My favorite Democrat is Ruy Teixeira, a Washington think-tanker who has lately migrated from the increasingly left-wing Center for American Progress to the not exactly right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Teixeira has a Substack called The Liberal Patriot, which is remarkably clear-sighted about most that is wrong with today’s Democratic Party, particularly the way it has spurned the long-held allegiance of America’s blue-collar class in favor of the information economy’s new elite who dominate the government, the media, education, entertainment, and even big business.

But Mr. Teixeira is also remarkably myopic, in my opinion, about his party’s capacity for change and renewal. No matter how insane or remote from the everyday concerns of ordinary folks are the Democrats’ policies under President Biden, no matter how many of their traditional supporters they appear to have alienated, Mr. Teixeira is forever proposing a tweak here or a tweak there that will, he believes, correct the problem and so bring the old-time Democrats back home to the quondam Party of the Working Class.

Maybe the problem will even correct itself. Recently The Liberal Patriot purported to explain “Why Democrats Will Become Energy Realists.” The short answer? “There is no alternative.” Ruy, Ruy. How little you know them after all. For the Democrats, there’s alwaysan alternative to realism—and, indeed, to reality itself. Having thrown in their lot with the fashionable ideologues in higher education and the media, they always have the option simply to stick their heads in the ideological