hello friends,
This week's podcast interview (audio above) is with Ruy Teixeira, about his new book with John Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. It’s a fascinating conversation.
But first, a word on something else.
Five words actually, written across the Twitter profile of a young woman who appeared in court this week, stood out to me: "A servant of Jesus Christ."
The young woman is named Jenna Ellis, 38. She pled guilty this week to a felony charge of "aiding and abetting false statements and writings," for her part in spreading "false statements to the Georgia Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, including allegations of unsubstantiated voter fraud" during the 2020 election. She will serve five years of probation, pay a $5000 fine, and has written a letter of apology to the citizens of Georgia.
You can read a transcript of her hearing here. The prosecution said that if the case had gone to trial, the state "would have shown" that Ellis, along with Rudy Giuliani and others, made "false statements" about supposed voter fraud and irregularities in the Georgia election, and that they did so "with reckless disregard of the truth ... and with conspicuous purpose to avoid learning the truth."
Ellis addressed the court Tuesday, and said the following to explain why she made false claims about the 2020 election:
I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information, especially since my role involved speaking to the media and to legislators in various states. What I did not do, but should have done, Your Honor, was to make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true. In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence ... If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post election challenges. I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse for those failures of mine. For those failures of mine, your honor, I’ve taken responsibility already before the Colorado bar, who censured me, and I now take responsibility before this court and apologize to the people of Georgia.”
Credit to Ellis for taking some responsibility for her actions here, though she was under threat of jail time, which was quite an incentive to do so.
But the phrase that stood out to me was, "I failed to do my due diligence."
In other words, Ellis was going everywhere she could in the weeks and months after the 2020 election — on TV, on social media, talking to lawmakers, talking to your relatives and friends and mine, telling them that the election had been stolen from Trump, from them — and when she's finally called into a court of law to answer for her false statements, her excuse is, I didn't really check to see if what I was saying was true.
Huh? You play a major role in forcing American democracy to a point of crisis, helping a sitting president to deceive and mislead millions of Americans into believing he — and they — had been victims of the most egregious theft, that the election and the very country has been stolen from them, and you didn't check to see if what you were saying was true?
I should add that there's very little that we know today that we didn't know when Ellis was making these statements. Every major allegation and accusation made by Ellis and her co-conspirators was fact-checked in real time at the time they made them, and were shown to be bogus, false, empty, without merit. Yet she and others, and most of all the former president Trump, continued to make these claims. Trump still does.
"The American people deserve to know what we have uncovered in the last couple of weeks," Ellis said in a televised press conference on Nov. 19, 2020. She then ridiculed the "fake newspapers" that dared to ask her skeptical questions about whether there was any proof of her claims. "All of your fake news headlines are dancing around the merits of this case and are trying to de-legitimize what we are doing here," she said.
Roughly two weeks later, here she is on December 4, 2020, saying that a video of election workers in Georgia moving ballots in a normal procedure was "smoking gun" evidence of election fraud. "We know now that the elections in these six states ... are irredeemably compromised," Ellis said.
All false. Fox News paid $787 MILLION to Dominion Voting Systems to avoid a defamation trial over its role in spreading some of these lies.
But back to the point: this is how a "servant of Christ" behaves? Of course we all make mistakes, but could we at least have less of the sanctified chest-beating along the way?
Yet this is how many Christians think they are supposed to "stand" for their faith: with loud, public statements. But rather than advertising one's self as a servant of Christ — all while spreading lies that drive people to violence and bring harm to an entire country — maybe it would be better to say a little less about how Christlike one is and just be that way. I'm just spitballing. But perhaps living a life of truth and honesty and integrity that honors the religion you espouse is the first step, which could then be followed up, when appropriate, by a testimony to how your faith helps you to live that way.
But Ellis' lack of "due diligence" is sadly all too common among those who practice a blind belief. The culture of conservative evangelicalism, unfortunately, is "heavily, cosmically, existentially invested in being right," as Holly Berkley Fletcher put it so well this week. And evangelical culture too often decides what the "right answers" are based on dogma, rather than open inquiry. (Also unfortunately, elements of the political left have come to mirror religious fundamentalists in some ways, sometimes showing an intense fervor born of the conviction that they are righteous and those who disagree with them are evil. That mindset is discussed to some degree in the interview below with Ruy Teixeira).
Ellis, by the way, is the third lawyer who worked for or with Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election who has pled guilty in a court of law over the past few weeks to making false statements about the 2020 election. The other two are Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, who you can read about here and here.
Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
Ruy Teixeira and John Judis' new book is all about a critique of Democrats. But it's important to begin the discussion of their book, and their entire project, by setting the frame for why they are focused on Democrats.
It's because they do view the Republican party, or at least large swaths of it, as a threat to democracy.
The "radical side" of the GOP has "propensities for violence and contempt for democracy" that "far outweigh the foibles of the Democrats' cultural radicals," they write.
Andrew Sullivan made a similar point a few days ago.
I have plenty of issues with Democrats. They too have a hard time corralling their extremes. But they are capable of governing a democratic society according to the rules that such a society is built upon. The Republicans, quite simply, are not. Their candidate [Trump] is a terrifying joke. Their party, as it has devolved into Bannonism, is a cancer on our democracy.
Sullivan made a crucial assertion. The Republican Party is not conservative anymore, he said.
A party wedded to ideological abstractions, emotional hissy-fits, constitutional brinkmanship and a strongman candidate is not a conservative party. It is the anti-conservative party. Objecting to everything is objecting to nothing. Gerrymandering yourself into a homogeneous, minority cult only rewards ever more extremism. Obsessed with themselves, demanding the impossible, and risking everything for it: this is not a party that is in any way fit for government, and yet it is a party that is all but guaranteed huge sway because America is so polarized that extremists get away with anything.
So with that said, on to Teixeira and Judis' critique of the Democrats.
This is a tricky book. To me, the most interesting portion is the economic history of the last 50 years. Teixeira and Judis trace the very specific ways that particular policy choices by Democratic presidents from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama increasingly hurt and disenfranchised working class people in industrial states around the country. I had not heard before the contention that Carter's decision to put Paul Volker in as Fed chairman in the late 70's, to fight inflation by raising interest rates and cutting spending, "signaled Wall Street's ascendancy within the Democratic governing coalition." The book explains how the decline and demise of labor unions, and the rise of a "K Street constellation of business groups, think tanks, and policy groups" funded by big business was a big part of moving the Democrats away from making the hard choices to side with working people.
I did not fully grasp the ways that Bill Clinton's "laying the groundwork for China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001" and his "furthering the deregulation of finance that had begun under Carter and Reagan" accelerated this move of the Democrats away from the working class. Again, Clinton was "besieged by business lobbies and prominent former officials calling on him" to open up trade with China. The book cites multiple studies that find that the U.S. lost around 2.5 million jobs in the decade after Clinton left office "from Chinese import competition."
It is really an argument that in many ways aligns with the critique of American politics leveled by people such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, who argues that both parties have been co-opted by the rich, by big business. The book spends all its time blaming the Democrats for their part in this, but that's because the authors believe the Democrats used to be the party of the working person, and that it can and should be again.
But the book is tricky because a lot of the attention will go, as it often does, to the book's critique of Democrats on social issues. Their views on race and racism, on gender and sexuality, and on climate change will anger a lot of progressives, and draw a lot of criticism. They are not right-wing on these issues. Their point is ultimately a pragmatic one. They are interested in Democrats winning elections, and winning elections is an issue of math. And they believe, based on quite a bit of statistical evidence and history, that the Democratic party has alienated key elements of the country that they need to win elections, both by losing touch with working class people on economics, and on social issues.
To the matter of race. I do not think one has to agree with Teixeira and Judis on how they talk about the question of systemic or structural racism to assess their practical argument for how to work toward policies that remedy key outcomes of injustice: poverty, crime, education and health disparities, and the like. But what I think is compelling is their argument that if someone is interested in helping people escape poverty and suffering, a politically effective argument might be to point to economic policy as a key driver of poverty for both poor blacks in cities and poor whites in the Rust belt and rural areas, and to push for policy changes that benefit both.
"There are tragic similarities between the fate of low-income urban blacks and working-class whites in small towns that suffered from deindustrialization and the closure of mines," Teixeira and Judis write. "Both are victims of neoliberal economics and of the trajectory of postindustrial America."
"A program of revitalization directed at all the different communities, small towns and cities affected by deindustrialization might win majority support in the country and even in a divided Congress, but one directed only at blacks will not."
That is a political argument, based in a set of assumptions about what is achievable. It's not a proposition based in a value judgment about a group of people. But it's still likely to be controversial.
Jon Ward: Why don't we start just by kind of clueing people in. Most people won't be familiar with the backstory of your first book, which led to what became essentially a myth among Democrats. Maybe you would use a different word, but can you kind of tell that backstory?
Ruy Teixeira: John Judas and I wrote this book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which came out in late 2002, actually right prior to the 2002 elections. We argued that the sort of tectonic plates of American politics were shifting in such a way the Democrats potential coalition could definitely dominate for a considerable period of time if the Democrats played their cards right.
And we looked at a lot of factors. The thing everyone picked up on was the demographic shifts that were taking place in America, in terms of the rise of the non-white population. We also looked at the rise of professionals as a group that was now swung heavily to the Democratic Party. We looked at the shifts among women voters. We put all that together and suggested Democrats were more in sync with these changes than the Republicans. And since they were more in sync with these changes, they had a potential to form a majority that they might have some staying power.
Now, as I say, initially it was met with some skepticism. But by the time 2008 rolls around and Obama has this great victory, which seemed to confirm a lot of the trends that we were talking about, people decided, well, maybe that's really what it's all about.
But we had a fairly complicated analysis in the book, and we also had very important things to keep in mind for Democrats. Like for example, the role of the white working class, which we talked about very specifically in the book. But that whole part about the white working class got forgotten and so did a lot of the other stuff we wrote. In a way, it all came down to: Demographics Are Destiny. That was the sort of bowdlerized version of the thesis. And I think after 2008 that really takes off, and it has various different names: the coalition of the ascendant, the Rising American majority, so on and so forth. This became received wisdom in a lot of sectors of the party.
That's partly what our new book is about: try and understand what happened to the Democratic Party in the period between when we published that first book in 2002 and today, where clearly the Democrats do not dominate American politics. It's really this sort of unhappy stalemate between the parties. And the Democrats have continued to hemorrhage working class voters this time, of all races.
Jon: I think it's important to point out that when you and John wrote this book in 2002, you were, and were for a long time, at the Center for American Progress, which is a left of center, pretty progressive think tank. So can you just trace the arc of your career now at the American Enterprise Institute, which is a right of center think tank. Where do you sit now as a former CAP scholar now at AEI?
Ruy: Well, that's an interesting and somewhat convoluted story. I was one of the people who was initially part of CAP even when it started. So I was there from 2003 to 2022, 19 years in different capacities.
When CAP started, the concept was Democrats did not have the infrastructure Republicans did. They weren't generating ideas, they weren't being effective advocates for their own positions. They needed more firepower. They needed to push back and push back in a smart way. And John Podesta and a bunch of other people basically decided they would try to form a new institution, which eventually became the Center for American Progress that would push back against the Republicans, the Bush regime and so on, and lay the basis for a future dominant democratic party.
They kind of picked up on my book and sort of brought me into the fold, when they started, as someone who would be a representative scholar for the institute, who would help advance their thinking. And one thing that attracted me to the organization at the time is they kept on saying, 'Our idea is to incubate the ideas of the future. We're going to think outside the box. We're going to be creative, we're going to really push the envelope in terms of thinking new thoughts and figuring out ways that progressives can do better in American politics.'
That didn't really last that long. The new ideas part, I mean over time it declined. I think when the place began, there was more of that ethos and I think some interesting ideas were come up with in terms of healthcare and the war Iraq and so on. But you could really see before your very eyes, the organization evolve into basically — not a legal arm of the Democratic Party — but so in support of it, so in support of its agenda, so sensitive to what was going on in Capitol Hill, that they were an advocacy group. And the extent to which actual new thinking was being promoted, I thought, just became less and less true over time.
I found over time that my repeated efforts to say, 'Okay, wait a minute. Yes, the country's changing. That is true and I am documenting it, but it's not the case that the Democrats can sort of ignore the white working class. We actually need to figure out how to reach these voters more effectively, otherwise — given their size and given their geographical distribution — this could create real problems in the basic political arithmetic of the coalition. But despite my repeated efforts to get people interested in this question more and more over time, that became dismissed as almost like quasi racist. 'Why are you interested in all these white people? And if they're not voting for the Democrats, it must be because they're racist.'
After 2016, it was at that point that I realized we were reaching the point of no return on some of the issues I was raising because the dominant view was this sort of hashtag resistance. 'Trump is the face of fascism and racism. Anyone who voted for him was basically beyond the pale. This is Armageddon and this is the last fight.' And I kept on trying to make the argument, 'Well, look, I mean it's much more complicated than that. There's a reason why these voters the Midwest moved all mass toward Trump and delivered him the victory they did. We need to understand that. We need to understand why they feel the way they do, why they respond to Trump's populous messages, why they feel the way they do a traded immigration.'
Look, CAP and progressive organizations have spent 40 years talking about how neoliberalism is destroying communities in the United States and how awful that is. And here we have an election where some of those voters were in their own way responding to it and rejecting the elites and clearly saying they wanted something different. And you may not like what they chose, but we need to understand it. And dismissing them all as racist and xenophobes was not a productive or correct way to look at it. But again, that fell on deaf ears basically. And I just continued to do my demographic work and I just wrote in other places about other things to say.
During the George Floyd summer of 2020, it was really at that point that a bunch of us — four of us at CAP, the ones who founded the Liberal Patriot — we had a sort of discussion group going on. We kept on saying, 'This is crazy. Everything's now white supremacy and structural racism and how awful America is and how we must all commit ourselves to the anti-racist cause. It just was clear to us that this was not a good approach for the Democratic party, and a good approach for progressives and a good approach for forming a majoritarian big tent kind of party. And we just got more and more dissatisfied. We thought we'd maybe write a manifesto about it, but then this thing called Substack came around. We realized we could start getting our thoughts out there at no cost to us if we didn't charge for it. And we just started writing. And after a while it kind of took off and here we are today and now we're all out of CAP because we couldn't take it anymore.
I knew people from AEI from way back and I started having discussions with them, and it was apparent to me that even though they're right of center, it was a community of scholars. It wasn't a party line in the sense there was at CAP. They would welcome someone like me who is a bit of a heterodox thinker. So in addition to my Liberal Patriot commitments, now I'm also a senior fellow at AEI, and I'm doing a big project on the evolution of party coalitions with Yuval Levin, who helped bring me in. And I find it a delightful place to be. Everybody's very nice, very open-minded, and I don't have to agree with everyone there, which is great.
Jon: You don't talk about Republicans really at all in the book. You do say that the radical side of the GOP has propensities for violence and contempt for democracy that far outweigh the foibles of the Democrats' cultural radicals. And then it's not until the end of the book, you mentioned Trump. But basically you're saying that your hopes for democracy and American prosperity and vibrancy rests with the Democrats and with the working class. Is that a correct way of understanding this critique?
Ruy: Yes, absolutely. That's the correct way of understanding it. We don't rule out that the Republicans could right the ship and there are very interesting intellectual currents in and around the Republican party. That could bear fruit over the medium to long term. But right now, realistically, looking at our political landscape, we still see the Democrats as being the best bet, if they sort of return to the roots as a party of the people, as a party of the common man and woman. If they shuck off some of this cultural radicalism for more of a centrist approach.
Jon: What is your sense of whether Democrats are listening? Because one thought I had as I read the book was the framing I just laid out for you. If it's just all criticizing the Democrats, that could be hard for Democrats to listen to. Did you guys think about how to make it palatable to the audience you're trying to persuade?
Ruy: Well, yeah. I mean we did, and I think we tried to make it as they say, fair and balanced as best we could. And the first part of the book, for example, is not slamming the Democrats for their cultural radicalism, but is the historical evolution in the late 20th century of the Democrat's economic labor commitments away from its historic roots, and its identification with sort of a soft neoliberalism, and a general sense of alienation that developed among the working class on economic terms and the decline of the role of labor union. All these things were very important to how the Democratic party evolved in the late 20th century and the image it developed among working class voters.
People don't understand this history as well as they should. It's not something Democrats have the right to be forever: the party of working people. They think they do. They think with our history, how awful the Republicans are, well of course we're the party of working people, but actually this is something that has been eroding for decades. It was never a gimme, and now it's almost fading out of reach.
We're trying to make people understand how even though the Democrats are plausibly the best alternative at this point — the sort of the Trumpist Republicans are not a great look — here's why they can't seem to beat the other side more decisively. And here's what they might need to be, to be the party we need to have in America.
Jon: What you would predict for the country if Donald Trump was reelected president?
Ruy: Well, that's obviously a question that's on everybody's minds, and I get it a lot. I think that if Donald Trump is reelected, it will be bad.
However, I don't think it's productive that this is like the cut point of world history: 'If Trump gets in, again, democracy will die. We'll all be in the camps. Judiciary will be compromised, civil service will be all little Trumpy robots.' I think that's drastically overstated.
If Trump wins, he will take office. He will do bad things. There will be a reaction, but I think the republic will hold, the system will hold, there'll be a counter reaction — thermostatic reaction to Trump being in office again. That will be bad for the Republicans.
The median Democrat, especially the media educated democratic liberal — the people I talk to — are like, 'Oh my God, this is it. If Trump gets in again, it's all over.'
But I think that again leads to unproductive thinking. If you really believe that's the case — 'Hey baby, it's the popular front against fascism!' — you should be making the tent as big as possible. You should be compromising right and left on everything and no litmus tests except please vote Democratic. These other things aren't important to us.
But that's not what the Democrats are doing. The same people who think we're on the verge of fascism are the same people urging the Democrats to press the accelerator on basically everything and mobilize the progressive base.
Interesting Reads
The Savior Complex: Thoughts on "altruistic narcissism" by Holly Berkley Fletcher on her Substack, A Zebra Without Stripes
I’m really enjoying reading some of Fletcher’s writing recently. Provocative and spicy!
The Terrifying Learning Curve Facing Mike Johnson by Brendan Buck for Politico Magazine
The speakership comes with enormous institutional responsibilities, from keeping the Capitol and the people who work there safe, to the upkeep of the building, to presiding over countless ceremonial events. He now has national security responsibilities that will regularly keep him in classified briefings.
The speaker is also the face of the House GOP, and Johnson must be prepared to meet the press. He will be the chief communicator for the conference, required to consistently drive messages and rally support for the House’s agenda.
The speaker must stand up a large-scale political operation, develop relationships with donors and set a political strategy for protecting a thin majority. For all the things he must quickly learn, the new speaker’s schedule will constantly be crushed by basic obligations of the job.
Meet the evangelical activist who’s had a 'profound influence' on Speaker Mike Johnson by Mike Hixenbaugh for NBC News
Johnson’s effusive praise for Barton, an influential background figure in the conservative evangelical political movement, sends an unmistakable signal about how the devout Christian Republican lawmaker — now second in the line to the presidency — views the role of religion in government and public life, said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah University in Pennsylvania.
“David Barton is a political propagandist, he’s a Christian-right activist who cherry picks from the past to promote political agendas in the present, to paint a picture of America’s history as evangelicals would like it to be,” said Fea, who’s also an evangelical. “Mike Johnson comes straight out of that Christian-right world, where Barton’s ideas are highly influential. It’s the air they breathe.”
Here’s my fall music playlist! Have a great weekend!
Where Have All the Democrats Gone?