Liberal Strategist: Democrats Should Mimic Donald Trump’s Policies

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 29: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with industry
Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty
Neil Munro

Democrats are losing elections because their radical equity agenda is frightening normal people who are focused on jobs and wages, according to Ruy Teixeira, an important Democratic strategist whose 2002 book helped to create the modern Democratic Party.

Democrats “would be on much stronger ground [in 2024] if they became identified with an inclusive nationalism that emphasizes what Americans have in common and their right not just to economic prosperity but to public safety, secure borders and a world-class but non-ideological education for their children,” Teixeira wrote on his substack blog, The Liberal Patriot.

But the political need to move towards Trump’s centrist — but also chaotic and combative — “America First” platform will be difficult, Teixeira admitted, Progressives are contemptuous of the Republicans, Democrats and other Americans who disagree with their never-ending equity agenda, he noted:

This [political move] may strike many Democrats as terribly unfair; [They would say] why should Democrats try to do this when GOP attacks are so cynically motivated and so many in their own ranks are guilty of holding truly reactionary and extreme cultural views?

To explain the progressives’ current mistakes, Teixeira cited the example of immigration, which he covered in a November 10 column:

 It is now apparent that the perceived liberalization of the border regime under the Biden administration did indeed spur more migrants to try their luck at their border. An astonishing 1.7 million illegal crossings at the southern border have been recorded this year, the highest total since at least 1960, when the government first started keeping such records. In response, the administration has scrambled to deploy whatever tools it has at its disposal, including some left over from the Trump administration, to stem the tide …

These and other pressures, as well as the desire not to give in to Fox News talking points about a border crisis, has led most Democratic politicians to treat the topic of border security—and even the phrase—very gingerly. As a result, there is no clear Democratic plan for an immigration system that would both permit reasonable levels of legal immigration and provide the border security necessary to stem illegal immigration.

Amusingly, Teixeira also downplays the political impact of the federal government’s migration policy — even though it is likely killing thousands of “Latinx” migrants.

He describes it only as a “sociocultural issue” — as if legal and illegal immigration is not an elite economic policy that shifts trillions of dollars in Americans’ wages, including American Latinos’ wages, towards wealthy coastal investors who donated to the Democratic Party.

Many Democrats prefer to view their self-serving easy-migration preferences as noble social policy, even though their business allies recognize it as a massive subsidy for investors concentrated in coastal cities. For example, New York Times writer Tom Edsall argued December 8:

If, as much evidence shows, working-class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial and gender issues than by economics … should the Democratic Party do what it can to minimize those sociocultural points of dispute, or should the party stand firm on policies promoted by its progressive wing?

In reality, the federal government’s wealth-shifting policy of extraction migration causes so much economic distortion that it is pushing millions of Latino voters towards the GOP, as Breitbart News has repeatedly shown.

On December 8, the Wall Street Journal reported:

Hispanic voters were also evenly divided when asked about a hypothetical rematch in 2024 of the last presidential contenders, with 44% saying they would back President Biden and 43% supporting former President Donald Trump. In 2020, Mr. Biden won 63% support among Hispanic voters, nearly 30 points more than Mr. Trump, according to AP VoteCast, a large survey of the presidential electorate.

[…]

Hispanic voters in the survey ranked economic issues as the priority for Mr. Biden and Congress to address. Hispanic men said Republicans had the better economic policy, by a margin of 17 points. Hispanic women, by contrast, said Democrats had better economic plans, by a 10-point margin.

A majority of Hispanic men said they would like to return to the policies that Mr. Trump pursued as president, while a majority of Hispanic women said they would rather stick with Mr. Biden’s policies.

But status-conscious progressives are determined to ignore the economic harm of migration — and to ignore the mass killing of migrants by their enthusiastic support for policies that sneak many migrants into the U.S. economy.

Much of the Democrats’ current problem emerged from Teixeira’s influential 2002 book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” The book predicted that the Democrats could build a stable majority based on Hispanic immigrants, women, and younger progressives.

But his book did not recognize the ruthless class and economic agenda of his college-educated progressive peers. Those progressives cited Teixeira’s book as they subsequently joined with GOP-leaning business groups to push the self-serving economic combination of free trade and cheap migrant labor that has devastated blue-collar Americans and almost every state without a coastline.

To be sure, Teixeria always favored policies that would help ordinary wage earners. In 2000, for example, he published “America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters” and “The Myth of the Coming Labor Shortage: Jobs, Skills, and Incomes of America’s Workforce 2000.”

The U.S. government’s post-1986, bipartisan economic policy of extraction migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their housing costs.

The invited migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture, and allows the elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.

 

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