Ruy Teixeira on What the Liberal Patriot Closure Says About the Center Left

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk Episode: Ruy Teixeira on What the Liberal Patriot Closure Says About the Center Left
Date: April 7, 2026

---

Overview

In this episode, Yascha Mounk sits down with Ruy Teixeira, co-founder of the now-defunct Liberal Patriot and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. They dissect the closure of Liberal Patriot, delve into the troubles plaguing the Democratic Party, and discuss why merely riding on the unpopularity of Donald Trump is a risky and potentially perilous strategy. The conversation explores ideological shifts on the center left, the failures to adapt to changing voter bases, and the kinds of reforms necessary for sustained democratic renewal in America.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Origins and Mission of Liberal Patriot

[03:20–05:04]

• Liberal Patriot was founded about five years ago by former Center for American Progress (CAP) staff who were alarmed by the Democratic Party’s leftward shift, especially culturally.
• Their approach: “Pro-worker, pro-family, pro-America”; mixing social democratic economics with cultural moderation.
• It aimed to push the Democratic Party to broaden appeal, especially among working-class voters.

2. Evolution and Radicalization at the Center for American Progress

[05:04–08:54]

• CAP, initially center-left, moved sharply left on cultural issues post-Obama, reflecting broader party trends.
• Teixeira recalls deepening intolerance, with issues like racial preferences becoming flashpoints.
• The party misattributed Trump’s 2016 victory solely to racism/xenophobia, failing to address economic discontent or estrangement of the white working class.

3. Why Liberal Patriot Split from CAP

[09:13–11:45]

• After repeatedly warning about weakening white working-class support, Teixeira was frustrated at being ignored by party elites.
• 2016 was a turning point: “They’re consigning all these voters to the eighth circle of hell. I mean, how are you going to win people over on that basis?” (Teixeira, [11:45])
• The post-2020 George Floyd era intensified the Democratic Party’s “great awokening,” alienating working-class voters of all backgrounds.

4. The Depth of the Democratic Party's Problems

[15:42–19:10]

• Mounk challenges: Have the worst excesses (cancel culture, etc.) subsided?
• Teixeira concedes some toning down, but asserts: “People who are very culturally liberal, the radical, still really have control of the commanding heights of cultural production.” ([19:10])
• The party’s national image remains “pretty terrible” among working-class and rural voters despite tactical policy shifts.

5. The Two-Party Trap and Electoral Math

[21:37–25:57]

• U.S. two-party system allows unpopular parties to win by default.
• Mounk: “If one party is really unpopular, it allows the other party to be pretty damn screwed up and do relatively better.” ([21:37])
• Both agree: Democrats may win short-term, especially midterms (2026) and possibly in 2028, but risk a Keir Starmer–type backlash due to lack of vision—"they’ll become unpopular, both because they’ll overreach and because they haven’t actually developed a substantive vision..." ([29:07])

6. Policy and Cultural Blind Spots

[30:43–37:45]

• DEI and Racial Preferences: Teixeira criticizes Democrats for promoting group outcomes over equal opportunity, ignoring majority preferences for meritocracy.
  • “People should be judged on the basis of merit... Democrats, by... outright opposing the idea of merit based rewards... have actually gone far out of the mainstream.” ([30:43])
• Immigration: Once pragmatically pro-border, the party is now perceived as “quasi open borders.”
  • “It was not popular to have this kind of quasi open borders...” ([32:45])
• Trans Issues: Rapid ascendance of “trans rights as the civil rights issue of our time” seen as radical, often enforced by party orthodoxy.
  • “It’s still very hard to dissent from the so called trans rights agenda up to and including gender affirming care for minors...” ([36:43])

7. The Electoral Consequences of Cultural Radicalism

[37:45–44:58]

• Moderates dodge hard issues in primaries for fear of blowback; only at the presidential level is there potential for “a lane for normie Democrats.”
• “The moderates... bow out of a discussion... [they] feel completely boxed in.” (Mounk, [37:45])
• Teixeira: “What’s really needed is a Sister Souljah moment...” ([39:50])—an unapologetic, high-profile break with party activists’ orthodoxy.

8. Demographic and Coalition Dynamics

[45:52–52:26]

• Democrats now resemble the “Bob Dole coalition”: the party of educated, affluent professionals, losing touch with the working class (of all races).
• To reverse this, Democrats must endure flak and actively court estranged groups through policy and image changes—not just focus on “affordability” slogans.
  • “If you want to reach the working class... you have to set your cap to do that, be willing to take some flack, have some Sister Souljah moments...” ([51:33])
• Merely outlasting Republican unpopularity is a “delusional” long-term strategy.

---

Notable Quotes

• “It's like political malpractice that they won't do it.” — Ruy Teixeira, [00:00]
• “This is not going to end well. Bad things will happen.” — Ruy Teixeira, [12:53]
• “The party line now... is shut up and pivot. Don't talk about what your positions are on unpopular issues.” — Ruy Teixeira, [20:43]
• “You don't want to just alternate with right populists for another 20 years or so. You want to actually... have a stable coalition that can govern effectively...” — Ruy Teixeira, [26:46]
• “People who are very culturally liberal, the radical, still really have control of the commanding heights of cultural production.” — Ruy Teixeira, [19:10]
• “It shouldn’t be that hard to... develop a political program and an image that would actually be attractive to, like, 54% of the American voters.” — Ruy Teixeira, [00:00]

---

Important Segment Timestamps

| Timestamp | Topic | | --- | --- | | [03:20] | Origins of the Liberal Patriot | | [05:04] | CAP’s change and cultural radicalization | | [09:13] | Motivations for breaking from CAP | | [15:42] | Cancel culture, public opinion, and party image | | [21:37] | The two-party system’s implications | | [30:43] | Policy blind spots—DEI, immigration, trans issues | | [39:50] | Need for a ‘Sister Souljah’ moment | | [45:52] | ‘Bob Dole coalition’ demographic shift | | [51:33] | Roadmap for Democratic recalibration |

---

Tone & Language

• Candid, analytical, occasionally frustrated.
• Both speakers show a mix of exasperation with party orthodoxy and clear-eyed realism about electoral constraints.

---

Memorable Moments

• Mounk and Teixeira’s mutual frustration at the “delusional” belief that the Democrats can simply win as the lesser evil.
• Laughter over betting markets (Rahm Emanuel as a “cheap buy” for President; [45:40]).
• Candid acknowledgment that Democrats are “boxed in” on cultural issues at lower electoral levels but might find space at the presidential level ([42:41]).

---

Conclusion

Teixeira and Mounk argue that Liberal Patriot’s closure is a microcosm of struggles facing the Democratic center left: pressures for conformity, donor-driven orthodoxies, and a stubborn refusal to adapt on critical cultural and demographic fronts. Without bold course corrections and a willingness to brave activist anger on divisive issues, they warn, Democrats risk future electoral boomerangs and will fail to forge a sustainable, moderate governing coalition capable of keeping authoritarian populism at bay.

Transcript

[Rui Teixeira]

It shouldn't be that hard to, like, develop a political program and an image that would actually be attractive to, like, 54% of the American voters. I mean, it's just. It's like political malpractice that they won't do it. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

[Yasha Mounk]

A few days ago, I opened my email and got a sad piece of news, which is that one of my favorite publications, Liberal Patriot, is closing down. The Liberal Patriot is, in key ways different from Persuasion. At Persuasion, we think of ourselves as philosophically liberal, standing up for values like free speech, irrespective of a partisan valence. And we have a lot of essays about philosophy and other kinds of issues. The Liberal Patriot, in a way, was the loyal opposition within the Democratic Party. It saw its missions explicitly as getting the Democratic Party to reform itself to appeal to a broader section of the electorate. And it tended to focus on questions of public policy a little bit more narrowly. But we are absolutely kindred publications trying to defend democratic values and recognizing a lot of establishment institutions need to reform themselves in order to do that. So I was very saddened to read that the Liberal Patriot got strong pressure from its donor to stay within an ideological orthodoxy and despite being a small organization, struggled to expand its funding. Well, to talk about what the Liberal Patriot accomplished and why it had to close down, and more importantly, to talk about the state of the Democratic Party and why it is great danger to the party to think that it can simply write the coattails of Donald Trump's unpopularity to actually recapture power and rid America of the threat posed by populism. I invited on Rui Teixera. Rui is, of course, a former podcast guest. I think this is his third appearance on the podcast. He is one of the co founders of of the Liberal Patriot, as well as a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. And he is the author of many influential books, including with John Judas of the Emerging Democratic Majority. Rutixera, welcome back to the podcast.

[Rui Teixeira]

Hey, delighted to be here. I think this could be the third time I've been on the Good Fight. Is that right?

[Yasha Mounk]

I think you're officially a regular.

[Rui Teixeira]

I'm a regular.

[Yasha Mounk]

Well, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. Though I have to say that I would like to talk to you under more pleasant circumstances. You are one of the co founders of the Liberal Patriot, which I have been reading religiously for the last five years, and I'm sure that many of my listeners are well acquainted with the Liberal Patriot, and like many of you readers, I was shocked to learn a few days ago that you are closing down the shop. Tell listeners who don't know what the Liberal Patriot is a little bit about the publication. And why did you sadden our weekends with this news?

[Rui Teixeira]

Right. Well, it started about five years ago. Yasha was started by a group of people who either left or in the process of leaving the center for American Progress, who were like pretty worried about the state of the Democratic Party, that they didn't seem to be absorbing the lessons they should from the rise of Trump and right populism and some of the other ways politics had evolved in the country and the weakening they sustained among working class voters, moving to the left pretty severely in cultural issues and a lot of other things. So we were just disquieted about that. And we thought we'd start a substack where we put forward a different philosophy and a different approach and had a no holds barred attitude toward the problems of the Democratic Party. Sometimes we summed it up as pro worker, pro family, pro America. Sometimes we looked at as a combination of, I don't know, social Democratic economics and cultural moderation. But it was certainly different than the mainstream of the Democratic Party and where it was going. And given that we started this five years ago, as you can sort of figure out from the math, this was sort of right as Biden was coming into office and right on the heels of the great awokening. Well, the crest of the Great Awokening in 2020, the George Floyd summer and all that, which we as a longtime observer of Democratic politics and someone who was actually hanging out at the center for American Progress at the time, it's like, what hell is going on? I mean, this is crazy. I couldn't believe the things people were saying and causes they were taking up and the intolerance and cancel culture type attitude toward anyone with a different point of view. So that was all take, take us

[Yasha Mounk]

back to that moment a little bit. We don't need to go through all of the summer of 2020 and so on. But the center for American Progress was founded by the center left right. It was founded, I believe, by the kind of Clintonite faction within the Democratic Party. It was very kind of center left establishment think tank was dominant in the 2000 and tens. How did CAP evolve in the years before your departure?

[Rui Teixeira]

Well, I think that if you're a careful observer of it, as I was, I think when it started out, it really was a more conventional center left think tank and they were pretty focused on just because it started in 2003, getting rid of the Bushies and sort of managing to move the Democratic Party back into power and sort of not really pushing the envelope on cultural issues necessarily. But that really changed over time. I mean, the two things the center did that were most well known to begin with was they laid some of the basis for Obamacare and they basically did a lot of stuff around the Iraq War and how we needed to get out of it. So it was like pretty unradical kind of stuff, really. But as time went on and as the Obama administration came into office and went through its second term, you could see that the nature of the party was starting to change. And CAP fully reflected that. People really were moving to the left on a lot of cultural and other issues. They really were becoming more intolerant of the other side. I mean, Black Lives matter started in 2013. I mean, we may decrepit in 2020, but. But those kinds of ideas were already out there and they really were infecting the minds, as it were, of people in the Democratic Party. Infrastructure, the think tanks, foundations, the arts, world, legacy media, you name it. So you could already see the hints of it evolving. And again, as someone who has a more small c conservative attitude toward cultural issues in the sense of, look, we're for equality, we're for anti discrimination, where for tolerance, for things like that. But we're not really on board with a lot of this more radical stuff. I mean, that's just going to scare off a lot of voters. And besides, what the hell is progressive about racial preferences, for example? But that became a harder and harder thing to sustain at a place like cap and indeed within the center left in general. And I think things really have a phase change in a sense after 2016, because Trump wins, as we all remember, and people could not process it on the center left, in my opinion, that was very true. At cap, all they could think of was that this was a result of racism, xenophobia, and all the other things that deplorables of our nation all believe in, and that Trump managed to mobilize, and that was really all there was to it. And we must resist, resist, resist. And as someone who followed American electoral politics for a long time, I just didn't think that was an adequate understanding of why the Democrats did lose, why working class voters deserted them so severely, particularly in the Midwest. And I never cease to be amazed that for 40 years Democrats have been talking about the depredations of neoliberal economics. And here was, in a sense, at least partly a revolt against neoliberal economics, on trade, on manufacturing, a lot of other things and a lot of left behind communities that were not too happy with the way the country was going. And all they could think of was how awful these people were. I mean, just like beyond the pale. And of course, things just got worse over the course of the first Trump administration, 2018.

[Yasha Mounk]

So that started to happen in 2016, 2017. Obviously, you, like I say fast change,

[Rui Teixeira]

I think it really intensifies. And then by the time you get to, you know, the lead up to the 2020 election and the George Floyd summer, I mean, that's when things really got out of control. And you just, you saw this incredible group think on a lot of these cultural issues.

[Yasha Mounk]

So for those four years, you kind of are trying to stay a loyal soldier of the center left. You stay within cap. You're trying to push the Democratic Party to address some of these issues, both because you disagree with some of the policy positions we're embracing, but more broadly because you think that this kind of stuff is going to do some elections, that it's not what is needed in order to defeat people like Donald Trump. What finally pushed you and some of your co conspirators available Patriot, to say, you know what, in order to actually push the Democratic Party to reform in these kinds of ways, we have to leave cap. We have to start this new publication. And what were your hopes for what this publication would accomplish in 2020?

[Rui Teixeira]

Well, it's true, while you say, Yasha, that for years I was kind of more in the loyal soldier position, I mean, I was always kind of tugging at people's sleeve at CAP and saying, well, don't forget about the white working class. Don't forget we're really doing pretty badly among this demographic. They're still pretty big. They don't get what they don't really think the Democrats are their party. And this could really hurt us. So 2016.

[Yasha Mounk]

And by the way, for people who don't know a backstory and who haven't listened to the excellent back episodes with you on the good fight or read the work you published In, I believe, 2003 or 4, you had some authority on this because you are one of the people who coined the concept of the emerging Democratic majority, which emphasized that Democrats could build on the diversification of the United States, that they were doing very well among knowledge workers, among people who've gone to college, but also among racial minorities that are growing as a share of a population. And so when you say, hey, hang on a second, yes, Democrats can build on all of that. But if they fall below a minimum level of support among the white working class, the electoral math is not going to work out. That comes from somebody who you know isn't exactly like your strategy all along was not Democrats need to build a white working class and forget these new voters. You were saying Democrats can win thanks to these new voters, but assuming that they retain significant support among its historic constituency, which was the white working class. And so when you're going to people saying, hey, hang on a second, our policies are so alienating us from the rural voters, from the white working class, et cetera, but we're not going to be able to win, that carries more authority than it would coming from some random other point, right?

[Rui Teixeira]

Yeah. I mean, in that book with John Emerging Democratic Majority, we did frame things in terms of progressive centrism that would be consistent with the way the country was changing, but wouldn't be obviously too far to the left and that they would have to retain a core of white working class support that couldn't afford to shrink much. And why 2016 is kind of a phase change in all this, Josh, is because I had been again, like reminding people of this over and over and over again in my role as loyal soldier. Nobody was paying any attention. And then after 2016, it's like clearly, I mean, not they're taking this event that I more or less in some ways predicted and instead of trying to remedy the weakness, they're just making it worse. They're paying no attention. They're consigning all these voters to the eighth circle of hell. I mean, how are you going to win people over on that basis? And then of course, when you get, you know, Fast forward to 2020 and the, you know, the rise that sort of the peak of the great awokening. I mean, obviously this stuff was not going to go well with a lot of these voters. This was not the way they were going to win any of them back. Even if Biden did manage to win the election, which he did. But in the process, I noticed a very important thing which a lot of other people did as well, which is that non white working class voters were starting to lose their, you know, sort of weaken their support for the Democrats. And I think that's, that was what kind of really led us to think this is ridiculous. I mean, if they don't realize now they have a problem when not only white working class voters are deserting them, but non white working class voters, they're losing support. I mean, what can we do? I mean, they're just. And of course, as you know, Yasha, from the way the Biden administration went down, he ran as a moderate, but he did not govern in a particularly moderate way. And it was just a symptomatic of the way the center of gravity of the Democratic Party had changed dramatically, both in cultural and other ways. And that the kind of people who were staffing his administration and the supporters outside of the administration, what John Judas and I called in our other book, the shadow party, were pushing the party very strongly to the left, and the Biden administration was responding, and it didn't seem like that would end up very well either. So that's the kind of stuff we started to write in 2021 and onward to warn that, well, look, the way the Democratic Party is going at this point is sort of you're on a train bound to hell and you don't realize it. Right? This is not going to end well. Bad things will happen. But again, we wrote a lot and I think we made some cogent arguments, but people didn't really want to believe that the problem was as deep as we said. And then the 2022 election, famously, the Democrats did better than they thought they would. And of course, they now clean up in special elections where their turnout advantage among higher education, more engaged voters is typically operationalized. And you have a formula for the great forgetting, the great refusal to engage. And I think we're seeing it again. And that's really what my latest piece is about in the aftermath of this. I mean, all Democrats should consider it a cataclysmic defeat. This guy who they anathematized and thought would never come back in 2022, won the popular vote. He won all his swing states. He's got to try. I mean, what is it you don't understand about the danger you're running, but how quickly they forget, right? I mean, for a few months, there was some moderately serious effort to engage in it, but now people have completely forgotten about it. They just want to oppose Trump. They're doing great in the special elections. They did well in 2025. Unless something drastically changes, they'll do quite well in 2026, I think. And it's just like, why change? Why bother? I mean, we've got them on the run. Trump is so terrible that the masses of honest workers and peasants have finally woken up and rejected right. Populism forever. And I think that is not true.

[Yasha Mounk]

So let me play devil's advocate on Menace Books Deal man on the other side is one that some of the most Toxic practices of sort of a period around 2020 have subsided that, you know, not just the Democratic Party, but more broadly progressive institutions have walked back some of the most absurd outrages of that time that people are no longer getting fired for, you know, referencing a Chinese filler word that has a passing resemblance to an American swear word, that electricians in San Diego are not getting fired because they have a hand dangling out of the truck and somebody thinks that they made the okay symbol, which they somehow associate with white supremacy and all of those kinds of things. No. I was at a dinner with people who I guess have broadly heterodox views yesterday, and somebody said, I just don't feel afraid that somebody's gonna try and cancel me in the way that I did five or six years ago. It doesn't feel like when I voice my perfectly tolerant and reasonable opinion out loud in a cafe or restaurant, I kind of have to take my voice down a notch. And of course, the unpopularity of Donald Trump is real.

[Rui Teixeira]

Absolutely.

[Yasha Mounk]

Trump has come in and governed in such an extreme way, in such a responsible way that perhaps the Democrats don't need to change all that much in order to win the midterm elections. They're likely to win the House. They may even win the Senate, which would be a remarkable feat given the map of the Senate. So why shouldn't Democrats just keep going the way they are? As you know, I don't fully agree with the Steelman version, but I'm trying to give you the actual Steel.

[Rui Teixeira]

Oh, no, I don't think Democrats need to change anything to do well in 2026. I mean, you could argue that if they change a few things, they might do even better than they're likely to do. But given the nature of this upcoming election, the way the out party tends to do well in these midterm elections anyway, and how unpopular Trump is, I don't see how they don't take back the House. And I do think they have an outside shot of taking back the Senate. But broadly speaking, it will be a very good election for them. The longer range issue is how do you, the Democrats change their pretty toxic image among tons of working class voters and rural voters, lots of other people around the country where they're still viewed as being pretty out of the mainstream in terms of a lot of these other issues and as culturally freighted issues as we've been alluding to. And also, as I pointed out at the end of my piece, have the Democrats learned anything? No learning pleas were Democrats. Their economic program is nothing to Write home about either. So, yeah, they'll do well in 2026, but I think their brand is still pretty terrible, particularly among working class voters. And you need to change that if you're gonna succeed on the presidential level and more generally in terms of forming a more stable majority coalition. I mean, winning in 2026 doesn't really.

[Yasha Mounk]

Yeah, there's an amazing poll recently which mostly sort of was paid attention to because of what it found about artificial intelligence. But by the by, it reveals something interesting by the Democratic Party, which is that artificial intelligence are very unpopular in the United States. And the two things that are less popular than artificial intelligence are the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Democratic Party.

[Rui Teixeira]

So. Yeah, so nothing has been unsolved in terms of those underlying problems. And that the problem is that Democrats don't want to solve their underlying problem and sort of feel they can get away without doing much about it at the current time. I mean, in terms of the specific stuff you were mentioning about, about race and cancel culture and all that, I do think that at the elite level, at a lot of levels, it's harder to cancel people and they're less interested in doing it than they once were. So you are a bit safer in terms of saying particular things in particular context. But I think the fact remains that people who are very culturally liberal, the radical, still really have control of the commanding heights of cultural production. They're basically still pretty ensconced. And universities, academic universities, newspapers, foundations, the infrastructure of The Democratic Party NGOs, I mean, they're all still there. I just think they sanded off a few of the rough edges. And the question becomes, if you really want to change people's perception of the party, its image, and what its fundamental commitments are, don't you actually have to change some of your positions instead of not talking about them, as I pointed out in that article? And as Lauren Egan mentioned in an article in the Bulwark, I mean, the typical approach now of the Democrats is shut up and pivot. Don't talk about what your positions are on unpopular issues. Just immediately attack the billionaire class and how this is just the diversion from the rich fat cats picking your pockets. So I think that is the party line now, and I think it's not very promising way to change your image in a fundamental way. It's a way to win the next election by deflecting. And I think that where are the Democrats who are willing to say forthrightly, actually, I think DEI programs are a terrible idea. Actually. I think that race based affirmative action is a bad idea and I don't support it. I mean, what you find, I think with a lot of these issues, trans rights is another one. I think that the. They're either not talking about it or they might mutter something about how, well, some of this stuff may have gone a bit too far, but it's basically pretty noble stuff. So I think that. Don't you think, Yasha, that this is a fairly tactical adjustment to an unfavorable situation and a whole vector of issues that help define a toxic image for the Democratic Party, but it's not fundamentally changing those positions, you know where.

[Yasha Mounk]

Yeah. So I want to go into some of those positions in detail and actually really think through what reasonable positions would be. But to answer your question, I guess my position on this is that we're in a two party system, and that means that, you know, if one party is really unpopular, it allows the other party to be pretty damn screwed up and do relatively better. And that always goes to the benefit of the opposition party. So the Biden administration was sufficiently dysfunctional and Joe Biden, of course, was sufficiently mentally unsound that people looked at that and said, I don't want that. And they went back to Donald Trump. Despite everything we knew from his first term about how irresponsible he was, now that Trump has come in, he had a great opportunity to actually turn the Republican Party into a multiracial party of a working class. He has completely squandered that opportunity by both, I think, being culturally extreme in ways that go well beyond the American mainstream and just making significant blunders like the current war in Iran. And so I think he's going to be so unpopular that in the midterm elections, Democrats are going to do very well and probably even in 2028. If you asked me for a point estimate right now, if I had to place a bet right now in one of these betting markets, I would say the Democrats probably retake the White House in 2028. I don't want to be certain about

[Rui Teixeira]

that because what would your probability estimate be?

[Yasha Mounk]

60? 40.

[Rui Teixeira]

60, 40. Ooh, bold. Okay. Could happen.

[Yasha Mounk]

And the reason for that? I think Republicans have an ability to rebrand. They have an opportunity to rebrand. Right. And primaries are unpredictable once the person who's been dominating the party for a very long time is out of the way. I don't think it's unimaginable that Marco Rubio and J.D. vance and perhaps Donald Trump Jr. Compete for the mantle of the MAGA movement and they split the vote and Perhaps some, like Spencer Cox, somehow manages to win the nomination, and suddenly Republicans go into 2028 with a much more palatable face, which, by the way, would be great.

[Rui Teixeira]

I think Marco Rubio would be actually a fairly formidable candidate. I mean, we could argue about that, but that's what I think.

[Yasha Mounk]

No, no, I agree. He would have real strengths. Anyway, I think the shadow of Trump will still remain quite strong. I think that if the administration keeps going the way it has for the first year and six weeks of it being in office for the next nearly three years, people are going to be so sick of them. The Democrats have a good chance of winning, but there's two fears that I have. Number one is the Keir Starmer scenario. The Tories were in power in Britain for 10 plus years. People got deeply sick of him. That was enough for Keir Starmer, who was never charismatic, who never had a substantive political vision of his own

[Rui Teixeira]

to

[Yasha Mounk]

come into office, but because he didn't have a coherent governing program, because he didn't solve some of the underlying problems of a Labour Party, within a few months, he was deeply unpopular. And now it looks like reform is likely to win at the next election. And so a broader way of putting this is that it depends on what you're solving for. If you're solving for getting Donald Trump and his chosen successor out of the White House in 2028, perhaps Democrats don't have to do that much. It's a risky strategy that would be much more likely to succeed in that crucial undertaking if they changed more. But perhaps it's not necessary. Good chance it's not necessary. But that's not the problem for me. The actual challenge for me is we are at a moment when there's people who are very dangerous to basic Democratic norms and institutions, who have the commanding heights of the Republican Party, and we need to lastingly and convincingly beat them, to force the Republican Party back to the negotiating table, to make sure that they have to expel those extremists from the commanding heights of Republican Party in order to win elections. And that has to happen not just in 2026 and not just in 2028, but for long enough for a Republican Party to make those reforms to themselves because of a wilderness that they're in. And that, I think would take much, much, much more than being, in the eyes of many voters, the lesser evil in 2028.

[Rui Teixeira]

Right. Well, just to clarify what I was going to say about necessary. I think necessary is, I mean, are you satisfied with a 51, 49 or 52, 48 chance of winning, or do you want to maximize your probability of winning? And if the situation is as dire as you say it is, and arguably it is, then Democrats should basically view it as a necessity to probability maximize their ability to win that election. You don't just want 60, 40, you want like 75, 25. So anyway, but that's somewhat technical point, but may I recommend here, you know, very much along the lines that you were talking about the report I wrote, Politics Without Winners with Yuval Levin, excellent report.

[Yasha Mounk]

And I had the two of you on the podcast to talk about it at the time.

[Rui Teixeira]

That's right. So that's really all about that idea that we're now in this very peculiar political space which isn't necessarily normal for American politics, where basically we toggle between the two parties and they don't get to hang around very long before they're tossed out because people get sick of what they're doing and there's no really stable dominant or majority coalition. And what you want to do is get to that point. You don't want to just alternate with right populists for another 20 years or so. You want to actually, if you're a Democrat, presumably have a stable coalition that can govern effectively and make the country prosper and gain the allegiance of the default allegiance of the American voter. And conversely, if you were the Republicans, you should want the same thing. Right? And as you're pointing out, I mean, there was actually like a brief moment where if Trump had played his cards right, the Republicans had governed in a different way, they really could have grown their coalition. Right. If they had been much more moderate on a lot of these cultural issues, they attacked and they didn't do this sort of weird tariff heavy economic regime. And I mean, it's everything, everything that was even a mile the border of

[Yasha Mounk]

Mexico and even

[Rui Teixeira]

the ICE thing was crazy. They didn't need to do that. I mean, they just, I mean, it was like a way of manufacturing, you know, bad publicity for your party and not doing anything even very effective. So, so everything they did, they overdid. And actually, if they played their cards ripe, they had a chance to, to be, you know, to really sustain a fairly high level of popularity again, consistent with politics outwinners. And as you say, let's say the Democrats do get back in, in 2028, what is the guarantee that they're not going to basically sort of have a light version of what Biden tried to do that would wind up being very unpopular? I think it's very unclear what they would do on the border, on the economy, on dei, on trans issues, what have you. I think the fundamental radicalism of some of the left agenda that the Democrats have adopted in the last 15 years would actually come out because they haven't changed. Their underlying positions are roughly the same. So again, if they want a probability maximized, not only winning in 2028, but sticking around for a while, they'd be well advised to change some of these underlying positions.

[Yasha Mounk]

Yeah. So the only smart way to think about the futures in terms of scenarios, and I'm going to defy that and give you a point estimate and obviously I think it's less than 50% that this exact scenario will play out. It's probably less than 5%. But you know, I think the Democrats are going to win the midterms, definitely the House, possibly the Senate, quite imaginably. I think they'll eke out a victory in 2028, unless they really self sabotage. I think then you're going to have the Keir Starmer problem very quickly. They'll become unpopular, both because they'll overreach and because they haven't actually developed a substantive vision for how they want to govern. And then in 2032 we see the Republicans romp back into power and, and whether the leader at that point is going to be J.D. vance or it's going to be Tucker Carlson or it's going to be Donald Trump Jr. It'll be potentially that's imaginable, even worse than the current Trump term. I'm conscious of the fact that in this conversation we've somehow to some extent presumed both a substantive case that Democrats are in the wrong place on a bunch of these issues and that people are going to agree with it. So I want you to lay out really clearly in a few of those areas, to what extent, how concretely are Democrats actually in the wrong place? And we can go through the piece, sort of valedictory piece you published with, as you mentioned earlier, the lovely title no learning please, We're Democrats. You say they have a cultural problem. That's the big one. What concretely is the culture problem? Not in the general terms we've been talking about. What are some cultural positions the Democrats have that they need to move away from? What should her position on those issues be?

[Rui Teixeira]

Right. Well, there's a long list of issues that have some cultural content to them where Democrats are way farther to the left than they used to be. I mean, we were recently talking about DEI and racial issues and so on. I mean clearly the Democrats are way too far to the left in these issues. I mean, people really don't believe and DEI except in the sense that basically everyone should have an opportunity. I mean, equal opportunity is popular, equal outcomes are not. And that just because there's a not completely proportional representation of different racial or other groups in a given professional setting or for a given set of rewards or positions, that does not prima facie evidence of racism. But that actually became a quite accepted position within the Democratic Party and still is to these days. And the solution to any of this stuff cannot and should not be racial preferences. People should be judged on the basis of merit. How good are they at X? How well did they do on the test? What are their skills? How competent are they? I mean, this is a fundamental principle of fairness that Americans deeply believe in. And Democrats, by basically sort of soft pedaling or outright opposing the idea of merit based rewards and positions have actually gone far out of the mainstream in a cultural sense. Again, I mentioned earlier, where are the Democrats today who are willing to say no? Actually, DEI is not written into the Constitution. As Hakeem Jeffrey said, we're actually for merit based rewards, positions, jobs, whatever. We do not believe in racial preferences. We actually don't think that's a good idea. We want everyone to compete on an equal playing field. And that's it. That's all we're for. We're against discrimination. So where are the people saying that? I don't see them. I mean, the immigration thing is really quite extraordinary, right, Yascha? Because if you look back to the late 20th century, Democrats had a very different attitude toward immigration than they do now. They were completely unafraid to say the border should be enforced. They were completely unafraid to say people here illegally should be deported. They're completely unafraid to entertain the notion that there might be some bad aspects to open immigration, that there is pressure in the low wage labor market, on unions and so on. And that really changes drastically in the course of the 21st century, culminating of course in the extraordinary spectacle of quasi open borders under President Biden, where every single lever was pulled to make it really easy to get into the United States and to pretty much stay here forever. And you had the biggest wave of immigration basically since I think the early 1900s. So this was amazing. I mean, this was like totally not what anyone in the United States wanted. Right? I mean, it was not popular to have this kind of quasi open borders, kind of. And again, this reflected the way the Democratic Party was evolving and its culturally Radical position on a lot of issues. Basically anyone who would object to this surge of immigration and the way it was being handled and how easy it was to game the asylum system and so on and so forth, they must be a racist, they must be a xenophob, they just don't like immigrants, they just don't like brown and black people. I mean, this was crazy stuff, but that was very much the hegemonic point of view in huge sectors of the Democratic party. And, and that's a pretty radical thing. That's pretty divorced from the way most people looked at the world and borders count and if you're gonna come here, you should come here the right way, all that sort of thing. They didn't hate immigrants, but they did not like a wave of illegal immigration. And that shouldn't have been that controversial, but it was. Another example, of course, is the trans issue, which is, I mean, unbelievably, it sort of hurtled into the top of the Democrats vector of litmus tests within about 10 years or so. It really starts in the mid teens, I guess. I mean, basically it became de rigueur to say trans rights, quote, unquote, are the civil rights issue of our time. Despite the fact it really wasn't controversial. That in terms of basic civil rights stuff around housing, employment and marriage and so on, there shouldn't be discrimination against people who identify as trans. But instead there was a huge push basically to do everything from personal pronouns to gender affirming care for kids, to of course, biological boys and girls, sports. And underneath it all, this concept of gender identity that everybody has an innate gender identity which frequently should trump their biological sex. If someone who is a biological male says they're a woman, then they're a woman, full stop, and they should be treated as one in every single context you can imagine. In fact, the whole idea that biological sex is real and our two sexes became sort of a marker of transphobia. This is a very radical idea, highly debatable at best. But it became the orthodox conventional wisdom within the Democratic party. And anyone who object to that was a transphobe and sort of a borderline Nazi. Look what happened to Seth Moulton, a representative from Massachusetts who basically at one point said, well, I'm not sure I want biological boys on my girl's sports team and running them over and so on. And he got hammered. People on his staff quit, People in his hometown denounced him as a Nazi and that they were going to primary him. So I mean, that is an example of something that is really Far to the left culturally, which became the dominant tendency in the Democratic Party, I might add, still is today. It's still very hard to dissent from the so called trans rights agenda up to and including gender affirming care for minors, despite the fact that basically the whole world at this point is moving against the idea. It's a great idea to medicalize children with gender non conforming behavior. And this is just, I mean, I mean, look at the way the 2024 election went down. The most successful ad by Trump was Harris is for they them. President Trump is for you. So this is a huge loser. It's a loser in public opinion. It doesn't make any sense as policy, as science. But tenaciously the Democratic Party continues to hold onto it. And to this day, again, I think it's very hard to descend from that orthodoxy. And to the extent anyone raises a question about it, it's shut up and pivot, right? If someone mentions anything around trans issues, the recommended consultant approved approach is to basically, well, it's just the billionaire class that wants to divert you. You know, trans people aren't taking away your health insurance. Trans people aren't making electricity expensive or whatever. You know, I mean, that is the reply.

[Yasha Mounk]

And that's, and that's the line, by the way, of the moderates in the party. The moderates, progressives in the party are very loud on these issues and double down on them. And, and then the moderates, when you look at Abigail Spanberger and her race for governor in Virginia, for example, say about an issue like people who've gone through male puberty on women's sports teams, that's just for an issue for local school districts should regulate that on their own. So it's just a way of bowing out of a discussion and having a talking point that you can repeat over and over. I think at one point you repeat it three times in the same minute of a debate to not have to take a substantive stance on themselves because people like her feel completely boxed in. Because on the one side there is the realization that there's an 8020 issue, that this is something where a huge majority of independents, actually most Democrats are on the other side of the official line of a Democratic Party. On the other hand, if you take the position that deviates from what most highly engaged Democratic party activists want you to take on this issue, you make yourself so toxic that you are attacked in very aggressive ways. And so it takes a lot of courage in order to be able to go with that given. And I have to say that When I speak to Democratic electeds, this is the issue on which I most often hear. I would love to vote for a particular bill that a more moderate Republican has introduced in my legislature on this, but if I do, I'm going to be primary tomorrow and I just can't. I've heard that from many Democratic electors, as I'm sure have you. Is there any way of changing those incentives? I mean, are those incentives so baked in that the that there's just no moving on them? What would it take for people like Abigail Spanberger or for the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee to actually speak in a more forthright manner on some of these issues?

[Rui Teixeira]

Yeah, I think basically someone has to break the mold on a lot of this stuff. I mean, it's popular and I've used it myself to talk about. What's really needed is a sister soldier moment where the Democrats sort of the hegemony of the Democratic Party professional class activists is challenged on some of these key issues in an unapologetic way. Probably Rahm Emanuel comes closest to it at this point. I mean, underneath what you have to contend with in the Democratic Party is just the unavoidable fact that the professional class who now votes heavily Democratic has actually a very radical point of view on a lot of cultural issues that we've been discussing. And related to that climate, too. I think that it just makes it very difficult for someone to break that mold. But it's not clear to me that it's impossible. I think if it happens, it'll happen around the 2028 presidential cycle. I expect nothing to happen before the 2026 election, but maybe there's a lane. Yeah.

[Yasha Mounk]

Is this the sort of thing where sort of, you know, actually if you are any candidate below the presidential level, the heat you take for taking a position like that is so big that you can't afford it. You have to kind of be the presidential candidate in order to make that break.

[Rui Teixeira]

Yeah, I think. Well, I think it's pretty common for parties to change their image in and around a presidential election cycle where the sort of the. Basically the person who's going to define the image of the party, the presidential candidate, takes a different position. Everything from compassionate conservatism to, of course, back to Clinton and his approach. So I think it's not out of the question. Someone could do that in and around the 2028 cycle. My fear actually, though, is everyone will be kurded in the same way toward the same positions about maximum resistance to Trump and basically defend all the basic Democratic positions on these cultural issues because otherwise I'll get hammered within the primary context of people to my left will attack me. But maybe there's an opening there for someone who's willing to do and say something different and see if there's a lane within the Democratic primary electorate for that. I think the problem is that doing what you and I might recommend, if I may make liberty of assuming we're similar in some of this stuff, it'd actually be great in the general election. The problem is getting through the primary electorate and the kinds of voters who show up in primary elections and the political dynamics that are peculiar to primary elections. I mean, I think that to navigate that would be difficult. Right. Right now you're gonna have Gavin Newsom,

[Yasha Mounk]

and that might be easier for a presidential candidate than a lower down candid. If you run for state representative, such a huge share of your electorate is people mobilized by your local teachers union and other kind of Democratic interest groups. But if they give out the directive that you're bad, there's really no way of winning against it. If you're running a presidential level, there's so much public attention to you, you have so much free media to be able to put forward your ideas that if they're compelling to a lot of people in the country, you can build your own kind of coalition. And certainly in some of those issues where actually Democratic voters 50, 50 or less than 50, 50, you might be able to move on that. Even if a majority of the people who vote for the local state rep in the midterm elections don't want agree. For example, with the ruling of the International Olympic Committee that trans women obviously free to compete in the Olympics but not in the female category in the primary elections, it's going to be really hard to get the nomination if you take that position very proactively. Just because the share of people who participate in that election is so low, it's so hard to make your argument because people aren't paying a lot of attention to your positions and so on. At a presidential level, that might be easier.

[Rui Teixeira]

Yeah, no, I think you're right. I think there are two big factors there. One is just it's a wider primary electorate, even though it's a primary electorate. And the other one is what you said. I mean, it's an enormous amount of free publicity is available for an aggressive candidate for the presidential nomination that could be leveraged to try to move the conversation in their direction. So there is a possibility there. But where is the profile encourage of a Democrat who's willing to do that and is a viable candidate.

[Yasha Mounk]

What about Rahm Emanuel?

[Rui Teixeira]

Well, I like Rahm. I think he's again come closest to really raising serious questions about the Democratic approach. Can he get the traction necessary to do that? Maybe. I think one thing that he may do possibly is he'll force the other candidates to reckon with some of these things. There will be debates, and if he's aggressive about raising some of these issues, maybe someone who's more viable than him will move in his position. Maybe there'll be sort of a lane for normie Democrats.

[Yasha Mounk]

Why is he not viable?

[Rui Teixeira]

Well, I think he's viewed as too much of an operative. There's not a lot of money behind him. I think he is actually not close to the center of gravity of the Democratic Party today, particularly its more activist segment. But maybe he will be by the time things really develop in terms of the cycle. Look, I don't want to complete disparage his chances. I'd love it if he had better chances than he did. I'm just trying to be realistic about who he is now and where the the debate currently is. I mean, I don't know what his betting market rate is at this point, but I bet it's pretty low, whereas

[Yasha Mounk]

it's probably a cheap buy.

[Rui Teixeira]

Very cheap buy. Gavin Newsom is probably too expensive now. Maybe you should go. Everyone out there should buy Rahm Emanuel in the betting markets. That's my advice.

[Yasha Mounk]

Do I have to do a disclaimer that we're not giving financial advice on this podcast or something like that?

[Rui Teixeira]

Don't listen to us.

[Yasha Mounk]

Yeah, Rui is giving us. I am not for podcast not, but Rui is giving you financial advice. I want to ask you a strategic question, which is that one of the most striking stats I saw about the 2024 election, and I therefore talked about it repeatedly, including on this podcast, is that when you look at the socioeconomic coalition put together by Kamala Harris and you compared to the socioeconomic coalitions put together by Donald Trump, George W. Bush, but also by Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, the one that it most resembles is not her Democratic predecessors. She's not unique in this. You see the Democratic Party starting to drift in that direction. It is that put together by BOB DOLE In 1996, the Republican candidate, which is to say that the Democrats are now the party of the highly educated and relatively affluent. So that's sort of a way of thinking about two demographic problems that the Democratic Party has. The first is that as we discussed Briefly, earlier in this conversation, this has become hopeless among rural voters. They have gone from getting a majority of the vote of the white working class in the past to getting a significant minority of it for many years to just bleeding votes in that demographic in an extremely rapid way. And that's one of the demographic problems. The other demographic problem is that as you predicted back in the 2000s, the diversification of America was meant to buoy the prospects of a Democratic Party. States like Florida, which was the decisive state in 2000, the hanging chats and all of that stuff were meant to become solidly Democratic as it became more and more diverse, as it became majority minority. And what's happened, Florida is now solidly Republican and even Texas has not very strongly moved towards the Democratic Party. So there's a Hispanic, to some extent Asian American and even black working class problem that the Democratic Party has bleeding rather than building its electoral base among those voting groups. To what extent does the Democratic Party need a distinct strategy for each of these demographic groups? And to what extent is this downstream from the same problem? Is there one set of fixes that would actually buoy the prospects of a Democratic Party among both of those demographic groups it's been struggling with in recent years, or does it take different sets of approaches to strengthen its positioning with each?

[Rui Teixeira]

Yeah, it actually reminds me, suggests a good, a good title for a column called Wither the Dole Coalition. I mean the Democratic Party. So I mean, that is striking. I've seen the same data you have. It really is amazing the extent to which today's Democratic Party resembles the coalition under Jean Bob Dole in 1996. So that tells you a lot about what the Democratic Party is today and the extent to which it really has become the party of the professional class and more affluent voters in high education areas of the country and not the party of the great unwashed or the rural voters of the working class. So how do you change that? I mean, the good news for the Democrats, so they have the votes of all these highly influential and active professional class voters. The bad news is the very fact that they do makes it hard for them to change, hard for them to strike a different course. And so the solution to that problem is to recognize the depth to which your image is completely toxic among these wide areas of the country. And you therefore need to make a break from a lot of Democratic Party priorities that people currently see as out of whack with them, their world outlook, their culture and so on. And that's going to be tough. You're going to get some blowback for doing that. But that's the only way, the only way out is through. If you want to reach the working class and sort of stop the bleeding, ongoing bleeding among working class voters, including non white working class voters, that's what you have to do. And that will take some time and you will get flack for doing it, but it's the only way to be done. Otherwise you are going to be stuck with this professional class driven coalition. And occasionally, yes, you will pick up working class voters when they're dissatisfied with the incumbent party, but they're not going to stick around for very long. That's what we see right now in terms of the polls as Trump's popularity has declined. Though interestingly enough, as a study I quoted in the article mentioned, these voters are disaffected with Trump and are not feeling like they're necessarily going to vote Republican in 2028. They don't like the Democrats either. As you were alluding to another data point earlier about how unpopular the party is. I mean, the fact that they are no longer down with Trump doesn't mean they're really happy with the Democrats and see them as their party. So I just think you have to have a very conscious effort to reach those kinds of voters who are out of the Democratic professional class mainstream and that if you don't do it, they will never come back. You really have to set your cap to do that, be willing to take some flack, have some sister soldier moments, and just in a way, it's just accepting the reality of contemporary American politics and the polarized politics we have today and the class divisions that have beset our politics. And I wish I could be more optimistic that they're going to do that anytime soon, but I think there's a lot of evidence that they basically think they can manage this problem by talking about and again, I talked about this in my article, Affordability, right? Well, yeah, we're for kitchen table issues. We're for like, you know, making sure the billionaire class doesn't pick your pocket. We're going to make everything better and more affordable. And that's all working class people care about. Right. I mean, if we could just basically leverage that slogan, we can fix all our problems that have developed over, you know, 20 years among working class voters. And I think that's, that's delusional, basically, but I think that's what people believe.

[Yasha Mounk]

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of a good fight. In the rest of this conversation, I asked Rui whether changing political circumstances make the prospect of a third party bid more realistic in the United States than it was in the past. And we talk about the reasons why the Liberal Patriot had to close its doors. We talk about the fact that its existing donors tried to exert ideological influence over it, telling Roui and his co conspirators what they shouldn't say and what they shouldn't publish about. And we talked about why it is that a small organization like the Liberal Patriot that doesn't need a huge budget wasn't able to raise the chargeable donations to keep going even as vast sums are spent on other organizations in an adjacent space. That question is personal to me. I've been running Persuasion for over five years now. We are a nonprofit organization with a very small staff and a very small budget. We work hard to raise money from funders and we too have struggled to raise the amount of funding we need to really do as much as I think we could if we had the necessary support. So if you are listening to this and you are a philanthropist or you are a program officer and you want to talk to us about being able to support our work, please shoot us an email. You can email Laura, our Director of Operationsaura belindersuasion.community that's Laura L A U R A B E R L I n d@ persuasion.community and if you are a listener who thinks that you might be able to support us in an ongoing way, I have decided over the last days to start a new program called Patrons of Persuasion for individuals who are able to make more sizable recurrent donation to keep this magazine afloat and thriving for the long run. I will be sharing a more formal announcement of this in months to come. In the meanwhile, if you want to be a Persuasion patron, please go to persuasion.community p donate for more information. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. I'll see you in a few days.