Ruy Teixeira on the Democrats’ Cultural Cosmopolitanism Problem

In 2002, political analyst and commentator Ruy Teixeira co-authored The Emerging Democratic Majority. The book, published near the zenith of the Bush presidency in the aftermath of 9/11, gave beleaguered Democrats cause for hope. Demographic change, Teixeira and co-author John Judis predicted, would soon create the political conditions for Democrats to forge an enduring political majority.  

When an emerging coalition of educated knowledge economy professionals, minorities, young people and women powered the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 and 2012, Teixeira’s optimism appeared prescient. But the big Democratic majorities of Obama’s early years were ephemeral. The country remained closely divided politically, yo-yoing back and forth between the two parties. Trump won narrowly in 2016, and then again, catastrophically, in 2024. 

Teixeira, now a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, has spent the years since Trump’s first victory excavating what went wrong for Democrats. So we invited him to join us on the latest episode to dissect the current state of the Democrat Party and its future prospects. In our conversation we explore why the leading optimist about the party’s future fortunes two decades ago has today became one of its most vocal pessimists. 

Why did demography not turn out to be destiny? We discuss the core findings of Teixeira’s more recent analyses, laid out in a string of articles published at The Liberal Patriot (the Substack site Teixeira co-founded) and in a follow up 2023 volume also co-authored with Judis. 

He argues that, from Obama’s second term on, the party’s increasingly strident promotion of the cultural beliefs of the educated elites of blue urban America has caused the party to hemorrhage working class voters of all races. Teixeira further explains why he thinks the party continues to be in deep trouble in the mid-to-longer term, despite benefitting currently from public backlash to Trump’s authoritarian excesses. 

We dig in with him into Democrats’ positions on immigration, race, and gender and why he believes they create a political anchor around the Democrats’ necks. And we close with a discussion of how the increasing polarization between the parties distorts our politics, with Teixeira arguing that the educated cosmopolitans who now comprise the Democratic Party’s vocal core need to stop treating politics as a self-ratifying moral crusade and focus on what matters: building a winning coalition.

“Politics is not supposed to be fun, It’s supposed to be about getting shit done, and that’s hard, typically, and you have to make compromises,” he tells us. “You don’t always get to stand on your soapbox and talk about how you’re on the right side of history.”

Robert Scaramuccia edited this episode.

Outside references:

John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002).

Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (2023)

Ruy Teixiera, "The Democrats' Common Sense Problem," The Liberal Patriot, March 24, 2022

Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin, "Politics Without Winners: Can Either Party Build a Majority Coalition?" American Enterprise Institute, Oc

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

Support the show