Hardcore liberal scholar and commentator is no longer safe at his think tank

 

Don’t kill me over the “conservative” label in the headline, but there wasn’t a better term. You’ll figure it out in a few paragraphs. The more important aspect is that a hardcore liberal scholar and commentator is no longer safe at his think tank. 

It’s Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress, founded by ex-Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta. On August 1, he’s going to the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. Why? He can’t do the work he wants to do at CAP. The younger woke junior staff is making his former workspace radioactive. 

Teixeira is known for his 2002 book “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which ingrained demography is destiny in the minds of younger liberals. He predicted the rise of Barack Obama. Yet, he’s been doing some fact-checking of those who he says misinterpret his thesis. 

Yes, young and diverse voters were essential, but so was keeping a good chunk of the white working class. The latter has sprinted from the Democratic Party, and Ruy is now joining that exodus. He sat with Politico and said the current crop of progressives makes him want to flee from the left (via Politico): 

Ruy Teixeira is one of Washington’s most prominent left-leaning think-tank scholars, a fixture at the Center for American Progress since the liberal organization’s founding in 2003. But as of August 1, he’ll have a new professional home: The American Enterprise Institute, the longtime conservative redoubt that over the years has employed the likes of Newt Gingrich, Dinesh D’Souza, and Robert Bork.

Teixeira, whose role in the Beltway scrum often involved arguing against calls to move right on economic issues, insists his own policy views haven’t changed — but says the current cultural milieu of progressive organizations “sends me running screaming from the left.”

[…]

To hear Teixeira tell it, CAP, and the rest of Washington’s institution-based left, stopped being a place where he could do the work he wanted. The reason, he says, is that the relentless focus on race, gender, and identity in historically liberal foundations and think tanks has made it hard to do work that looks at society through other prisms. It also makes people nervous about projects that could be accused of giving short shrift to anti-racism efforts.

“I would say that anybody who has a fundamentally class-oriented perspective, who thinks that’s a more important lens and doesn’t assume that any disparity is automatically a lens of racism or sexism or what have you … I think that perspective is not congenial in most left institutions,” he says.

[…]

Teixeira’s bill of complaints will be a familiar one for many who have followed the internal battles of the left over the past half-decade, or spent an afternoon on left-wing Twitter. Politically, as a strategist, he thinks the Democrats need to win culturally moderate voters if they’re going to ever create the kind of coalition that can get their policies enacted. And personally, as an employee, he’s none too fond of the institutional dynamics that he says are driven by younger staff but embraced by higher-ups afraid of a public blow-up.

“I’d say they have been affected by the nature and inclination and preferences of their junior staff,” he says. “It’s just the case that at CAP, like almost any other left think tank you can think of, it’s become very hard to have a conversation about race and gender and trans issues, even crime and immigration. You know, ‘How should the left handle these?’ There’s a default assumption about how you’re supposed to talk about these things, even the language. There’s a real chilling effect on all of these organizations, and I think it’s had an effect on CAP as well.”

Like a lot of older and whiter veterans of liberal think-tanks and foundations, he also says he’s exhausted by the internal agita. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land,” he says. “The fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.”

[…]

…the way projects work in think-tank world means that when an institution doesn’t embrace a scholar’s interests and ideas, life gets harder. He once tried to start something called the Bobby Kennedy Project, which would look at ways to appeal to the Black and White working-class together. It went nowhere.

“People sort of tolerated the idea at CAP but nobody wanted to push it,” he says. “We did have some conversations with people in and around the foundation world and nobody wanted to touch it. You could tell. People were leery of talking about the white working class, as if it was de facto racist … You’re supposed to do stuff that’s funded, and you can’t get stuff funded if the institution isn’t behind you.”

I know AEI isn’t what it used to be—its time has come and gone. It does pride itself in being a safe space for anti-Trump Republicans and now disaffected liberals who feel the “woke” crew plots to vote them off the island. The publication added that AEI now prides itself in being a place where folks from all stripes can just do their work, channel their passions, and not be bothered with the national mood of their respective political camps. 

I’d never thought a CAP mainstay would run away to find safety at AEI, and if you said that ten years ago, expect to be met with laughter. That’s like someone from Everytown for Gun Safety leaving to join Gun Owners of America or a similar group. Ruy is very diplomatic, adding that the left’s obsession with race, gender, and identity glosses over class issues. There are many ways to look at problems and trends, and the left has a strict ethos regarding their current train of thought on today’s topics. 

He’s not wrong. When others see speaking about class as de facto racism, it’s time to find a new home. 

Today’s liberals are focused on things that are not important to average voters. No one cares about pronouns when they can’t pay the bills, fill their gas tank, or find baby formula. The left is obsessed with academic exercises. Average voters don’t have time to discuss the nonsensical pillars of intersectionality, trigger warnings, and other “woke” niceties that only comfort and stroke the egos of the white, wealthy, and college-educated class. These people are not the majority and won’t be able to get the things Ruy and other ordinary liberals want to get done. I’m not crying about that, but as with most coalition building—you need moderate voters. Democrats still need white men, specifically white working-class voters. The left wants nothing to do with them. 

Ruy is trying to fix that, but the “woke” are so vicious he needs to hole up with right-ish think tanks just to analyze the data. What a mess, but it also allows us to corner this voter bloc and maybe rope nonwhite working-class voters into the fold.