Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
For the first time ever, I visited Whole Foods in Hyde Park, as I was craving matzos for Passover and it was the only place that carried them. (Trader Joe’s, for instance, was sold out and wasn’t getting any until 2027). Since Passover ended yesterday, nearly place was sold out for the holidays.
Over my entire life, I’ve avoided Whole Foods for two reasons: it’s very expensive and also carries homeopathic remedies, which I despise as they’re totally ineffectual.
But the craving for matzos (I eat them spread with good sweet butter) drove me on. My haul is below, acquired on the advice of a friend. The matzos are not kosher for Passover, but of course I don’t care about that. And I was told that Kerrygold butter from Ireland is about the best you can buy, so I got two sticks of that to smear on the matzos. Finally, there’s a small jar of tart cherry jam made by Dalmatia and imported from Croatia, also recommended by my food-savvy friend.
Yes, the place is expensive, and walking there and back took 1.5 hours given the fact that no employee seemed to know where anything was. The jam, for instance, is not with the other jellies and jams, but for some reason was put at the cheese counter. Nobody knew where the matzos were, so I had to ask about five people. (I should add that Whole Foods employees at the Hyde Park store are not very friendly, especially when compared with workers at Trader Joe’s, who are always helpful and amiable.) Fortunately, the Irish butter was in the dairy section where it should be.
This is all the makings of a fine snack!
Whoops! I forgot to add that gas prices in Chicago seem to be about a dollar higher than the average across the rest of America. Here’s a photo from my trip to Whole Foods:
My insomnia continues, and has apparently worsened for reasons I don’t understand. Perhaps it’s anxiety about the war, but it’s definitely anxiety about something. Perhaps subliminal anxiety—after all, we can’t control what our brain does. Last night I woke up at 2 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. When this happens nearly every night, I try to suppress the worries that arise almost—like everyone, I have a panoply of items on the worry list. But anxiety seeps in and keeps me awake. AT 4 a.m., I hauled my sorry tuchus out of bed, did my ablutions, and came to work. That is the usual situation.
If I were to guess at the items that make me most anxious (besides the worry about getting back to sleep, which is counterproductive), there are these:
The Middle East. Because I post daily about the war in Iran and other Middle Eastern matters, I seem to have gotten caught up in the roller coaster that is this region of the world, a roller coaster exacerbated by Trump’s waffling, which may be a deliberate strategy. Regardless, like the mess that is American politics now, I realize that there’s little I can do to affect matters. And given that, I should simply observe the situation, express my opinion when I can, but not get so engaged that I’m destabilized by the ups and downs of both the war and politics. But in this I’ve failed.
The ducks at Botany Pond. I should just do what I can to take care of them, including feeding the ducklings when they come, but caring for them has almost become an obsession. “No ducklings left behind” is my motto. There’s nothing I can do to stave off most predators or prevent errant mallards from entering the pond and harassing Vashti, but somehow it’s a constant anxiety until the ducklings grow up and fly away.
Death. I guess a lot of readers don’t worry about their mortality, but when you get into your seventies it’s almost inevitable. I’ve already lost several friends and classmates, and of course, as the syllogism goes, all men are mortal.
In response, some people have said that because they don’t worry about the time before they were born, which they equate with the time after they die, it’s futile to be afraid of death. In response to that I quote Christopher Hitchens, who knew he was dying of cancer but never openly admitted it:
“It will happen to all of us, that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party’s over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on — but you have to leave. And it’s going on without you. That’s the reflection that I think most upsets people about their demise.”
I once asked readers if they wanted to be immortal (with the stipulation that you don’t fall apart completely), and most said “no”—they will have seen enough of life when the Reaper comes. But I like the party too much!
Ecologist Susan Harrison has contributed some photos from one of my favorite places in the U.S.—and a former field site—Death Valley, California (there are also photos from Arizona). Susan’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can (and should) enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
What to do?? Luckily, the deserts contain a lot of elevation. Near Telescope Peak (elevation 11,043’), the highest point in Death Valley National Park, the snow lingered and wildflowers hadn’t yet bloomed, but at least the hiking was pleasant.
Telescope Peak, center, with Death Valley on the left and Panamint Valley on the right:
Foraying briefly down to Furnace Creek, with its minus 190’ elevation and triple-digit temperatures, we saw fields of faded flowers and stayed just long enough to track down one interesting bird.
Lucy’s Warbler (Leiothylpis luciae), a dainty resident of desert oases including the Furnace Creek golf course, singing its dawn song:
We then decamped to the high desert (4,500’+) along the east face of the Sierra Nevada, where temperatures were warm but not excessive and birds and flowers were abundant.
The Alabama Hills (foreground, with Sierras in background) are so scenically dramatic that they appear in hundreds of movies and TV shows – mainly old Westerns, plus some extraterrestrial and “Himalayan” epics:
White-throated Swifts (Aeronautes saxatilis), a.k.a. avian jet pilots, zoomed above the canyons leading up to the high Sierras:
Scarlet Milkvetch (Astragalus coccineus) grew abundantly on decomposed granite:
Sandblossoms (Linanthus parryae), which come in blue and white, were the focus of a classic controversy in evolutionary theory you can read about here and here:
LeConte’s Thrasher (Toxostoma lecontei), another uncommon desert bird, eluded us in the Alabama Hills. Farther north near Bishop, California, it was a delight to find this one and its mate apparently feeding large black insects to well-hidden nestlings:
Very fortunately for me, my next work duty after our desert vacation was a speaking engagement in Tucson, and the heat wave finally ended midway through that visit. Here are some photos from two lovely days of birding in southern Arizona.
Welcome to the end of a long week, though the troubles of the week won’t end tomorrow. It’s Friday, April 10, 2026, and National Siblings Day. Here’s the passport photo showing my mother, me, and my sister (2.5 years younger than I), taken before we went to Greece in the mid-Fifties. Look at my big ears!
The Artemis II heat shield, NASA agrees, is flawed.
The heat shield is the critical layer at the bottom of a spacecraft that protects it — and the astronauts inside — from searing temperatures upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. If the shield fails, the underlying metallic structure could melt, rupture and disintegrate.
And there is no backup, and no way for the astronauts to escape.
NASA officials, however, are confident that despite the known shortcomings of the heat shield, the four Artemis II astronauts will remain alive and comfortable as they arrive at Earth on Friday evening at a speed of nearly 24,000 miles per hour, concluding a 10-day trip to the moon and back.
Extensive analysis and testing of the heat shield material “got us comfortable that we can undertake this mission with lots of margin to spare,” Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, said in an interview in January.
However, Charlie Camarda, a former NASA astronaut and an expert on heat shields, says NASA should never have launched Artemis II. The agency does not understand well enough the chances that the heat shield might fail, he says, and the mission, a success so far, could end with the deaths of the astronauts.
“I’m going to pray that nothing happens,” he said during an interview a few days before the launch of Artemis II.
His hunch is that there is a 95 percent chance that the astronauts will return safely. But that would mean a 1-in-20 odds of a disaster.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 10 Wikipedia page.
Hours after vowing to continue strikes targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel appeared to make a concession on Thursday by saying his government would start talks with the Lebanese government on disarming the Iran-backed militant group.
Mr. Netanyahu’s announcement came as Israel’s attacks on Lebanon put immense strain on the shaky two-day-old cease-fire, as Iran has insisted the agreement covers Lebanon and the strikes violate the terms of the truce.
Israel’s attacks have also further strained and U.S. relations with Europe, where several leaders of NATO countries have been insisting that Lebanon be included in the truce.
While Lebanon has been pushing for talks with Israel since Hezbollah joined the war a month ago, the talks between Israel and Lebanon face enormous hurdles. It is far from clear how much buy-in the talks have from Hezbollah, which has long overshadowed the official Lebanese government. And while Lebanese leaders have voiced interest in disarming Hezbollah, Israel has voiced intense skepticism that they are willing or able to do so.
At the same time, the Israeli military warned civilians to evacuate parts of the country, including Beirut’s southern outskirts, suggesting another wave of strikes was imminent. People going north packed the roads.
It remained to be seen whether the Lebanon dispute would derail the cease-fire or affect talks between American and Iranian officials, which the Trump administration said were scheduled for the weekend in Pakistan.
There is more justification for Israel continuing its attacks on Hezbollah, which has been firing missiles and drones at Israel for a long time, and finally, violating the cease-fire sufficiently that Israel went after Hezbollah in Lebanon with boots on the ground (southern Lebanon only), as well as intensively bombing Hezbollah targets. If Trump includes Lebanon in the cease-fire deal, he is endangering Israel and promoting the continuation of terrorism. But the Lebanese government does not speak for Hezbollah, so talks with Israel seem futile.
*Here’s a 30-minute video about the ceasefire discussed by Niall Ferguson and put up by the Free Press (h/t Bill) in an article called “Why Iran thinks it’s winning.” (the subtitle is a quote from Ferguson: “‘President Trump may have made a mistake by not deploying ground forces. Because without them, it’s simply not going to be possible to shut down the Iranian threat to the Strait”). Ferguson discusses the Lebanon add-in to the deal, and argues that there’s no easy way to eliminate Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz save “deploying ground forces.” The U.S. has won militarily, he says, but not economically or strategically.
A quote from Ferguson: “One lesson of history is that negotiation when the two sides are this far apart is highly unlikely to deliver a result—certainly within a 14-day time frame.”
The video title is below, and it’s certainly provocative.
Shortly after President Donald Trump threatened to erase the “whole civilization” of Iran, all 6,000 years of it, the crowds came out into the streets of Tehran waving flags — and not white ones. They bore the green, white and red banners of the still-standing Islamic Republic. Some set fire to the star-spangledones of the superpower that, according to state media, they had just “humiliated.”
Whatever the outcome of the unstabletwo-week ceasefire that the United States and Iran agreed to just before Trump’s apocalyptic deadline — whether it becomes an enduring truce or a return to the violence that has upended life from Israel to Azerbaijan — the pause in hostilities did not begin with images of an “unconditional surrender” that the president repeatedly demanded.
Exhausted Iranians may yet get a fortnight’s respite from airstrikes, but Trump’s central war objectives remain unmet, and hard questions are left unresolved. Each side is claiming victory, but neither is a clear winner.
Trump launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28 demanding unconditional surrender, the elimination of Iran’s nuclear program and the destruction of its ballistic missiles. He, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said they hoped the attacks would lead to regime change.
By those measures, Wednesday’s scorecard after nearly six weeks of bombing makes for sober reading.
Iran is battered but unbroken. The regime has not collapsed; it has hardened. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still has weapons to fire, including ballistic missiles shot at Israel and Persian Gulf states in the hours after the ceasefire was announced, injuring two teenagers in Beersheba, Israel. Somewhere in Iran, a few hundred kilograms of enriched uranium remains as prospective raw material for a nuclear weapon.
Yep, I think we all agree that this is correct. The Post calls the cease-fire a “rest stop” rather than an “off ramp”. I am curious what is going to happen, but worried that we’ve gone to war and didn’t accomplish anything. But with Trump in charge, we don’t know what is going to happen, though I think he is quite reluctant to send in ground troops. Nothing creates more opposition to a war in the U.S. than the sight of body bags coming home containing the remains of U.S. fighters.
*Greg Mayer called my attention to another public dismantling of Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. The dismantling is at Current Affairs, conducted by Brian McLoone (!), and is called, “Ross Douthat’s shoddy arguments for religion“.
According to Pew’s most recent Religious Landscape Study, a growing share of Americans identify as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular.” These so-called “nones” made up 16 percent of the population in 2007, but 29 percent in the latest survey, from 2023-24. The trend among younger Americans is even more striking. In this latest survey, 43 percent of those born in the ’90s and early aughts identified as nones.
In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, hopes to stem the tide. Referring to the Gospel of Mark’s admonition to be awake when the “master of the house” (i.e., God) returns, Douthat warns the reader: “If you are this sleeper, I beg of you—awake.” But he doesn’t think there are only fear-based, prudential reasons for believing in God. He thinks there’s good evidence that God exists. “The religious perspective,” he explains, “has the better case by far for being true.”
At the start of Believe, Douthat says part of his job at the Times is “to make religious belief intelligible to irreligious readers.” Believe is an outgrowth of that project, and succeeds at the task; it is clear what Douthat takes his factual premises to be and how he thinks one can infer from those premises to a theistic conclusion. The problem is that many of those premises are false or suspect, and many of the inferences unwarranted. His conclusion, that we should all be religious, is a house built on sand.
Remember that Douthat thinks that science itself gives evidence for God. This view is dismantled:
Note that, while this scientific perspective doesn’t posit a God, it doesn’t strictly rule one out either. Of course, the perspective does raise some challenging questions for someone (like Douthat) who believes in the Judeo-Christian God. (In Believe, Douthat describes himself as “a conservative Catholic by the world’s standards.”) If we humans are special, why did God wait billions of years to create us? Why did He make many trillions of other solar systems? And, perhaps most pressing, why is none of this mentioned in the Bible? One possibility is that God wanted to speak metaphorically in Genesis about our origins. Another is that those stories were created by people who were trying their best to explain how the world around them came to be. If they had known how old and big the universe is, or that humans share a common ancestor with fish and olive trees, they would have incorporated those facts into their origin story. But they didn’t, so they didn’t.
The latter possibility, of course, is more parsimonious. But Douthat argues that science (e.g., the “fine tuning” argument) shows that the universe was “made for us.” Yet his method of arguing is inconsistent:
That argument [science shows that the Universe was “made for us”] sits uneasily with Douthat’s claim, elsewhere in the book, that we don’t understand some important bits of our existence, like consciousness. He says that “the immense progress we’ve made in figuring out how chemistry and biology interact in the pathways of the cerebellum has brought us no closer to answering the question of why these physical interactions yield both conscious self-awareness generally and the specific kind of experience we have.” Douthat takes science’s inability to explain consciousness to be evidence that the mind has a “supernatural character.” When we put these two arguments side by side, we see that together they make a rigged game: if science can render some natural phenomenon intelligible, then that’s evidence for God; and if science can’t render some natural phenomenon intelligible, then God must be the supernatural force pulling the strings. Heads theism wins, tails atheism loses.
The end of the piece, which is long but a very good review of Douthat’s execrable book, suggests that McLoone might be—gasp—a New Atheist:
How I wish that the issues Douthat discusses in Believe were of purely intellectual interest. But they’re not. Despite the decline in religiosity among Americans that I noted earlier, religion of course still has an enormous influence on U.S. culture and policy. To take a recent example, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who is almost certainly overseeing war crimes in Iran, clearly views that conflict from the perspective of Christian nationalism. One way to counter this trend is to amplify the commendable commitments to social justice that one finds in many religions, perhaps especially in Christianity and its strands that emphasize dedication to the poor (incidentally, the tradition in which I was raised). This is the rhetorical strategy that Texas politician James Talarico has adopted in his campaign for U.S. Senate. The problem is that adjudicating which politics better aligns with a given religion is a fool’s errand, since religious doctrine underdetermines how one ought to act. Some passages of the Bible seem to extol pacifism, others genocide. The better strategy is to show that the foundations for religious beliefs are very shaky. That skeptical project, spanning millenia and continents, has been slow but successful. Believe reminds us that the project is far from complete, and the current political moment reminds us that the project remains critical.
I should add that Greg wrote me, after the NYT hired Douthat, “Who, other than his close friends and family, could care at all what Ross Douthat thinks about anything?”
American woodcocks came to New York City looking to strut their stuff, and New Yorkers fell in love.
The curious birds, known for their bobbing walks and kazoo-like calls, have drawn a crowd to Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan since arriving in late March. Dozens of spectators are gathering at the park every day to try to catch a glimpse of the grapefruit-sized birds as they poke their long bills in the ground for earthworms.
“It’s a very charismatic bird. I mean, it’s goofy-looking. It’s got eyes that are always looking at you no matter where you are. It does this nice little dance when it’s nervous,” said Bill Rankin, a Yale University professor who stopped by the park. “Having two of them together is a kind of nice little romantic story of spring.”
The woodcocks are known to stop at Bryant Park every year as they migrate north in early spring. They are strange-looking critters, seemingly assembled from the parts of other birds — a round body, enormous eyes and a long, thin bill. They’re also called “timberdoodles” or “bogsuckers” by some.
Here’s a woodcock photographed in, of all places, at Bryant Park in NYC.
Masih is angry at loose talk about “regime change” in Iran:
My message to the U.S. government on CBS: stop talking about a fake “regime change” in Iran.
Any negotiation that says nothing about executions, political prisoners, mass repression, and internet blackouts is not about the Iranian people. It’s about saving a regime that is… pic.twitter.com/WdToTWiyik
From Jay, a video compilation of driverless cars stopping in the road to avoid hitting animals:
More than 350 million vertebrate animals are killed by human driven vehicles every year. In general, autonomous vehicles are much better than humans at dodging animals.
A mutation in goats from Sciencegirl. I’m not sure that breeding up a bunch of animals like this is an ethical thing to do:
The myotonic goat is a breed with a condition that makes it prone to stiffening or falling over in response to excitement or surprise. pic.twitter.com/EbsWAHESN5
A male orangutan started bottle-feeding four orphaned tiger cubs after watching his human caretakers.
Suryia lived at Myrtle Beach Safari, a wildlife preserve in South Carolina in the United States. In 2015 the cubs were just one to two months old and had been rejected by their… pic.twitter.com/rUHxFYMi9c
This German Jewish boy was one of the 90% of people in his transport gassed to death when it arrived in Auschwitz. He was 12 years old. https://t.co/CDQcQVRpzs
And two from Matthew. First, the astronaut fixation with watches (see the thread to see what models of watches were issued by NASA:
WATCHES IN SPACE 🧵Ever notice how all of the astronauts are wearing a billion watches in every picture? Christina Koch is wearing three in this picture1/x 👇
And a video showing that the pharyngeal nervous system of this flatworm can by itself organize feeding behavior (I don’t like them cutting up flatworms):
One of the wildest things I learned about planarian flatworms: you can isolate their pharynx (throat) and it will autonomously engage in feeding behavior.www.science.org/doi/full/10….
It was a rough morning on Botany Pond. Two undocumented drakes invaded this morning, and I must have spent 45 minutes chasing them around with my squirt gun. They would leave (along with Armon, who always returns), but then come back again. When they are around they will harass Vashti, even driving her off the nest, and that’s not good.
Finally Armon and Vashti were left alone, but I don’t want the undocumented ducks coming back. Also, when chasing the errant drakes away, I accidentally spooked the wood duck pair, who have taken off. I was sad because I love them so much, and I hope they return. (They’re clearly not yet nesting.) Armon goes after invaders, but not with great vigor: he’s a bit of a wuss.
But now all is quiet, and we had an epochal event a few minutes ago: four of the five red-eared slider turtles we put into the pond last fall (retrieved before Botany Pond was renovated) showed up, and all were competing for space and sun on a small rock. There are other rocks they could use, but they like the one below. I suspect the fifth turtle wandered away from the Pond at some point. This is the first time I’ve been able to see more than three turtles.
As always, an Aussie who wishes to remain anonymous sent me this link, and noted that New Zealand isn’t the only country in the Antipodes that tries to make science (again “Western science”) coequal with indigenous knowledge. Clicking on the screenshot below will take you to the strategy developed by the Aussie government: the “Australian Marine Science Strategy 2026-2036”
It begins on p. 2 with a land acknowledgement:
. . continues with a mission statement on page 4:
The National Marine Science Strategy 2026–36 sets out the research and development needed to realise the socioeconomic opportunities and benefits that come from enabling a thriving ocean economy while effectively minimising, mitigating and adapting to the critical challenges facing Australia’s ocean and coasts over the coming decade. It recognises that responding to challenges such as climate change and extreme events, biodiversity collapse and competing ocean uses will not only help ensure a healthy ocean, conservation and national resilience, but also unlock new opportunities for sustainable industries and innovation that deliver long-term environmental and economic prosperity for Australia.
. . . and then sets out seven “national ambitions” for improving our knowledge of marine science, all of which (save one) involve conservation, mitigating climate change, and fostering marine “industries.” The exception is the very first ambition:
Embed First Nations knowledge, innovation and leadership in marine science to ensure sustainable and equitable marine policy and management.
Finally, after going through the ambitions, continuously paying homage to the “knowledge systems” of the First Nations people (i.e., the Aboriginal Australians and Melanesian Torres Strait islanders), the report gives its recommendations. Here’s the very first recommendation (p. 33):
Now there’s nothing wrong with ensuring that the two groups that constitute the First Nations People get equal opportunity to do science and contribute to science. And insofar that the indigenous people have produced knowledge that can be verified by modern science, by all means give them credit and fold that knowledge into modern science. But, as usual, they do more than that. First the program argues, again with a dearth of examples, that “We also have much to learn from the integration and application of Indigenous knowledge systems and Western knowledge systems.” (p. 28). How do they know that? Where are the improvements in marine biology that have already come from “indigenous knowledge systems”?
This is not science or technology, but a drive for scientific equity: making indigenous knowledge coequal with modern science. And that is not even politics, but the sacralization of the oppressed. As we’ve seen so many times before from Canada and New Zealand, it is virtue signaling on a national scale.
Most readers here (and I) are keen on getting a Democrat elected as President in 2028, and it would be nice as well if the Democrats took over both houses of Congress this fall. And, indeed, with Trump’s ratings in the dumpster, that may well happen. But Ruy Texiera is worried that that is not enough: he thinks the Democrats feel that they don’t have to do more than sit back and let Trump self-destruct. His thesis in this Substack article (the last one in the five years the site has been going), is that the Democrats are jaded and have failed to learn the lessons of the last few years—lessons about what the public wants. This obtuseness, he says, will eventually come back to haunt them, and may even affect Democratic chances for victory in the next few years.
I recommend that you read this article: the message may sound old, but Teixeira expresses it in detail and writes extremely clearly. The sub-message for Democrats is this: “Don’t let the ‘progressives’ take over the party!”
If you don’t know Teixeira. here’s from his Wikipedia bio (he seems to be pretty much of a centrist):
Ruy Teixeira born December 15, 1951) is an American political scientist and commentator. He is a senior fellow at the centre-rightthink tankAmerican Enterprise Institute and co-founder and politics editor of the Substack newsletter The Liberal Patriot, along with John Halpin.
He is known for his work on political demography, particularly for the book The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002), which he co-wrote with John Judis. In it, they argue that the US Democratic Party is demographically destined to become a majority party in the early 21st century, a thesis that he later disavowed, citing the rise of the progressive movement in the United States.
. . . Since 2020, Teixeira has written critically about a leftward shift within the Democratic Party. He has argued that the progressive movement in the United States is over and finished after the 2024 United States elections, positing that Democrats still do not realise it as of 2025.
Click the screenshot to read for free (it’s the lack of money that has apparently killed the site, but it’s too late to subscribe):
Last year he wrote a related piece about Democratic obtuseness, “Is our Democrats learning?“, which gets its ungrammatical title from a G. W. Bush query, “Is our children learning?”.
On to the present piece; my comments are flush left; Teixeira’s quotes are indented.
The problem
Posing this question again in early spring 2026, it is my sad duty to inform you that our Democrats continue not to learn. If anything, they are increasingly adamant that such learning is not even necessary. Their mantra now might be, paraphrasing that old joke about the British: “No learning please, we’re Democrats.”
The proximate reasons for this complacency are not hard to discern. Trump and many of his administration’s actions are very unpopular and voters’ views on the economy, their most important issue, are dire. Consistent with these sentiments, Democrats did well in the 2025 elections, continue to clean up in special elections, and appear poised to have a very good election this coming November.
These favorable political winds have made it a great deal easier for Democrats to ignore the need for change. Surely the American people have now woken up, are rejecting Trump and Trumpism once and for all and will never be seduced by right populism again.
. . . Currently, the desire for change seems to be hovering around zero, as more and more Democrats have convinced themselves that their problems have essentially been solved. Here at The Liberal Patriot, we know all about that. Funding for our modest enterprise, always precarious, has now completely dried up. Our view that the party has neither solved its problems nor is even very close to doing so has tanked our appeal among partisan Democratic donors, even reform-oriented ones, who now tend to regard us with suspicion. A little heterodoxy is fine but there’s a limit! Hence: no money.
Teixiera then singles out five areas in which, he argues—convincingly—that Democrats haven’t learned. Immigration and trans rights are the most thorough areas he analyzes (though economics will be more decisive), but of course I can’t quote the whole piece. A bit of each:
The culture problem. This is a big one. The yawning gap between the cultural views of the Democratic Party, dominated by liberal professionals, and those of the median working class voter is screamingly obvious. One approach to this problem would be to actually change some of the Democratic Party positions that are so alienating to those voters.
Nah! That would be way too simple plus would create fights within our coalition plus…we’re on the right side of history aren’t we so why the hell would we change our correct, righteous positions? Democrats have instead chosen a different path, aptly summed up by Lauren Egan:
It didn’t take long after the 2024 election—in which their party lost the White House and the Senate—for Democratic leaders to identify the problem: The party had drifted too far to the left on social and cultural issues.
It also didn’t take them long to come up with a solution: simply to shut up about it…
The working-class and rural voter problem. This brings us to the Democrats’ working-class and rural voter problem, also screamingly obvious from long-term trends and the results of the 2024 election. Of course, Democrats take comfort from the copious evidence that many of these voters are now having second thoughts about their support for Trump and the GOP. This can be seen both in low Trump approval and future Republican voting intentions relative to those voters’ 2024 levels of Trump support.
But there is little evidence that declining enthusiasm for Trump has been matched by increased enthusiasm for the Democrats among these voters. Indeed, a careful recent study by Jared Abbott and Joan C. Williams for the invaluable Center for Working-Class Politics finds that “waverers”—those Trump supporters who now say they are not planning to vote Republican in 2028—are overwhelmingly not supporting the Democrats but rather supporting neither party or generally disengaging from politics.
The trans “rights” problem. Every once in a while, some Democratic politician ventures a mild dissent from the trans activist agenda. Without exception, they are met with a brick wall of intense intra-party opposition which typically results in a hasty retreat by said politician. It is truly a litmus test issue.
This is remarkable. Perhaps nothing would surprise a Democratic time traveler from the 20th century as much as the incorporation of transgender “rights” into the Democrats’ 21st century project. Going far beyond basic civil rights in housing, employment, and marriage, Democrats have uncritically embraced the ideological agenda of trans activists who believe gender identity trumps biological sex, and that therefore, for example, transwomen—trans-identified males—are literallywomen and must be able to access all women’s spaces and opportunities: sports, changing rooms, bathrooms, jails, crisis centers, institutions, etc. . . .
. . . . In reality, sex is a binary; males cannot become females and females cannot become males. Transwomen are not women. They are males who choose to identify as women and may dress, act, and be medically treated so they resemble their biological sex less. But that does not make them women. It makes them males who choose a different lifestyle.
As noted, the remarkably radical approach of trans activists and gender ideologues has been met with little resistance in the Democratic Party. But as evidence mounts that the medicalization of children is not a benign and life-saving approach, but rather a life-changing treatment with many negative effects, and voters stubbornly refuse to endorse the idea that biological sex is just a technicality and more and more strongly oppose the trans activist agenda, Democrats’ identification with gender ideology has become a massive political liability.
Indeed, for many, many voters the Democrats’ embrace of radical transgender ideology and its associated policy agenda has become the most potent exemplar of Democrats’ lack of connection to the real world of ordinary Americans. For these voters, Democrats have definitely strayed into “who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes” territory. And if they’re not realistic about something as fundamental as human biology, why should they be trusted about anything else?
Of course trans people deserve those “basic civil rights,” but the clash among the Left is about the “ideological agenda of trans activists.” I am not aware of any Democratic politican being asked outright by the press, “Do you think that trans women are actually women, and should, for example, be able to compete in women’s sports or be confined in women’s jails?” The press is not doing its job here; after all, part of its duty is to make Americans aware of where their politicians stand. But the mainstream media, being pretty “progressive” itself, is loath to even pose these questions.
Here’s another example of where the press has failed to do its job:
The immigration problem. The immigration issue has been a total disaster for the Democrats. They encouraged mass immigration through lax border and interior enforcement and porous asylum systems that effectively legalized illegal immigration and made a mockery of controlled, legal immigration. Over time, the intense unpopularity of these policies has contributed hugely to tanking Democrats’ working-class support. But to this day where are the Democratic politicians who are willing to unapologetically proclaim the following fundamentals of a realistic immigration policy?
There follows a list of ten reasonable propositions about immigration that no Democrat will touch. Teixeira rightly sees the Democrats as effectly espousing an “open border” policy, with the possible exception of immigrants who have committed crimes in their home country or have done so after illegal entry into America.
But so far what has happened? Clearly Democrats are much happier denouncing ICE (including calling for its abolition) and Trump than they are grappling with the immigration issue and making clear, unambiguous commitments to radical reform. Noah Smith rightly sums up the situation:
I have seen zero evidence that progressives have reckoned with their immigration failures of 2021-23. I have not seen any progressive or prominent Democrat articulate a firm set of principles on the issue of who should be allowed into the country and who should be kicked out.
This was not always the case. Bill Clinton had no problem differentiating between legal and illegal immigration in 1995, and declaring that America had a right to kick out people who come illegally.
I have seen no equivalent expression of principle [JAC: remember, he’s talking about the Democrats] during the second Trump presidency. Every Democrat and progressive thinker can articulate a principled opposition to the brutality and excesses of ICE and to the racism that animates Trump’s immigration policy. But when it comes to the question of whether illegal immigration itself should be punished with deportation, Democrats and progressives alike lapse into an uncomfortable silence.
Every Democratic policy proposal I’ve seen calls to refocus immigration enforcement on those who commit crimes other than crossing the border illegally. But what about those who commit no such crime? If someone who crosses illegally and then lives peacefully and otherwise lawfully in America should be protected from deportation, how is the right-wing charge of “open borders” a false one?
Why can’t a reporter ask Elizabeth Warren or AOC this question: “Do you favor unrestricted immigration into America, and, if not, who would you exempt?”
And a big problem that’s only going to get worse:
The economic program (or lack thereof) problem. Democrats seem to think that the well-documented discontent with the Trump administration’s economic management now makes the economy “their” issue. In a thermostatic, opposition party sense that may be true, but it remains the case that Democrats do not have an advantage over Republicans on handling the economy.
This makes sense since voters viewed the previous Democratic administration quite negatively on economic management. They may not like what Trump has done, but they have not forgotten what Democrats did.
And let’s face it: the current Democratic economic program is quite thin; voters can reasonably question whether Democratic plans for the economy would be much of an improvement over what the previous Democratic administration delivered. Take energy.
. . . Rounding out the hit parade of Democratic economic policy ideas is that old favorite, “tax the rich.” There are now several versions in circulation whose policy defects we will pass over in charitable silence. But if this is what now passes for an innovative Democratic economic policy idea, they are perhaps in more trouble than I thought.
Feel free to agree or disagree below, but I recommend reading the whole article. I’m not only worried about the Democratic prospects in the next two years, but also about whether if Democrats do get in, it will be “progressive” Democrats or disguised progressives like Kamala Harris.
Here are Teixeira’s last words ever on this website:
Looking over this list of problems, one thing that stands out to me is that Democrats have never come to terms with how profoundly mistaken many of their priorities have been. These haven’t just been minor errors in implementing an otherwise fine program. Much of the program was simply wrong and, arguably, not even progressive.
It’s time—past time—for Democrats to discard the conceit that they are on the right side of history and that therefore their positions are, and have been, noble and correct. Until they do so, I do not expect them to develop the dominant majority coalition they seek and vanquish right populism. Indeed, it could be the other way around. That’s a sobering thought.
I’m not as pessimistic as Teixeira, but it’s time for liberals to speak out against illiberalism in their party, and demand that their candidates listen to their constituents.
