In 2002, in the wake of the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential election, John Judis and Ruy Texiera's book "The Emerging Democratic Majority" was published.

(an excerpt of the first chapter on NYT, paywalled im sure but i read it fine Inc0gnito nytimes.com/2002/11/24/books/chapters/the-emerging-democratic-majority.html)

The book argued, in Texiera's own words (from a 2012 Atlantic article published in the wake of Obama's reelection), that the new and strong Democratic coalition was a "strengthening alliance between minorities, working and single women, the college educated, and skilled professionals."

theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/the-emerging-democratic-majority-turns-10/265005

As Judis and Texiera wrote in 2002:

"Women are still voting more Democratic than men, but they are also voting much more Democratic than Republican, particularly women who now work outside the home, single women and women with college degrees. Minorities, once about ten percent of the voting electorate, now constitute nineteen percent...They, too, are continuing to vote Democratic. Democrats are winning even more decisively in college towns, and these towns and their schools have become linked to entire regions like Silicon Valley and North Carolina's Research Triangle. And, skilled professionals have become a much larger and a dependably Democratic voting group."

And indeed, as most of the next two decades dragged on, these trends they noticed and predicted did indeed match their prognosis.

However, as many of you may have noticed, the narrative recently has been that this rock-solid Democratic coalition that will soon give them an iron grip on national electoral politics is now not considered as rock-solid as it was in 2012, when the Democrats, and Judis and Texiera, felt validated.

I don't have to belabor the characterizations of, say, "based border Hispanics" or "people leaving the Democrat plantation." The general mood at this moment is indeed that Hispanics in particular but really members of all of the groups who make up the "strengthening alliance" that Judis and Texeira predicted would empower the Democrats to electoral success are suddenly not as solidly Democratic in their voting patterns as they predicted.

The final paragraph of their book may shed some light on why this is:

"Today's Americans...want government to play an active and responsible role in American life, guaranteeing a reasonable level of economic security to Americans rather than leaving them at the mercy of the market and the business cycle. They want to preserve and strengthen Social Security and Medicare, rather than privatize them. They want to modernize and upgrade public education, not abandon it. They want to exploit new bio-technologies and computer technologies in order to improve the quality of life. They do not want science held hostage to a religious or ideological agenda. And they want the social gains of the sixties consolidated, not rolled back; the wounds of race healed, not inflamed."

I think Judis and Texiera are bang-on right here. I think that the way that both parties reacted to each other in the last ten years have made the Democratic Party seem less and less like the party of grown-ups and science and more like the party of science-as-ideology and "racial wounds" as scabs to be picked at.

What's funny in a sad way is that Judis and Texiera will be declared wrong if indeed Hispanic voters and other assumed Democrats defect in numbers sizable enough to destroy the Emerging Democratic Majority. But the last words of Texiera's 2012 article, in reference to the final paragraph from the book, are true:

"If the Democrats can do all that, the emerging Democratic majority could be here to stay."

They didn't, and it appears like it's not.

people might argue that Trump's presidency and its consequences were the nail in the coffin for Democrats, but in reality it was the 8 years of Obama

the modern democratic party has always had its moments of insane cringe (hillary clinton 1996 DNC macarena) but realistically the party, while obviously bound by the omnipresent liberalism of the US regardless, could have gone into a lot of different directions in the latter quarter of the 20th century and beyond - especially being the party with the chronology of JFK and prior Wilson & FDR

instead the party singularly coalesced more and more over time and the presidencies of dems like Clinton didn't help that, and that legacy post-Clinton immediatedly survived into the Bush years, especially in light of immediate post-90s nostalgia that even to this day is still omnipresent within the country

while the seeds of many modern issues may have been planted under bush (and further back, Reagan), virtually everything that happened under obama set the stage for and primed the real modern handling of american liberal discourse and ultimately set the stage for what the modern iterations of the D & R parties are

It really was specifically Obama’s second term when the Democratic Party made the ultimately dispositive decision to fully lean into “America is fundamentally racist” as a plank of their platform

As Judis and Texiera were fully aware of way back in 2002, the modern Democratic Party was basically born when JFK was elected, killed, replaced by old-school LBJ, who got the 64/65 bills passed and then was hounded out of running for re-election by the New Left, who were gradually absorbed into the party (hi Chesa!), for better or worse

as a result that New Left tendency to orient the Democratic Party towards left-wing fire and brimstone rhetoric is always something that bursts out and then is re-stifled (McGovern, then Carter, then Mondale and Dukakis, then Slick Willie…)

So in 2002 Judis and Texiera knew, if the Democrats focus on James Carville “economy, stupid” issues and don’t subordinate science to ideology or inflame racial tension (in the guise of combating it ofc)… they could run this s***…. A Democratic Majority, if you can keep it

Instead we had 2013, 14, 15…

And the Republicans went Trumpist, which was of course absurd in its own way, but which played to GOP electoral strengths (it’s white voters, stupid!). When both parties get in the muck, the GOP has the higher ground

Like I said, the way Democrats win is by acting like the adults in the room. I know the whole “they go low we go high” thing was and is cringe but when ppl perceive the Democrats as New Left longhairs, they lose.

And props for referencing the Hillary Macarena

Buchanan’s description of the 1992 Dem national convention in his famous “sounds better in the original German” 1992 RNC speech is the defining encapsulation of the image that Democrats who want to win on the national level can not lean into

Yall dumbasses should vote 3rd party

Thinking the establishment will allow this easily..

.. and the hoops in place you have to jump through to even start a 3rd party is ridiculous.

so easy huh

rather than "America is fundamentally racist” per-se, while maybe a part of it, i would say it's under obama that Dems became the party of social justice nationalism - i.e. the pride flag becoming a symbol of america overseas, and further the idea of doubling down on ideas of social justice but molding them in a b******ized manner of which they serve a twisted form of self-aggrandizing patriotism

the one thing i will say is that many rw pundits and the like get the institutional stuff wrong, because of many of them (and general anti-idpol left types, all 500 of them on reddit & twitter), is that they often prescribe the merger of institutions/corporations and such above rhetoric as symptom of post-occupy wall st and also the strategy of dems during/post-obama

in reality it's the other way around, the dem party post-obama was the one catching up to the fact that institutions were participating in culture wars, not that the institutions were catching up to the democrats. a lot of people even think "hollow social justice rhetoric by institutions" began in the 60s but in reality thats just when it became the most visible because of rise of media, public academia, etc. - that s***s been going on since the 19th century

thats a much better way to describe what the Democratic Party has done to try and productively reabsorb New Left currents that bubbled back up during the years after the Great Recession, their race policy is only a part of it

but i will say that it's the spear of the tip

specifically with regards to the OP topic of "Democrats will lead a 1000-year reich because of our new coalition!" this meme of "lololol Hispanics are switching to the GOP because you libs can't stop saying Latinx!" I think distorts the fact that "America is fundamentally racist, antiblackness is the lodestar of American life and most of our energy must be devoted to rooting it out" ultimately repels the right wing of the Judis/Texiera coalition much more than the other stuff (LGBTQ/feminism/abortion/disability/fat fetishism/this space left blank)

(so maybe they're right and America actually is)

lol, the retconning of occupy wall street as some rw-friendly populist upsurge that threatened to shake america out of its complacency and led the Corporations to birth "Woke Capital" in order to combat it is my least favorite just-so story, and there are a lot of them (the aformentioned "Latinx" meme and "Tumblr banning p*** lead to gender ideology being enshrined in law" are two other gems)

and ofc, ironically, acting like the 60s is when all that started is itself (not even intentionally) buying into the omnipresent boomer New Left self-mythologizing that basically defines mainstream historiography of post-war America

the modern right in the US can't really argue with democrats with any type of reckoning except these meme quips because ultimately the right believes absolutely nothing, not even on a meme level, but because they're mostly a messy entanglement of how to react to events or instate policy rather than a consistent form of either ideology or coalition. this is true even with things like their economic policy, it's more of a set of vague reactions as extrapolated to events rather than something done with overt goals or meanings. this isn't to say democrats are leading some grand Machiavellian ideological war, but rather that they don't really have, because they act more as a supplement to the integration of the aforementioned ideals into wider institutions and society. of course the confusion from the right here is that much of the democrats aren't necessarily "participating" in such, but rather are simply not against restricting or countering it - this is why so many conservative pundits sound absolutely braindead trying to argue Biden is trying to lead us into south african race riots. the integrations here are far more subtle than a cabel of democrats scheming into turning the pride flag into the american flag, it's instead the reflectional passivity of a mirror to institutional society, while meanwhile republicans are a broken funhouse mirror

i agree

that's why i like talking to rightists better at this moment in time, tho, bc im not gonna lie, i have no idea "what can/should be done" in a macro sense tbh

and the more I learn or the more open-minded I am the more that feeling strengthens in me

that is why I feel a strong kinship with the Rogan/Gervais/pre-George Floyd James Lindsay style of centrist, despite fundamentally disagreeing with them on many things as well

because they really are right that "the left" in America is close-minded, in the sense that anyone has to be to be dedicated to a plan and to stick to it

of course, as you said, it's not a "grand plan" with Soros and Gates spitroasting the world

it's literally just having a semblance of a consistent philosophy that can be instantiated in policy

right-wingers, center-right and 'dissident' alike, think they have this too... but of course, anyone who has spent sufficient time trying to grapple with their ideas might have the scales fall from their eyes regarding certain mainstream shibboleths, but will not come away with any idea how this could be REAL

(that's why i feel comfortable around them, they're too impotent for me to take seriously or feel any actual fear that the future they want will substantively come to pass)

peep Vance on (lol) Jack Murphy's podcast, cribbing moldbug's mass-pink-slips-for-gov't-employees-when-we-win idea and saying that we need a de-Baathification of wokes

some leftoid journalist characterized it as "Vance suggesting we fire every government employee who isn't a far-right fascist" and noted that there wouldn't be enough people left to run the government

and the gist of the second point being a true obstacle to Vance's plan is precisely why the first statement comes off as histrionic-- Vance is full of s***

as someone said of freud, the modern right "is good where they aren't original and original where they aren't good"

the most reasonable leftists are the ones who are blackpilled because "there is no path for us to win"

the most reasonable rightists are the ones who are blackpilled because "there is no winning"

I can’t imagine that the Dumbocratic policy of taking an ideological knife to what little exists in the way of high quality public education (especially primary & secondary) is helping!

i know waht you mean but also the Republicans are also implicated definitely for opposing public education funding so fervently that a critical mass of institutions in public education naturally became completely politically (and eventually ideologically) aligned with the Democrat party

and now reduced to saying "well i guess we should all homeschool and y'all libs can put armed guards in front of whatever remains of public schools" because those institutions are lost to their influence and barely affected by even explicit GOP attempts to use Shtate Capacity to retake power over public schools

the realistic answer of how things will "become real" is an answer no one really wants to hear obviously, which is you either have some type of culture-shattering event (violent revolution, balkanizing, etc.), you wait long enough across multiple generations that culturally subtly changes in some direction, or you go the richard spencer way of "accept literally everything entirely that's currently the norm socially in mainstream acceptability politics but add one kinda spicy thing to it and hope that thing takes root through legitimization"

of course the final point there is laughable universally, the middle one no one wants to hear but it's apolitical, the first seems unthinkinable because fukuyama end of history capitalist realism blah blah blah

Certainly the Republicans played more than their part in gutting public education in the first place (and I think both the pro-homeschooling and anti-university attitudes on the right are counterproductive) - but what is the consequence of this? The best public schools are concentrated in solidly Democrat-voting areas - moreover, in areas where many voters have education as a top priority (immigrant-heavy high-income suburbs). For me, this then makes it even more baffling that Democrats would risk alienating these voters and willingly reduce their relative advantage in/over the educational system.

well there still are republicans who send their kids to public schools, a whole lot of them, so their party's elected politicians deciding to govern the way they do means they basically decided that millions of their voters' kids spend 13 years of their lives in public school system whose direction "their side" has very little influence over even with DeSantis types now actively trying to go to the mattresses against the libs (groomers)

sure the democrats are just shooting themselves in the foot by grafting their stupid ideological fixations onto preexisting curriculum, but they wouldn't have such free reign to do so if the Republicans hadn't been necessarily married to policies that basically divest them from effective governance

for instance when the Department of Education started, instead of the GOP immediately trying to kill it, bc it was a public program, instead of trying to get more of their guys to join it for reasons other than trying to slowly starve it to death

with no GOP influence over the direction of "education" as a discipline (including education schools, one of the few places in academia where the GOP fear of ideological brainwashing is explicitly justified) then the ideologies which democrats shape themselves to have no check on their growth, and grow to a level that it repulses voters and shoots the Party in the foot

one could say this is 4D electoral chess from the Republicans tbh but they are too stupid, if just the right amount of Machiavellian, to think of "letting the democrats control public education just to run it into the ground with libbery and send voters running to us"

I’m far from a political expert so speaking from a casual, but caring perspective, I can say as someone who used to align a lot more with the Democratic Party the last few years especially have completely turned me off from them. I at least give the republicans credit that they can rally together and get s*** done. Literally the entirety of the trump administration was filled with “we need to get him out of here” and they finally do it and all we hear is how s*** can’t get done or back to blame tactics. It’s almost incredible how inept they are

middle way, i just want to grill (while furtively looking at my phone every three minutes)

@Ronin another great example of republicans being stupid about education is deciding that they were going to be the party of standardized tests

now i like standardized tests

but the No Child Left Behind strategy of making the test so central to the school year alienated teachers, making them hew even closer to currents aligned with the opposition to standardized tests (i.e, ed school readings of pedagogy of the oppressed)

where’s school readings of the pedagogy of the oppressed being done?

talking about education school specifically

city-journal.org/html/pedagogy-oppressor-13168.html

the article is obviously anti-friere but whatever one's opinion on the man or his work, im just saying that if you are a teacher and see two "sides" in education -- pro-standardized test and if kids fail you shoulder the blame, or pro-friere in training programs -- leaning away from one will incentivize you to lean towards the other