Many people on the left have had government employment in tax-payer funded universities, NGOs, etc. so have been insulated from the struggles of the working class.
Many more Americans have had employment in tax-payer funded federal, state, and local departments, in the tax-payer funded military, in hospitals and other health-care operations that rely on federal and state tax-payer funding at least as much as state universities, etc., so have been insulated from the struggles of the working class.
(Note: NGO stands for "non-governmental organization." The reason is that they are non-governmental organizations.)
Great column. Two comments. The new green strategy was doomed from the very beginning when they put a constraint as an objective (zero CO2) instead of a consumer need (abundant cheap energy. If they had picked the energy as the main strategic goal and then made constraint goals, it would have drastically changed where we are now and we would be well on our way to integrating nuclear energy as a key contributor using the solar green energy where it made sense. Who could not see that putting a constraint as the strategic overall objective for a part of our economy that drives growth I do not know but that has resulted in us losing 20 plus years in our energy system.
Second, I agree economic growth is a US strategic goal. If we do not have that we will be stuck in a series of what I call “stop the bleeding “ projects. This is a BIG issue because these type of projects do not fix the underlying issues and every stop the bleeding project has a strong potential of causing more problems than it fixes. I did not make this up as a theory, it is classic Deming
We know that energy drives growth. So really, it should start there, yes?
Here in Maryland, our electricity costs (like everywhere else) are thru the roof. We know demand is surging, and we know we have no realistic plan to address this.
If I were running from Governor, I'd say I don't want to build a nuclear reactor here, I want to build two dozen power plants. Let's make our energy costs so low that people and companies will want to set up shop here because our energy is so damn cheap.
Nationally? Maybe we have the federal government incentivise states to do the same. Each state that can create the same number of nuclear plants as they have representatives gets a 10% reduction in their citizen's income tax for the next decade. Or 2% off each plant above 3.
Or maybe we keep doing the same short sighted shit that doesn't work. But man, it would be fun to have some national goals that everyone could get behind.
Yes energy is a prerequisite for economic growth. So if we had started with economic growth as an objective and developed realistic energy needs ( amount, where, cost et) and we did this 25 years ago we would be in a completely different place. This is a crucial strategic need. We just messed it up by placing the constraint as an objective. I don’t even have to debate the issue of carbon dioxide limits as they would have been taken care of by setting appropriate constraints. This would have led us to reducing coal, utilizing natural gas and going after nuclear energy.
Everytime I think about nuclear power, I think about asparagus. It takes 3 to 5 years to grow to a harvestable state. I've wanted to grow it for the past 15 years. But each year I never did, because, attention span.
I keep reading nuclear plants take up to two decades to build and so nobody wants to. But, I'll bet you in two decades, we'll be sitting around wishing we started building them 20 years ago.
You are right about this! Plant Vogtle went fully online in Georgia in about 2024. (largest nuclear power plant in the US). Planning began in the 1970s.
I think AI is going to jump start us into nuclear. My daughter in law told me she heard that some of the AI companies are starting to talk about building nuclear plants. Does not surprise me
It is also the case that the new green strategy doesn't focus enough on the most important part of reducing emissions, which is making green technologies naturally profitable to the private sector. The long-term solution involves a pipeline whereby government investment in R&D (alongside infrastructure) develops new, more energy-efficient, less emissions-heavy tech and transfers it to the private sector, so that producers in the private sector will refine its development, and then propagate and distribute it to consumers. Trying to have the government do it all by itself, or through negative rather than positive incentives, will never work in the long term. (and trying to get the private sector to do it all by itself, as the right desires, will also never work in the long term)
My sister in law is selling 30 to 50 electronic motorcycles a month in Vientiane. Turns out they cost less to build and a huge amount less to run. For folks who only take the kids to school, go to work, or the market, electric motorcycles far outsell gas powered. With no government subsidies of course. The electric production is all hydro and about 4 cents a kwh, not all green is a failure. As always we will adopt what works and what doesn't work will be a dim memory.
As for growth being the fundamental building block for a renewed Democratic Party. Hardly. Don't get me wrong, I make money on productivity increases and growth,,,,, in the stock market that is. Here in the US productivity growth has been decoupled from wages since the mid 70s. Productivity goes up, wages flatline. Trump correctly identified the huge dissatisfied working class as a potential source of votes. Unless and until productivity and growth translates into more money for normies it will do nothing for the Democratic Party electorily.
Democrats are now in the affordable Park Slope condos with loan forgiveness and au pairs for attorneys stage of denial. It's not enough. Better than Trump is an extremely low bar, it's disheartening to know we don't seem able to clear that bar.
They are decoupled only because wages as we currently conceive of them are out of sync with the way the economy functions--they are a vestige of the era when industrial machinery dominated economic production, and labor-time was what was monetized. Now it is data--personal data--that is monetized. And we don't have a wage system for that yet--so increases in production can't be as robustly recycled to labor.
Growth *is* the answer, but we need to fix the recycling mechanism. Digital rights are a start, and I think the ultimate answer lies in creating some kind of universal data payments system. This is one of the main avenues the left should pursue if it wants to help labor. (UBI is *not* the answer)
Re: productivity growth, increasing wages is only part of its importance--rising productivity is also the only way of reducing prices and the COL without raising unemployment and depressing economic activity.
I don't see how selling someone's data helps businesses with the people like me that don't buy anything. How can they make money off my data? A third of the country makes under $20 an hour. The very people who need a boost in wages don't have much monetary value in data, they spend on rent and lotto tickets. I also can't see productivity coming to housing or health care or the cost of borrowing. If phones and TVs were free most would still struggle. I'd like it if it happened, I just don't see how.
The largest, most powerful corporate entities in the world, that structure the broader economy within whose constraints your business functions--particularly the FAANGS and social media more broadly--book the lion's share of their profits by contracts with third parties (both advertising consultancies and small-to-midsize businesses) that pay for these mega-entities to direct the attention of people using their platforms to ads for these third parties' products through the use of behavioral algorithms. The reason these dominant entities can achieve this mass manipulation of people's attention through these algorithms is because as people use their platforms, the mega-companies run massive data-harvesting operations that captures those users' personal information. Only by running fancy statistics on this data does the algorithm actually do anything. Any business that uses modern advertising and SEO strategies essentially supports this system, and any business that doesn't is still shaped by the economic environment it creates, and also less likely to succeed than a business plugged into it.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly in regards to the future, personal data is the basis for AI. Fundamentally, all AI consists of is correlative-statistical algorithms crunching massive amounts of data over and over again and producing remixes of it. Every response given by a chatbot, or an image generator, or a music generator, etc. is just a gazillion conversations/pictures/songs recombined and mashed together using a neural net algorithm. This data is produced by people--including you and I--but people aren't paid for it. It is harvested for free by the aforementioned mega-companies and the modern AI superpowers. In order to function, ChatGPT (or more accurately OpenAI) must scrape the entire internet everyday multiple times and collect massive dossiers of information produced by people to run through its neural net algorithms. As AI becomes the main profit center of society--and as everything becomes more software-mediated as a result--the fact that the AI superpowers and their services aren't paying people for the data they monetize will hollow out the middle class, because it will be stuck trying to generate its income in the old, conventional way that is quickly becoming obsolete. Or, more succinctly: data is the new form of labor and the new basis of value, and its creators aren't being compensated for their work. (This is why the idea that 'AI will replace workers' is just a silly way of redefining 'worker' so that you can get free labor)
If instead people have rights to their data, and must be paid a share of any profits that extend from its use, you can restore the natural recycling of value from capital to labor that the wage system was originally invented to sustain, and which is the basis of both capitalism and the middle class. Ultimately, that is the fight the left should lead. My fear is that it is not until things get really bad and the fake gospel of 'AI will make workers obsolete' is ascendant that they will perceive that.
"That means acknowledging that, no, climate change is not an 'emergency' and does not justify an impractical rapid transition to wind and solar."
Although I agree with Mr. Teixeira the need to moderate the Democratic approach to climate change, I don't view his reasoning as responsible nor likely to persuade people who are on the left but not full-blown progressives: precisely the sector of the party whom I take him to be appealing to.
Nothing has changed with regard to the facts of climate change itself. The rate of warming has not confounded predictions except in being slightly faster than most forecasts. The effects in terms of frequency and severity of extreme events are now visible. To brush this off because of a comment made by Bill Gates is a lazy argument. No lazy argument is going to convince the people Mr. Teixeira wants to convince.
The climate has an unusually long timeline for an emergency (which is is). Economic needs and desires are immediate. Mr. Teixeira is correct that voters have demonstrated they are not going to respond to the alarm that climate advocates have sounded. The argument he should be making (and I'm not even going to add an "it seems to me" disclaimer) is that to achieve the *best available outcome* the party must downplay alarmism, accept that the phase-out of fossil fuels will be slow, foreground an electable all-of-the-above platform, and then use elective office to advance green policies to the maximum level that electoral realities makes possible, using whatever strategies work electorally for each initiative. There is a moral imperative to pursue the best available outcome rather than the best conceivable outcome.
A Democratic party that indulges in climate denialism -- which Mr. Teixeira comes very close to here -- cannot retain the active support of its progressive wing. Moving to the center can't work if it bleeds as many votes as it gains: Mr. Teixeira surely knows this. Instead of denying scientific facts and the mounting data that confirm their validity, Mr. Teixeira should be sounding the alarm that the urgency of the situation requires full commitment to sustained electoral pragmatism and unrelenting policy gradualism as a progressive strategy. In time, either technological advances will open means of acceleration or the continued worsening of climate effects will alter the electoral salience of climate-emergency platforms.
"The effects in terms of frequency and severity of extreme events are now visible."
“The observational data published by meteorological agencies in 2023 has confirmed once again that there are no upward trends in global hurricane activity since reliable records began in the 1970s.” Source: Global Warming Policy Foundation
In the decade 1891-1900, there were 21 hurricanes, of which 8 were Category 3 or above. In the decade 2011-2020, there were 19 hurricanes, of which 5 were Category 3 or above. The biggest decade for hurricanes was 1941-1950, with 24 hurricanes of which 10 were Category 3 or above. Source: National Hurricane Center
Maybe it's different with other "extreme events" like blizzards or tornadoes, but the frequency and severity of hurricanes show no evidence of increasing.
“to achieve the *best available outcome* the party must downplay alarmism, accept that the phase-out of fossil fuels will be slow, foreground an electable all-of-the-above platform, and then use elective office to advance green policies to the maximum level that electoral realities makes possible“. Just what millions of voters fear. If ‘advancing green policy to the maximum level’ is still the way democrats are thinking, they may be very disappointed.
Excellent timing Ruy. A day or two after Nature Magazine retracted a major study predicting the impending Climate Apocalypse. It will be decades before anyone can calculate the real human costs of the Climate overreaction/con, depending on one's perspective. Worldwide, a political reckoning will likely arrive sooner.
Historically, the German Economic Miracle, has produced nearly 25% of the 27 member EU GDP. Germans have long acted as EU's rich Uncle, backstopping the EU's most challenging economic times, while providing an enviable lifestyle for Germans. 3 years into an economic downturn caused by soaring energy prices, that is over. The fallout will not be pretty. Between the Open Border and Climate policy, Merkel will eventually go down in German history as the person to harm the nation most, without ever sporting a Nazi uniform.
In the US, the notion EVs, along with expensive poor performing appliances, could be shoved down the throat of every American, has collapsed. It was always lunacy for Dems to insist every US family, regardless of location, size and lifestyle would one day embrace small EVs, that require a half hour to charge. Only the notions of saving planet via private jet to Davos and the world's wealthiest investing in 8 and 9 figure mansions steps from oceans, supposedly rising so fast they would soon consume the massive estates, made less sense.
Much of US governance the past 1/4 century, has been conducted in a state of panic and overreaction. From 9/11, to Climate and Covid, the adults seem to have left the building. The initial reaction is always, cost does not matter. (Hence our $38 trillion dollar debt.) Treasury printing presses running full tilt, are always followed by mass government edicts that produce a loss of liberty and lower living standards, as DC plays fast and loose with our inalienable rights. All, as Dem hypocrisy soars to new heights. The pendulum is swiftly swinging back, Right. It is more than a little ironic, that a Dem political party that fails to realize their 15 minutes of Climate fame is over, risks extinction.
Maybe I should have read more comments prior to posting mine. But then two saying the same thing might carry more weight towards the LP's new position on man made climate change.
Energy Realism, The left's definition of the science of climate change has never been about science or correct in any way. Climate change predictions are based on models. The base model used for years and favored by the IPCC was labeled RCP 8.5. It was never a scientific model and way overestimated the extremes of doomsday scenarios. We know that now because the IPCC is searching for a new model to replace RCP 8.5, in part because their past is now shown to be corrupt and not reliable in any sense of the word.
In any case, climate science is a corrupted "science". Most scientific journals have been taken over by the climate change industry and corrupt scientists. How do we know about this corruption? Because they spend more time denying discussions are needed or wanted and other scientific results, papers, from being published. The essence of science is constant questioning of current understandings of science and trying to duplicate past results or new strategies to test the old results of science and newer results being published all the time.
And now we have this: From Roger Pielke jr.
"A Huge Retraction, the Usual Playbook, and Reason for Optimism
The collapse of Kotz et al. was followed by predictable climate spin but also signs of a return to scientific integrity"
For years the IPCC and other climate zealots have relied on a base report that was flawed from the beginning but was used anyway for all the catastrophic predictions of climate change and what needed to be done to correct it, until they couldn't get away with it any more. All current science that they say supports the world's claim of climate change being real by man made gases is not true. https://substack.com/inbox/post/180627951
The AP's reaction to this devastating news about how they view climate change, "Some responses to the retraction follow the longstanding admit-no-error-nothing-to-see here approach to scientific integrity that has become normalized among climate activists in the media and in academia.
For instance, the AP tells its readers — incorrectly — that the retraction is a nothingburger and instructs them to move along:
The authors of a study that examined climate change’s potential effect on the global economy said Wednesday that data errors led them to slightly overstate an expected drop in income over the next 25 years."
No doubt, the Dems will have the same reaction. Because they never take personal responsibility for the wrong they have wrought. And they just don't have it in them to pivot to the truth.
I believe that the facts will bear out that the Dems will die on the hill of man made climate change as real even though it is not near the top of any voters concern list. Younger voters still care, but as the truth comes out, and they see their lives have been greatly harmed, by policies based on bogus science, there will be a price to pay. Even in this article current science is not mention. Will it ever be? As gas prices come down and home energy costs come down, actually, my gas bill is $93 dollars per month and elect is $104 for a 3,000 sqft house, such costs have never been an issue for me. Even though a few miles away, every big tech company is now building data centers in our state. The current public electricity company is building gas powered smaller electricity generating plants to supplement the renewable energy those companies require. I believe the majority of the middle of the country have the same attitude. As long as the Dems rabid climate change base denies reality and won't change their approach to lower electrical bills, people will notice. The Dems are the party of bad science and exorbitant energy prices.
When the whole picture is known, or just more of the truth, 2026 is looking very bad for the Dems. But keep using the outdated narratives being used today, they make 2026 look worse and worse for the Dems. The kitchen table is there for the Dems to join the voters who count, educated and savvy independents, disenfranchised identity voters who finally figured out the Dems have been playing them for decades, but the Dems refuse to take a seat.
Will we read about this seismic change in climate changetruth anytime soon in the LP?
In other words, Democrats need to adopt the MAGA Republican agenda.
It is sort of proved by what is happening in much of Europe. The liberals noting the right growing in popularity have pivoted to adopt the agenda of the right only so those left politicians can retain their gravy-train producing power.
Your admonitions on climate extremism are entirely valid. Some of have said essentially the same over the last 15 years in both Canada and the US. But do you think Democrats can bring themselves to fundamentally reverse themselves on climate? Airheads line Newsome, Healey, Hocul , Murphy etc would tell us otherwise.
The true "dubious crusade" is the campaign that TLP is conducting against prioritizing climate issues. Although the rhetoric needs addressing and tactics need improving, nothing is, in fact, more important than addressing climate issues, especially now that Trump is rowing backwards as fast as possible on all fronts, including coercing other countries to adopt his duplicitous and unsustainable anti-climate policies. What is needed is a reconfiguration of the rhetoric and the effort of addressing climate issues to speak to the people, and to find a way for TLP-type thinkers to offer the call to arms that is needed against this vital issue. Unlike many issues, where policy choices can, in principle, be made on the basis of polling, climate is a true, exogenous, ominous problem that won't go away and will only get worse if not addressed. It's complicated, but that's why true, effective, and thoughtful political leadership is needed. Leadership, not complacent dismissal, which seems to be what TLP is offering. Oddly, that complacency overlooks the fact that significant majorities of real people, of all economic classes, see that there is indeed a climate crisis. It's a perfect opportunity for the left, if it can find the right rhetoric, to undermine the Trumpers and contribute substantially to solving society's most pressing problem, a problem that underlies many others, including housing affordability, immigration, and many medical issues.
The biggest obstacle to getting people concerned about global warming is the failure of past predictions. Consider these lines from Matt Ridley in The Spectator:
"In his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, for which he jointly won a Nobel Prize, he (Al Gore) predicted a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet “in the near future” – out by around 19 feet and nine inches. In 2009, he said there was a 75 percent chance all the ice in the Arctic Ocean would disappear by 2014. In that year there was 5 million square kilometers of the stuff at its lowest point – about the same as in 2009; this year there was 4.7 million square kilometers."
Given that progressives have totally blown "energy realism" and "growth realism" I declare that progressives should not have political power until after they have crawled over broken glass along the Road to Canossa and begged forgiveness from Pope Don the Populist.
Ruy Teixeira keeps presenting himself as the apostle of “realism,” but his project is neither especially realistic nor particularly helpful for understanding the challenges of the 21st century. His analyses reliably point in one direction: diagnosing every political or economic problem as the fault of “the left,” while leaving untouched (and unexamined) the systems of economic incentives and structural distortions that actually shape outcomes.
Nothing in his program meaningfully addresses climate risk, economic stagnation, declining productivity, demographic shifts, or the realities of a warming planet. It won’t arrest anthropogenic climate change, it won’t prepare societies for unavoidable climate disruptions and migrations, and it won’t produce the kind of broad-based economic growth he likes to invoke. Instead, his version of “realism” simply ratifies the worldview of the professional and donor classes who already hold most of the power in Democratic politics.
In that sense, his writing doesn’t expand understanding — it constrains it. It reframes debates so that structural economic failures become cultural grievances, and planetary-scale challenges become messaging problems. The result is a politics optimized for elite comfort rather than public resilience. His ideas won’t send Earth down the path of Venus, but they also won’t do much to keep the Earth we have livable, equitable, or economically dynamic. They mostly keep his preferred faction seated at the upper table while the grand narrative is reduced to another round of scolding the left.
We do not have economic stagnation, we have economic growth. The annual GDP growth rate was 4.59% as of July, 2025 (Bureau of Economic Analysis). We do not have declining productivity, we have rising productivity, at the annual rate of 1.8% from 2019 to 2025 (Bureau of Labor Statistics). As for climate risk, review the failure of past predictions, covered in other comments on this thread.
Chris Murphy certainly gets some things wrong, but he’s right to be worried about AI. For all the benefits it can bring, I see two severe downsides:
Relying on AI to do our moral and critical thinking for us will ruin our minds more than social media already has. AI seems to have a very conformist energy that is not conducive to original, creative thinking.
If AI really does destroy tens of millions of jobs, the homicide rate will skyrocket. A large population of people that can’t work or can’t up-skill will include a lot of young men with too much free time and a very low sense of self-worth. That’s especially dangerous in a country awash in guns.
I would also like to hear exactly how all of what’s presented here differs from the “right populism” bogeyman in the opening paragraph. While I largely agree with the policy positions put forward by Ruy over the past couple of years, they all seem far more likely to come from a Vance or Rubio led (I.e. right populist) GOP than any Democrat.
Brilliant essay. Supporting and promoting growth is essential. Some may be ready to accept that Income retribution and government programs aren’t leading to enough growth. But are they ready to set aside long held other priorities and ‘‘to substantially rise living standards for the working class by more economic growth, especially higher productivity growth.’?
Time to make this big change. Even CNN is talking about the low growth blue states.
Fareed Zakaria: If America Has An Affordability Crisis, It Tends To Be In Places Democrats Govern | Video | RealClearPolitics
I must say that *this* Ruy Teixeira is far preferable to the one doling out red meat every week. I have some minor disagreements--and I still think Eurasia will be taking the lead from the West this century, albeit perhaps to the ultimate benefit of the Left--but for now I'll just say that this was an excellent column and I hope Mr. Teixeira produces more like it. It shows how great his contributions can be when he dares to pose a positive vision for a renewed left to go with his critiques...and saving liberalism from the present illiberal onslaught may well depend on more people conceptualizing and implementing such visions.
I'll be eagerly awaiting installments two and three.
Many people on the left have had government employment in tax-payer funded universities, NGOs, etc. so have been insulated from the struggles of the working class.
Many more Americans have had employment in tax-payer funded federal, state, and local departments, in the tax-payer funded military, in hospitals and other health-care operations that rely on federal and state tax-payer funding at least as much as state universities, etc., so have been insulated from the struggles of the working class.
(Note: NGO stands for "non-governmental organization." The reason is that they are non-governmental organizations.)
Many NGOs receive government funds.
So do many farms. That is why farmers are insulated from the struggles of the working class.
Great column. Two comments. The new green strategy was doomed from the very beginning when they put a constraint as an objective (zero CO2) instead of a consumer need (abundant cheap energy. If they had picked the energy as the main strategic goal and then made constraint goals, it would have drastically changed where we are now and we would be well on our way to integrating nuclear energy as a key contributor using the solar green energy where it made sense. Who could not see that putting a constraint as the strategic overall objective for a part of our economy that drives growth I do not know but that has resulted in us losing 20 plus years in our energy system.
Second, I agree economic growth is a US strategic goal. If we do not have that we will be stuck in a series of what I call “stop the bleeding “ projects. This is a BIG issue because these type of projects do not fix the underlying issues and every stop the bleeding project has a strong potential of causing more problems than it fixes. I did not make this up as a theory, it is classic Deming
Gosh I love Ruy's columns.
We know that energy drives growth. So really, it should start there, yes?
Here in Maryland, our electricity costs (like everywhere else) are thru the roof. We know demand is surging, and we know we have no realistic plan to address this.
If I were running from Governor, I'd say I don't want to build a nuclear reactor here, I want to build two dozen power plants. Let's make our energy costs so low that people and companies will want to set up shop here because our energy is so damn cheap.
Nationally? Maybe we have the federal government incentivise states to do the same. Each state that can create the same number of nuclear plants as they have representatives gets a 10% reduction in their citizen's income tax for the next decade. Or 2% off each plant above 3.
Or maybe we keep doing the same short sighted shit that doesn't work. But man, it would be fun to have some national goals that everyone could get behind.
Yes energy is a prerequisite for economic growth. So if we had started with economic growth as an objective and developed realistic energy needs ( amount, where, cost et) and we did this 25 years ago we would be in a completely different place. This is a crucial strategic need. We just messed it up by placing the constraint as an objective. I don’t even have to debate the issue of carbon dioxide limits as they would have been taken care of by setting appropriate constraints. This would have led us to reducing coal, utilizing natural gas and going after nuclear energy.
Everytime I think about nuclear power, I think about asparagus. It takes 3 to 5 years to grow to a harvestable state. I've wanted to grow it for the past 15 years. But each year I never did, because, attention span.
I keep reading nuclear plants take up to two decades to build and so nobody wants to. But, I'll bet you in two decades, we'll be sitting around wishing we started building them 20 years ago.
You are right about this! Plant Vogtle went fully online in Georgia in about 2024. (largest nuclear power plant in the US). Planning began in the 1970s.
https://www.southernnuclear.com/our-plants/plant-vogtle.html
I think AI is going to jump start us into nuclear. My daughter in law told me she heard that some of the AI companies are starting to talk about building nuclear plants. Does not surprise me
It is also the case that the new green strategy doesn't focus enough on the most important part of reducing emissions, which is making green technologies naturally profitable to the private sector. The long-term solution involves a pipeline whereby government investment in R&D (alongside infrastructure) develops new, more energy-efficient, less emissions-heavy tech and transfers it to the private sector, so that producers in the private sector will refine its development, and then propagate and distribute it to consumers. Trying to have the government do it all by itself, or through negative rather than positive incentives, will never work in the long term. (and trying to get the private sector to do it all by itself, as the right desires, will also never work in the long term)
My sister in law is selling 30 to 50 electronic motorcycles a month in Vientiane. Turns out they cost less to build and a huge amount less to run. For folks who only take the kids to school, go to work, or the market, electric motorcycles far outsell gas powered. With no government subsidies of course. The electric production is all hydro and about 4 cents a kwh, not all green is a failure. As always we will adopt what works and what doesn't work will be a dim memory.
As for growth being the fundamental building block for a renewed Democratic Party. Hardly. Don't get me wrong, I make money on productivity increases and growth,,,,, in the stock market that is. Here in the US productivity growth has been decoupled from wages since the mid 70s. Productivity goes up, wages flatline. Trump correctly identified the huge dissatisfied working class as a potential source of votes. Unless and until productivity and growth translates into more money for normies it will do nothing for the Democratic Party electorily.
Democrats are now in the affordable Park Slope condos with loan forgiveness and au pairs for attorneys stage of denial. It's not enough. Better than Trump is an extremely low bar, it's disheartening to know we don't seem able to clear that bar.
They are decoupled only because wages as we currently conceive of them are out of sync with the way the economy functions--they are a vestige of the era when industrial machinery dominated economic production, and labor-time was what was monetized. Now it is data--personal data--that is monetized. And we don't have a wage system for that yet--so increases in production can't be as robustly recycled to labor.
Growth *is* the answer, but we need to fix the recycling mechanism. Digital rights are a start, and I think the ultimate answer lies in creating some kind of universal data payments system. This is one of the main avenues the left should pursue if it wants to help labor. (UBI is *not* the answer)
Re: productivity growth, increasing wages is only part of its importance--rising productivity is also the only way of reducing prices and the COL without raising unemployment and depressing economic activity.
I don't see how selling someone's data helps businesses with the people like me that don't buy anything. How can they make money off my data? A third of the country makes under $20 an hour. The very people who need a boost in wages don't have much monetary value in data, they spend on rent and lotto tickets. I also can't see productivity coming to housing or health care or the cost of borrowing. If phones and TVs were free most would still struggle. I'd like it if it happened, I just don't see how.
The largest, most powerful corporate entities in the world, that structure the broader economy within whose constraints your business functions--particularly the FAANGS and social media more broadly--book the lion's share of their profits by contracts with third parties (both advertising consultancies and small-to-midsize businesses) that pay for these mega-entities to direct the attention of people using their platforms to ads for these third parties' products through the use of behavioral algorithms. The reason these dominant entities can achieve this mass manipulation of people's attention through these algorithms is because as people use their platforms, the mega-companies run massive data-harvesting operations that captures those users' personal information. Only by running fancy statistics on this data does the algorithm actually do anything. Any business that uses modern advertising and SEO strategies essentially supports this system, and any business that doesn't is still shaped by the economic environment it creates, and also less likely to succeed than a business plugged into it.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly in regards to the future, personal data is the basis for AI. Fundamentally, all AI consists of is correlative-statistical algorithms crunching massive amounts of data over and over again and producing remixes of it. Every response given by a chatbot, or an image generator, or a music generator, etc. is just a gazillion conversations/pictures/songs recombined and mashed together using a neural net algorithm. This data is produced by people--including you and I--but people aren't paid for it. It is harvested for free by the aforementioned mega-companies and the modern AI superpowers. In order to function, ChatGPT (or more accurately OpenAI) must scrape the entire internet everyday multiple times and collect massive dossiers of information produced by people to run through its neural net algorithms. As AI becomes the main profit center of society--and as everything becomes more software-mediated as a result--the fact that the AI superpowers and their services aren't paying people for the data they monetize will hollow out the middle class, because it will be stuck trying to generate its income in the old, conventional way that is quickly becoming obsolete. Or, more succinctly: data is the new form of labor and the new basis of value, and its creators aren't being compensated for their work. (This is why the idea that 'AI will replace workers' is just a silly way of redefining 'worker' so that you can get free labor)
If instead people have rights to their data, and must be paid a share of any profits that extend from its use, you can restore the natural recycling of value from capital to labor that the wage system was originally invented to sustain, and which is the basis of both capitalism and the middle class. Ultimately, that is the fight the left should lead. My fear is that it is not until things get really bad and the fake gospel of 'AI will make workers obsolete' is ascendant that they will perceive that.
"That means acknowledging that, no, climate change is not an 'emergency' and does not justify an impractical rapid transition to wind and solar."
Although I agree with Mr. Teixeira the need to moderate the Democratic approach to climate change, I don't view his reasoning as responsible nor likely to persuade people who are on the left but not full-blown progressives: precisely the sector of the party whom I take him to be appealing to.
Nothing has changed with regard to the facts of climate change itself. The rate of warming has not confounded predictions except in being slightly faster than most forecasts. The effects in terms of frequency and severity of extreme events are now visible. To brush this off because of a comment made by Bill Gates is a lazy argument. No lazy argument is going to convince the people Mr. Teixeira wants to convince.
The climate has an unusually long timeline for an emergency (which is is). Economic needs and desires are immediate. Mr. Teixeira is correct that voters have demonstrated they are not going to respond to the alarm that climate advocates have sounded. The argument he should be making (and I'm not even going to add an "it seems to me" disclaimer) is that to achieve the *best available outcome* the party must downplay alarmism, accept that the phase-out of fossil fuels will be slow, foreground an electable all-of-the-above platform, and then use elective office to advance green policies to the maximum level that electoral realities makes possible, using whatever strategies work electorally for each initiative. There is a moral imperative to pursue the best available outcome rather than the best conceivable outcome.
A Democratic party that indulges in climate denialism -- which Mr. Teixeira comes very close to here -- cannot retain the active support of its progressive wing. Moving to the center can't work if it bleeds as many votes as it gains: Mr. Teixeira surely knows this. Instead of denying scientific facts and the mounting data that confirm their validity, Mr. Teixeira should be sounding the alarm that the urgency of the situation requires full commitment to sustained electoral pragmatism and unrelenting policy gradualism as a progressive strategy. In time, either technological advances will open means of acceleration or the continued worsening of climate effects will alter the electoral salience of climate-emergency platforms.
"The effects in terms of frequency and severity of extreme events are now visible."
“The observational data published by meteorological agencies in 2023 has confirmed once again that there are no upward trends in global hurricane activity since reliable records began in the 1970s.” Source: Global Warming Policy Foundation
In the decade 1891-1900, there were 21 hurricanes, of which 8 were Category 3 or above. In the decade 2011-2020, there were 19 hurricanes, of which 5 were Category 3 or above. The biggest decade for hurricanes was 1941-1950, with 24 hurricanes of which 10 were Category 3 or above. Source: National Hurricane Center
Maybe it's different with other "extreme events" like blizzards or tornadoes, but the frequency and severity of hurricanes show no evidence of increasing.
“to achieve the *best available outcome* the party must downplay alarmism, accept that the phase-out of fossil fuels will be slow, foreground an electable all-of-the-above platform, and then use elective office to advance green policies to the maximum level that electoral realities makes possible“. Just what millions of voters fear. If ‘advancing green policy to the maximum level’ is still the way democrats are thinking, they may be very disappointed.
Excellent timing Ruy. A day or two after Nature Magazine retracted a major study predicting the impending Climate Apocalypse. It will be decades before anyone can calculate the real human costs of the Climate overreaction/con, depending on one's perspective. Worldwide, a political reckoning will likely arrive sooner.
Historically, the German Economic Miracle, has produced nearly 25% of the 27 member EU GDP. Germans have long acted as EU's rich Uncle, backstopping the EU's most challenging economic times, while providing an enviable lifestyle for Germans. 3 years into an economic downturn caused by soaring energy prices, that is over. The fallout will not be pretty. Between the Open Border and Climate policy, Merkel will eventually go down in German history as the person to harm the nation most, without ever sporting a Nazi uniform.
In the US, the notion EVs, along with expensive poor performing appliances, could be shoved down the throat of every American, has collapsed. It was always lunacy for Dems to insist every US family, regardless of location, size and lifestyle would one day embrace small EVs, that require a half hour to charge. Only the notions of saving planet via private jet to Davos and the world's wealthiest investing in 8 and 9 figure mansions steps from oceans, supposedly rising so fast they would soon consume the massive estates, made less sense.
Much of US governance the past 1/4 century, has been conducted in a state of panic and overreaction. From 9/11, to Climate and Covid, the adults seem to have left the building. The initial reaction is always, cost does not matter. (Hence our $38 trillion dollar debt.) Treasury printing presses running full tilt, are always followed by mass government edicts that produce a loss of liberty and lower living standards, as DC plays fast and loose with our inalienable rights. All, as Dem hypocrisy soars to new heights. The pendulum is swiftly swinging back, Right. It is more than a little ironic, that a Dem political party that fails to realize their 15 minutes of Climate fame is over, risks extinction.
Maybe I should have read more comments prior to posting mine. But then two saying the same thing might carry more weight towards the LP's new position on man made climate change.
Energy Realism, The left's definition of the science of climate change has never been about science or correct in any way. Climate change predictions are based on models. The base model used for years and favored by the IPCC was labeled RCP 8.5. It was never a scientific model and way overestimated the extremes of doomsday scenarios. We know that now because the IPCC is searching for a new model to replace RCP 8.5, in part because their past is now shown to be corrupt and not reliable in any sense of the word.
In any case, climate science is a corrupted "science". Most scientific journals have been taken over by the climate change industry and corrupt scientists. How do we know about this corruption? Because they spend more time denying discussions are needed or wanted and other scientific results, papers, from being published. The essence of science is constant questioning of current understandings of science and trying to duplicate past results or new strategies to test the old results of science and newer results being published all the time.
And now we have this: From Roger Pielke jr.
"A Huge Retraction, the Usual Playbook, and Reason for Optimism
The collapse of Kotz et al. was followed by predictable climate spin but also signs of a return to scientific integrity"
For years the IPCC and other climate zealots have relied on a base report that was flawed from the beginning but was used anyway for all the catastrophic predictions of climate change and what needed to be done to correct it, until they couldn't get away with it any more. All current science that they say supports the world's claim of climate change being real by man made gases is not true. https://substack.com/inbox/post/180627951
The AP's reaction to this devastating news about how they view climate change, "Some responses to the retraction follow the longstanding admit-no-error-nothing-to-see here approach to scientific integrity that has become normalized among climate activists in the media and in academia.
For instance, the AP tells its readers — incorrectly — that the retraction is a nothingburger and instructs them to move along:
The authors of a study that examined climate change’s potential effect on the global economy said Wednesday that data errors led them to slightly overstate an expected drop in income over the next 25 years."
No doubt, the Dems will have the same reaction. Because they never take personal responsibility for the wrong they have wrought. And they just don't have it in them to pivot to the truth.
I believe that the facts will bear out that the Dems will die on the hill of man made climate change as real even though it is not near the top of any voters concern list. Younger voters still care, but as the truth comes out, and they see their lives have been greatly harmed, by policies based on bogus science, there will be a price to pay. Even in this article current science is not mention. Will it ever be? As gas prices come down and home energy costs come down, actually, my gas bill is $93 dollars per month and elect is $104 for a 3,000 sqft house, such costs have never been an issue for me. Even though a few miles away, every big tech company is now building data centers in our state. The current public electricity company is building gas powered smaller electricity generating plants to supplement the renewable energy those companies require. I believe the majority of the middle of the country have the same attitude. As long as the Dems rabid climate change base denies reality and won't change their approach to lower electrical bills, people will notice. The Dems are the party of bad science and exorbitant energy prices.
When the whole picture is known, or just more of the truth, 2026 is looking very bad for the Dems. But keep using the outdated narratives being used today, they make 2026 look worse and worse for the Dems. The kitchen table is there for the Dems to join the voters who count, educated and savvy independents, disenfranchised identity voters who finally figured out the Dems have been playing them for decades, but the Dems refuse to take a seat.
Will we read about this seismic change in climate changetruth anytime soon in the LP?
In other words, Democrats need to adopt the MAGA Republican agenda.
It is sort of proved by what is happening in much of Europe. The liberals noting the right growing in popularity have pivoted to adopt the agenda of the right only so those left politicians can retain their gravy-train producing power.
Your admonitions on climate extremism are entirely valid. Some of have said essentially the same over the last 15 years in both Canada and the US. But do you think Democrats can bring themselves to fundamentally reverse themselves on climate? Airheads line Newsome, Healey, Hocul , Murphy etc would tell us otherwise.
The true "dubious crusade" is the campaign that TLP is conducting against prioritizing climate issues. Although the rhetoric needs addressing and tactics need improving, nothing is, in fact, more important than addressing climate issues, especially now that Trump is rowing backwards as fast as possible on all fronts, including coercing other countries to adopt his duplicitous and unsustainable anti-climate policies. What is needed is a reconfiguration of the rhetoric and the effort of addressing climate issues to speak to the people, and to find a way for TLP-type thinkers to offer the call to arms that is needed against this vital issue. Unlike many issues, where policy choices can, in principle, be made on the basis of polling, climate is a true, exogenous, ominous problem that won't go away and will only get worse if not addressed. It's complicated, but that's why true, effective, and thoughtful political leadership is needed. Leadership, not complacent dismissal, which seems to be what TLP is offering. Oddly, that complacency overlooks the fact that significant majorities of real people, of all economic classes, see that there is indeed a climate crisis. It's a perfect opportunity for the left, if it can find the right rhetoric, to undermine the Trumpers and contribute substantially to solving society's most pressing problem, a problem that underlies many others, including housing affordability, immigration, and many medical issues.
The biggest obstacle to getting people concerned about global warming is the failure of past predictions. Consider these lines from Matt Ridley in The Spectator:
"In his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, for which he jointly won a Nobel Prize, he (Al Gore) predicted a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet “in the near future” – out by around 19 feet and nine inches. In 2009, he said there was a 75 percent chance all the ice in the Arctic Ocean would disappear by 2014. In that year there was 5 million square kilometers of the stuff at its lowest point – about the same as in 2009; this year there was 4.7 million square kilometers."
Great article, once again.
Given that progressives have totally blown "energy realism" and "growth realism" I declare that progressives should not have political power until after they have crawled over broken glass along the Road to Canossa and begged forgiveness from Pope Don the Populist.
Ruy Teixeira keeps presenting himself as the apostle of “realism,” but his project is neither especially realistic nor particularly helpful for understanding the challenges of the 21st century. His analyses reliably point in one direction: diagnosing every political or economic problem as the fault of “the left,” while leaving untouched (and unexamined) the systems of economic incentives and structural distortions that actually shape outcomes.
Nothing in his program meaningfully addresses climate risk, economic stagnation, declining productivity, demographic shifts, or the realities of a warming planet. It won’t arrest anthropogenic climate change, it won’t prepare societies for unavoidable climate disruptions and migrations, and it won’t produce the kind of broad-based economic growth he likes to invoke. Instead, his version of “realism” simply ratifies the worldview of the professional and donor classes who already hold most of the power in Democratic politics.
In that sense, his writing doesn’t expand understanding — it constrains it. It reframes debates so that structural economic failures become cultural grievances, and planetary-scale challenges become messaging problems. The result is a politics optimized for elite comfort rather than public resilience. His ideas won’t send Earth down the path of Venus, but they also won’t do much to keep the Earth we have livable, equitable, or economically dynamic. They mostly keep his preferred faction seated at the upper table while the grand narrative is reduced to another round of scolding the left.
We do not have economic stagnation, we have economic growth. The annual GDP growth rate was 4.59% as of July, 2025 (Bureau of Economic Analysis). We do not have declining productivity, we have rising productivity, at the annual rate of 1.8% from 2019 to 2025 (Bureau of Labor Statistics). As for climate risk, review the failure of past predictions, covered in other comments on this thread.
Chris Murphy certainly gets some things wrong, but he’s right to be worried about AI. For all the benefits it can bring, I see two severe downsides:
Relying on AI to do our moral and critical thinking for us will ruin our minds more than social media already has. AI seems to have a very conformist energy that is not conducive to original, creative thinking.
If AI really does destroy tens of millions of jobs, the homicide rate will skyrocket. A large population of people that can’t work or can’t up-skill will include a lot of young men with too much free time and a very low sense of self-worth. That’s especially dangerous in a country awash in guns.
I would also like to hear exactly how all of what’s presented here differs from the “right populism” bogeyman in the opening paragraph. While I largely agree with the policy positions put forward by Ruy over the past couple of years, they all seem far more likely to come from a Vance or Rubio led (I.e. right populist) GOP than any Democrat.
Brilliant essay. Supporting and promoting growth is essential. Some may be ready to accept that Income retribution and government programs aren’t leading to enough growth. But are they ready to set aside long held other priorities and ‘‘to substantially rise living standards for the working class by more economic growth, especially higher productivity growth.’?
Time to make this big change. Even CNN is talking about the low growth blue states.
Fareed Zakaria: If America Has An Affordability Crisis, It Tends To Be In Places Democrats Govern | Video | RealClearPolitics
I must say that *this* Ruy Teixeira is far preferable to the one doling out red meat every week. I have some minor disagreements--and I still think Eurasia will be taking the lead from the West this century, albeit perhaps to the ultimate benefit of the Left--but for now I'll just say that this was an excellent column and I hope Mr. Teixeira produces more like it. It shows how great his contributions can be when he dares to pose a positive vision for a renewed left to go with his critiques...and saving liberalism from the present illiberal onslaught may well depend on more people conceptualizing and implementing such visions.
I'll be eagerly awaiting installments two and three.