In 2002, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority (Scribner). Now the pair are back with Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes (Henry Holt, 2023). In their new book, an essential guide to the trends that roil the Democratic Party and threaten its national standing, the authors forthrightly acknowledge that they had underestimated “the defection of the white working class” from party ranks. Our conversation focuses on a core reason for this defection: the rise of a “shadow party” of elite donors, activist groups and media voices that is alienating the white working-class vote with an unbending, culturally-left posture on hot-button matters like race, immigration, climate change and sex and gender. This self-appointed “vanguard” possesses a quasi-religious mindset of a neo-Puritan stamp—an outlook that many Democratic voters, and not only in the white working class, reject. The battle is on, Judis and Teixeira aptly warn, for “the soul of the party in the age of extremes.”

Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January.

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