July 15, 2022

"I’m just a social democrat, man. Trying to make the world a better place."

Said Ruy Teixeira, quoted in "'A real chilling effect': A Lefty Scholar is Dumping CAP — For AEI/Ruy Teixeira predicted Obama’s rise. Now he’s scorning DC’s liberal think tanks for caring more about diversity than class" (Politico).
To hear Teixeira tell it, CAP [Center for American Progress], 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.... 
“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?’ ...
“It’s just cloud cuckoo land,” he says. “The fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.”... 
Unlike some of the other conflicts in the now-voluminous older-normies-versus-young-graduates canon, Teixeira’s does not involve claims of being snubbed or censored or canceled or maligned.... But, he says, 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....
Going back to the likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick, AEI [American Enterprise Institute] has long had a constituency of academics who didn’t quite fit in on campuses; it also had fellows, like Norm Ornstein, who didn’t fit the conservative mold.... One veteran of conservative think tanks tells me.... “AEI has already alienated the people who stand in the mainstream of the Republican Party by being the home of the Never Trumpers. This is doubling down.”... Yuval Levin, who runs the AEI Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies shop where Teixeira and many of the other unlikely newbies have landed, says thinking of think-tank work as simply a collection of policy papers ignores how profoundly unusual the current moment is in America....

52 comments:

Jefferson's Revenge said...

Irrespective of the politics of this, as a conservative I totally am on board with switching the topic from race to class. I am also on board with class based diversity programs in education. How to parse class distinctions is complex but can be done.

Why should a white kid like I was 60 years ago, from an impoverished family with single mom who could barely read, see a college slot got to a upper middle class back doctors kid who scored 300 points below me on the SATs? It happened to me and I just shrugged and went on with my life but how is that right for society?

Michael K said...

The realignment proceeds apace and the left does not understand. Why are Biden's numbers so much worse with under 30s? Teixeira predicted that Hispanics would rule America once they were given amnesty. How's that working out ? It's gotten so bad Hispanic politicians are accusing Republican Hispanics of not being "Genuine." Mean while that politician's Jewish ex-wife kept his last name to run for Mayor of Phoenix. Hispanic last names are bankable in AZ unless you are a Republican.

Rabel said...

So he's a Nazi Now?

Carol said...

Well there you go. The activists try to turn politics into a great moral crusade to remake society but politics is amoral. You just use it to get what you want, incrementally.

Nobody likes being preached at.

Beasts of England said...

’It’s just cloud cuckoo land,’ he says. ‘The fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.’

Splitter!!

Can’t wait to check his cucoometer after the midterm Breakfast Taco Exodus.

Václav Patrik Šulik said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
RMc said...

Eating. Their. Own.

wendybar said...

Hear!! Hear!!! Can we please go back to MLK quote “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

They stick everybody in boxes, and are going back 50 years to have segregation again.

Robert Cook said...

"Why are Biden's numbers so much worse with under 30s?"

Because they see clearly he is a dithering, ineffectual old fool, a life-long member of the establishment, not even trying to generate effective policies to address the nation's problems.

Lurker21 said...

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.

Very true, but more money may also have something to do with his move.

William Kristol, clad in a suit, has just left the room.

What's he usually clad in? A toga? Buckskins? Fatigues? A loin cloth?

Chris Stirewalt, the Fox News analyst who infuriated Trump by calling Arizona for Joe Biden and subsequently lost his job.

Stirewalt doesn't like Trump, but the sentence is misleading in that he didn't decide Biden had carried the state and didn't lose his job because of it.

AEI has long had a constituency of academics who didn’t quite fit in on campuses; it also had fellows, like Norm Ornstein, who didn’t fit the conservative mold.

He did come to fit the liberal Democrat mould very closely.

Giselle Donnelly, born Thomas.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

What is a "social democrat" anyway?

Remember when SDUSA liked Reagan?

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

Rabel said...

So he's a Nazi Now?

He wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority with John B. Judis back 2002 that sent the Dems down the diversity road, so if I were a Dem I'd probably think that 'Rat Bastard' is a more appropriate term.

Yancey Ward said...

Why does Texeira even matter- he is made of cricket-based tortilla and ground tofu.

Tina Trent said...

I was required to attend CAP meetings as part of my job before CAP kicked me out (2 meetings -- point of pride) and soon before I walked out of the centrist-Dems to the paleos, with a brief GOP sojourn (different from Sojourners).

They're billionaire Maoists funded by Meathead from All in the Family. And if I didn't already know that by doing my usual due diligence, I would probably have guessed it soon enough. Watching those jibones trying to use all the laptops and other electronic equipment showered on them was like waiting for the bonobos to start jacking each other off, as was watching the ACLU and Sierra Club submit to them in every sense of the word.

The Left is a prison camp they want all of us to attend.

MikeR said...

Best of luck, but if AEI is the home of the never-Trumpers, then it is the home for people willing to spout whatever woke nonsense is required so that they get the wars they want. That's what "never-Trumpers" actually are.
Don't know how much Teixeira’s going to enjoy that.

MikeR said...

Hey, isn't this the old Demographics is Destiny guy? The Destiny of the Democratic Party is to be completely overrun by the new Demographic of lunatics flooding out from college. Eat it, O wolves!

Iman said...

Fans of Democrats are becoming more “selective”.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

The left's answer to everything is ... You're a violent gender hater, a BLANK-o-phobe, a racist or a Nazi.
OR A RUSSIAN AGENT!

gets old, huh?

tim maguire said...

Jefferson's Revenge said...Irrespective of the politics of this, as a conservative I totally am on board with switching the topic from race to class.

Yep, the real issue is class. The left wants to pretend it's other things because the left is dominated by privileged people who want to maintain their privileges while also portraying themselves as the good guys protecting the weak and marginalized. They can achieve those goals with cultural issues (gender, abortion, sometimes race, etc.), they cannot achieve those goals by admitting the problem is class.

baghdadbob said...

Yes, programs should focus more on class than race. The idea that a wealthy black child would be favored for college admission over a poor white kid with better grades and test scores is racialist, if not racist.

As the great philosopher Joe Biden once said, "poor kids are just as bright and talented as white kids."

As an aside, Ruy Teixeira, wrote "The Emerging Democrat Majority" in 2002, a seminal tome describing what is now called The Great Replacement Theory.

Kate said...

'“My perspective is, the single most important thing to focus on in the social system is the economic system,” he tells me. “It’s class.” We’re sitting in AEI’s elegantly furnished library.'

Politico with the subtle shade.

Marty said...

It cracks me up that people like Texeira cannot see the connection between their supposedly benign "social democratic" leanings and the Wokerati they have spawned. "Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life" (Galatians 6:7-8).

pacwest said...

The problem with this is the same as Glenn Reynolds has been pointing out with his Welcome Wagon project. The fact that you don't have pictures of Che and Mao in your office doesn't make you a conservative. Radicals are driving the "moderates" out of the Dem party but that doesn't give them Republican status. The Big Tent theory is all well and good, but we really can't have a watered down form of conservatism right now. It's the AEI, so, really more of a lateral move, ala Kristol.

In a side note check out the article at RCP on the amount of business experience of the the appointed economic advisors of Trump vs Biden admins.

MartyH said...

He's written numerous times lately about Democratic Party leadership being totally out of sync with Hispanic voters' concerns. It's good to see him move to a place less rigidly ideological.

Narayanan said...

time to ask NASA to turn Webb-prism to earth peering

J Melcher said...

Hispanic last names are bankable...

Beto O'Rourke considers Hispanic given names equally valuable.

Jimmy said...

Social Democrat. My understanding is that they advocate the 'peaceful' transition from capitalism to socialism.
And are think tanks now where public intellectuals reside? Open to interpretation obviously, but I always thought of Buckley, Mailer, Vidal, Hitchens, Paglia, Bloom, and Moynihan as public intellectuals. Just a partial list.
I list the above, simply because they were willing to debate on the issues. that seems to be out of favor these days. Instead, we get lectured and treated like children who can't understand 'complicated' issues.
Do think tanks produce anything of value these days, regardless of the ideology involved?
Free speech these days seems to mean a lack of debate, especially at education institutions.
In the past, contentious issues were subject to debate, in many places. Now people seem to start from the position that their views are 'settled' science.

Jokah Macpherson said...

"How to parse class distinctions is complex but can be done."

My rule of thumb is that if you have a foundation (e.g. the Jokah Macpherson Foundation), you are not lower class.

Jupiter said...

Putin says that the West has been overtaken by "totalitarian liberalism" and "hypocritical double standards". He says that "People in most countries do not want such a life and such a future," and "They are simply tired of kneeling, humiliating themselves in front of those who consider themselves exceptional."

Hmmm. That's Vlad Putin, you know, from Russia. Fairly astute analysis. It's been over thirty years since the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Why exactly does NATO still exist? Is it really in our national interest to drive Russia and China together?

Totalitarian liberalism.

n.n said...

Eating. Their. Own.

Tacos, served with a liberal flood of diversity [dogma]. The People of Color... Brown (POB) are not amused.

n.n said...

Diversity dogma is a color judgment, class-based bigotry that is held under the twilight faith, practiced under the Pro-Choice ethical religion, and realized through liberal ideology.

n.n said...

Is it really in our national interest to drive Russia and China together?

And India, if not for China.

Marty said...

"Because they see clearly [Biden] is a dithering, ineffectual old fool, a life-long member of the establishment, not even trying to generate effective policies to address the nation's problems."

Always nice to agree with Cookie every now and then.

n.n said...

Do think tanks produce anything of value these days

TERFS, xenophobia, toxic masculinity, political congruence ("="), trans/homophobia, cisgender, witches, warlocks, fetus (a technical term of art) for social distance, "burdens", sex and sexual holes, diversity [dogma], [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] climate cooling... warming... change, etc.

JK Brown said...

Just a social democrat? Or is it democratic socialist? Even Jordan Peterson falls for them.

But a century ago, the Social Democrats demonstrated their true nature when they thought they couldn't be opposed. And we've seen Democrats, social or otherwise, call for essential dictatorship when they felt strong enough to suppress their opponents. But now some are not so sure, so they rush to the "just kidding" excuse.


"The Social Democrats were democratic only so long as they were not the ruling party; that is, so long as they still felt themselves not strong enough to suppress their opponents by force. The moment they thought themselves the strongest, they declared themselves— as their writers had always asserted was advisable at this point— for dictatorship. Only when the armed bands of the Rightist parties had inflicted bloody defeats on them did they again become democratic “until further notice.” Their party writers express this by saying: “In the councils of the social democratic parties, the wing which declared for democracy triumphed over the one which championed dictatorship.”

"Of course, the only party that may properly be described as democratic is one that under all circumstances— even when it is the strongest and in control— champions democratic institutions."

--Mises, Ludwig von (1927). Liberalism

Narr said...

Think tank warfare. Got to expect deserters and turncoats.

Not that RT's wrong, mind you.

Jupiter said...

"Trying to make the world a better place."

Don't do me any favors.

Jupiter said...

"Only when the armed bands of the Rightist parties had inflicted bloody defeats on them did they again become democratic “until further notice.”

Armed bands, huh. Interesting. Where was this? "Bloody defeats".

John henry said...

I hate to be defending the odious Beto, but "O'rourke", and o'daley, o'casey, O'Reilly, O'Higgins and many other similar names are "hispanic"

Kicked out of Ireland by the Brits in Cromwell's ethnic cleansing, many wound up in Spain. They and their descendants then wound up in South America looking for and finding opportunities

Ambrosio O'Higgins was sprains viceroy over much if Spanish America. His son led the fight for liberation.

There is probably more Irish than Spanish blood in most Hispanics. Probably even more Italian and German, especially in Argentina, Chile, peru.

A good book on this is "paisanos:the forgotten Irish who changed the face of Latin America" by Tim Fanning

Greg The Class Traitor said...

Chris Stirewalt, the Fox News analyst who infuriated Trump by calling Arizona for Joe Biden and subsequently lost his job.

Now that's a nicely dishonest description.

At the point where Stirewalt "called AZ for Biden", there were so few votes in that there's only two ways he could make that call:
1: he's a dishonest Democrat hack wish-casting what he wanted
2: He expects Biden to win the State my over 5%
IIRC the final reported margin was less than 1%

So either Stirewalt was just lying, or his call was wrong.

IIRC, at the same tiem he also predicted the Dems would pick up 15 seats in the House
They lost 12

Anyone who hired him for his polling abilities is dishonest or incompetent

Robert Cook said...

"The fact that you don't have pictures of Che and Mao in your office doesn't make you a conservative. Radicals are driving the 'moderates' out of the Dem party...."

Hahahaha!

Just because you have a "D" on your voter registration card doesn't make you "left," (and certainly not "radical").

The Dems are far less progressive overall than they have been in the past, and they've never been radical about it. That you and your ilk seem to honestly believe the Dems today are "left," and even "radically left" simply reflects how far to the right you and your ilk (Republicans and not) have traveled.

effinayright said...

Robert Cook said...
"The fact that you don't have pictures of Che and Mao in your office doesn't make you a conservative. Radicals are driving the 'moderates' out of the Dem party...."

The Dems are far less progressive overall than they have been in the past, and they've never been radical about it. That you and your ilk seem to honestly believe the Dems today are "left," and even "radically left" simply reflects how far to the right you and your ilk (Republicans and not) have traveled.
***********************
I don't know whether such an inane comment should be filed under "Obliviousness", "Obtuseness", or "Ignorance"----or all three.

Jupiter said...

Just because you have a "D" on your voter registration card doesn't make you "left," (and certainly not "radical").

No true Leftist, right Cookie?

pacwest said...

That you and your ilk seem to honestly believe the Dems today are "left,"

No need to be offended. But I continue to believe defunding police, swamping the border to the point assimilation becomes impossible, teaching kids to hate each other and sexualizing the in kindergarten among many of the other insanities that Dem voices and even LEADERS are promoting qualifies as radical. Nor do I really consider a laughing matter. Sorry that you do.

Michael K said...


The Dems are far less progressive overall than they have been in the past, and they've never been radical about it. That you and your ilk seem to honestly believe the Dems today are "left," and even "radically left" simply reflects how far to the right you and your ilk (Republicans and not) have traveled.


You are as far left as most of Biden's handlers. There is no one short of Lenin or Mao who you would consider left.

Lurker21 said...

The meaning of "progressive" and "progressivism" has changed over the years. Today's Democrats are more united and more committed to their progressive ideas of race, gender, sexual identity, and climate change than they were ever committed to egalitarianism or socialism.

Face it: Democrats in the days of Stevenson, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton weren't especially hostile to corporate capitalism or determined to break up conglomerates and family fortunes, and they certainly weren't as committed to such an agenda then as they are to race, gender, sexual identity, and climate change now.

cubanbob said...

Hmmm. That's Vlad Putin, you know, from Russia. Fairly astute analysis. It's been over thirty years since the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Why exactly does NATO still exist? Is it really in our national interest to drive Russia and China together?"

I can't understand this anti-NATO sentiment. It has no basis in reality. NATO is a defensive organization. There is no offensive equivalent to Article 5 of NATO. It is one thing to band together for collective defense and another to band together for aggression.
The former Warsaw Pact countries are the most wary of Russia and the ones who are willing to expend a slightly larger percent of their GDP in defense spending. NATO never had or is planning an offensive war. Putin is driving Russian closer to China with Russia's badly executed invasion of Ukraine. The anti-American pro Russian Indians are the ones who were pro-Soviet. Some things just don't change.


Jamie said...

That's Vlad Putin, you know, from Russia. Fairly astute analysis. It's been over thirty years since the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Why exactly does NATO still exist? Is it really in our national interest to drive Russia and China together?"

I can't understand this anti-NATO sentiment.


First para - Jupiter, I think. Second - cubanbob.

So. It was too complicated to excerpt, but Jupiter's quote from Putin was in fact pretty astute - that the west has lost its assurance of its own moral ground. At the same time, cubanbob brings it home by pointing out that it doesn't matter a whole lot what Russian aggression is fueled by - NATO just needs to be present and ready to respond, even if the reason seems puerile.

I love this blog...

Saint Croix said...

Good article in the Intercept about woke culture destroying progressive advocacy groups.

Love it!

Spewing all that poison into our society and it comes back and bites you in the ass.

Too funny.

staff were ignoring the mission and focusing only on themselves, using a moment of public awakening to smuggle through standard grievances cloaked in the language of social justice.

You mean the grievance industry is a pain in the ass?!

How weird that identity politics -- that most divisive of ideologies -- is incapable of uniting people in harmony!

Saint Croix said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Bilwick said...

If you want to make the world a better place, jefe, more liberty and less statism, por favor.

Greg The Class Traitor said...

Robert Cook said...
Just because you have a "D" on your voter registration card doesn't make you "left," (and certainly not "radical").

If you are voting D, you are voting for the people who unanimously opposed the Born Alive Infant's protection act, which is to say if a baby made it out of mom and on the table, the GOP wanted to force the doctor to stop trying to kill the baby, and the Democrats refused. You voted for the Party that demands that abortion be legal in every single State up to, if not past, the moment the umbilical cord is cut

If you are voting D, You are voting from the people who create a fund "bail funds" for rioters who are caught burning down people's homes and businesses.
If you are voting D, you are voting for a complete trampling of US immigration law. Not passing different laws, but simply ignoring the laws on the books
If you are voting D, you're voting for the proposition that "trans women are real women", and that therefore any person with a penis who says "I'm a woman" must be allowed into women's sports, women's spas, women's bathrooms, women's locker rooms, women's dorm rooms, and women's jails.

Every single person who's voting D, is voting for all of the above. because that's what a vote for a D gets you

The Dems are far less progressive overall than they have been in the past, and they've never been radical about it.
If you find the above "not radical", it is because you are completely and utterly fucked in the head.

The vast majority of current D positions are ones that 20 years ago would have gotten you laughed into silence pretty much anywhere in America

And rightly so.
Radical lunacy doesn't become "moderate" just because most of the politicians in a Party support it.

Tina Trent said...

AEI are also pikers. The good people are frogs stuck between a boiling pot and toxic astroturf.