Not long before Tuesday’s election, Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic political scientist and commentator, predicted that, regardless of the outcome of the election, the contemporary progressive movement was dead. Harris, he intimated, could still win the election, but the dominant force in Democratic politics for the last two decades was done. Voters had clearly and unambiguously voiced their distaste for the four pillars of contemporary progressivism: open borders/mass immigration, lax law enforcement/social disorder, identity politics, and the war on fossil fuels. As Teixeira astutely noted, the electorate simply isn’t buying what the progressives are selling.
Teixeira, it should be noted, is not alone in his concerns about and disapproval of the contemporary progressive agenda and its alienating effect on average voters. In the few days since Donald Trump handily defeated Kamala Harris, a handful of prominent Democrats have condemned their party’s polarizing platform and have echoed Teixeira’s denunciation of the progressives’ stubbornness. For example, Matt Yglesias, a longtime left-wing journalist and political commentator, posted a short “common sense” Democratic platform to restore the party’s following, overtly rejecting the entirety of the progressive plan. Like Teixeira, Yglesias slammed the progressives’ obsessions with climate, race, and anti-social behavior in particular.
Based on what we all saw the other night—the most improbable political comeback in American history and a realignment of the electorate—it is clear that both Teixeira and Yglesias are right. The progressive movement has enfeebled the Democratic Party and made it unappealing to a majority of voters. In order to stave off long-term minority-party status, Democrats must move on from contemporary progressivism and must realign themselves with the needs and wants of their traditional voters. The party must change.
There’s only one problem—and it reminds me of the old joke:
Q: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Only one, but the light bulb really has to want to change.
Teixeira, Yglesias, James Carville, and a host of other Democrats are inarguably correct about the state of their party, the malign influences on it, and the necessity of change.
The problem is that the party has to want to change first, which is not as easy as it sounds.
Indeed, there are several very important reasons why the Democratic Party will not change—why it cannot change.
The most obvious and overpowering of these is the capture of the institutions.
For decades, conservatives have noted that the far-left controls all of the institutions of cultural transmission in this country (and in the West more generally). We have noted as well that this is hardly an accident, a fateful coincidence. It is by design and the result of a century-long effort by Marxist revisionists, executed with dedication and determination.
In my book, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, I spend an entire chapter discussing that which the infamous East German Marxist student-leader Rudi Dutschke later called “the long march through the institutions.” In brief, after World War I, the Marxists of Europe realized that the workers of the world were never going to unite and throw off their chains, meaning that the long-anticipated revolution was never going to occur—or at least it was never going to occur on its own. The revolution and the triumph of Communism were not, as Marx had declared, historically inevitable. They would have to be incited.
Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, and the scholars at the Frankfurt School (helmed by Max Horkheimer) collectively decided that the only way to accomplish this incitement was to alter the consciousness of the workers, to strip them of their institutionally created false consciousness and liberate them “from the circumstances that enslave them.” And the way to do that, in turn, was, as Horkheimer put it, to mount a “historical effort to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers of men.” In short, they would have to change society by changing its institutions of consciousness and cultural transmission. Hence, the “long march.”
Near the end of that chapter, I note how shockingly successful the long march has been, especially in the United States. Whereas Marx was a crackpot who knew almost nothing about economics, history, or the conditions of the working class, his post-war successors turned out to be quite brilliant and attuned to the nature of the relationship between man and society. In less than half a century, the critical theorists “managed to do precisely what Gramsci and Lukács had suggested needed doing a half-century earlier”:
They stripped away the veneer of false consciousness—or, more accurately, they stripped away the consciousness that had existed previously, replacing it with their own consciousness, one rooted in skepticism and alienation, which would become the overarching themes in higher education and every single endeavor subsequently undertaken by those who passed through the American system of higher education from the 1970s on.
Conservatives have dealt with the repercussions of the Long March and the takeover of the institutions for a long time. And they’ve adapted to it as best they can. They’ve created their own intellectual organizations (think tanks), their own media environment, and a host of other competing institutions designed to blunt the impact of the Long March. While this effort has been impressive and important in resisting the far-left’s takeover of the culture, it has also been a strictly rearguard undertaking. Conservatives are constantly having to defend themselves and what’s left of the traditional culture from the advancing institutions. With the left firmly in charge of the educational, religious, news, and entertainment establishments, the best conservatives can do is to “hang on” to whatever scraps are still up for grabs.
The catch here is that this is an existential challenge not just for conservatives but for “common-sense” non-progressive liberals as well. These institutions were not taken over by “liberals” or moderate Democrats. They were taken over by leftists, by radicals, by the very progressives whom Teixeira and Yglesias have identified as the cause of the Democrats’ disconnect with the electorate. In other words, changing the Democratic Party and restoring it to its former common-sense, working-class roots is an undertaking that will run into the very same ivy-covered wall that has stymied conservatives for decades.
It is no mere coincidence that Ruy Teixeira works for the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative-ish think tank) and, before that, worked for the Brookings Institution (a center-left think tank). There really is no home for a guy like him in traditional academia. Likewise, it’s no coincidence that Matt Yglesias left traditional news media to start his own outlet (Vox.com) and now does most of his work on Substack, an “alternative” media platform. He too is out of place in the contemporary institutional arena. Such is the nature of the game.
The difference between conservatives and the center-left is that conservatives have invested heavily in building their own institutions, while the denizens of the center-left have not really understood until now (if they do, indeed, understand at all) that the takeover of the institutions was meant to undermine their worldview as much as conservatives.’ For the most part, they do not have their own alternative institutions and therefore do not have their own means for fighting the far-left’s cultural takeover.
It is largely inarguable that the nation would be far better off with a Democratic Party dominated by non-progressives, but that’s not especially likely, at least not anytime in the foreseeable future.
