The Way Forward

A Democrat Ponders a ‘Thumping Rebuke’

Ruy Teixeira says the party went wrong when it abandoned ‘progressive centrism’ and embraced a hard-left cultural ideology.

Did you feel the joy on Tuesday night? Ruy Teixeira sure didn’t. He held his nose and voted for Kamala Harris, but he found her “distinctive policy ideas, to the extent she had them, questionable. I was definitely not a big enthusiast, but I voted for her anyway.” His “historical loyalty” to the Democratic Party meant that he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Donald Trump. “A lot of the obvious things that bother people about Trump bothered me too,” he says. Mr. Trump is “a bit too chaotic and unpredictable, and it seemed risky to me.” Mr. Teixeira didn’t buy into “all this baloney about how he’s going to institute fascism, but Trump did make me kind of nervous.”

Mr. Teixeira, 72, is a longtime Democrat who is distraught about the direction his party has taken. In 2002, he and John Judis published “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which predicted a dominant future for his party. It didn’t come to pass. Two decades later [Ruy Teixeira] resigned from his fellowship at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington think tank that had become a cauldron of woke conformity, and joined the center-right American Enterprise Institute, of which I [Islamaphobe and Wall Street journal contributor Tunku Varadarajan] am also a fellow.