One of the most prominent left-wing scholars in Washington, D.C., who has been a fixture at the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) since its founding in 2003, is leaving the organization and heading for a conservative think tank.
Why is he leaving CAP and heading for the American Enterprise Institute?
Ruy Teixeira got fed up with the cloying wokeness at CAP and on much of the left. He says the current atmosphere of progressive organizations “sends me running screaming from the left.”
“My perspective is, the single most important thing to focus on in the social system is the economic system,” he told Politico. “It’s class.”
Indeed, economic inequality is a left-wing concern. But Teixeira insists, “I’m just a social democrat, man. Trying to make the world a better place.”
To hear Teixeira tell it, CAP, and the rest of Washington’s institution-based left, stopped being a place where he could do the work he wanted. The reason, he says, is that the relentless focus on race, gender, and identity in historically liberal foundations and think tanks has made it hard to do work that looks at society through other prisms. It also makes people nervous about projects that could be accused of giving short shrift to anti-racism efforts.
“I would say that anybody who has a fundamentally class-oriented perspective, who thinks that’s a more important lens and doesn’t assume that any disparity is automatically a lens of racism or sexism or what have you … I think that perspective is not congenial in most left institutions,” he says.
Teixeira isn’t the only Washington intellectual who has rebelled against this stifling woke atmosphere. The Intercept published an in-depth analysis last month of the “meltdown” of left-wing advocacy groups that have become paralyzed by their mania for diversity and equity. It turns out that becoming hyper-conscious of race, gender, and identity can become draining. Walking on eggshells trying to avoid race and gender landmines leads people to slough off “rational philosophy and policy debate on the merits,” according to HotAir’s Ed Morrissey.
As such, and since immutable characteristics exist in contrast to each other rather than in cooperation, this approach inevitably sets up all the incentives to claim primacy simply on the basis of ethnicity, gender, and the various combinations of those permutations. In fact, the more varieties one can establish within “immutable characteristics,” the better. It’s not for no reason that LGB grew to LGBT and then to LGBTQ and now to LGBTQIA+, for instance. Those definitional assignments leave no room for compromise or common ground — only tribalism. That kind of power structure relies on recriminations to sustain itself, and the only defense against such recriminations is character assassination and attempts to shut down debate.
Ruy Teixeira finally rejected the madness as any rational, logical, thinking person would.
“I’d say they have been affected by the nature and inclination and preferences of their junior staff,” he says. “It’s just the case that at CAP, like almost any other left think tank you can think of, it’s become very hard to have a conversation about race and gender and trans issues, even crime and immigration. You know, ‘How should the left handle these?’ There’s a default assumption about how you’re supposed to talk about these things, even the language. There’s a real chilling effect on all of these organizations, and I think it’s had an effect on CAP as well.”
Like a lot of older and whiter veterans of liberal think-tanks and foundations, he also says he’s exhausted by the internal agita. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land,” he says. “The fact that nobody is willing to call bulls**t, it just freaks me out.”
Yeah, us too.
Teixeira will never be a “conservative” in the sense that he will embrace Milton Friedman or Russell Kirk. But escaping from the liberal insane asylum in liberal think tanks will certainly free up his mind and feed his need for flexible thinking among his colleagues.
