WTH Have All the Democrats Gone? With Ruy Teixeira
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 14 December 2023
⏱️ 71 minutes
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Summary
In 2002, Ruy Teixeira co-authored The Emerging Democratic Majority. Now, two decades later, his new book is out – Where Have All the Democrats Gone? So what happened to the Democratic Party in those intervening years? A couple of major factors stand out. First, the Democrats have bled working-class voters – once the party’s base. This means that your average Democrat today is not a UAW union worker, but probably a middle to upper-class post-grad student at Harvard. Or Colombia. Or U Penn. Second, the party’s mission has been captured by extreme versions of wokeism, making progressivism synonymous with total agreement with the far Left. And while the Dems’ recent winning streak is attributable to the specific alchemy of special and off-year elections – in 2024, it will be a much bigger challenge to see how coastal elites and college grads sustain the party.
Ruy Teixeira is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on the transformation of party coalitions and the future of American electoral politics. Before joining AEI, he was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress from 2003 to 2022. He coedits “The Liberal Patriot” blog. His new book is Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes (Henry Holt & Company).
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Check out Ruy Teixeira's new book here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.1 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. Hotels gone on. |
| 0:01.0 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:23.6 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pekka. |
| 0:29.6 | I'm Mark Teeson. |
| 0:31.6 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:32.6 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:34.6 | So, Mark, what now? |
| 0:36.6 | Well, we've got our friend Rudas with us today, who's |
| 0:40.7 | written with John Judas a fantastic new book called Where Have All the Democrats Gone? And it's |
| 0:46.3 | fascinating because in 2004, he and John Judas wrote this book called The Emerging Democratic |
| 0:52.0 | Majority, which was Kevin Phillips's famous book, |
| 0:55.3 | a play on Kevin Phillips's famous book about the emerging Republican majority, which was predicting |
| 1:00.2 | a long assent of conservatism in the age of Reagan and beyond. And they were sort of predicting |
| 1:06.9 | the same thing for the Democrats. And now he's written, where of all the Democrats gone? So he's clearly rethinking his thesis. And, you know, this is a guy who is a liberal, |
| 1:16.6 | who hails from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, as Ronald Reagan used to refer to being |
| 1:21.9 | the Republican wing of the Republican Party. And he's very concerned about the direction of his |
| 1:25.9 | party and what's happening. And he doesn't, |
| 1:29.1 | the left doesn't seem to be listening. Look, one of the things that really strikes me when we |
| 1:34.6 | talk to Rui and, you know, when we talk to Karl Rove, is this absolutely weird, manic political |
| 1:42.4 | analysis that Washington loves to engage in. So Democrats win an election, |
| 1:46.9 | and it's like, and we will win forever. Demography is destiny, right? And George W. Bush wins. |
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