“The principles of a once great political party had become empty platitudes which no longer had relevance to the anguished lives of millions of Americans,” observed the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) about the traumatic unraveling of the Republican Party that ended a 70-year period of political dominance which had begun with Lincoln and the Civil War. (See The Crisis of the Old Order, the 1957 opening volume of Schlesinger’s acclaimed Age of Roosevelt trilogy.)
Today the same words could describe the Democratic Party as it experiences a similar unraveling which portends the final end of its long period of political dominance which began with Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression.
The Democratic Party’s decline and growing incoherence are well illustrated in the lives and work of two of the Progressive movement’s best-known public intellectuals of the modern era—John Judis and Ruy Teixeira.
In 2002 Judis and Teixeira co-authored The Emerging Democratic Majority, a book that won lavish praise across the political spectrum from E.J. Dionne on the left to George Will on the right. In this seminal work they posited that increasing demographic trends—the rising percentage of black and Hispanic voters within the total electorate with seemingly unshakable loyalty to the Democratic party—and the prevalence of more-tolerant cultural mores—e.g. growing acceptance of gay and interracial marriage—would soon make it nearly impossible for a Republican presidential candidate to win a majority of the national popular vote.
Teixeira, from 2003 to 2022 a senior fellow at the progressive Center for American Progress, is now a senior fellow of the center-right American Enterprise Institute, though like Bernie Sanders maintaining his identity as a Social Democrat. His most notable recent articles are “The Progressive Moment is Over” in the Liberal Patriot and “How Progressives Blew It” in the Free Press.
Judis, a lifelong Democratic socialist and for 20 years a writer and editor of the liberal New Republic, titled his last book Where Have All the Democrats Gone? and his most recent article (3/10/25) in Compact was “The Emerging Democratic Minority.” Quite the reversal on both men’s part.
So, in the eyes of these two Progressive icons, what were the policy ideas that proved most disastrous for Democrats? Start with Ruy Teixeira. In that recent Free Press article on how Progressives, in his opinion, blew it, he fingers four examples under the heading “a terrible idea and voters hate it”:
(1) Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration. Here Texieira notes that “public opinion polling over the years has consistently shown overwhelming majorities in favor of more emphasis on border security. He also cites an astonishing June 2024 CBS News Survey that showed 62% of voters supporting “a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants." Those in favor included 47% of blacks, 58% of white college graduates, and even 53% of Hispanics.
(2) Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder. Here Progressives pushed the Democratic Party into being associated with unpopular movement slogans like “Defund the Police" that did not take public-safety concerns very seriously.
(3) Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics. This Teixeira calls an “obvious contradiction to logic and common sense,” which compelled Democrats to “solemnly pronounce American society structurally racist and shot through with white supremacy from top to bottom.”
(4) Telling people fossil fuels are evil and we must stop using them. This doctrine insists that “climate change...is a crisis that already threatens the existence of the planet and requires immediate, drastic action including rapid replacement of fossil fuels with renewables.”
John Judis concurs—and in that March 25 piece on “The Emerging Democratic Minority” he further refines this litany of the Democratic Party’s self-inflicted wounds through an in-depth statistical analysis of three demographic groups where declining Democratic vote totals have been particularly stunning. These are, first, the working class; next, rural areas and small towns; and thirdly males, particularly young men. Judis demonstrates that these voter groups have now become part of a Republican “Red Wall” that is larger than the Democrats better-known “Blue Wall.”
Thus both writers, in spite of themselves, reach the same overarching conclusion, namely that America's two political parties have over time, but mainly in the Trump era, executed an extraordinary role reversal.
Republicans have been reinvented as the party of the working class, a designation long owned but now abandoned by Democrats, who have inadvertently become a numerically smaller party catering more the affluent and college-educated—a descriptor historically associated with the Republicans, and a formula for failure at the ballot box. Somewhere, Arthur Schlesinger is weeping.
William Moloney studied history and politics at Oxford and the University of London and received his Doctorate from Harvard University. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Hill, Washington Post, Washington Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Denver Post and Human Events.