October 29, 2025

RUY TEIXEIRA: Big-Tent Politics Won’t Save the Democrats. As Teixeira writes, “voters know whose tent it is, even if a few heterodox guests are allowed inside:”

A recent New York Times conversation between columnist and “abundance” advocate Ezra Klein and progressive author Ta-Nehisi Coates illustrates the problem. Klein, a proponent of big-tent politics, tried to persuade Coates of its necessity. “[A] huge amount of the country, a majority of the country,” Klein said, “believes things about trans people. . . that we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong. . . . What politically. . . should our relationship with those people be?”

Coates, unsurprisingly, rejected the premise. As far as he was concerned, those people were on the other side of a moral line: “If you think it is okay to dehumanize people,” he said, “then conversation between you and me is probably not possible.”

Of course, Coates has no problem dehumanizing people himself: The Toxic World-View of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

His monstrous passage about 9/11 is a good summation of where he’s coming from. He writes of the police and firefighters who died running into the burning buildings in a forlorn effort to save all the people whose bodies were about to be obliterated into dust, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

More from Teixeira:

But the telling detail is in Klein’s own phrasing. He described dissenters from progressive orthodoxy as “fundamentally and morally wrong.” His version of the big tent, then, is that some Democrats, particularly those in conservative areas, should be permitted to adopt wrong and immoral positions for the sake of expediency. But the positions of the party on those issues will and should remain the same. You can come into the tent, but the left will still run the show.

That won’t work. Advocates of the big tent must face the facts: The party’s many unpopular and unworkable positions—on everything from energy to identity politics—have to genuinely change if Democrats hope to win back skeptical voters. Simply holding their noses and letting a few candidates deviate from orthodoxy won’t work.

Take immigration. Democrats have had little to say about Trump’s successful efforts to close the southern border, but much to say about his deportation measures, which they see as cruel and immoral. That, as Josh Barro notes, doesn’t add up to a change in party position. To win back voters’ trust, he argues, the Democrats “must acknowledge that the Biden administration’s policy of laxity was a failure,” and put forward better enforcement measures of their own. He adds: “If Democrats are only seen talking about how the government is doing too much enforcement, we’ll be seen as the anti-enforcement party, and that’s politically deadly.”

And that is precisely what’s happening. The party increasingly looks like the anti-enforcement party that doesn’t want to deport anyone. And that image means that a Democrat running in a conservative area can try to carve out a tough-on-illegal-immigration profile, but—even assuming the activists leave him or her alone—the party’s overall stance on immigration enforcement will mostly negate any benefit from the candidate’s heterodox position.

That’s because Biden administration’s “policy of laxity” wasn’t a failure, it was a strategy, and voters knew it:

● Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

● Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller in February of 2021: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

● “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”

● Tom Cotton’s Response to Kamala Harris’ Border Failures Should Be the Default for All Republicans: “‘You know, Laura, Kamala Harris didn’t have to go all the way to Guatemala and Mexico to find the root causes of this border crisis because they’re not there,’ Cotton told Fox News host Laura Ingraham [in June of 2021]. ‘The root causes are in the White House.’ He further explained that it ‘happened on January 20th when Joe Biden took office, and he essentially opened our borders, reversing very effective policies that had our borders under control.’”

Speaking of Kamala and immigration, the Biden “Politburo’s” border stance made the Bulwark rather cross last November:

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll