The Other Great Replacement: Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
REVIEW ESSAY
Where Have All the Democrats Gone?:
The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes
by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira
Henry Holt, 2023, 336 pages
Much is said these days about manufacturing, but what about meatpacking? Chicago, the big-shouldered city of Carl Sandburg’s America—before toolmaker or player with railroads—was hog butcher for the world. As John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira note in last year’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, working in meatpacking paid 25 percent more than a mean manufacturing job in 1965. But 1965 was also the year of the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act. Soon, the processing companies were moving their plants, 80 percent of which were unionized, out of Heartland cities like Chicago and into rural flyover country. “In 1969, IBP brought in Mexican workers to break a strike and replace the workers at its Nebraska plant. Over the next thirty years, the meatpackers replaced a predominately white and African American unionized workforce with a predominately Hispanic and predominantly nonunion workforce.” More than a quarter, even then, were illegal aliens.
Jeremiads have long been a favorite genre of social conservatives, of late inveighing against the failures, moral or otherwise, of feckless Republicans. Judis and Teixeira, though targeting the other party, write in the same tradition—the book of Jeremiah is as much futile prophecy as pure lament—with a mix of “we tried to warn you” and “how did it ever come to this?” In their 2002 The Emerging Democratic Majority, as the pair recall in this latest collaboration, “we argued that professionals, women, and minorities were displacing the old New Deal blue-collar working class as the key ingredients in a new Democratic majority.” They were right, and the country is suffering the consequences. And if we define social institutions more broadly than those around human reproduction or law enforcement, then Judis and Teixeira are social conservatives, too, holding as they do to the old New Deal settlements.
Two decades after prophesying an emerging Democratic majority, Judis and Teixeira reexamine their party and the uncertain future of the country. This book is one more effort in what has now become a long series since 2015 to explain how Donald Trump’s Republican Party came into existence and what it means. And it is an indictment of a Democratic Party elite who made our current, chaotic politics of near-realignment inevitable. A thoroughgoing jeremiad, it is a complaint, and a vain invocation of a dead vision of solidarity. What is doom and gloom to Judis and Teixeira, of course, should be to others opportunity; but as everyone knows, when it comes to civic decline, diagnosis is easier than prescription, let alone cure.
The Shadow Party
Judis and Teixeira point to the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit,” between General Motors and the United Auto Workers, as a model of domestic diplomacy from a time when government, business, and labor cooperation caused wages, profits, and productivity to rise in tandem. Then a bipartisan ruling class opened borders, opened trade, and opened shops. Joe Biden—the memory of the man, and the idea of his administration projected from his campaign basement and a locked-down White House—has off and on seemed to promise a return to that old America, whether through invocations of FDR or a kind of MAGA with progressive characteristics. These rhetorical suggestions have been a great strength for Democrats against disorganized elected Republicans, but are clearly a source of disappointment for true believers like Judis and Teixeira. They have not survived contact with reality, or with diversity, equity, and inclusion fantasies either. If they had, this book would not have had to be written.
As the authors explain, the Democrats’ choice to trade white (male) working-class voters for white-collar women and glibly abstracted minorities has only worked up to a point, and President Biden is unlikely to undo the damage to the party. In sum, “Biden’s appeal was clearly genuine, but over the last decades, Democrats have steadily lost the allegiance of ‘everyday Americans’—the working- and middle-class voters that were the core of the older New Deal coalition. Initially, most of these voters were white, but in the last elections, Democrats have also begun to lose support among Latino and Asian working-class voters as well.” And while Republican gains in the putative multiethnic working class are easily overstated, it is a fact that the Democrats are hostage to an elite, what Judis and Teixeira call a “shadow party,” totally disconnected from the people they pander to. Patrons and clients should at least agree on the bathrooms to use, even if they don’t speak the same language.
The shadow parties are “the activist groups, think tanks, foundations, publications and websites, and big donors and prestigious intellectuals who are not part of the official party organizations, but who influence and are identified with one or the other of the parties.” Readers of Curtis Yarvin might be reminded of his “Cathedral,” though our authors are more willing to assign personality and deliberation—if still not exactly the special interests of the old cigar-puffing bosses—to what Yarvin conceptualizes in terms of systems of interests and emergent structures of power. Nevertheless, the way in which these shadow parties widen the gap between candidates on the campaign trail and their governing programs once elected is, in the authors’ description, systemic. This is the salve to their bitter disappointment in President Biden, who, Judis and Teixeira write, “ran primarily on his own electability. He led in the polls on that basis, but he had no support among the shadow Democratic groups that were at the forefront of the party’s radicalism.” Thus goes the story for the administrations of Clinton and Obama, too, who both ran as candidates of the people.
Judis and Teixeira rightly present Bill Clinton’s efforts on behalf of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization as the most consequential action of his second term, pairing it with the further deregulation of finance under Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. What Hart‑Celler and Cold War globalization started—the country ran its first trade deficit of the century in 1971—the China shock finished: the final destruction of the New Deal middle class. They make clear in their telling that the power of organized labor in America had in large part already been either broken or co-opted by the same Democrat shadow party that President Clinton was beholden to. For while the United Auto Workers registered their protest at the prospect of China’s most-favored nation status, the afl-cio “was relatively silent about the trade agreement.” The federation of unions was without excuse, for Judis and Teixeira note that Robert Lighthizer could not have been clearer or more accurate than in his 1997 New York Times opinion piece, in which he “warned that ‘it is not an exaggeration to say that if China is allowed to join the W.T.O. on the lenient terms it has been demanding, virtually no manufacturing job in this country will be safe.’”
Democrats, both voters and down-ticket elected officials, have suffered for Clinton’s success. David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, the authors of the China shock paper, found that, from 1999 to 2011, approximately 2.4 million American jobs were lost to Chinese competition. The impact this had on Trump’s campaign and the 2016 election is widely acknowledged and discussed, but Judis and Teixeira note that the China shock paper found that the Republican Party had experienced gains in affected congressional districts since 2002, that is, immediately after China entered the WTO. And for all the apparent animosity between their machines, Barack Obama largely continued the Clinton legacy.
While red-meat commentators made much of young Obama’s apprenticeship to Saul Alinsky, there was little populist organizing done once the man was elected. The shadow party found him—when exactly remains mysterious—a more than willing technocrat. “Obama had run against Washington,” Judis and Teixeira write, not very convincingly, “but as president, he had become captive to its inner circles.” No hope of change after all. In retirement, the first black president has revealed himself to be something of a country club Republican, a reality his own base of support began to suspect in the disappointments of his first term. But with smart campaigning he put off the disillusionment long enough to win reelection against an actual country club Republican. In 2012, facing Mitt Romney, he “pivoted from conservative centrism to progressive populism and economic nationalism,” getting, one imagines, Judis and Teixeira’s hopes back up. Then, for all that, and his talk of a pivot to Asia, he returned to liberal internationalist form.
The Great Divide
The diagnosis is clear enough: neither party has presented, let alone governed on, a coherent platform that represents all of the American people. And though Judis and Teixeira avoid acknowledging its centrality, the cause is clear, too, between the lines: thanks to unchecked immigration, the American people continues to change too rapidly for a new social settlement and national self-narrative to be established. As the authors write,
In 1965, when Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, 85 percent of the population was white, 11 percent was black, and 4 percent was Latino. According to the current Census tabulation, about 58 percent are white, 19 percent are Hispanic, 12 percent are black, and 6 percent are Asian, and Asians (a category that comprises wildly different ethnicities) are the fastest growing group. In other words, America is no longer a white and black country, and the conflict between whites and blacks can no longer explain, as the 1619 Project claimed, “every aspect” of life.
In the midst of the post–Cold War presidential administrations, from Clinton to Biden, the country has been unable to define itself. Indeed, our domestic political divides, especially what Judis and Teixeira call the “Great Divide” of interests and values between largely urban professionals and the rest of Americans, have only grown. And it is no wonder, when the population and its cultures and habits continue to change, year over year. Like the Ottoman millet system, identity politics has come to define more and more of public life—ethnic factions fighting for pieces of a shrinking pie of public goods.
Donald Trump won in 2016 because of “The Wall,” something many commentators continue to try to forget, even as the Biden administration has belatedly—and ironically—begun adding sections to it. On the whole, however, the Biden administration has overseen what could be designated an invasion of the United States. This past December broke the monthly record for illegal migrant apprehensions on the southern border, with Customs and Border Protection reporting more than 276,000 before the month was out. A November report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) examining the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey finds “the total foreign-born or immigrant population (legal and illegal) was 49.5 million in October 2023—a 4.5 million increase since President Biden took office and a new record high. At 15 percent, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population is also the highest ever recorded in American history.” That includes an estimated 2.5 million net increase in illegal aliens since January 2021, what is almost certainly a conservative figure. The foreign-born-share-of-population record is notable in itself, but the rate of increase is also significant in any consideration of the consequences for civic life. The CIS report notes that the “foreign-born population has grown on average by 137,000 a month since President Biden took office, compared to 42,000 a month during Trump’s presidency before Covid-19 hit, and 68,000 a month during President Obama’s two terms.” No policy wonkery will matter unless something is done to stop the flood.
Where Have All the Democrats Gone? presents this story as simply a matter of elite disconnect, the shadow party imposing its agenda on the voters. “What these groups advocate almost universally widens the Great Divide and alienates working-class voters that the Democrats need to reach.” On this point, the authors’ attempts to game out America’s changing demographics electorally appear statistically compelling, and Republican Party loyalists reading Where Have All the Democrats Gone? are likely to take the rehashing of recent election results as encouragement. The authors note that, “Among Hispanics, the largest shifts [toward Trump] were among working-class voters. According to a Pew analysis, Trump got 41 percent nationally of the working-class Hispanic vote.” Further, “Democrats no longer can be said to suffer simply from the defection of white working-class voters,” Judis and Teixeira observe. “The term itself had no political meaning until the white backlash that began in the sixties to the civil rights legislation. What began happening in the last decade is a defection, pure and simple, of working-class voters.”
Yet, at some level, this analysis seems like a failure to look the real crisis in the face. Judis and Teixeira’s own account shows how the shadow party has been able to maintain power despite its failure to represent the interests of American voters over the last several decades. The prospect of a multiracial working-class coalition winning a new social settlement by politics as usual thus seems like an ever-receding mirage. They present the culture war as a bipartisan distraction from questions of popular material interests, but their class analysis may instead obfuscate more fundamental problems of national and democratic sovereignty. There is perhaps a generational divide—the security of an older commonsense account of human beings and American equality prevents the authors from recognizing how truly revolutionary the shadow party’s ideological commitments are, as well as its true sources of power.
The two culture war theaters Judis and Teixeira present as especially alienating to working-class voters, contemporary race politics and transgenderism (especially as it affects minors) are not especially rewarding in themselves to elected and party officials. Who are the clients and who are the patrons? This is not financial deregulation. So what explains the shadow party’s insistence on this agenda? The authors poke at the problem—observing that college-educated professionals live not primarily as Americans, but “amid a plentitude of identities that define what matters and what is moral behavior”—but they fail to offer an account of how the new post-labor status hierarchy between shadow party and politicians emerged. How did this shadow party take power in the first place, if democratic majorities are decisive in American politics? And why would factions that want to maintain their power so willingly undermine their electoral base of support—unless it doesn’t matter all that much?
In a media environment dominated by professional conservative boomer-baiting or compliant doublespeak, it is nevertheless refreshing to read the wry tone of unapologetic skepticism with which Judis and Teixeira describe contemporary radicalism. Their New York editors clearly did not subject them to the ever-shifting standards of elite media. As they put it, “Most significant of all, perhaps, the term ‘black’ was now to be capitalized as ‘Black,’ suggesting that blacks were a national group similar to the ‘French’ or the ‘Chinese’ in conformity with the radical nationalism being espoused by Kendi and others.” Can America, e pluribus unum, really be a nation of nations?
The transgender activist movement gets similarly polite but frank description. Its organizations were accepted into the Democrat shadow party in the early 2000s with Pritzker help, and Lia Thomas is casually referred to with male pronouns. “Half of the women on the Penn team protested Thomas’s participation, as did parents of swimmers that competed with him, but he was unrepentant.” One wonders if that sentence, so tempting to edit for any publisher thinking of conversation at his next dinner party, will survive the next edition.
The Wrong Horse?
Judis and Teixeira’s clarity about racial and identity politics, however, seems to put them in a bind when it comes to their ability to influence the Democratic Party. They uphold a colorblind vision of racial reconciliation that was never implemented in fact and only sometimes invoked in speech, and certainly not on the left today. They cite the work of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson with great approval. Wilson, they write, was “critical of the approach of the War on Poverty, which, he charged, had incurred political opposition because, unlike the universal programs of the New Deal, it had required middle-class taxpayers to fund programs from which they would not receive any benefit.” In some sense conservative then, that observation sounds like rank reaction to progressives today. The alternative? Wilson “urged government policies that would promote full employment and higher wages, along with universal childcare and family allowance programs.” The people who talk like that today on Capitol Hill tend to be Republicans. American Affairs receives a “we wish them well,” along with American Compass, in the book’s introduction.
The trouble for Judis and Teixeira is not just that the Democrat shadow party is liable to call them conservatives, or that the working-class Democrats they seek to be tribunes for now vote Republican, but that more Republicans than Democrats agree with their centrist, “moderate” positions anyway. Their own polling would suggest that, in their quest for a national populist party, they are backing the wrong horse. With every statement they had Public Policy Polling present to primary voters in Wisconsin—formulated to represent “a midpoint between the extremes on current controversies about race, immigration, patriotism, sex and gender, political correctness, and the police”—more Republicans agreed than Democrats, sometimes significantly, an average of 87.3 percent to 67.7 percent. Judis and Teixeira point to these results as evidence that Democratic leadership is missing an enormous constituency, and there is obviously something to that. For example, 89 percent of Republicans agreed that “America benefits from the presence of immigrants, and no immigrant—even if illegal—should be mistreated. But border security is still important, and is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country,” while 74 percent of Democrats agreed. Three-quarters is pretty good, but the weight of the whole poll suggests that the disappearing Democrats of the book’s title might also include the authors.
Perhaps it is unfair to expect what would amount to political theory from what is essentially a work of opinion journalism. But the disappointment of Where Have All the Democrats Gone? is a failure to ask the question behind the title question: what kind of America is it possible to make? We may live in the corpse of FDR’s America, history beginning in 1945, but Judis and Teixeira do too good a job summarizing the history of its murder to make their suggestions for reviving it sound plausible.
Nevertheless, they persist in presenting a primarily electoral case for common sense, against the lunacy they believe has destroyed the Democrats’ potential to be the vehicle for a truly popular political restoration. Florida’s turn red is their main negative example, but that is thinking rather small, even on Florida’s own terms. The states, red and blue, increasingly look not back to the New Deal but to federalism and the nullification crisis. At the time of writing, Texas and the federal government are in a standoff over competing claims of authority to police the border. Judis and Teixeira seek to defend the American nation against people who wish to discard nations, but they will not quite advocate for a nationalism stronger than FDR’s promise to use “the ‘new machinery’ of government to effect major social and economic changes for ordinary working Americans.” Meanwhile, the leading Republican presidential candidate has been thrown off of ballots on the thinnest of legal pretenses, and illegal aliens pour across the Rio Grande in record numbers. This is disenfranchisement, and it is the rights, duties, and privileges of citizenship in a representative democracy, prior to economic policy reforms, that today demand defending.