You won’t believe where all the Democrats have disappeared to!

It’s the title of a forthcoming book by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, which I’ve been reading obsessively since I received the galleys. In 2002, the couple released The Emerging Democratic Majority, a work that essentially created the concept “demography is fate”. Many people took the idea as a fait accompli – but obviously hadn’t read the book, which actually argued that a growing Democratic coalition of young people, urban professionals, minorities and single women could not be a winning base only if the Democrats could also keep working-class whites under the same banner. It didn’t work as expected.

The two authors are now back to dissect why the Democratic coalition – which formed during the New Deal – worked so well for so long, why it finally fell apart and what Democrats need to do to rebuild a coalition. winning as a workers’ party. It’s the best take I’ve seen so far — both on a macro level and on a micro reporting level — on why Democratic politics has gotten so extreme.

Importantly, the book goes beyond the class versus race debate – should policies to improve the lives of working people aim to help racial minorities or poorer Americans more generally? – and talks about all the ways workers have been kicked out of the party. These are innumerable. They include Democratic support for trade deals that have led to plant closings; support for spending bills paid by the working and middle classes but which primarily benefited the poor; the party’s enthusiasm for the immigration of unskilled workers; support for abortion rights and strict gun control; the hyper-identification with identity politics and avant-garde lifestyles, especially among young people (and perhaps more importantly, the disparagement of those who were not immediately supportive); and finally, snobbery towards overt displays of religiosity or national symbols such as the American flag, which are still common attitudes in much of this country.

Taken in isolation, many of these positions are justified. But taken together, they begin to drive a wedge, as the authors put it, between “big post-industrial metropolitan centers like the Bay Area, Atlanta, Austin, LA, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Seattle” and everyone else. . This absolutely resonates with me. There is a popular idea right now that the great political divide in the United States is between the educated and the less educated. But as an extremely well-educated person who grew up in the rural Midwest, I can tell you that there are plenty of people like me in high-level positions in business, journalism and the public sector far from shore who see things the same way.

In fact, I often find that even as someone who leans to the working-class left, I’ll have a more common worldview with, say, a business leader from Columbus, Ohio, than with an average young in my Brooklyn neighborhood at Park Trail. I love flag day. I believe in god. I don’t understand why we spend so much time on the left talking about trans rights when transgender people make up such a small part of the population. I understand and support that everyone deserves equal rights, but I also think that dividing people into smaller and smaller identity groups is terrible for the Democratic Party and for society.

This book crucially captures the paradox of today’s coastal democrats. The authors write about Mountain View, California, a chic town in Silicon Valley. He has a minimum wage of $18.15 an hour, but in 2020 he backed an initiative banning trailers — the only viable housing for many low-wage service workers — from parking in the city. It reminds me of when the PTA at my kids’ elementary school decided to take animal protein off the menu because it probably didn’t come from a free-range organic supplier. A city government worker had to remind them that this “progressive” stance would hurt poorer students, whose main source of protein comes from school meals.

It’s that kind of stuff that Central America really hates. That, along with the belief in some liberal circles that it’s inevitable that we all work in finance or software. Those of us who grew up between the coasts also understand that some of the economic policies that have benefited the FTE hubs (finance, technology, and electronics) have been very bad for other parts of the country. This is not only a political problem – these are the hollow areas that have turned to Donald Trump-style fascism – but also an economic problem, since the American economy is struggling today to reindustrialize.

I could go on about the book and probably will in a future column closer to its release date later this summer. But my question in the meantime for you Ed is this: what factors did the authors overlook in the list above to explain why the Democrats lost their status as the American workers’ party? And what do you advise them to do to get it back?

Recommended Reading

• I was interested to see Li Yuan’s piece in the New York Times about how Chinese college graduates struggling to find jobs have been told to ‘eat bitterness’ by the Communist Party, which references an old Chinese saying that you have to l aspire and carry on. Basically, just enjoy the fight. I wonder how the party is going?

• It is fascinating that State Farm, one of America’s largest insurance companies, has announced that it will stop selling coverage to homeowners in California. Not just in wildfire areas, but everywhere. It’s a perfect example of how climate change risk is finally being calculated by the financial industry, with massive real-world implications.

• I loved Nicholas Kristof’s unexpected New York Times op-ed about what Mississippi – of all states – go straight to education. It’s important to come up with success stories to counter all the bad news going around right now, which tends to make people cynical not only about the world but also about the media.

• Also, even though I don’t usually like the New York Times Magazine, it recently made the front page of what Vienna can tell the rest of the world how to create affordable housing. A really smart story.

• Finally, several great articles this week in the Financial Times: my colleague Sarah O’Connor explains the principle of the suitcase of white-collar work, and why we keep creating more work for ourselves, no matter how good the technology. Stephen Bush explains the new United Kingdom approach to thinking about education and training as well as loans for that, which is an interesting mirror of what’s happening in the United States. And finally, my New York colleague Joshua Chaffin has the best summary ever of why Succession been TV date.

Edouard Luce responds

Rana, when I returned to the United States in 2006 (after having been in India for the previous five years), the book by Teixeira and Judis The Emerging Democratic Majority was furious. Among the professional Democratic consulting class, the idea that demographics were fate was something of an article of faith. In a nutshell, their view was that the politics of California, which had just become a “majority minority” state, was about a generation ahead of America. Republicans were shrinking as a party in the Golden State and in danger of becoming an irrelevant rump. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 reinforced the belief that a coalition of educated whites and especially less educated non-whites would accomplish the same thing for Democrats nationwide as was happening on the West Coast.

I found this reliance on a racial view of political loyalty both troubling and misguided. It was troubling — and the rest — because he viewed the loyalty of certain groups as an axiomatic, which breeds complacency and neglect. Among models of Democratic urban machines, consider Chicago, which relies on automatic support from the black vote but is seemingly unable to alter the life chances of people on the city’s dreary south side. There must be something corrupting in an electoral argument based on the implicit question: “Where else are you going to go?” It is now home ground. The problem, as Teixeira and Judis point out today, is that a growing number of non-white blue-collar workers are responding, “We can become Republicans.” That Hispanics and even African Americans can vote for Donald Trump is so outside of the Democratic frame of reference that it’s not really debated — and often barely acknowledged.

My response to the issue you raised is that Democrats should relentlessly focus on what all of these groups, including blue-collar workers, have in common – their lack of health care, the precariousness of their economic nest eggs, the fact to be excluded from the educational path to meritocracy happiness, and so on. Stop assuming white blue collar workers are all covert racists looking to recapture a nostalgic past. Telling about 40% of the electorate that they are old fashioned and should be ashamed of their national heritage is no way to win elections. As you know, I think the critique of globalization is a red herring and sells people an impossible promise — the return of well-paid manual manufacturing jobs. But he at least goes beyond the narrow ethnic placements that have hurt the Democratic brand so badly, including among those he targets (don’t get me started on what Hispanics think of the term “Latinx”).