How Democrats can stop talking past each other and start winning
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The third group of moderate Democrats yearns to turn back the clock to the New Deal coalition. A chief spokesperson is Ruy Teixeira of the Liberal Patriot newsletter. '[T]he New Deal Democrats were moderate and even small-c conservative in their social outlook,' he
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Beginning in the 1970s, college-educated progressives began to focus on issues involving race, gender, the environment, and sexual freedom. Teixeira
This brings us to the only moderate position that holds promise for Democrats: defining moderate as being pragmatic, rather than doctrinaire. College-educated progressives need to recognize that their priorities and their cultural values don't match those of most Americans.
In 2024, inflation and the economy were
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Centering that economic message is the first pragmatic step in rebuilding Democrats' brand to appeal to both college grads and noncollege grads. The second step is to recognize that cultural preferences differ across class lines. Non-elites value self-discipline because they need to get up every day, on time, without an attitude, to work at jobs with little autonomy. Consequently, they highly value traditional institutions that anchor self-discipline: religion, the military, the family. Those same institutions offer non-elites sources of social status independent of their subordinate positions in a capitalist economy. Blue-collar values reflect blue-collar lives.
That's why, on cultural issues, college-educated progressives need to stop demanding a mind-meld with the Democratic Party. If you're playing to win, politics requires not purity but an ability to build coalitions with people whose values may differ from yours in fundamental ways. Democrats need to treat voters without college degrees as respected coalition partners, making tradeoffs.
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This doesn't mean that progressives need to abandon their values; it means they have to act on them. Here are two uncomfortable facts: Progressive activists as a group are much
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