Transcript: John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira

My interview with the authors of Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

2024 is an election year for the United States. And one of the stories so far is the political realignment that we’re continuing to witness — with the working class moving to the right. This is something that is also happening here in Canada. My guests on this week’s program have written an entire book about the phenomenon, and what it might mean for the future of politics.

John B. Judis is editor-at-large at Talking Points Memo, a former senior writer at The National Journal, and a former senior editor at The New Republic.

Ruy Teixeira is a contributing columnist at The Washington Post, a cofounder and politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter on Substack, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Their new book is Where have all the Democrats gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can stream the interview for free here.

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TH: John, Ruy. Welcome to Lean Out.

JJ: I'm glad to be here.

RT: Delighted to be here. 

TH: Thanks for making the time to come on today. I found your book fascinating and it really helped me to understand some of the political currents in my own country, which have become a little extreme. But I want to start today with the 2016 election. The dominant narrative in the American media was that Trump won the working class, white vote by appealing to racism. Why is that not an adequate explanation for what happened?

JJ: Well, there were a few other issues besides racism. The country was still suffering from the Great Recession and from losing a lot of its industry to China. If you look at Trump's vote, where he won swing states — states like North Carolina with its furniture industry, the Midwest, which we know has auto, rubber, tires, all those other industries — those were places where Americans have lost a lot of industrial jobs. And there's a considerable correlation between that and Trump's vote. 

When you actually went to the Trump rallies, which I did, the first thing he talked about was often corporations leaving the country and leaving workers in the lurch. He would talk about Nabisco Oreo cookies leaving Chicago, Carrier leaving Indiana. So that was a big part of his appeal. But a lot of the mainstream media, so-called, just missed it and focused entirely on race and immigration. Immigration, again, was a big part of his appeal — no question about that. But that also had a big economic, as well as social, dimension.

RT: Trump's genius was recognizing that the Republican party base was shifting. It was increasingly dependent upon working class voters. These working class voters were increasingly unhappy, not just with democratic elites, but with Republican elites. So he was able to garner the nomination by basically running against the elites of the country as a whole, and how the rest of the Republicans were in bed with this. “You're just being left behind. Nobody cares about you anymore. I care about you.” 

It turns out he could run that same playbook against the Democrats quite effectively, especially someone like Hillary Clinton. A lot of these people in these left behind areas did in fact feel — and know — that they were being left behind. They weren't high on the list of things to care about. As John is pointing out, Trump ran on trade, he ran on runaway shops, he ran on immigration. He ran on a lot of policy issues that were missed by the mainstream press. Because all they could hear was he doesn't like black and brown people. He's a racist. He's just a horrible, horrible person. 

And that's really what Hillary ran on. That's what 90% of her ads were about. Whereas Trump's ads were about these broad policy issues. So, it really is quite extraordinary, the level at which this was not understood by people who are the shepherds of the conventional wisdom in America, and who necessarily failed after his election to understand what hit them. As far as they were concerned, it was this bizarre outpouring of the deplorables against all that is good and right with the world.

TH: Your previous book together, The Emerging Democratic Majority, argued that by uniting professionals and single women and minorities, the party would enjoy an advantage, possibly over several decades. But in this book, you write about the significance of what you call the Great Divide in America. What is that — and when did you first become aware of it?

JJ: I think we became aware of it sometime around 2010, after being lauded for anticipating the Democratic majority. The Democrats lost their majority in the house in the 2010 elections, and there was a dramatic repudiation. And, again, that election reflected not just college educated, non-college educated — but a kind of divide in the country between those areas. The great metro areas that depended upon high-tech and the information economy and on universities. Professionals were a dominant part again of its culture. And then a small town, mid-size town America, which was turning against the Democrats.

Believe it or not, rural America, used to be the heartland of the Democratic Party. And that had started going south a little before that. In the 2010 election and beyond, you saw these towns like Erie, Pennsylvania, and Youngstown, Ohio — those had been very loyal Democratic communities, but were industrial — leaving the party and becoming Republican. So that was the Great Divide that we saw.

RT: In some ways, this is precisely what we worried about in The Emerging Democratic Majority, but nobody paid attention to it. We argued that yes, the tectonic plates of American politics were shifting in some important ways that would benefit the Democrats. These demographic, economic, ideological changes. You could see the outlines of a solid Democratic majority. But we emphasized that if you look at the trends among the white working class in particular — which still loomed very large in the country, despite being a declining demographic — they had not been favourable to the Democrats because of their reflection of that Great Divide we're talking about. Which goes back to the 70s and 80s, when geographical and economic divides start opening up between the working class and the more privileged and more educated areas of the country. We said, “This majority could work and we think it has an excellent chance. However, Democrats need to be very careful to maintain a solid minority share of the white working class.” 40% overall, maybe more like 45% in the industrial Midwest states, where the weight of these voters is much larger. And that if they didn't do that, that could undercut the whole political arithmetic of this emerging coalition.

But it was remarkable how quickly that was forgotten. As John was pointing out, in 2008, while we were hailed as seers, everybody ignored the fact that Obama actually did relatively well among white working class voters. And people immediately forgot it. In 2010, they get sandbagged with this sharp move, especially among white working class voters, away from the Democrats. 2014, somewhat similar. And then 2016, of course, history was made. So, we were very clear, I think, that Great Divide potentially could bite Democrats in ways that they were not going to be happy about if they didn't pay careful attention to it.

Back to your question about the 2016 election. What's remarkable about it, in some ways, is that Democrats completely forgot what country they're really living in. There is a Great Divide. There are a lot of people out there who don't like Democrats and don't like the way the country has evolved economically. They don't like elites, they don't like professionals. They think they're being looked down upon. And if they were appealed to directly, as someone like Trump did, that really undercuts the Democrats. Now we see — and maybe this is something we'll get into — that non-white working class voters are starting to move toward the Republicans, which really calls into question this sort of Democratic model. I think a lot of them were willing to interpret the 2016 election and the trends among the white working class as just indicating racism and xenophobia. But when you have Hispanic and Black working class voters starting to get less enthusiastic about your party, that does raise some questions about whether this truly is all about racism. Maybe it's a lot more complicated than that.

TH: I thought it was really interesting, when you were writing about Obama, that you noted that during his presidency, income inequality reached heights not seen since 1928, and there was a net loss of 300,000 manufacturing jobs. In terms of the working class vote — this is a sizable, important part of the electorate — if that working class vote rejects neoliberal economics and cultural radicalism, how exactly is it that the Democrats have come to embrace this exact combination as their strategy?

JJ: I think that a lot of it has to do with the decline of the labour movement in the United States, which you haven't suffered from to the same degree that we have. I mean, the private sector workers now are, what, five or six % unionized?

RT: Six.

JJ: In the 1950s, 1960s, about a third of working class families were union members. The labour movement gave the Democrats a social and political base that it just doesn't have anymore. As it began to deteriorate in the 70s and 80s, the Democrats slowly but surely lost not just voters, they also lost an element within their governing coalition that kept the party in line on issues like taxes, trade, and regulation. In the absence of that, you had — let's say in the Clinton administration, it starts in 1992, where the key person becomes Bob Rubin, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Nothing against him personally, but politically he was a classic neoliberal: free trade, relatively open borders on immigration, wishy-washy on financial regulation, but big on welfare and things like that. On social issues. So, the Rubin politics became the Democratic politics, and labour was no longer strong enough to challenge it within the ranks of the party. So, that was, I think, the key development.

RT: And of course, when Obama comes into office in 2008, 2009, who shows up again? The Rubinomics crowd: Timothy Geithner is Secretary of Treasury, and so on. It's the same old, same old. So, even though it was touted as the great hope and change kind of election — where everything was going to completely change — in fact, in some important ways, things didn't change at all.

Another thing about the Democrats losing their anchor in the working class, particularly the union movement, is that there's a cultural element to it as well. It becomes easier for the Democrats to get enthralled by the latest culturally radical trends among their young, professional and college-educated base — the rhetoric and issues that are of concern to these folks —because they do have much less of an anchor in the working class.

The union movement has very little influence on the policymaking apparatus and the culture of the Democratic party. So, you have a simultaneous move over time — and though that may be changing now somewhat — toward this neoliberalism. At the same time as you lose your cultural anchor in the working class. And then it becomes much easier for Democrats to get weirdly obsessed with issues around race and gender, immigration, crime. All these strange positions that Democrats 20 years before wouldn't have dreamed of taking, now become relatively easy for the Democrats to glom onto. By doing so, their culture becomes more divorced from your average working class voter — union or non-union. I think that's a lot what's happened.

TH: You write about this “shadow party” of the Democrats, and how it pushes the party to more extreme positions. Tell us a little bit about that — and why you include The New York Times in that shadow party.

RT: Oh, okay. John, hit them. [Laughs]