Ruy Teixeira’s Warning to the Democrats
Ruy Teixeira’s Warning to the Democrats
Plus: Lifting the rock on the Gutter Right.
Catching up on a busy morning:
Our good friend MBS joined with Putin to shiv the U.S. on oil production.
“Aaron Judge, who hit his historic 62nd home run Tuesday night, is now the rightful record-holder of the single-season record….”
“Oath Keepers trial to resume with testimony from fresh witnesses.”
“After Mar-a-Lago Search, Talk of ‘Civil War’ Is Flaring Online.”
“A majority of GOP nominees — 299 in all — deny the 2020 election results.”
Your ghastly story of the day: “Gunman attacks day-care center in Thailand, killing more than 30, including 22 children.”
The Herschel hits keep on coming: “She Had an Abortion With Herschel Walker. She Also Had a Child With Him.”
But the GOP continues to rally around him.
Happy Thursday!
Ruy’s Tough Love
“To even get in the door with many working class and rural voters and make their pitch,” writes Ruy Teixeira, “Democrats need to convince these voters that they are not looked down on, their concerns are taken seriously, and their views on culturally-freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened. With today’s Democratic party, unfortunately, that is difficult. Resistance is stiff to any compromise that might involve moving to the center on such issues.”
Resistance? You don’t know the half of it.
ICYMI: Ruy, who has spent decades as a progressive analyst, joined me on Wednesday’s podcast to talk about his recent articles about the Democrats’ challenges on crime, culture, immigration, economics, and patriotism.
It’s great stuff, and it’s very much worth your time. (And also quite timely given today’s headlines: “Democrats Worry as G.O.P. Attack Ads Take a Toll in Wisconsin.” And: “In key battlegrounds, GOP onslaught of crime ads tightens Senate races.”)
You can listen to our whole conversation here . . . or, if you are a Bulwark+ member, you can listen to the ad-free version here.
Not surprisingly, not everyone is in the mood for this kind of tough love right now. Here’s a comment from one Bulwark+ listener:
We are where we are now - it's a month til the midterms. So:
1. STFU
2. Make the best of the situation with the candidates we have to defeat the lunatic GOP slate and save our democracy from these racist ass terrorists.
As much as I appreciate the sentiment, I’m afraid there will not be any shutting up anytime soon.
Some clarification also seems to be in order: It’s not our role to be cheerleaders or flacks; others can do that. Our job is to tell you the truth and give our best analysis, especially if we think we might be sailing at flank speed into an iceberg. With all due respect, if you want a safe space, or a rah-rah for our side site, you really ought to look elsewhere.
And here’s the thing about Ruy’s tough love: he’s saying these things because, unlike too many of his fellow Democrats, he actually does think we face an existential crisis . . . and he is trying to explain how not to lose to what our listener calls “these racist ass terrorists.”
That’s what makes Ruy’s warnings so important — and urgent. If you haven’t read his stuff, his latest piece is a good place to start. His advice: “Embrace patriotism and don’t apologize for it.”
That’s the creed of ordinary Americans even if many activist Democrats reject it. Illustrating this, a survey project by the More in Common group was able to separate out a group they termed "progressive activists" who were 8 percent of the population (but punch far above their weight in the Democratic party) and are described as "deeply concerned with issues concerning equity, fairness, and America's direction today. They tend to be more secular, cosmopolitan, and highly engaged with social media".
These progressive activists' attitude toward their own country departs greatly from not just that of average Americans but from pretty much any other group you might care to name, including average nonwhite Americans. Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans, in fact, are highly likely to be proud to be Americans and highly likely to say they would still choose to live in America if they could choose to live anywhere in the world. In contrast, progressive activists are loathe to express these sentiments. For example, just 34 percent of progressive activists say they are “proud to be American” compared to 62 percent of Asians, 70 percent of blacks, and 76 percent of Hispanics.
Here’s some more tough love from Ruy:
The Median Voter Doesn’t Want a Green New Deal: Try an Abundance Agenda Instead
Time for the Democrats’ Chesa Boudin Moment! If Not Now, When? If Not Him, Who?
Working Class and Hispanic Voters Are Losing Interest in the Party of Abortion, Gun Control and the January 6th Hearings: White College-Educated Voters, On the Other Hand, Are On Board
The Democrats’ Hispanic Voter Problem: It's Not As Bad As You Think—It’s Worse
The Fox News Fallacy; It’s Blinding the Democrats to Real Problems
The Democrats’ Common Sense Problem: Voters Think They’ve Abandoned It
The Bankruptcy of the Democratic Party Left: You’d Think They’d Get Tired of Losing
Democrats Misunderstand the Suburban Vote: And Why It’s Not Likely to Save Them in 2022
The Democrats’ Progressive Organization Problem: They’re an Albatross Around the Party’s Neck
How Not to Build a Coalition: The Left’s Theory of the Case Falls Apart
The Democrats’ Shifting CoalitionUnlike Trump, They Love the Highly Educated
Exit take: The tough love will continue until morale improves.
Lifting Up the Rock on the Gutter Right
This piece by David French — in which he takes on “Lie after lie after lie” — is a cri de cœur, but also immensely important.
He writes about the “cruelty and slander and how those dark sins are wielded as weapons of political and cultural warfare in the worst corners of the online right.”
He tells his own story about the latest troll attack, but makes a much larger point.
“While politics has never been a gentle pursuit, the advent of Trumpism and the Trumpist ethos has spawned a host of popular voices who embrace lies as a tactic and character assassination as an objective.”
Consider my last few days as a case study. It all started, as so many of these online mobbings do, with a lie. A person who works for The Blaze and who trolls me constantly accused me of calling management to complain about his tweets. I did no such thing. The claim is completely false, and I told him so. And that, I thought, was that.
But no. Instead, the gutter right picked up the lie, repeated it, amplified the falsehood, and then added more lies, and personal attacks on French and his wife. For much of the right, this is the new normal.
Gutter right trolls lied that I called Blaze management. Gutter right trolls lied that I tried to get Kelly fired. Kelly misrepresented my wife’s age at the time of her abuse (and refused to apologize or delete her tweet after she was corrected). All of this, of course, has been accompanied by an online campaign of vicious insults directed at me and my wife.
French also explains why he writes about the trolls, as opposed to ignoring them:
I know there are readers who are yelling at their screens, “Why do you respond to this, David? You’re giving them oxygen!” And I agree with you, mostly. I rarely respond to online lies and online attacks. There are right-wing publications that have “David French” tags that link to articles that are chock-full of vitriol. They’re often written for the purpose of goading me into a response. I rarely give them what they want.
But why is the answer “rarely” rather than never? For the simple reason that a sufficient number of attacks made over a sufficient span of time can crush your reputation if there’s no response…
And he ends with this:
[This] is not the time to give in. This is not the time to shrink back, join the “exhausted majority,” and cede the public square to America’s worst voices. Instead it’s vitally important for Americans—in public and in private—to live the political values they seek to advance. It’s not enough to wish for a change in American culture. It’s important to model the change, as well as imperfect people can.
To paraphrase Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we can resolve to live our lives with integrity. The lies may come into the world, they may even triumph. But not through us.
Damn straight.
Quick Hits
1. Apathy Keeps Russia’s Death Cult Alive
Some Russians embrace their country’s nihilism, writes Natalia Antonova in today’s Bulwark. Others help maintain it through their resignation and indifference.
“Sell your soul, and I’ll take care of you” is the classic devil’s bargain, and in the end he always collects what he’s purchased. The Russian imperial mindset, which dictates that anyone can be bought, terrorized into submission, or simply destroyed, does not account for that little detail. A heavily sanctioned and isolated Russia is now trying to extract from its citizens the ultimate price, life and limb, in exchange for a vague sense of national pride and the chance for the country’s top bureaucrats to continue to live lavishly.
With each passing day, Russians who accept the bargain see fewer and fewer benefits in return. That’s because “Die for our money” has always been the real demand of the Putin regime, spelled out in the fine print of Putin’s social contract with his citizens but becoming harder and harder to miss. It has manifested itself in the way the country has been run, with a bloated state apparatus, mass corruption, astronomical inequality, sadistic disdain for human dignity, an HIV epidemic, a healthcare system that shrugs at pain, and so on. With the failed invasion of Ukraine, the demand to lie down and die has simply become more obvious.
2. Merging Politics and Celebrity is Bad for Democracy
Ted Johnson in today’s Bulwark:
[C]hasing fame for the sake of power is corrosive of our system of democracy. Rather than leveraging a celebrity turn to improve one’s ability to shape the governing process and its outcomes, for too many fame becomes an end in itself. And given our politics-as-entertainment media landscape, elected office—increasingly the nation’s brightest and choicest stage—is considered a means of furthering one’s fame.
Cheap Shots
I’ve been super angry about this podcast since I listened to it which led to more than a few snarky remarks. I don’t often have such a visceral reaction to positions I disagree with so I wondered if it really was warranted. But after some careful consider, while I do regret the language and style of my criticism, I don’t regret the content. I thought about Charlie’s rebuttal to the “resistance” of the “tough love”:
“And here’s the thing about Ruy’s tough love: he’s saying these things because, unlike too many of his fellow Democrats, he actually does think we face an existential crisis… and he is trying to explain how not to lose to what our listener calls “these racist ass terrorists.”
Firstly, I can think of almost no Democrats who *don’t* think we are facing an existential crisis. But after listening to Sarah and JVL this morning, I realized it was the *second* part of that statement that I not only disagreed with but this is actively dangerous. Why? Because for several decades now, the Republican Party has made small Faustian bargains and compromised on some of their principles because it was becoming demographically more difficult for them *to win* and in the end, they reasoned that if they didn’t win, then it would be *game over*. They started small - inserting little things in their rhetoric and ads to appease the racists and the hardline religious types. It was no big deal right? I mean the politicians themselves didn’t hold those views and wouldn’t enact legislation that was overtly nativist or stripped certain people of their rights. So it was a win-win situation right? Wrong. Trump did not come out of nowhere because of some massive and mysterious voter realignment. He was a very predictable result of what happens when you start down a road of compromising principles in order to appease voters. In the beginning, it seems worth it - because you end up winning - lots and lots of people will vote for you and all you need to do is throw them a crumb every so often. But then you find that the people are starting to demand more than crumbs - know they want a 7 course meal and then eventually you reach a point where they threaten to eat *you* unless you do what they say. That’s what happened to the Republican Party. It was eaten alive by the fringe racists, bigots, homophobes, and religious nut jobs that it had been sustaining for all these years. Now they’re in charge.
And what is Ruy’s stated goal? The purpose of his “tough love”? To help Democrats understand what they need to do to *win* (ie appeal to more voters by compromising their principles). Of course he doesn’t say it exactly like that - but make no mistake - that’s what he means. Would his advice actually help Democrats win in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and make greater in-roads with “rural working class voters”? Quite possibly it would. But at what cost?
To put this is more concrete terms, imagine a hypothetical scenario where Ruy was advising Liz Cheney’s campaign. I imagine he might say something like: “It would really help if you stopped focusing so much on the January 6th stuff and walked back some of the impeachment talk. A majority of Wyoming voters feel like the election was stolen, so maybe try and understand where they might be coming from. You need to convince these voters that they are not looked down on, their concerns are taken seriously, and their views on [election fraud] will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened…Your emphasis on the rule of law, Presidential responsibility, fidelity to the Constitution and preserving our democratic [institutions] while catnip to some socially liberal, educated voters, leaves many [rural working class Wyomings] cold. These issues are just not salient for them in the way they are for college-educated voters. Their concerns are more mundane and economically-driven. So maybe just focus on “Kitchen Table” issues like inflation and gas prices”
I could go on…but you get the picture. Would this advice have given Liz Cheney a better chance of winning the election? Almost certainly. Should she then have followed such advice? You may disagree, but I think she made the right call by trying to convince voters that the issues she was concerned about were salient to them rather than deceiving her constituency (and possibly herself) by pretending that Trump was not a greater existential threat than gas prices or immigrants. And although she lost, I think her refusal to compromise was important and history will treat her more favorably than her colleagues.
Look, I get the importance of winning. I am frankly terrified of losing control of Congress and the consequences of someone like DeSantis in the White House (despite the voters in the focus groups think - I don’t think a Trump nominee would win because Biden will not run again if he thinks he can’t win. And I believe Queen Liz when she says we shouldn’t underestimate her ability to complete her mission of keeping Trump out of office)
Last point: Mitt Romney was probably the last decent high ranking Republican candidate in an election. He lost and I can imagine that it was hard for Republicans…but does any *real* Republican really believe that the state of the Republican party and the country in general were worse after his loss than they were after Trump’s victory? Because it feels like Ruy and Charlie don’t quite understand the significance of that point. Winning isn’t everything.
Republicans thought it was and look where it got them. Hilary’s loss to such an egregiously unfit person, on the other hand, didn’t destroy the Democratic Party - it strengthened their resolve and we won the house in 2018 and won back the Presidency and the senate in 2020.
If we lose in 2024, so be it. But if we win by the methods that Ruy prescribes and start down the same dangerous path as the Republicans, then God help us all.
Exit take: you improve morale by remembering Liz and Romney and Hilary and letting people know that losing an election is not the end of the world but listening to people like Ruy and compromising principles to appease a racist, uneducated mob, that might well get you there.
How do you compromise with people that do not have a factual basis for their beliefs? Every goddamn issue the right wingers are passionate about is based in a lie or failed policy. Border crisis? Lie. Mostly the same self inflicted wound from 30 years of inattention or unseriousness of republicans. Litter boxes in schools? Lie. Trickle down? Failure. Tax cuts create jobs? Failure. Activist judges? Lie. That you can bargain better with a multinational corporation alone than with your union? Lie. Crime is out of control? Lie.
It’s almost like there is a small group of people that make a metric shit ton of money (industry term) lying to people. Disabusing people of their poor epistemologies takes more than just making nice with them, they actually have to embrace objective truth.