In 2002 Ruy Texeira and John Judis wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority. It was the book of the year, discussed by practically everybody—left, right, and center. It has been widely interrupted a predicting an inevitable new progressive era, a consequence of demographic shift. In a recent post at Substack he cautions Democrats that they can’t depend on demographics alone. Here’s his conclusion:
Finally, the long-range effects of rising diversity are also an all-else-equal proposition. While cycle-by-cycle voter preference shifts can be volatile and even out over time, sometimes they result in a long-term shift against a party like the Democrats—think of the move of white non-college voters toward the Republicans in the 2000s. This can cancel or even swamp the pro-Democratic effects of demographic change over a lengthy period.
In short, demographics set the playing field, but they are not destiny unless all else remains equal. And all else almost never remains equal. Therein lies a challenge for the Democrats that the simple fact of rising racial diversity cannot solve.
or, said another way, the “progressive centrism” that he and Mr. Judis advocated in their book is a necessary prerequisite for that progressive triumph.
Is that what’s happening? Or is what we see presently more like the neo-feudalism that other both on left and right, starting with John Kenneth Galbraith sixty years ago and most recently Joel Kotkin, have been warning about?
My own view has been that demographic shift doesn’t work exactly as Mr. Texeira has imagined. Blacks and Hispanics tend to be much more conservative than would be required for the sort of progressive parousia that he imagined and today’s progressivism is focused far more on Harvard Yard and Silicon Valley than it is on Back of the Yards and the Salinas Valley.
Consider the 2020 presidential election, for example. Contrary to what you might gather from listening to the Democratic leadership, Hispanic voter turnout in 2020 was actually higher than in 2008, 2012, or 2016 and a lot of those votes went to Trump. Black voter turnout was higher than in 2016. Many of those votes, too, went to Trump.
