Where the Progressive Movement Goes From Here
In the immediate term, this election was unequivocally good for liberal and leftist America. The presidency has metastasized into a bloated Titan more powerful than most gods and Kings throughout history, and simply replacing the industry-sponsored leeches in the executive branch with actual civil servants will do immense good for billions of people across the world. Any leftist discussion of the 2020 election must begin with the acknowledgement that Joe Biden’s victory was gigantic (likely winning by over 7 million votes when it’s all said and done), historic and it advanced the leftist agenda simply by replacing an aspiring autocrat with a potential ally in the most powerful seat in the world.
However.
Democrats got whooped up and down the ballot. Donald Trump inspired immense turnout both for and against him, and hiding in his shadow was a Republican wipeout in legislative races that will shape President Joe Biden’s legacy. It may come as a shock to some that Robby Mook, the same brain-genius who ran Hillary’s “don’t travel to important states and tell 30% of my base to go to hell” campaign, was tasked with overseeing the Democrats’ legislative gains in 2020. But this is the National Democratic Party, where a wave of overpaid consultants continue to fail upstream into more and more positions of power. The DNC and DCCC are fundraising apparatuses masquerading as a political party.
But I’m not here to talk about them, I’m here to talk about how to subvert them.
Once you account for the upgrade that Trump to Biden presents, there’s not a whole lot of great news left for the left. Joe Biden has been clamoring to compromise with Republicans since the start of his campaign, claiming they would have an “epiphany” post-Trump, and now he likely has a Republican Senate to work with (and best case scenario with the runoffs in Georgia still results in Joe Manchin being in complete control of the Senate). A narrow House majority means that individual members will have more power to defect from the Democratic caucus, and it is incredibly difficult to see how any serious liberal legislation will be passed in the next two years in the face of a Republican Party determined to tank an economy they can hang around Joe Biden’s neck in 2022 and 2024.
The Obama strategy to deal with Republican obstructionism was to give them something they wanted (harsher immigration policies) in the hopes that it would bring them to the table. It didn’t. One would hope that Joe Biden and the Democrats would learn from these mistakes of the past, but this is a party that let Robby Mook lose not one but two elections to a game show host who can’t stop telling us how badly he wants to bang his own daughter. All we have on this front is hope.
So where does the left go from here? Sure, the Senate map looks friendly in 2022 and it is possible that the Democrats could have full control of the government by the back-end of Biden’s first term, but we have no promises that what does get done in Biden’s first term will be friendly to the left. There is reason to be optimistic, as he campaigned on a much more inclusive vision of the party than Clinton did (plus his half-Bernie, half-Biden policy team bought him a whole election cycle of goodwill). However, Biden is still as establishment a politician as it gets, and the only entities available to compromise with in Washington D.C. are the rotting carcass of the Reagan administration, feckless corporate Democrats who are scared of their own shadow and a nascent progressive movement still learning how to walk. Sure, The Squad has doubled in size, but unless they’re going to start voting with Republicans, it’s still a sizeable distance away from possessing real power.
Leftists point to ballot measures like Florida’s $15 per hour minimum wage gaining over 60% of the vote in a state where Biden got clobbered in as a way forward, and this definitely is the case, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “do progressive policy and win.” Biden’s shocking under-performance in Miami Dade was a collective failure on the liberal messaging in that area, and it’s not unreasonable to think that tying Biden to socialism in a region with people who recently fled a murderous socialist regime hurt his chances. To say that progressivism failed the Democrats everywhere is to ignore the fact that the progressives lost the primary and the Democrats ran on a platform of courting disaffected Republican voters (shocking that this strategy led to Republican gains down the ballot!). The Democrats outside Miami pointing the finger at the left for their losses have very little credibility to back their assertions up, and they are just engaging in the DCCC’s mandated “blame the left when we screw up” routine every time their army of braindead lanyards blow an election. Leftists should understand that 2020 proved progressivism’s reach in America has grown significantly since 2016, but it is still limited to minority status.
Bernie Would Not Have Won
I think it’s clear that if Trump had done just a mediocre job handling COVID and passed a stimulus in the fall, he would have coasted to reelection. The Democrats faced an uphill battle, as polling misjudged Trump enthusiasm yet again. In retrospect, Joe Biden is the only person in the Democratic primary who both could have weaponized the suburbs against Trump to the degree he did and held so much of the left base that Hillary shed in 2016 while tempering Trump’s blowouts in deep-red districts.
Republican down-ballot victories buoyed by Trump enthusiasm (and the split-ticket voters courted by the Dems) prove that Sanders would have had a steep uphill battle in the areas that decided the elections. Yes, Tío Bernie surely would have performed better than Biden did amongst the diverse array of people that is the “Latino vote” in America, and he also would have flipped some populist Trump votes — but the suburbs are ground zero in the Trump era, and both the primary and general election proved that Biden checked the most boxes for the most important regions in American politics. Jackasses like this on the internet could not have been more wrong about what American voters wanted in their deviation from Trump.
The red-to-blue shift in the suburbs is not being driven by progressive inspiration, but by conservative revulsion. This is a delicate opportunity for the left, and there are two charts from this 2016 Voter Study Group report that I believe reveal the path forward for progressives.
First, progressive policies can absolutely court Republican voters better than traditional liberal policies can. To say otherwise is to misunderstand where the electorate is right now.
Second, cultural connections are incredibly important to voters, and leftists need to get a lot better at this vital part of politics. We must learn to bite our tongues when our silence serves our interests, and allow people space to enjoy their political culture even if we think it’s stupid (our memes are dumb too, just not as corny).
Besides, there are bigger fish to fry. Your average swing voter is not socially liberal and economically conservative like the (socially liberal and economically conservative) media has told us for years, it’s literally the opposite.
America is economically liberal. It just is. It’s our culture where the flashpoint exists. This is the dynamic underpinning things like Joe Biden’s loss in Florida but $15 per hour’s forceful victory, or Claire McCaskill’s loss in Missouri while the state voted to expand Medicaid. A generation of hollowing out the federal government has made more people favor more robust economic policies, and whether you call it socialism, populism, compassionate capitalism — whatever — people just want more economic intervention from the federal government.
But!
Our national myth is intertwined with capitalism, and our good guy-bad guy form of storytelling combined with the lasting victories of Joseph McCarthy have made left/liberal politics a touchy subject in this country. This is where progressivism’s cultural capital (or lack thereof) is a serious liability. Hell, people who live off their social security checks claim that socialism will ruin what makes this country great, and the inertia of the status quo combined with the fear of “socialist” change has blunted the progress of the left since at least the beginning of the Cold War. There is currently a clear ceiling of around 30% for progressive candidates in a party where progressive policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal poll above 50%. Anyone saying they are certain they have all the answers for progressivism on how to thread the needle on this catch-22 is either an oracle or a liar.
Leftists clearly have to find a balance to strike. I know that we hate compromise because it has been used by corporate Democrats as a cudgel against even trying to work towards any kind of enduring liberal progress for at least half a century, but the fact of our objective reality is that at a certain point you do have to compromise on something or else you will never amass real power.
That doesn’t mean you have to turn into a Chamber of Commerce-approved drone, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to reflect on the left’s failures this morning while also publishing a forceful thread pushing back on the tired Democratic talking point that the party is not to blame, and everything is the fault of a smaller wing of the party that hasn’t had any real power in America since the Boomers protested being fed into the imperialist wood chipper that was Vietnam.
Progressive strategy has been more effective than it has been since the 1960s to get us to this point, but it must continue to adapt in order to make gains in the power centers of this archaic system which favors the powerful. This is not to say that unabashed fealty to progressive issues is an electoral drawback, as it is clear as day that there is a ton of room to expand the progressive movement with a growing young and non-white coalition.
But in places like Miami-Dade, or certain suburban purple districts, perhaps a less fervent tone and an avoidance of uttering the words “socialism” or “progressivism” is prudent. Progressives like to say that we have Americans on our economic side due to political science studies like the one I shared above from Voter Study Group that reveal the country’s true biases, but so long as Americans continue to generally self-identify as conservative, progressives will find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place with culture and policy.
Add in the fact that we are likely to have to battle Republicans for Joe Biden’s attention and operate in a House where Dem defectors to the GOP have great power, and it seems like it will be a dark beginning to this decade for progressivism.
Progressives lost a battle this week, but the charts I shared above and all the winning progressive ballot measures (particularly in the war against the War on Drugs) demonstrate that the left is continuing to gain ground in America’s long-term ideological shift.
So how do we start to translate some of these pyrrhic victories into tangible ones?
I’ll co-sign this thread about going on the offensive and “seeding the soil” from my former editor at Paste Magazine, Shane Ryan.
The Future of U.S. Progressivism Lies in Better Branding and Federalism
As part of this strategy to seed the soil, progressives must reclaim the awesome brand of The Progressives of the early 20th century in order to push back against being labeled a Cold War slur. Teddy freakin’ Roosevelt became known as the Trust-Buster when he joined The Progressives in their initiative to become the first generation of Americans to successfully break up monopolies like Standard Oil, and this movement set the stage for the New Deal coalition to emerge a few decades later and inspire our politics to this day. Matthew Stoller may be annoying about this on Twitter but he’s right about the need for Democrats to aggressively take up the anti-monopoly banner, and the left should not leave the job solely to Elizabeth Warren to fight a winning messaging battle that can tap into people’s patriotism and also has the added benefit of potentially diluting the power of the oligarchy that progressivism aims to eliminate.
As far as policy goes, the left will need to focus on local politics even more given that’s where smaller factions can more easily command both attention and power. With the Senate inherently gerrymandered for Republicans and the Electoral College in their favor as well (so long as Texas and Florida stay red), the immediate future of our national policy seems to be legislative gridlock while the parties swap the White House and just ctrl+alt+delete each other’s executive orders. Amassing power in Congress is still an important priority, but it seems likelier that actual progressive influence over the federal government is going to be wielded at the state level, and the less the federal government does, the more room there is for the states to step in.
The lesson the left must take from 2020 is that our core message can inspire the Democratic base and mobilize new voters, but we must develop a much more delicate and nuanced strategy for the array of expected voters who disagree with us — and another one for those who only think they do. Republicans gerrymandered suburban districts believing they would be GOP strongholds, and Trumpism has provided the Democrats with an opportunity to seize these formerly red counties. Given that Robby Mook is more likely to run the 2022 DCCC campaign than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, progressives must develop their own strategy independent of the Democratic Party to try to convince these new crucial swing voters to vote blue.
Sometimes that will be leading with progressivism, sometimes it won’t be. Every district is different and all politics is local. Just talk about specific things we will do to improve people’s lives and make them simple.
$15 per hour.
$1,000 per month.
Job guarantees.
Simple and popular is good politics.
My enduring lesson from my sales career is that if you cannot quickly inform people as to how you will help them, they will tune you out. This is also what the Democrats should have learned from the thousand-plus seats they lost since Obama’s first inauguration as life has deteriorated for the American working class (you can also take this lesson from Andrew Yang’s surprising run on his very good and simple idea to give everyone $1,000 per month that inspired more grassroots energy than the majority of Democratic candidates did).
What is certain for progressives is that a militant way of thinking about this political movement and moment is sure to undercut our ultimate goals, and not only are national bad faith actors ready to pounce on us, but we have plenty of evidence demonstrating that we are targets of state-backed disinformation campaigns abroad. We have earned a rep for being rigid Puritarian hard-asses who believe the worst about our political enemies, and regardless of the merits of that charge, it is one we must be cognizant of rebutting at all times.
Trusted journalists like Matt Taiibi and Glenn Greenwald have come under fire for attacking the left, and while both have put forth flawed arguments (not to mention how rich Greenwald’s argument is coming from his perch as Tucker Carlson’s lap dog), they have a point about this destructive puritan strain within the movement that thinks in purely academic terms. This opaque and exclusionary brand of politics that is unique to the left is incredibly counter-productive, and the net result of demanding that people change their minds in an instant or they’re hopeless is a lot of people thinking you’re an asshole. At some point, we have to connect theory to the actual reality on the ground or else all we’ll ever have is theory. We’ll never get people over to our side of the argument if we don’t give them the time and space to change their minds. Leftists could benefit a great deal from some more patience and humility.
Progressives must continue to evolve our thinking about the nature of this movement, and find a balance between unapologetically fighting for our values — which inspires the base and expands the coalition into non-voters — while also courting a vitally important electorate that holds more conservative values. Our focus should particularly be on cultural conservatives who are not locks to vote Republican, given that is where one can find swing voters most receptive to our economic arguments. For example, there are worse ideas than progressives highlighting over and over and over that you can find a lot of leftist policies in Jesus’s teachings.
I didn’t say this would all be easy, or that I have all the answers, but I think these are a few guideposts that can help progressives continue to advance the ball down the field. While this week’s elections did not unfold in our favor, we should not lose sight of what is an incredible once in a half-generation success for leftist politics to even be seriously talking about obtaining power in a fundamentally conservative country.
