Democratic prophets who scare me

Voices crying out in the wilderness are pointing the way for the Left - but are liberals still capable of listening?

I’m going to give some unsolicited advice to the Democratic Party. Are you ready, my lefty friends? Here goes: heed the prophets who tell you what you do not want to hear.

Invest all the power to recruit candidates, pick policy positions, and decide campaign messaging in these few brave prophets. Let them call the shots. Invest in them top-down, monopoly power (you guys like that model, right?) and run everyone else out of business.

Three prophets who in the wake of the party’s 2024 setback have dared speak the truth about the chasm between their party and the working class are Ruy Teixeira, James Carville, and Matt Yglesias. You should give them heed.

I know that the progressive mind (note how I flatter you by putting those two words together, “progressive” and “mind”? I know you think it’s redundant, but you like it anyway) values expertise, so you should buckle up and let these guys drive your collective plug-in electric vehicle for a while. They can’t possibly make things worse for you.

Carville has been barking the truth at you folks for a long time, but because he’s an old white Southern dude, Democrats blow him off.

Last summer, when Kamala Harris was consolidating her coup of the nomination after Joe Biden was forced out, Carville warned, in a mockery of wrong-headed liberals:

"‘We know what's best for you, don't eat hamburgers, don't watch football, don't drink beer.’ Guess where our young male number is going? In the toilet, alright? Because Democratic messaging, I'm sorry, is too feminine, it just is," he said.

How right he ended up being. The gender gap – which Team Harris bragged about – turned out to be great math for Republicans instead, driven by Gen-Z. Just days before Harris crashed and burned, Carville gave you distasteful but prescient medicine. He said:

“We’re going to say we told you so,” he said. “We told you this identity shit was a disaster. We told you to get out in front of public safety issues. You didn’t.”

Sure enough, he was right. Identity politics and a failure to be tough on public safety matters did help sink Harris. And Carville hasn’t stopped, recently saying hard lefties might ought to be run out of his party:

“They need to really consider whether they’re Democrats or not,” he said. “Maybe they ought to go join the pronoun justice – social, I don’t know, equity party or whatever they’re doing.”

If Carville was akin to the prophet Jeremiah, giving you one last warning before collapse, then Ruy Teixeira is Malachi, the writer of the last book of the Old Testament who called his people to repentance. (I know being religiously ignorant, err, dismissive, is in vogue in some Democratic circles, so I apologize to the adamantly secular among us for these ancient analogies requiring a search engine.)

Teixeira, who has been a political consultant and a scholar, is the co-author of the must-read Substack The Liberal Patriot, and uses higher-brow language than Carville, so maybe it will make you wince less. He faults the “Brahmin Left” in his party and its brain-dead focus on the hyper-educated sliver of the electorate. He mocks the quick fix proposals of lefties who think they can perfume up a noxious platform by dangling giveaways and scare tactics at blue-collar voters.

“Hey working class, over here, we love you and will fight for your interests against the billionaire class and their Republican handmaidens!...This is not remotely plausible…You cannot undo the damage of decades of Brahminization by simply asserting you are something so many working-class voters think you are not: the tribune of the working class. The challenge goes much deeper than that and involves a decisive break with the many Brahmin Left priorities that alienate the working class.”

A “decisive break!” Teixeira is dead on. Democrats must not merely waggle re-distribution, they must renounce the secular snobbery and cultural demeaning that caused the party’s schism with a working class that is decidedly more religious, more traditional, more patriotic (sorry, “jingoistic,” for my far lefty friends still reading), and tougher in approach to criminals and free loaders.

Unlike some people who just grumble, Teixeira’s critique is based on his deep dives into data. Democrats in fact are in a flat spin headed for a crash with working class voters of all ethnicities. Shane Goldmacher of The New York Times this week summarized the long trend Teixiera has warned about:

“The (Democratic) party’s sparse areas of growth are concentrated almost exclusively in America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets. Yet Mr. Trump has steadily gained steam across a broad swath of the nation, with swelling support not just in white working-class communities but also in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations.”

In a country in which two-thirds do not have a college degree, a party willfully polarizing itself toward sheepskin neighborhoods will lose.

Having cut my teeth on politics in the rural south, I’ve always said the way to predict the winning candidate late in a race is to see which one is campaigning among people who have their name on their shirt. These voters, who wear uniforms, always tip the scales. Donald Trump gets that, which is why he worked at McDonalds and drove a garbage truck late in 2024 – both stunts derided by the Brahmin Left but respected by the critical middle.

Lastly, I come to Matt Yglesias. I’m going to flag him as the Zechariah, because he’s best at foretelling the glory to come for his audience, should they turn from their (political) sins. Yglesias is not a political consultant, but a writer with an optimistic eye on the horizon. The current cool-kid book in Democratic circles, Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is in many ways a logical extension of Yglesias’s 2020 book “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger.” (That book echoed forward-looking themes from futurist Joel Kotkin’s great book a decade earlier, The Next Hundred Million, but I digress; Yglesias was ahead of his time and still is.)

A legit “progressive” (terminological hubris flagged by quotation marks), Yglesias and I likely disagree on most issues. On top of that, he weirdly values technocratic synchronicity. He loves trains irrationally. He criticizes his own party, but take heart, he also rips my side plenty.

Unlike most true-believing lefties, though, Yglesias seems to grasp the foolishness that’s making Democrats lose. In the days after the 2024 election he begged his party to reform and indicted the nasty combo of elitism and moral relativism, writing in his well-read Substack “Slow Boring”:

“I believe the answer is that the Democratic Party should embrace commonsense moral values and move away from academic fads and deliberate tent-shrinking.”

That may seem slow and boring to my Republican readers, but in today’s Democratic Party it’s sorta radical. So is his belief in natalism and positivity about child-bearing and rearing as a societal expectation.

A faculty lounge takeover of the Democratic Party on culture has coincided with - and perpetuated - a realignment makes it disastrous politics.

Lucky for my fellow Republicans and me, there’s little chance prophets preaching contrarianism and contrition can drown out the dopamine flood of elitism that’s driven Democrats to this precipice.