically stood for tolerance and against discrimination and racism and sexism and things like that, and equal opportunity. These are very different than the kinds of things — basically, these sort of escaped from the academic lab into the broader political discourse powered, of course, by young, college-educated folks who are coming to take over some of these institutions and whose voices are very loud on social media, very important. It’s hard to see how any of this happens without social media.

And this is really not in the wheelhouse of most working-class voters. I mean, immigration is another good issue that we talk about quite a bit in the book. If you look at the Democratic Party, historically they tried to deal with the issue of immigration on the basis both of tolerance and about protecting the wages and livelihoods of working-class people in the United States.

Crime is another issue that’s loomed large recently, and Democrats have historically tried to right the ship from the ‘80s, right? Law and order. Violent criminals are bad, and they should be in jail. And we’ve now come to a point of view where basically we have to be very careful about how we enforce the law, and a lot of issues because it could have disparate impact, and so on and so forth and maybe policing is the real problem, not crime. I’m not saying these are things everybody in the Democratic Party believes. That is not the case. But clearly they’ve had an enormous influence on the Democratic Party’s image and how it’s perceived by many voters, particularly working-class voters. And this makes a big difference.

I’d also even include climate in this, Ezra, as a kind of cultural issue. I mean, I don’t think this is the number one issue for a lot of working-class people. Not even close, but it’s the number one issue for a lot of elites who dominate the Democratic Party and a lot of groups who put pressure on them.

None of this stuff is good, because basically it’s associating the Democratic Party with a vector of positions on culturally-inflected issues that are basically out of the wheelhouse of most working-class voters — alienate them, make them think the Democratic Party is dominated by elites who look down on them and don’t care about them and don’t take their views seriously and concerns seriously. In addition to that, a lot of these things don’t even make much sense as policy. Right? Quasi-open borders don’t make any sense.

Ezra Klein

Well, let’s hold before we go into the policy. So first I want to note, there’s like two definitions of good that can be used here. One is, are these policies good. Right? Would they be good policies to pass? On climate, for instance, it may be that you have policies that are not supported by many voters but are actually what you need to do if you do believe holding warming down to 2 degrees centigrade is important. So you can have “good as policy,” and you can have “good as politics.”

I want to go backwards though before we get to climate to the sort of potted history of the Democratic Party there on race, because I think you cleaned that up more than it merits. So we’ve been talking about, somewhat interchangeably here, working-class and white working-class voters, but what Democrats have primarily lost is white working-class voters.

And I think it’s pretty standard and, in fact, you all say this in the book, that they primarily began that process of losing white working-class voters after the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the efforts to enforce the Civil Rights Act and similar bills like that. There’s also a big shift in white working-class voters around the time of Barack Obama, which most political scientists I know think is not an accident.

And so I think sometimes there’s a tendency to cut the history of the Democratic Party fighting for racial justice in this era, and now we look back and we’re like, oh, that was totally fine because that all worked out and we all agree the Civil Rights Act is good. And now the stuff that is on the margin is not fine. That’s politically unpopular. It’s controversial. It’s not how the white working class looks at the world. But when these fights were happening, they also weren’t how the white working class was looking at the world. I mean, Martin Luther King Jr. Was not an icon of national consensus. He was shot down in the streets, ultimately, and he was unpopular for much of his life. I mean, the Freedom Riders were unpopular when you polled people on them.

So I think one push on this is that many people will say this is in the tradition of the Democratic Party. Right?

Gay marriage is another one where I remember people blaming gay marriage ballot initiatives and the Democratic Party’s assumed support for gay marriage for John Kerry’s loss in 2004. Now it seems obvious that the party would eventually come to support it. But that was another place where people said, by being as open — and it wasn’t that open, I think, in my view — to gay rights then was alienating people.

So there is this tension between what is on the edge of trying to have a more inclusive America, an America where there is equal opportunity — and I’m not a believer in the sort of equal opportunity, equal outcomes distinction a lot of people make. Equal opportunity is extraordinarily hard to achieve, and we are nowhere near achieving it. But it’s not popular, typically. And it wasn’t popular then. And the fact that it’s not popular now — tell me a little bit more about that cut you’re making, because a lot of Democrats see themselves and say, this is the proud tradition of the party.

We have often taken on difficult, unpopular fights that eventually become consensus positions in American life. But they only become that position because we took the fight on and even, at times, accepted political cost for taking the fight on.

Ruy Teixeira

Right. Well, I mean one thing John and I do is we make a distinction between good radicalism and bad radicalism. All radical ideas aren’t great. Some radical ideas are pretty great, and history will absolve them, in a sense. I mean, Social Security at one point was a radical idea. The Civil Rights Act was a radical idea. There are lots of things that have been promulgated by left parties or by activists that eventually do become consensus positions and actually are extremely important in a policy and social sense.

But I guess I don’t buy the idea that every radical idea is just waiting for its time to come. I do make a distinction, for example, between being against discrimination against gay people and for allowing gay marriage — that’s basically making gay people equal with other people. I make a distinction between that and, say, the idea that biological sex is not important and that a biological man who says they’re a woman is exactly the same thing as a woman, and that gender affirming care should be promulgated, no questions asked, despite all the tremendous medical questions around it as a policy issue. I don’t think these are matters of radicalism that’s the same as the radicalism around —

Ezra Klein

But I think you just did a weird thing there where you compared a policy to a not-policy. So, I mean, it eventually became the policy of the Democratic Party that gay marriage should be legal. I don’t actually think it’s a policy of the Democratic Party that biological sex is unimportant or that gender affirming care should be given to children, no questions asked. I mean, I’ve done reporting on this. The experience people have in that is that there are actually quite a lot of questions asked, and it’s a difficult thing to do. I think it’s a very unsettled space, so I’m open to the idea that, and believe that there’s going to have to be a lot of difficult political and also medical work and social work figuring that out.

But the jump I would make — I mean, it was considered wild —

Ruy Teixeira

There was a Biden official — Rachel Levine? What is her name? Who basically said gender affirming care is settled science. That is not true. It is not settled science. So the administration is associated with this kind of approach to issues of transgender concerns. Right?

Ezra Klein

But I think their policies tend to be in the anti-discrimination category. I don’t want to get totally caught on this question of gender affirming care for minors, because I do think it’s an incredibly hard space. And I’m not arguing with you the Democratic Party is obviously associated with a more open position on that, or certainly with a position that is not looking to lock it down.

I mean, I’m just old enough to remember, as are you, when the idea that you would treat gay couples equally in American life was considered, in politics, ridiculous. You weren’t allowed to be gay in the military. You weren’t allowed — and the belief was it would destroy American marriage. And this was a dominant politics.

Ruy Teixeira

Well, Ezra, you’re saying basically these issues are the same?

Ezra Klein

I don’t think you need to say the issues are the same. I don’t think the question here is really do Ruy and Ezra agree on gender-affirming care. I don’t think it really matters whether we agree on gender-affirming care. The question I’m trying to present to you is actually this issue of, what do you do if you believe there is something unpopular that is nevertheless necessary? If it’s a better space to do it we can talk about this in climate, where I have a much more expansive view on how much climate action is substantively necessary than I think you do.

But if I’m right and if you are right, that the politics of it are bad, which I accept it may well be, how do you think about that? What is the role of a political party when it begins to believe something is necessary, but the something it believes to be necessary is not popular?

Ruy Teixeira

Well, I think the first thing you do is you scrutinize this particular new or radical idea on the grounds of, does it, in fact, make sense? Is it, in fact, necessary? Is it the right policy? And I would raise questions about a lot of this stuff in the race and gender area, and indeed in the climate area.

The second thing you would say, once you decide what the correct policy is even if it’s a bit radical is, how do I promulgate this in a way that will allow me to progress politically? Because if I don’t progress politically and keep my coalition together and expand it, the radical thing that I apparently want to do won’t happen. Right? You always have to make compromises. You always have to take cognizance of the level of popularity at any given time that the radical policy or quasi-radical policy you stand for has, and you have to negotiate politics on that basis.

So I think both things are important. A, the substantive judgment, and then B, the political reality. So you have to take cognizance of it to actually get the thing you want to get done, done.

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Ezra Klein

So Donald Trump wins in 2016. And again, I think people want to make that very unusual, but as you’ve said and we’ve talked about, there are a lot of populist-right figures winning across the world in this era. But he doesn’t have a big popular majority, right? He loses the popular vote.

The Democrats win in 2018. Then in 2020 I think there’s a big view that things like Defund the Police, et cetera, are going to wreck them, but they win in 2020. Maybe — yeah. They went in 2020. And then they win in 2022, despite high inflation and these sort of lingering questions of the Democratic Party. And they’ve won so far most of the special elections in 2023.

And so one question I have about that is that, if this is also toxic why, in your view, is the Democratic Party’s electoral record in this era reasonably good? In fact, much better than it has been in eras where it had more, say, working-class voters but it wasn’t really competitive at the national level and was not able to hold the Senate, et cetera. Like, how do you how do you see the record in this period matching up with the theory?

Ruy Teixeira

Well, they have a couple of secret weapons at this point, I feel. One is that the way the Democratic coalition has evolved, being increasingly dependent on the votes of educated, active people who pay close attention to politics, I mean, this is great for special elections. It’s great for off-year elections.

In an odd sort of way, Democrats have become low-turnout election specialists. They actually benefit from lower turnout, not higher turnout. And I think that’s going to be a problem for them in 2024, when a lot of peripheral voters are going to be drawn back into the voting pool. And a lot of data suggests these voters are, in fact, less enthusiastic about Biden, more skeptical of a lot of things the Democrats have done, and more open to voting for Trump. So that’s a bit of a problem.

But perhaps the most important secret weapon is, the other side is so screwed up. I mean, I don’t think I probably have to convince a lot of listeners to this podcast the Republican Party is kind of a wacky, dysfunctional party at this point. And given, in fact, how dysfunctional the Republican Party is and how weird they are and how vexed Trump is as a candidate, why is this even in question? Why aren’t the Democrats obviously going to kick their ass in 2024? And I don’t think that’s obvious at all at this point, and that concerns me quite a bit.

Ezra Klein

So one of the difficulties here is that if you move towards one group you can begin to lose power or support among another group. So to use one of the examples we’ve been talking about, let’s say the Democratic Party listened to Ruy and said, man, yeah. We’re way too far to the left on climate, and we’re going to show people we’re not. Right? Which is not just shifting the innards of their bills, but somebody’s really going to say this aloud and pick the fight. And on the one hand that might shift them a little bit more toward some of the voters you’re worried about. On the other hand, Democrats have benefited in recent years from a lot of support among young voters who do care about climate and who do care about some of these other baskets of issues. And if leaders in the Democratic Party picked a fight on this specific set of issues, maybe you pick up here, but don’t you lose strength among some of these voters who have been attracted to you for exactly that reason? And maybe you only pick up a couple of the working-class voters you’re thinking about and you lose a lot of the young voters who have been an important source of Democratic strength.

How do you think about that question of trade-offs, of how moving from one position to another might pick you something up but it could also cost you just as much or more?

Ruy Teixeira

Right. Well, as you point out, it would be a trade-off. And it’s a little hard to comment on it without knowing the content of whatever fight or different policy position we might really be talking about here. But I think the general idea would be that it’s probably more important for you to get in the wheelhouse of more working-class voters in terms of energy issues and in terms of their raw material concerns about how they’re going to pay their electric bills or whatever than it is to get in the wheelhouse of the climate activists who are most concerned about this.

Yes, young voters are more concerned with climate change than, say, the 45 to 54-year-old cohort and 65-plus cohort. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that for a lot of these voters that climate is their number one issue and they would be completely freaked out if the Democrats actually backed off from any of their current commitments or softened any of their approaches to these issues. That’s not clear to me at all. I think the Democrats have a lot of problems with young voters. The issue of climate is only one of them at this point. And my judgment about that trade-off is that it would, on net, be good for the Democrats.

I mean, really talking about people who would back off on climate if the Democrats softened a bit, I suppose who just wouldn’t turn out? I don’t know. Would they maybe vote for R.F.K.? I don’t know. It’s a little hard, again, without the context of an actual policy change or policy fight. But my judgment is that the nature of that trade-off would be beneficial for the Democrats. They would lose some, but they’d gain more.

And I can’t prove that because we don’t really have a specific policy here we’re talking about or a specific fight we’re talking about, but I think this would be a trade-off well worth experimenting with. And we’ll see what the Democrats do in the future. They may actually have to entertain this based on some of the trends we’re seeing in other industrialized countries.

Ezra Klein

The other thing that brings up for me is this question I think Democrats have to face and Republicans have to face alike, which is that it’s proving in this era very, very difficult for parties to not be captured by their own base. Right? So a lot of what is in your book, a lot of your argument here — I mean, I think you actually align with the things you are saying politically. Right? You’re not saying, in general, I believe X radical things are great, but they’re just bad politics and the Democratic Party shouldn’t do them. I think it’s sort of clear that you have an alignment between what you think the good politics and the good policy is. But you could imagine a world where that wasn’t true. Right? And you’re saying, OK, move on all these things. Right? Even though you want them, move on them. But it’s been striking to me how hard that is for parties. So the Republican Party can’t even move off of the position that the 2020 election was stolen. They’ve proven really unable to make strategic decisions as a party that would potentially lead to an easier election for them in 2024.

I mean, another way of saying what you were saying is, like, Joe Biden’s 81 and polling at, depending on the day, 37. The Republican Party should stomp to win in 2024, but because they’re going to nominate a bunch of wild candidates including Donald Trump, they may well lose. How do you think about that relationship right now between parties and their base? Because parties feel — even as partisanship is fairly strong, parties feel quite weak.

Ruy Teixeira

Yeah. No, that’s a very good question. And I do think it sort of highlights something, as you say, both parties are going to have to deal with. The difficulty of separating out their policy and their political brand and their strategy from what their most fervent supporters would prefer, and the fervent supporters who are on social media, whose voices are loud, who provide a ton of donations and set the tone for the party.

Clearly that’s not as functional and desirable for a political party that wants to maximize its electoral potential and its coalition as a strategy might be that took account of the views of the base but realized it needed to appeal to a much broader part of the electorate and, in fact, some of what their most fervent activists want are really bad ideas and really sets limits on their ability to put that coalition together. How do you break out of that?

I think someone basically has to come up and read the market signals and provide a different kind of politics that gets out of this endless cycle of polarized conflict between the parties. But I do think that’s sort of a shock to the system that is necessary to get us out of where we are.

Ezra Klein

One of the things I think about when you say signal — like, this gets back to the part of this I’m not nihilistic about. I don’t think party reputations, the sense people have of a party, is based on the innards and sometimes not even the direction of policy. For a bunch of different reasons, I just think that the amount people know about policy, feel from policy, are able to track back from policy is much less than I would like it to be, as a policy guy. If I thought it were much more, I would feel much more sanguine on a bunch of issues.

I do think you can change a party’s vibe though. I do think you can change its character. It tends, though, I think, to work in the attentional space, not the policy space. So I don’t know how many people really know anything about Joe Biden’s industrial policy, no matter how well or how poorly it ends up working.

What Trump was very effective at doing was, by being as confrontational and outrageous as he was, including with elements of the Republican Party, attacking the Bushes for starting the Iraq War and attacking the party for trying to cut Medicare and attacking free trade deals — it was so obvious that he was different, that he could be believed to be different. And he lost people on that belief who went to the Democratic party. He won people as those beliefs changed, who went to him. But he worked through the attentional space much more so than through the policy space where — I mean, quite famously his policies were often very different than things he said on the campaign trail in 2016.

I think Barack Obama shifted the nature of the party, in part just by being who he was, in part by being the first Black president and a Democrat. I mean, he did it through policy a little bit, too. But who he was, the energy he gave off, I think, shifted the party.

And so that, to me, is what this would end up looking like in your theory, or in any other. You need a president, a party leader who seems different and who is willing to pick certain fights that make them look different. But it has to be very high-attention. I mean, I think in some ways that you were sort of describing somebody who had aesthetically looked to me like John Fetterman, at least prior to his stroke, who I sometimes think is interesting here because on the one hand Fetterman struck me as a candidate who was really creating a working-class aesthetic within the Democratic party. But on the other hand, on a lot of things that you think about — very liberal on criminal justice reform, very liberal on climate, very liberal on a bunch of these dynamics — but the who he was, the how he came off really mattered. And even with the stroke, he ended up being the only Democrat to flip a Senate seat in 2022.

So how do you think of the Fetterman example, both in terms of seeming different than other Democrats, breaking through in that way, but also not really moving to the right on policy almost at all?

Ruy Teixeira

Well, I mean, that may be changing though. I mean, famously he has said, I am not a progressive. That’s really not where I’m coming from. I think it’s actually, like, a really bad idea when the population of Pittsburgh shows up on the border every month to get into the United States. We really need to do something about border security. He’s been very sort of intransigent on supporting Israel as opposed to joining in with some of the concerns that people oriented toward Palestine have been doing. He sort of — I mean, these are fights he’s picked with certain elements of the progressive left within his own party. And we’ll see if he picks other fights.

But I actually agree with you, Ezra, that picking those kinds of fights that are high-profile issues that sort of have this broad resonance but aren’t like super-granular policy stuff and certainly aren’t about industrial policy, is probably the kind of thing that some politician who resets the tone for the Democratic party would have to do. So I think Fetterman’s definitely a guy to watch on this point.

And it’s interesting to note that since he’s really incredibly popular in Pennsylvania — it’s like an 80 percent approval rating. So to the extent to which he’s alienated people by sort of taking this stance, it doesn’t seem to have done much harm to him politically. There aren’t very many people out there saying, oh my god, he said these things about immigration. I can’t support him anymore. I mean, they’re not there. So that’s interesting to note, that there is perhaps more degrees of freedom than a lot of Democratic politicians think in terms of taking some of these positions and picking some of these fights.

I mean, the progressive left and its associated activist groups and the shadow party John and I talk about in our book, they punch way above their weight among actual voters. And to some extent they’re a paper tiger, and I think Fetterman is calling them out in some ways, and that’s probably a good thing.

Ezra Klein

I think the thing that interests me so much about Fetterman though, is the necessity of what the — what I will call the aesthetic, though I want to make sure people don’t take that negatively. I just think the aesthetic dimension of politics really matters, what people seem like, how they look, how they present. I wonder if you could do what he’s doing and make it stick if you didn’t seem the way he seems?

Which is to say that, there are a lot of politicians in the Democratic party who have his basket of issue views or, in fact, have his basket of issue views and are well to the right of him. I mean, the things that he says on border security, on Israel, I would call them closer to mainstream views in the Democratic Party than they are to anything well to the right of the Democratic Party. But nobody really cares when Mark Warner makes that argument. It just isn’t that important to them, because Mark Warner feels like the Democratic party. He’s a former tech executive. He was high up in the Democratic Party and its actual infrastructure.

And so I wonder if some of where your book nets out and a thing that I often think about is that just part of the issue is that, as the Democratic Party becomes compositionally different, it picks candidates who kind of seem like the elite of the Democratic Party. Right? Very highly educated. I mean, people got all over themselves because Pete Buttigieg spoke all these languages and was a Rhodes Scholar and taught himself — what was it, like, Norwegian or Icelandic or something to read a book? And that appealed to people. Right? That appealed to a certain kind of Democrat.

Part of what is happening here, even if you put policy to the side, is that a more educated party goes for a more educated vibe. And some of the great Democratic politicians in different ways were able to merge those two dynamics. Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar with this very down-home dynamic. Barack Obama was the editor of the Harvard Law Review but also had a whole tradition in the Black church.

And that the thing that Democrats are struggling with, it seems to me maybe even increasingly, is pulling from a wider pool of candidates. Because if voters don’t see themselves in you, it almost doesn’t matter what you say after that. They’re not really going to think you’re their kind of person.

Ruy Teixeira

Yeah. I mean, Fetterman is kind of like a walking shock to the system. I mean, he does — that aesthetic, I think, is very important. I think that’s a very fair point. And I think Democrats probably need to have a bit more cognizance of how they appear to people, and especially the kind of people who look at your typical hyper-educated, buttoned up Democratic candidate who speaks a zillion languages and think, what does this person have to say to me? They probably look down on me.

Getting past that barrier where you can get a voter to listen to your broad points about what you stand for without taking one look at you and the way you talk and think, this is not a person who’s on my side who shares my values and who is like me in any way — I think that’s really important, and I completely agree with that.

Ezra Klein

I think that’s a good place to end. So always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

Ruy Teixeira

A, I would recommend a “Political Cleavages And Social Inequalities” by Thomas Piketty, et al., “A Study Of 50 Democracies,” because all the political trends and demographic trends we’ve talked about on this podcast today are detailed with copious data in this marvelous compendium of studies. So I totally recommend that.

I’d also recommend “Visions Of Inequality” by Branko Milanovic, “From The French Revolution To The End Of The Cold War,” that just recently came out. And this is a fabulous book for understanding how views of inequality have changed over time, seen through the lens of a lot of economic giants who kind of set the tone for our understanding of inequality over time and how that evolved up until, as I said, the end of the Cold War and even getting a little bit into the way we are today, when inequality studies are, in a sense, enjoying a big renaissance. So I think that’s really a fantastic book to take a look at.

But I think I’ll take the opportunity here to — I’m a bit of an evangelist for this book. It’s called “House Of Government” by Yuri Slezkine. And it’s a incredible, brilliant book about — I mean, it centers in a way — well, in the title the “house of government” was the big house built on the embankment near the Kremlin where all the apparatchiks lived in the ‘30s under Stalin. But what the book does is, it’s this panorama of oral history, of architectural studies, of literary analysis, of memoirs, of incredible stuff just that paints this portrait of how the Soviet Union came into being. Who were these people who made this happen? What did they think? How did it affect the way they did everything, from their views of art and literature to their views of politics to their personal relationships with each other? I just can’t recommend this book highly enough.

It’s 1,000 pages, but I consider it one of the most brilliant books I’ve ever read. And I would almost go so far as to say, you can’t really understand the Soviet Union until you’ve read this book.

Ezra Klein

Ruy Teixeira, thank you very much.

Ruy Teixeira

Hey, thanks for having me, Ezra.

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Ezra Klein

This episode of The Ezra Klein Show was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special Thanks to Sonia Herrero.