SHIHO FUKADA/AP PHOTO
It is hard to see how the Democrats can be a progressive party if they are not the party of the working class.
This article appears in the February 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes
By John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira
Henry Holt
Ever since the mid-1970s, Democrats have been trying to recreate the robust political majorities they enjoyed from the 1930s through the 30 years after World War II. Encouraged by demographic forecasts of a majority-minority society, many progressives in recent decades have seen the makings of a new Democratic era in the rising electorate of minorities, women, and younger voters. Barack Obama’s two presidential victories seemingly confirmed that prospect. But, especially since 2016, critics of that theory have insisted that the rising electorate is insufficient. Democrats, they say, need to return to the politics that used to win them working-class as well as middle-class support, white as well as minority. In their different ways, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders both reflect the conviction that restoring working-class confidence in progressive politics is vital to its success.
In Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira provide a strong version of the working-class thesis—strong in two respects. First, they call for a decisive rejection of the neoliberal economic policies of Democratic presidents from Jimmy Carter through Bill Clinton and Obama, which contributed to the decline of the party’s old base in the industrial working class. Second, they want Democrats to “declare a truce” in the culture wars and back off from the cultural radicalism that they see as shaping public perceptions of the Democratic Party and alienating working-class voters.
The braver half of the book is the second part, which defies much current progressive orthodoxy on issues of race, immigration, gender, and climate. But even if you think, as I do, that some of Judis and Teixeira’s criticism is reasonable, it’s unclear how Democrats could declare a culture-war “truce” that neither Republicans nor progressive movement groups would have any intention of observing.
Like many other analysts today, Judis and Teixeira define “working class” as people without college degrees, and often they speak of the “working and middle classes” together. But throughout the book, they are mainly concerned, as they put it in their introduction, with the factors that have “driven working-class voters out of the Democratic Party.” This is not just a matter of winning elections but of the party’s very character. It is hard to see how the Democrats can be a progressive party if they are not the party that working-class Americans see as their own.
The title Where Have All the Democrats Gone? needs to be understood in relation to Judis and Teixeira’s 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. They’re now repudiating that forecast and asking why the stable majority they expected has not emerged. Since I published an article called “An Emerging Democratic Majority” five years before their book, I have a stake in this argument. As predictions from the ’90s go, that one stands up reasonably well. After all, Democrats have won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections since 1992 after losing five of the previous six from 1968 to 1988. I am not going to delete “An Emerging Democratic Majority” from my bibliography out of remorse or embarrassment.
But I underestimated, as they did, Democrats’ subsequent losses of white working-class votes. Nor did we expect that Republicans would ever nominate someone like Trump or that such a candidate might attract substantial support from working-class Hispanics, as Trump did in 2020. The erosion Democrats now face in working-class support is not just among whites—it’s across racial and ethnic lines.
As Judis and Teixeira tell the story, two sets of culprits lie behind the Democrats’ economic and cultural missteps. They hold Wall Street and Silicon Valley responsible for the party’s failure to follow through on the populist economics that Carter, Clinton, and Obama at times rhetorically invoked. The true culprit for cultural radicalism, Judis and Teixeira argue, is the Democrats’ “shadow party”—advocacy groups, think tanks, foundations, and other donors as well as liberal media that have pushed the party toward positions that make no sense to working-class voters. Basically, Judis and Teixeira think that neoliberal economics and cultural radicalism make a deadly combination, appealing to an elite but not to the mass of voters. They want Democrats to move left on economics and toward the center on culture to recreate the politics that sustained the New Deal.
I have a lot of sympathy for that general position, but much of Judis and Teixeira’s broad-brush picture leaves me unconvinced. They devote a lot of their book to recounting the history of recent Democratic administrations (the Republicans get no attention), as though Democrats were entirely to blame for all working-class woes. But as the political scientist Larry Bartels shows in Unequal Democracy, middle- and low-income Americans did far better in pretax income growth under Democratic than under Republican administrations from 1948 to 2014, a pattern that Bartels shows still held for the period after the mid-1970s despite lower overall rates of growth. And Democratic tax policies were also far more progressive.
To be sure, Democrats did not do enough to counteract the decline of unions and other sources of rising inequality in market income, and neoliberal trade policies compounded those problems. But, except for Carter, whose presidency was an unmitigated disaster for Democrats’ reputation for economic competence, it is hard to argue that the party’s economic performance objectively drove working-class whites to vote Republican. If the problem was neoliberalism, Republicans could not have been the answer because they were more wholeheartedly devoted to it—that is, until Trump overthrew the Republican establishment and its views on trade and immigration. But now that Republicans have abandoned neoliberal policies in those areas, it has been easier for Democrats under Biden’s leadership to reject neoliberalism on industrial policy, energy, and climate as well as trade—which is why, in their economic-policy chapters, Judis and Teixeira are knocking on an open door.
Judis and Teixeira don’t have a plausible alternative for addressing the political problem that immigration poses.
Race, gender, and immigration—“cultural issues” in this book’s framing—are more plausible explanations for Democrats’ pre-Trump working-class losses. But Judis and Teixeira don’t object to the policies that primarily caused those losses. They approve of the reforms adopted in response to the civil rights, women’s, and gay rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s, and they show no interest in reversing the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Their fire is directed mainly at more recent, radical ideas like critical race theory and policy positions like defunding the police that they point out have little support in public opinion, especially among working-class voters. But, compared to the earlier measures, which reshaped American society, the recent things that trouble them are often only tenuously connected to the Democratic mainstream, symbolic rather than substantive, and without clear electoral impact.
Still, I don’t disagree with Judis and Teixeira that a slogan like “defund the police” was counterproductive or that many progressives’ censorious preoccupations with politically correct language consume energy, mystify and alienate ordinary people, and lead nowhere, least of all to a more just society.
But Judis and Teixeira fail to make relevant distinctions on cultural issues as they do on economic ones. On race, for example, they seem to think that the idea of “systemic” or “structural” racism (they always put those terms in quotation marks) is a radical invention. In fact, the notion that racial inequalities are institutionally reproduced, without necessarily requiring conscious individual racist attitudes, is a standard, useful, and reasonable social-science idea. But they are right to criticize what I would call racial reductionism, the tendency to make racism an all-encompassing explanation and indictment of American society. And they are right to tell progressives to call off the constant accusations of racism and to recognize that white workers have also suffered from deindustrialization and other economic changes that have increased inequality. As an alternative to recent writing about anti-racism, they hold up a worthy model: the sociologist William Julius Wilson, a Black intellectual who sees himself as a social democrat (and who published one of his noteworthy articles developing that position in the first issue of this magazine in 1990).
On each of the other cultural issues they discuss, Judis and Teixeira make the same argument about how Democrats have lost working-class votes. Progressives, they say, have become too “extreme”—too extreme on immigration, too extreme on transgender identity, too extreme (“apocalyptic”) on climate—and that extremism has infected the Democratic Party because of the shadow party’s influence. But whatever you think of transwomen competing in women’s sports, that issue is unlikely to have moved many votes to the Republican column. Similarly, after a year in which worldwide temperatures hit a new peak in human history, I don’t see Democrats’ climate policies, including the idea of a Green New Deal, as a form of extremism dragging down their electoral support (Republicans ought to be more worried). Of the issues that this book raises as instances of “cultural radicalism,” immigration is the only one where, I agree, Democrats are in serious political jeopardy.
CHRISTIAN CHAVEZ/AP PHOTO
Asylum seekers assemble in Mexico, across the border from El Paso, Texas.
Judis and Teixeira, however, don’t have a plausible alternative for addressing the political problem that immigration poses. In their telling, Democrats once had a balanced immigration policy that protected working-class interests, but they abandoned it in favor of a stance that’s chiefly protective of illegal immigrants (the substitution of the term “undocumented” for “illegal” they see as part of the problem). In the early 1990s, a bipartisan commission on immigration chaired by Barbara Jordan, a Black Democratic member of Congress from Texas, included in its recommendations a federal system of employer verification to ensure job applicants were legally eligible to work, along with serious penalties for employers who flouted the law. Such a system could have significantly deterred illegal immigration, but Congress never approved it because of the opposition of both employers and Hispanic groups. The latter feared it would adversely affect their community, which it certainly would have. The Jordan Commission, Judis and Teixeira write, “proved to be the last gasp of liberal bipartisanship and of immigration reform that took the condition of American workers fully into account.” Not only did liberal organizations from the ACLU to the NAACP come out against the kind of restrictionist measures Jordan included in her report; so did the AFL-CIO. Nonetheless, the Jordan Commission is the model to which Judis and Teixeira argue Democrats ought to return for the sake of American workers and their own electoral fortunes.
Two things are wrong with the Jordan Commission model. Its chances of approval today are probably worse than in the 1990s, and Judis and Teixeira’s assumption that illegal immigrants have significantly reduced Americans wages is probably wrong. (See Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan’s terrific recent book, Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success, for a succinct summary of the economic evidence on this question.)
Nonetheless, it is true that many Americans, especially those with a high school education or less, see immigrants as an economic threat and resent public spending on their behalf. Moreover, the current surge of asylum seekers on the southern border has created an immigration issue that is different from the one that the United States faced in the 1990s. The principal source of this new problem is not illegality but the law itself, in this case the 1980 Refugee Act, adopted originally with overwhelming bipartisan support.
If Democrats are to deal with the latest phase of the immigration issue—and this is where I agree with the general thrust of Judis and Teixeira’s argument—they will need to make substantial compromises to limit an influx that, at least in the short run, represents a serious fiscal and political liability, and they are going to have to make that position unambiguously clear in this election year. In the long run, the asylum seekers will contribute greatly to this country as other refugees have, but we need better means of regulating their numbers and ensuring that related public costs do not fall on states and localities already struggling to meet other needs.
Judis and Teixeira may be aiming their book primarily at the “shadow” Democratic Party. They seem to be saying to progressive donors, foundation officers, advocacy groups, and, yes, magazine editors: Stop promoting views that are undermining Democrats’ ability to build cross-racial, working-class support. Stop getting intimidated by your young staff of passionate college graduates. Even if Judis and Teixeira are wrong about much of their indictment of cultural radicalism, the shadow party ought to take seriously their central, cautionary political message: “It’s the working class, stupid.”
