From Ruy Teixeira, a longtime progressive scholar, on why he's gotten tired of the relentless identity politics among the left:
I’m just a social democrat, man. Trying to make the world a better place.
I don't know if Teixeira is right about conditions at the Center for American Progress, where he worked for the past couple of decades, but he has nothing good to say about it:
Like a lot of older and whiter veterans of liberal think-tanks and foundations, he also says he’s exhausted by the internal agita. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land,” he says. “The fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.”
Since neoliberalism is now in such bad odor, how about if we all start up a new think tank that's called The Foundation for Social Democracy, or some such? We could have different groups dedicated to the Swedish model, the French model, the Japanese model, and so forth. Just sign up for the softball team of your choice.
A "longtime progressive scholar" -- who just joined the American Enterprise Institute. By now this is just trolling.
But to address your point directly, no one needs to care about office politics at think tanks.
Agreed. He's just trolling us now. The most progressive "think tank" he could find was the right-wing AEI? I think he saw how Greenwald is doing with Fox News and decided this was a good moment to join the "anti-woke" crowd and greatly improve his lifestyle and retirement prospects.
Yeah, it's a far more lucrative career path than just being another three-named dipshit at the Federalist or whatever from the beginning.
More likely, Ruy Teixeira was just coming around to the anti-#idpol inclinations of his former cowriter turned rival John Judis.
They wrote their Blexas ("Blue Texas") book after the 2004 election, but as the years advanced & the Lone Star was still a GQP hothouse, they just gave up.
I still want them both shot into the sun for "emerging democratic majority"
Judis needs to be ostracized just for working for Joshua Micah Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo.
Fun TPM Fact: lamestream dinguses Ryan Cooper & Brian Beutler, supposed leftists, got their start there. When Josh Marshall is sending us his people, he's not sending his best. They're rape apologists, fascist enablers... & some, I'm sure, are good people.
Dunno. He'll never get cent from me because of how he treated Bernie. But he himself has good insights more often than not. TPM was my first blog ever.
I feel the same about the Commie Gurl Collective d/b/a Wonkette. The veneration of Bernie in 2016 was a disgusting act.
Trivially dismiss people who used to be, very loudly and publicly, on your side rather than thinking about why they have had such a dramatic change of heart?
And people say that filter bubbles are mainly a problem on the right!
People are going to draw analogies with the (few!) fellow travelers of the 20s who were smart enough and honest enough to see what was going on with Stalin in the 30s.
But the analogy I see is those preachers who rail from the pulpit that no-one should even look at the books, TV, movies portraying any sort of dissent from the religious line – and the vast bulk of the flock who go along with this.
Ah, yes, the Gulag & the Holodomor. The very same as telling J.K. Rowling & Jordan Peterson to chill with the bating of queen people.
*queer
Yep.
I know Kevin doesn't like the way Kids These Days talk, but this is just getting dumb. I'm not that much younger, I am probably just as clueless about youth culture, and I think some of it is silly, too.
So? I'm an old fart. When I was a kid, old farts thought I was extremist and weird. Whatever.
> no one needs to care about office politics at think tanks.
I mean, good lord. Quoting Gingrich's replacement at AEI on the state of progressive think tanks is clearly a great way to make your point to fellow democrats, amirite?
Get the fuck over the pronoun thing and move on.
Do you work at a progressive think tank or something similar? I think it's possible the experience of working at a place like that might be somewhat different than just arguments about pronouns.
For years I've been the first one to call BS about these complaints about woke culture and the PC police. My experience is that these kinds PC police types have been out there for decades and it's nothing new.
But I'm starting to come around to the idea that we are really starting to turn a corner into nutbar land. Maybe I'm just getting old.
I think you’re mostly getting played. One thing I noticed in the Politico article was the seemingly very careful avoiding of any questions about what this guy felt was “too woke” for and drove him into the arms of the Republican Party (of which AEI has historically been a part). My guess is that the subject was agreed to be off limits, as the the subject of money.
I finally had time to actually read the article and he certainly does not go into any specifics that seem to have any real merit. I must admit that Texiera moving to AEI seems pretty nutbar in itself.
FYI I am definitely not getting played, just starting to wonder. Again I'm generally the first one to get annoyed when, for example, some comedian starts saying "oh you can't even tell a joke anymore!" Tell that to Lenny Bruce who got arrested in the 60s. He didn't get a few moans from the audience because his "joke" was more gross than it was funny.
But still I am starting to grow concerned over here that when our democracy is *this* close to being taken away from us that we are having fights about microagressions and other penny ante stuff.
I do get some of this. So much of the abortion debate seemed to get hijacked and sidetracked by “pregnant people” or non-binary people who might or might not have reproductive system. That stuff, like the obsession with pronouns (especially “Latin-x) makes it so much harder to reach the overwhelming majority of voters.
But it does seem to be rather an overreaction to join a component of an authoritarian political party. Again, the silence in the article about money speaks volumes to me.
Yglesias and Kline got chased out of Vox that they founded by vanderweff alleging she felt it was unsafe. I have disliked then for a long time but that's ridiculous. That's when I began to agree that this needs to be reigned in.
Emily van Der Werff is sus, having gotten her start at THE ONION avclub, but still gets the benefit of the doubt when stood against Kaptain Kontrarian Matty Church & Maths hipster Ezra Klein.
Fuck all three of them, though.
Renamed to Emily St. James I discovered. Which I mean, take her even less seriously now that she has a full on porn name.
Not the first time I heard someone lament the names transpeople select.
The first was a 26 year old filmmaker from Rice Lake, about a trans punk singer in the Miltown, & the second was my mother, perplexed why Caitlyn Jenner chose a name that is anachronistic to her age cohort.
I have my issues with Laura Jane Grace, but at least when she decommissioned Tom Gable, she chose a name that was apparently her mother's choice for a girl name, when Laura Jane was in utero.
I know they’ve both claimed to have suffered from irritating coworkers and an oppressive “woke” atmosphere but they’ve always been very short on specifics and there really doesn’t seem to be any perfect workplace free of conflict and unpleasant situations. And, notably, they both did extremely well for themselves by moving to more conservative organizations and loudly condemning “wokeness”.
I have been trolling Matt Yglesias (if he has the guts to work in a place that enables comments) for nearly 20 years.
Ezra's defining moment for me was wheb he blamed the youth for 2004.
Is that any worse than lamenting John Kerry's Poland erasure or claiming that Gavin Newsome going hogwild with the sane sex nuptials in SFO led to W's reelect?
(John Edwards trying to make hay of the inconsistency of Dick & Lynne Cheney elevating their lesbian daughter while in a party preaching conversion therapy was a bad look, though. Especially considering what turned out to be in the Millworker's Son's closet.)
Now I want someone like Will Oldham or, God forbid, Jason Isbell or Sturgill Simpson, to record a reimagining of the Randy Newman agitprop classic "Rednecks". Call it "Wokenecks" & have Conor Friedersdorf as the unenlightened opposition & some Oberlin student government leader as the Lester Maddox figure whom the song opens targeting as the problem but then comes back around to saying everything is #idpol.
Just keep whistling...
I think the Democrats are whistling past the graveyard but my suspicion is that Teixeira is whistling Dixie because he sees how well Greenwald is doing and he wnts some of that.
70 year old white guy chimes in on "the kids today!"
Like Hugh Hefner going out to lunch with his girlfriends on the Girls Next Door on E!, c. 2005, & bringing his own silverware & banging it on the table when the service was too slow.
Teixeira is a doddering old coot.
So we should dismiss him because of his age, his gender, and his race?
Hmm, wasn't that we he has been arguing against his entire life?
And just possibly, maybe he's concluded that the party of "dismissing people because of age, gender, and race" has flipped back to where it was as of, say, Strom Thurmond and the 50s?
The goal of many of us was to REPLACE caste in America, not to create an ALTERNATIVE caste system...
Over the next few elections, I think we're going to see that that's the goal not just of many of us, but of *most* of us.
We should dismiss him because he's politically frozen in amber.
We should dismiss him because he presents _no_ facts at all in this ill-advised screed. This is especially disgraceful because every journalist of any knows that you don't have a story unless you have the five W's: “Who,” “What,” “When,” “Where,” and “Why.” Some people did something to him and he didn't like it, so he's moving on is _not_ a story, merely yet another riff on "Many people are saying yadda yadda yadda."
I wonder if his list of microagressive actions against him by the Loony Left at CAP is greater than 52. Because if not, it's hardly anything to trouble over.
By & by, has Orange Qounty Republiqan Kevin Drum popped off on Twitter or elsewhere about the malign effort by the Woke Mob to cancel Meghan Mc Cardle?
Mc Meghan is still at it.
Her Twitter this week is offering evidence for both Felicia Sonmez in a wrongful termination case AND Dave Weigel in a false suspension case.
The Newspaper Guild has to hand it to an anti-union Glibertarian, in this one case.
Yeah, his whole case seems to be that he didn't wield as much influence as he used to so he was taking his ball and joining the fascists.
So can we use FONDUE for the acronym?
Let's see...
Foundation ON Democracy Under Extremis...
Foundation ON Democracies United Earth....
hmmm....
Teixeira has some valid points, but that still does not justify a self-described class warrior going to AEI. Are there really no think tanks or other institutions concentrating on realistic leftish economics? Couldn't Teixera get together with Bernie or Robert Reich? How about this for example:
https://rooseveltforward.org/
You don't have to go to Sweden - the New Deal was a framework that was successful, but it was reversed when Republicans started using racism to get votes for tax cuts and deregulation.
Yeah, well, I'm still waiting on this "Emerging Democratic Majority" thing that he'd been predicting since 2002. And waiting...
On the other hand, I'm all for FONDUE: Foundation on Democracy under Extremis. Very timely.
I kind of agree that there wasn’t much logic behind “ demographics is destiny “. I think the reason why Democrats are bleeding minority support (particularly among Latinos) is that they don’t offer a coherent policy position which offers minorities or young people anything beyond being ineffectual and somewhat less bad. That’s not much of an appeal. Trust, the Democrats presume the support of the “inevitable democratic majority” way too much.
Democrats are too fond of detailed policies and white papers. Local organizing, on the ground discussions, and local solutions to local problems need to be emphasized. People need to feel listened to, help develop and buy into proposed solutions if they are going to work.
Democrats need to deliver on jobs for kids, safe and clean schools, reduce gun violence, and have cops police neighborhoods and not occupy them.
Socially, minority groups can be rather conservative. That is probably where Republicans have made some inroads.
African Americans. Latinos, and most Asians are famously culturally conservative. It’s why, in the mid-50’s until Pete Wilson sunk the Republicans with prop. 187 the assumption was that the influx of immigrants from Mexico, Vietnam, incoming African Americans from other states would keep the GOP competitive, if not dominant. The Democrats have mainly relied on the Republicans overplaying their hand and scaring or alienating minorities and young people rather than deliver on the exact types of things that you mentioned.
We see how this is playing out now. Democrats are clear that they aren’t going to deliver on abortion but they’re going to fundraise off of it like crazy and hope that voters will be frightened about Trump and abortion and will essentially “self-actualize” themselves to the voting booths in November.
Further to your point, this is well worth reading. It seems as though even the centrist Jonathan Chait has reached his breaking point:
“By realistic or even minimal standards of performance, this two-year term, almost certain to be the last period of Democratic-controlled government for the foreseeable future, has been a failure.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/07/joe-manchin-didnt-kill-biden-democrats-agenda-alone.html
Alas, that's part of the "Green Lantern" theory of the presidency. Biden got a lot done under duress. And he's still trying to repair all the damage Trump has done to, well, everything. So...whine about not getting everything all at once.
With only 50 seats in the Senate, his programs will be constrained by both the filibuster and the most "conservative" Democratic senator. Not to mention the judiciary abandoning the rule of law....
That isn't what Chait's article says at all. He barely even mentions Biden past the first paragraph--most of it is about Democrats in Congress and the party as a whole.
Hell, we're lucky joebiden hasn't been murdered by his Secret Service detail.
Speaking of messes El Jefe Maximo made that need cleaning up...
Biden did indeed get a lot done but (apart from the Covid-19 bill) less on his agenda than than one things he could accomplish with Republican assistance. But as to the aspects of the agenda that he campaigned on, he’s accomplished nearly nothing.
I don’t understand this Green Lantern stuff. You seem to be saying that obstacles cannot be overcome and it’s unsophisticated even to try.
I'm curious what you imagine he could have accomplished with effectively 48 senate seats? And what should he have done specifically to accomplish it, outside of "forcing" Joe Manchin somehow.
All things considered the Covid relief and infrastructure that did get accomplished is a miracle, not to mention having the courage to get us out of Afghanistan despite an avalanche of bawling from the military journalist industrial complex.
What did Trump accomplish exactly, aside from promising infrastructure week every week and fellatiating Putin nonstop?
He ensured Christine Blasey Ford can't go home again, & likewise chilled the willingness of other abused people to come forward.
& so here we are, four years later: Blasey Ford is still not safe in her home, but Brett Kavanaugh can't get dessert with his Morton's dinner. #bothsides
I’m curious how you believe Biden was able to accomplish anything if he has no power to shape public opinion or voter behavior and no power to persuade anyone in congress to do what he wants.
He was able to accomplish Manchin's agenda, full stop. That's not a reflection of Biden at all, it's just the reality of only having 50 senators.
But even with that massive limitation, he's accomplished far more than Republicans did in their last 4 year term.
Chait pretending that this is actually "Democratic control" and therefore a failure is profoundly disingenuous, and the game they always play around this time to drive up Dem negatives to distract from the latest satanic Republican "should make them unelectable" chicanery.
Manchin is a member of the Democratic Party. He’s actually a part of the leadership. In fact, he’s still a part of the leadership even after wreaking Biden’s presidency and almost certainly costing the Democrats the congress.
Right, because if Biden had yanked his leadership he could have switched parties and handed another Supreme Court seat o the Republicans.
There seems to be this fantasy that Biden could have somehow whipped Manchin to do anything but just chose not to. It's nonsense.
Between Johnathan Taint & Johnathan Turdley, I think Johnathan might have to be considered on par with Matt & Nate as a cursed name.
"Local organizing, on the ground discussions, and local solutions to local problems need to be emphasized."
Kinda hard to say that with a straight face when the Democratic Party (for better or worse) has been the party of *uniform* *Federal* solutions to every issue.
I mean, FFS, the entire argument about abortion right now is precisely about the Dems insisting AGAINST a local solution to local problem...
A local problem? Every other OECD country treats health care as a national (or federal) problem, and spends <60% of what the US does on healthcare, with equal or better outcomes.
Yeah, without specifics, it's inkblot time. Project whatever you want on to this story, because there's nothing substantive reported.
Here's my inkblot. I have been a regular reader of some sites on the internet where their go-to villain is the cisgendered, heterosexual, old, white male. He's the source of all evil, and the daily identity they vent their frustrations on.
As it turns out, I'm in that category. None of the tales told about such villains describe me in the least, but man, that daily grind takes a toll.
A few times I've challenged the use of stereotypes, and the response has been, "Well, you might not have done those things, but you benefited from it." Which is both true, and an excuse for not seeking better language. My request for some reciprocity is treated as a power struggle.
I know where this comes from. People in my category have done terrible things, and because they had power, the consequences were worse than if somebody else did them.
And, I can't really be around people like that every day. It's exhausting, and it alters my psyche in an undesirable way.
I will note that this does not change my political aims at all, and I continue to be on board with the general goals of such groups. I just have to do what I do separately from them.
...
I have no idea whether this describes Ruy Texiera. It describes me, though.
I'ma "cisgendered, heterosexual, old, white male" too. I don't feel ground on at all. Partly because the people who feel ground on always seem to be part of the problem.
So, that's an accusation. It seems pretty personal. It comes from somebody who doesn't know me at all. It's precisely the sort of thing that bothers me. Thanks for reproducing it so accurately.
I mean, I'm glad you don't feel ground on. I don't either, but that's because I now avoid - not people with similar goals, but people who love the broad brush, and the dismissive generalization.
The term "Karen" comes to mind. It basically means a middle aged white woman who dares to assert herself. Because that's the source of all of our troubles. Sit quiet in the corner, old woman!
Gleefully used by many people who consider themselves enlightened, though falling out of favor.
No, a Karen is a chiseller, just an absolutely obnoxious, whinging clownshow, who takes, takes, takes. Betsy de Vos, old, conservative, white bitch, is a Karen. But so is Jane O'Mara Sanders, putatively leftwing, but mostly a tradcath (but oddly divorced).
That said, the application of Karen to (white) women generally is a bit much. It needs to be reserved for the smarmiest, the smuggest, the most obdurate of the kind.
A Karen is a white woman who uses her status to sicc white male violence on minorities (and occasionally, lower-status whites) who annoy her. A woman becomes a Karen when she threatens to call the cops over some slight offense. Demanding to "speak to your supervisor" is another Karen move.
Summoning white male violence has been a perk that white women have enjoyed since antebellum times.
Yup.
I do think we need to spin off a sub party within the Democratic party much the way Bernie did with "Democratic Socialists", call them "Labor Democrats"... purely focused on class and progressive economic issues and expressly avoiding identity politics.
I think it would shock a lot of progressives how many minorities would likely jump ship into the Labor Democrat camp, along with a bunch of the white working class.
Will the Labor Democrats be allowed to segregate their union halls & shops like in the good ol' days?
Thanks for reaffirming why this is such a good idea.
The Plessy Party.
I think it would shock a lot of progressives how many elections Republicans would win if this happened. Let's split our vote! That's how you win!
I didn't say form a new party. I said do what Bernie did and carve out a new banner for primaries while still technically being a Dem. At the end of the day there would only be one Dem candidate in the general election.
I don’t entirely disagree with you but the problem is that we are where we are. The institutional Democratic Party and its leadership are hopelessly incapable of rising to this moment. And yet, there’s no way to make such a transition (which I do favor) in time for either the midterms or the 2024 presidential election. And it’s likely that after the 20#4 election the Republicans will be so dominant there will be no room for any opposition party except the already neutered Democrats.
Clearly, the long term solution is as you’ve described. The programs are attractive well educated people (including minorities) young people, and perhaps a smattering of blue collar workers, too. If the authoritarians are not too firmly in control, I believe we should start in January of 2025.
I wish Tex was more specific on his complaint. No doubt people on both sides can be exhausting. If I hear one more nutter complain about immigration my head will explode (all they do is complain with no real solutions- if one wants to expel all undocumented immigrants, one will need to create a police force large enough to do that and even if that was possible which it isn’t, it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars- meaning higher taxes).
At least they are consistent. "Fund the Police"!
except there actual policies cut funding in general, which cost police their jobs...
Except the DC Police who contradicted the Secret Service denial of Cassidy Hutchinson's hysterical story about Donald Trump's lunging ploy on January 6th, 2021, & the Capitol Police who murdered Ashli Babbitt in a racially-tinged shooting.
Are we supposed to pretend these think tanks do useful “thinking”? I don’t think so.
I haven’t noticed.
The Politico piece is certainly light on specifics. Exactly what is Teixeira complaining about ? It would be nice to know. Also, AEI ? Really ?
That said, it is not hard to infer, at a broad level, what this is about. If most of the emphasis of an organization is on identity politics it comes at a cost to other concerns. And this is not just about age, though I am much closer to Teixiera's age than his putative critics at Politico. It is also about class. Working class people of ALL colors and identities are suspicious of the agenda of usually highly educated young people with narrow ivory tower cultural issues.
The classic quadrant breakdown of social/cultural issues vs economic ones applies. Cultural liberals and economic conservatives (the limousine liberals of an earlier age) are just not popular and to some extent that it is exactly how some of the new young lefties are perceived; there is some vague pie in the sky economic recommendations joined to very moralistic posturing on identity.
It is just not a winning formula. I want liberals to win. I want Democrats to win. That's how progress can be made on both measures.
I'm working class. Nearly all of my income comes from wages. I'm not suspicious.
You aren’t curious about how this guy went from a poorly funded liberal think tank to an extremely rich Republican one in one fell swoop? And the fact that he’s very conspicuously neither asked about money nor about his experiences with “radical wokeness” doesn’t arouse any suspicion in you? Donald Trump would like to talk to you about investing in one of his fabulous projects.
Please. You don't know his motives any better than I do.
You can turn that around too. How "woke" and inflexible does a liberal think tank need to be to cause a lifelong liberal to go to the AEI ?
We don't get much form the Politico article for either explanation, but heck, it's Politico.
I work in Hi Tech. There are lots of center of the road types there who are completely fed up with "wokeness". I don't think they are correct, but if you don't know this is a problem then perhaps you need to invest your time and money more wisely too.
Being feed up with wokeness is understandable. But this is an amazingly radical move from the Democratic Party to one of the most conservative parts of the Republican Party. And he does this without elaborating on his reasoning and he very conspicuously isn’t asked and doesn’t volunteer a word about money.
Neither of us know this guy’s innermost thoughts but this seems like a pretty strange trip if the explanation is something other than money. I look at this and I see another Hitch or Greenwald, selling out for the buck. That my conclusion and I’ve explained how I reached it.
Likewise.
The travails of septuagenarians who don't think they should have to keep up because they were YIPPIES, once, are not something I want or need to think about. If the vibe shifted & they just can't get with it, they can retire. They still have Social Security, even as I, thirty years their junior, might not, should Rick Scott get his way.
They ain't lefties. Your first error.
The new young lefties are socially liberal, economically conservative "limousine liberals"?
Have you listened to Chapo? CumTown? Those mugs are hardly voices of Wokeness. They are closer to David Duke if he had a trustfund.
What I don't understand is why people who feel they are being subjected to relentless identity politics just don't move on, stop following twitter all the time, quit your unpleasant job and just walk the walk instead of listening to all the talk. Work for an environmental nonprofit saving whales, or maybe habitat for humanity, or help immigrants. I hate think tanks that do nothing but produce blather about what those of us who live in the real world should be doing. Just join us and do real work in the real world.
No money fight the Republicans; vastly more money fighting against the Democrats. More money explains a lot of things.
Identity politics isn't left wing, but right wing. All of it. Mislabeled morons need to read history.
What he called "leftist" are transcendental/unitarians. All obsessed with the individual.
Actually, true.
Otherwise, Herschel Walker & Tim Scott & Bobby Jindal & Nikki Haley wouldn't be put out there to embarrass themselves.
The GQP starmaking of their unblanched few is evidence that in the Party of George Lincoln Rockwell, being nonwhite & being there is enough.
In the Democrat Party, someone of the timber of Scott or Haley would be a backbencher. Just look at two Black former Democrats in Ohio: Nina Turner was a never elected State Senator as a Democrat who has become Chief Ratfucker as a rightist, while Ken Blackwell was a politically lightweight individual as a Democrat but rose to Ohio Secretary of State as a Republiqan & helped shepherd Wally O'Dell's voting machine fix thru the halls of governance.
Social democracy (tho' Texeira would, evidently, like to fudge this point) is economic, and, as such, it is fighting the last war. Economics and materialism dominated political discourse for many years, but their resonance has been fading for some time, and it has now fallen to zero. The future is violence, full stop, and that is why the future is "woke", because "woke" (tho' it dare not say so) is anti-violence, full stop. Identity politics is the misdirected response to lynching, a response that never dared explain itself and that therefore has sunk deeper and deeper into argot with each passing decade.
Until the capitalist system and the dollar liquidate. The future ain't woke. A dialectical term if one ever invented.
A big part of the progressive agenda extends beyond economic equality to social equality. Social democracy doesn't really do that. Having a great social safety net is good for everyone except those who feel they have to pay for a bunch of "freeloaders" and fail to see how greater economic equality creates public goods that they also enjoy (fewer beggars, for one thing).
So while as a progressive I am for social democracy, I am also for social equality for the trans and gay students in my classroom, and that is a divisive issue that the GOP likes to use to agitate its base and peel off socially conservative moderates.
+3 generations of Germany-born Turks denied citizenship because, eh, NOT German
(That said, change eventually came, & Mesut Ozil is as much of a despot-worshipping bitch as either Alex Ovechkin or Novak Jokovic.)
Ruy Teixeira blogs on the substack The Liberal Patriot:
https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/about
I agree that joining AEI is a dick move. Still, I think that some of what he writes, particularly about the drift of Hispanic voters to the GOP, is inciteful.
Teixeira makes the fundamental error of asserting the Democatic Party "lost" the "white working class", as if the Republican Party had no agency in the matter. The truth is Trump Republicans won the support of the majority of those voters by exploiting their existing bigotry and assiduously cultivating their grievances. There's no way Democrats can win them back without appealing to the same sentiments ... which of course would lose them the support of the voters who 18 months ago gave them control of Congress and the White House.
The Democratic Party's reliance on polls and focus groups, which assumes that politics is all about marketing, not leading, is a corrosive influence that it would do well to abandon.
Teixeira's problem is that he wants to see politics in class terms when most Americans don't even think in those ways and rarely have. And without strong labor movement it's almost impossible to do so.
If you went back to the 30s, only a tiny group of Americans went to college or were college alumni and they were of the small professional class, solidly Republican. What changed this is of the course, the G.I. Bill, which opened college to vets of all classes; the Baby Boom generation, many of whom went to college and many first of their families to do so and the rise of computers and automated work fields which made people feel they had to go to college to get a decent job. More people go to college, costs go up and when they do and state support of higher education declines, a whole financial industry springs up to help Americans pay for it.
So what we've gone from is a small group of people to a larger mass and they vote and they vote largely Democratic more and more because the Republican Party has basically turned Philistine in their attitudes (especially now that Roe has been repealed). What are the Dems supposed to do, tell them not to vote for them? The party seemingly has been having this debate for the last 50 years going all the way back to George Meany admonishing McGovern supporters for their brazen act of voting for their favorite candidate. The decline of the American Labor movement meant the decline of said voters voting for the Democrats so naturally those with college educations took more power as a result. Until that movement is restored, no amount of caterwaulling from Teixeira is going to change that.
Instead of worrying about politics, if I was Teixeira, I would worry about union organzing. Because you're not going to get a class-base politics without it.
If only Gary Hart had been the 1984 Democrat nominee...
The NY Times has an opinion essay about ableist words like dumb and stupid. So I guess maybe that’s the sort of thing which he finds annoying.
Actually it's not Teixeira that's changed, it's AEI.
Because of Trump, those we used to damn as "neocons" (including yours truly) are moving left back to the center, AEI including. They were looking for a good social-democrat to add to their ranks as they are making this move and who better than Teixeira, who is no doubt put off by the reported infighting over culture in liberal think tanks and wants a more secure home where he doesn't have to worry about job security.
It's amazing when you think about it. 10 years ago I was damning neocons like Kristol and Frum and now I read their twitter feeds and read Bulwark while damning Lew Rockwell and the Von Miesians and giving up on the Pauls. That's not a long time and if I could have looked into the future back to see today I would have fainted.
In the end, professional campaign ops are mercenaries. Teixeira's switch, & Judis's several years before him, are just carrying on the legacy of Hamilton Jordan, Ed Rollins, Tad Devine, David Plouffe, David Axelrod, et. al.
I talk a lot of shit about Bob Shrum, & he may be the ultimate loser, but at least he has limits. Likewise, erstwhile John Edwards campaign chief Chris Kokinis, who would have every right to chuck any idealism he had, given how his last big name candidate fucked how own campaign, remains a generally honest broke. Not to go all Equal Vision/Vagrant/Drive Thru Records second & an half generation emo like a Gen Y nostalgist, but three cheers for perpetual losers.