For most Democrats, Trump’s win was a shock. For Ruy Teixeira, it was unsurprising.
A political scientist and lifelong Democrat, Ruy has for years now been warning that the party was prioritizing ideological purity over popular appeal.
His 2023 book with John Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, could have been a wake-up call for the party. One wonders how the election might have gone if the Harris campaign had read it carefully.
Ruy’s writing has been prophetic on the exact questions Democrats are grappling with as they try to find their way out of the political wilderness. Questions like: Why did so many working-class Americans abandon the party? What happened to the promise of a multiracial Democratic majority? And how, once Democrats have picked themselves up and dusted themselves off, should they go about putting together a winning coalition again?
These questions are set to be a major theme of our politics in 2025 and beyond, and we can think of no better guide than the man who saw so much of it coming.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that Ruy is joining The Free Press as a Contributing Writer.
Every other week or so, you can find Ruy right here, helping us make sense of the future of the left and the Democratic Party, as they try to figure out how to handle a second Trump term—and how to win in 2028.
In his first column as a contributing writer, Ruy argues that Democrats are in denial about why they lost the election. — The Editors
In the wake of the Democrats’ drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the GOP, you’d assume the party would be all-in on a fundamental rethink, starting with some serious soul-searching on how the party came to be so out of sync with the majority of America on key cultural questions.
Questions like: Is America a “white supremacist” society? Is it racist to question levels of immigration? Are citing one’s personal pronouns necessary? Is anyone who questions the differences between trans women from biological women a bigot who should be expunged from polite society? For each of these questions, the answer for the overwhelming majority of Americans is an obvious no. But in elite Democratic circles, it’s a different story. For a party pondering its unpopularity, you might think that this gap would be a good place to start.
Well, if the six weeks since the election is anything to go by, you’d be wrong. Instead, much of the party is maneuvering to change as little as possible on the cultural front. Why? Because many of today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues to be real issues. Instead, they see them as fictions, distractions, or expressions of bigotry that are to be opposed, not indulged.