For most of my working life, the Democratic Party has counted heavily on demographics. Its theory of politics had different names — the “Emerging Democratic Majority” that John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote about in 2002, or Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” — but the idea was the same: Demographic shifts meant Republicans would be stuck with a rump of aging White voters while Democrats built a dominant coalition from all the groups that were growing: the young, the college educated, the LGBTQ+ community, and the non-White working class, particularly Hispanics.

Over time, this idea became somewhat unmoored from its roots. Judis and Teixeira had envisioned the party holding a healthy chunk of the White working class, but a lot of the later progressive versions envisioned a kind of demographic destiny in which the party, no longer hostage to its culturally conservative voters, would be free to move significantly leftward. It all seemed plausible at the time, but history has decisively falsified that thesis.

After shifting noticeably Trumpward in 2020, this year, heavily Hispanic counties swung toward Trump by 14 points compared with four years ago. Hispanics are almost 20% of the population, and accounted for more than 70% of total population growth between 2022 and 2023. The coalition of the ascendant assumed that voting bloc would reliably deliver fat margins for Democrats; if they don’t, there is no durable, dominant majority.

If you want to understand why Democrats became so invested in this theory, and why it failed, I recommend Musa al-Gharbi’s new book, “We Have Never Been Woke.” One of the prominent themes of the book is that for all the talk about ending racial disparities and economic inequality, this was a movement by and for elite “symbolic capitalists” who make their living manipulating ideas rather than physical reality.

Unsurprisingly, it tended to serve their interests and values better than anyone else’s.

Consider the racial reckoning of 2020, and what it actually achieved. Activist groups with a racial justice focus saw an influx of donations, and some local governments flirted with radical de-policing ideas that were quickly abandoned as crime started to spike. Some buildings were renamed, and some prominent people prominently lost their jobs. The most noticeable effect, however, was that the kind of workplaces employing a lot of college graduates expanded their diversity, equity and inclusion offices and increased DEI initiatives and training.

That’s not to say the new hires didn’t deserve to be there. Diversifying elite workplaces is good for many reasons, including social justice. But it can create the illusion of more progress than is actually being made: If you were a Black food-service worker living in a high-crime neighborhood, or a Black small business owner trying to figure out how to meet payroll during a pandemic, how much did you benefit from all this frenetic activity?

As with so much modern activism, it became the social justice version of what critics used to call Ronald Reagan’s “trickle down economics”: Elites would spend a lot of time searching our souls and policing our language, and create new opportunities for college graduates who belonged to underrepresented minorities. Somehow, by osmosis, those changes would eventually work their way down to the majority of people in those groups who didn’t have a college diploma, or any shot at working in Hollywood or at the New York Times.

Call it trickle-down social justice.

Of course, it’s valuable to have people in the room who can speak personally about being victimized by racial profiling, or languishing inside the bowels of our malfunctioning immigration system, or getting targeted for discrimination because of their sexual identity. But Democrats were acting as though these activists were something like old-school union bosses, elected to represent a broad membership, when the only people they truly represented were their colleagues and the people writing checks.

Trickle-down social justice has failed, both as an instrument of broader social change and as a theory of politics. College-educated Democrats can win by speaking to working-class voters, but not by speaking for them.