The Democratic Party needs more sensible, centrist voices. Save Ruy Teixeira's Liberal Patriot.

“No Learning Please, We’re Democrats!,” griped The Liberal Patriot’s founder Ruy Teixeira on March 26. 

Unfortunately for Teixeira’s many subscribers and supporters, the post was Teixeira signing off.

“The Liberal Patriot closes its doors,” he announced, sadly. No one, it seems, wanted to hear any more about a Democratic Party that has lost the working class, lost to Donald Trump, and, perhaps worse, lost to a new generation of elite, white-collar, activist Democrats who will not (Will. Not.) moderate.

“So we are forced to close our doors,” wrote Teixeira. “The Liberal Patriot, alas, will be no more. ‘[P]assed on…no more…ceased to be! [E]xpired and gone to meet [its] maker!…Bereft of life…rests in peace!…kicked the bucket…shuffled off [its] mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!’ You get the idea: we are now an ex-site.”

Teixeira’s point of view is common in the mainstream of voting Democrats, less common in the well-heeled activist and donor circuits that now run the party for better or worse.

Losing him will be a blow to the Democratic Party. Through the Liberal Patriot, many independent and progressive voters got a fresh take, outside the echo chambers of the elite liberal establishment.

That is a problem for Democrats.

Ruy Teixeira has spent years making an argument many Democrats still do not want to hear: that the party has drifted too far from the common sense of ordinary working- and middle-class voters, especially on culture, identity, borders, merit, and patriotism. 

You do not have to agree with every Teixeira column to see his value. In fact, that is almost the point. He has been useful precisely because he has been willing to irritate his own coalition instead of flattering it. His recent work kept returning to the same basic theme: Democrats lost badly in 2024 and still seemed resistant to real learning.

A healthy political movement needs people like that. It needs internal critics with receipts. It needs writers who are not impressed by slogans, who do not confuse elite consensus with public opinion, and who can say, plainly, that a party which keeps alienating normal voters should maybe stop doing that.

Which brings us, naturally, to Bari Weiss.

Weiss has done something most media critics only dream about: she built an actual institution. Her substack, which became an outlet, The Free Press, says it was founded on “honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence,” and it has become a genuine home for heterodox reporting and commentary rather than just another opinion page reciting approved doctrine.

In late 2025, that project got bigger still: Paramount acquired The Free Press, and CBS News announced Weiss would become editor-in-chief while remaining the boss of The Free Press.

That success matters. Immensely. It proves there is a market for independence. It proves readers are hungry for journalism that is not written in fear of the staff Slack channel. It proves that ideological nonconformity is not a niche hobby for a few eccentrics. It can be a business. It can be a newsroom. It can scale.

And that is exactly why someone in Weiss’s position should take a long look at Teixeira and The Liberal Patriot.

They are not identical. Teixeira is more center-left policy realist than culture-war impresario. Weiss’s universe is broader, sharper, and in some cases more combative. Fine. Good, even. A publication does not get stronger by filling up with carbon copies. It gets stronger by bringing in smart people who see different parts of the same broken landscape.

What Teixeira offers is something rare: an empirically minded, unsentimental, center-left critique of the Democratic Party from someone who actually wants it to recover rather than simply lose. At a moment when Democrats are struggling with working-class voters, men, Hispanics, and the basic problem of seeming strange and preachy to the median American, that voice is not expendable. It is necessary.

So yes, this is a plea: Bari Weiss, CBS, The Free Press, whoever now has the resources and institutional muscle: do not let The Liberal Patriot simply disappear into the digital graveyard. Bring Ruy Teixeira and that sensibility into a larger home. Preserve it. Expand it. Give it backing.

Because the Democratic Party does not need fewer people willing to tell it the truth. Like all political parties, it needs more.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)