Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, fits neatly within a micro-genre of particular interest to me at the moment: books that critique the social justice left, but not from a conservative perspective.
In recent weeks, I have also read Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap, which lays out an intellectual history of left-wing identitarianism, and Freddie deBoer’s How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, which offers a Marxist analysis of the failures of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Occupy Wall Street. Where Have All the Democrats Gone? is the most pragmatically-minded of the three books: in order to win elections, Judis and Teixeira make the case that Democrats “need to look in the mirror and examine the extent to which their own failures contributed to the rise of the most toxic tendencies on the political right.”
While there are significant differences among the three books, one thing they all have in common is a pointed refusal to use the word “woke.” I assume this is because none of the authors wants to be confused for a censorious “anti-woke” activist in the mode of Ron DeSantis or Christopher Rufo. But make no mistake: these are all anti-woke books. Taken together, they offer a powerful rebuke of the way that progressives have attempted to advance their goals in a host of areas, including race, gender identity, climate change, and immigration. (Notably, Teixeira and Mounk have also helped to launch publications, Persuasion and The Liberal Patriot, that are part of an emerging network of periodicals that seek to combat illiberalism on both the right and the left.)
One of the things that makes Where Have All the Democrats Gone? convincing is that it is first and foremost an act of self criticism. In 2002, Judis and Teixeira wrote a book entitled The Emerging Democratic Majority which predicted that growing numbers of college-educated professionals, single women, and minority voters would tilt the playing field toward the Democrats in the years to come. This argument became a rallying cry for many activists, who came to believe that “demographics are destiny,” and that with the United States on track to become a majority-minority country, the Democrats would be ascendant for generations.
It’s safe to say that things haven’t turned out that way.
Judis and Teixeira wrote Where Have All the Democrats Gone? to explain why not. Their answer is simple: white working-class voters remain a significant percentage of the American electorate and Democrats have failed to hold on to enough of them to reliably beat the Republicans. They offer a snapshot of a voting public that is in flux, with blue collar voters (of all races!), traditionally the base of the Democratic Party, increasingly moving into the Republican column.
There are many villains in Judis and Teixeira’s potted history of the past half century of American political life, but two stand out: Bill and Hillary Clinton. Bill is blamed for pursuing “neoliberal economics and globalization” that set the tone for Democratic policy up until the current moment. Hillary is faulted for being a “perfect representative” of a cultural and social elite that is out of touch with mainstream American values.
Judis and Teixeira argue that a “Great Divide” has opened up in American politics, between the thriving urban centers and their cosmopolitan residents that have benefitted from the economic policies of the past generation and the struggling small cities and rural voters that have borne the brunt as manufacturing jobs have disappeared.
What is to be done? Is there a way for Democrats to bridge the divide and win enduring majorities in Washington DC? For Judis and Teixeira, it all comes down to economics and culture. And on both fronts, they argue that the Democrats need to shift their strategy significantly. Judis and Teixeira believe that Democrats should seek to reduce the salience of the culture wars by tacking to the middle on social issues. Doing this would help focus voters’ attention on economics, where Democrats can prevail by striking a more populist tone and bolstering the power of unions against multi-national corporations.
This recipe seems sensible enough. And a solid case can be made that, as President, Joe Biden has essentially stuck to the roadmap that Judis and Teixeira lay out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the bulk of the Democratic Party is particularly enthused about following Biden’s lead. Why is this?
For Judis and Teixeira, a big part of the problem is that the party itself is weak. (A point that Matt Yglesias and others have made as well.) Instead of a strong formal party apparatus, the Democrats are increasingly governed by a “shadow party” comprised of “organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Sunrise Movement, Planned Parenthood, and Black Lives Matter, publications such as the New York Times, MSNBC, and Vox, foundations like Ford and Open Society, and think tanks like the Center for American Progress.”
These groups, which are primarily staffed by the young and the college-educated, have been at the vanguard of arguing for causes like defunding the police, abolishing ICE, and passing the Green New Deal. According to Judis and Teixeira, “What these groups advocate almost universally widens the Great Divide and alienates working-class voters the Democrats need to reach.” Moreover, some of these groups don’t actually care whether the Democrats win or lose — they are more interested in “pleasing their own followers by pressing insistently for their pet causes, even if a candidate’s support of those causes might risk his or her losing in the general election.”
As someone who has spent his entire professional career in the nonprofit sector, I found Judis and Teixeira’s take on the “shadow party” chastening. It rings true to me that many nonprofits do not think about how their behavior and messaging might have an impact on public perceptions of the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, the incentives at work in the nonprofit sector don’t necessarily encourage organizations to be reflective of popular opinion. Indeed, funders often push organizations in the opposite direction. I’m not sure what the answer is but I think if nonprofits don’t take this kind of critique seriously, they will continue to do harm not just to the Democratic Party, but to themselves, accelerating the loss of public support that the nonprofit sector has experienced in recent years.