A coalition of the redpilled flees the left – The Spectator World
Ruy Teixeira has left the Center for American Progress and will, on August 1, start as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. That sentence will, of course, mean absolutely nothing to the overwhelming majority of Americans. It may not even mean much to you, a subscriber to this email about political life in the country s capital.
But this admittedly very Beltway development is the latest development in a bigger story. For a sense of the way in which Teixeira s move is a sign of the times, imagine telling a Washingtonian who d been in a coma for fifteen years that a mainstay of progressive DC and the author of The Emerging Democratic Majority is about to start work at the think tank that had the ear of the Bush administration and has long been a byword for the conservative establishment. It would be unfathomable. So what changed? Not Teixeira s own views, he insists in an interview with Politico. I m just a social democrat, man. Trying to make the world a better place, he says.
Teixeira s move was born of exasperation at progressive organizations preoccupation with identity politics at the expense of class: I would say that anybody who has a fundamentally class-oriented perspective, who thinks that s a more important lens and doesn t assume that any disparity is automatically a lens of racism or sexism or what have you& I think that perspective is not congenial in most left institutions, he told Michael Shaffer.
Reading of Teixeira s frustration brought to mind a must-read article by Ryan Grim published last month on the Intercept that painted a convincing picture of a progressive movement paralyzed by woke navel-gazing, internal rows and Slack-channel revolutionaries.
Teixeira s move is the latest reminder of the ways in which the American left has lost its way. But it also poses interesting questions about what the fightback against wokeness might look like. Teixeira makes for a strange bedfellow for many AEI scholars. Though the think tank is a broad church that in no way insists on any sort of party line, it is a conservative endeavor that at least according to the old rules would appear to be at odds with Teixeira s class-focused progressivism.
Explaining Teixeira s arrival at the think tank, AEI president Robert Doar says he likes taking chances. The question, then, is what the gamble is here. It is, I think, best understood as a bet that the broadest possible coalition is best suited to taking on illiberal wokeness: out-and-out conservatives, exiles from the left now on the center-right (the new neocons, if you will) and, yes, unreconstructed leftists like Teixeira.