New York Times: Confessions of a Liberal Heretic

Do reporters and viewers care about the same things? And when there's a mismatch, what should the media do differently? pic.twitter.com/kvAvAvro6r

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 23, 2022

Ruy Teixeira is a smart guy.

You can’t blame him for getting it wrong about The Emerging Democratic Majority. He wrote that book in 2002 before Brian Stelter’s generation came to power in the media and before the Acela Corridor Twitter bubble reinforced their most narcissistic tendencies. Jim Acosta now has a show on CNN where he preaches to the choir every night about the imminent death of American democracy.

New York Times:

“A funny thing happened on the way to the emerging Democratic majority. Twenty years on, the co-authors of a hugely influential work on the subject acknowledge that their party took a detour. …

“The Emerging Democratic Majority” took note of the demographic change pulsing through the country, and boldly predicted that the Democratic Party was poised to dominate American politics for the foreseeable future. …

There’s lots of nuance that gets lost in translation, but the narrative that a lot of people took from your book was that the Democratic Party would benefit from the inevitable growth of people of color, young people, this new cadre of voters who at the time seemed ready to join the party and put the Republican Party in the rearview mirror. And the narrative has been complicated since then, hasn’t it?

Well, it was even complicated back then. You fairly summarized what is a bowdlerized version of what we said. That was only part of what we were saying. Demographic change was inevitably shifting the political terrain. It did not make it inevitable that Democrats would benefit.

And even on this raw demographic basis, it’s not crazy that there’s a natural popular-vote Democratic majority in the country. However, that does not translate into political power. We very specifically said — and this is widely ignored — that for this majority to attain and exercise political power, you have to retain a significant fraction of the white working class. The country was changing, but it wasn’t changing that fast.

The second thing we didn’t anticipate was the eventual effect of professional-class hegemony in the Democratic Party — that it would tilt the Democrats so far to the left on sociocultural issues that it would actually make the Democratic Party significantly unattractive to working-class voters.

It’s a huge liability for the Democrats, because the people who staff the party, the people who staff the think tanks, the advocacy groups, the foundations, the staffers, they’re all singing from the same hymnal to some extent. They live in this liberal cultural bubble, particularly the younger members. …”

That’s exactly what I have been saying on this website.

For over a year now, they have obsessively covered 1/6 and have identified themselves as a class with “our democracy.” Every day is 1/6 in coastal media. Life has gone on in the rest of the country.

Rightwing media has pummeled the Jake Tappers and Jim Acostas of the world on dozens of issues that split Democrats and Independent swing voters. There is inflation and shortages of all kinds. There is gas prices. There is COVID which the Biden administration has utterly failed to control. There is school closures. There is the spike in violent crime in Democratic cities. There is the homelessness crisis. There is record illegal immigration. There is police resignations and progressive DAs who turn a blind eye to shoplifting and other crimes. There is Afghanistan which was an embarrassment on the world stage. There is censorship and “trans” and toppling statues. There is Wokeism in schools and hospitals.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have hung themselves with embarrassing public defeats on Build Back Better and voting rights. There was no student loan debt forgiveness. There was no $15 minimum wage. They delivered nothing on health care which is always a top issue for their voters. They haven’t raised taxes on the billionaire class, but have pushed instead to lift the SALT cap. They have allowed the child tax credit to expire. They haven’t even done much on climate change except for rejoining the Paris Agreement.

If they lose the 2022 midterms, well, it is lights out for “our democracy.” It is also systematic racism and white supremacy and “authoritarianism” not to vote for us. That’s their pitch.

Note: We might still have another foreign policy debacle in Ukraine and a market crash before we get to November.