The attacks from moderate Democrats and the progressive counterattacks traveled from the postelection call to social media to the news, and into the commentary of pundits, academics, and consultants. The truth is, there are orthodox ideas and policy positions among both moderates and progressives.
Instead of acknowledging their differences, moderate Democrats paint progressives as inflexible and divisive and present themselves as flexible and unifying—when both moderates and progressives can be inflexible and flexible, divisive and unifying. And both can misinform. Read: Hillary Clinton says she was right all along. Neither moderate nor progressive candidates generally ran on socialism or defunding the police. Republican candidates, though, commonly ran attack ads declaring that all Democrats from Biden to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were far-left socialists seeking to defund the police.
But instead of uniting with progressives to attack Republican misinformation after the election, some moderate Democrats attacked progressives, thereby spreading Republican misinformation. And I, as a Democrat, am just as frustrated. If the main line of Republican misinformation right now is voter fraud, then the main line of Democratic misinformation is that progressive policies are unpopular.
Progressive policies succeeded in swing states and red states during this election cycle. Voters in Arizona , South Dakota , and Montana legalized recreational marijuana. Arizona raised taxes on the rich to fund public schools. Colorado voters instituted 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave. Progressive policies, with the exception of defunding the police, are fairly popular. According to a Fox News exit poll , 70 percent of voters favored changing the health-care system to allow Americans to buy into a government-run plan.
In another poll , by Climate Nexus, 59 percent of respondents supported the Green New Deal, while only 25 percent opposed it. Two out of three respondents in yet a nother recent poll supported some form of widespread student-loan forgiveness, including 58 percent of Republicans.
When Herndon pointed out to Lamb that polls show progressive policies to be rather popular, Lamb did not correct himself. But candidates in swing districts supporting progressive policies did win. Among the 93 co-sponsors of the Green New Deal in the House, only one lost reelection. Four co-sponsors who represent swing districts ranging from very slightly Democrat to moderately Republican won reelection. Derek Thompson: Why big-city dominance is a problem for Democrats.
Moderate Democratic House candidates in swing districts who did not support progressive policies also won elections. None of these moderate Democrats expressed support for defunding the police, and the majority came out against doing so. Perhaps Democrats should be asking why some moderates won and others lost when they all weathered a similar avalanche of Republican misinformation.
No Democrat faced more Republican misinformation than Biden. This is where Sleepy Joe is being dragged by the socialists. I am the complete opposite, more money for Law Enforcement! Biden came out against defunding the police in June. But the truth hardly mattered. No one knows for sure what effect Republican misinformation really had at this point, but neither Republican misinformation nor progressive policies were universally fatal for Democrats. If it continues, though, Democratic misinformation will be fatal for Democrats.
Senate in Georgia. Freeing American politics of misinformation would help free American politics of Trumpism. Americans must insist that elected officials—no matter how conservative, moderate, or progressive they may be—speak from the evidence even when it is against their political interests.
It celebrates the openness and interdependence embodied in both globalization and multiculturalism. While this cultural left has sprung into vogue, the economic left has also been reenergized. It has finally recovered from a long abeyance, a wilderness period brought on by the decay of organized labor and the libertarian turn of the post—Cold War years.
While the cultural left champions a coalition of the ascendant, the economic left imagines a coalition of the despondent. It seeks to roll back the dominance of finance, to bust monopolies, to curb the predations of the market. It wants to ply back the white working-class voters—clustered in the upper Midwest—whom Greenberg deemed persuadable. Neither strain of activism has much disagreement with the broad goals of the other. On paper, they can peaceably coexist within the same platform.
But political parties can have only one main theory of the electorate at any given time—and the prevailing theory tends to prioritize one ideology.
The tensions between the cultural left and the economic left were evident in the last Democratic primary, and they have persisted. In a November talk after the election, Bernie Sanders railed against identity politics with an abandon that would have been foolish on the campaign trail. In a way, this squabbling is a prelude to the next presidential primary, a contest that will be packed with candidates, each attempting to show him- or herself as the truest champion of minorities or women or the working and middle classes.
Seeking victory, candidates will accuse their competitors of not authentically believing in the cause they themselves elevate most highly. The semiotics of Cory Booker are highly intentional. He is the embodiment of the Obama coalition—his moderate economic views comfort professionals while his pursuit of racial justice pleases the cultural left. Just before making my way to Booker, I had met with Bernie Sanders. Interviewing Sanders requires some fortification—and my exchange ended when he peremptorily dismissed me from his office for asking a question about his political relationship with Elizabeth Warren.
Sanders had expected Warren to endorse him in the primary, and her failure to do so sent him into a funk. But Booker waved this argument away. Booker said that he has no interest in high-minded discussions about the future of the party and pointed to the map on the wall. The term itself bothered him, he said: Too many people were throwing it around without bothering to define what they meant by it.
Identity politics might make for a fair description of the environment on some college campuses. This critique of the party, which lands on Bill Clinton and the tough-on-crime era over which he presided, is harsh and fair. This belated recognition makes the present moment fraught. As Booker pressed his case, it was not hard to imagine the campaign he might run.
Racial and criminal-justice issues would provide him a platform, and his point of differentiation would be his willingness to trumpet it to the whitest audiences—the starkest evidence of the authenticity he claims. Before there was a resistance to Trump, Warren had prefigured its combative style. In moments designed to spread virally across Facebook, she would ask sharp, angry questions of bankers and regulators.
The book before that: A Fighting Chance. I first spoke with Warren just after she lucked into another such viral moment. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted. She stepped with the bounce of a lottery winner. A few weeks earlier, she had found herself reamed by anti-Trump forces for voting in committee to confirm Ben Carson to the Cabinet, a vote that was unexpectedly condemned as a concession to tyranny.
McConnell had restored her bona fides. Some fear that white voters who are predisposed to racial resentments hear the word as code for a desire to transfer wealth from whites to blacks. Rather, Warren is most focused on the concept of fairness. A course she taught early in her career as a law professor, on contracts, got her thinking about the subject.
What drives her to rage is when bankers conspire with government regulators to subvert markets and rig the game. Trump managed to exploit populist anger in part because he could go places ideologically that no Democrat would ever travel. As a matter of politics and policy, Democrats will never be the party of economic nationalism. Its voters are, on balance, more globalist than the Republican base. They tend to live in places that have prospered from trade and technology. They typically support immigration.
But Warren has begun to outline the possibilities of a new center-left populism—one that gets beyond wealth redistribution alone. It justifies itself in the language of individualism—rights, liberty, freedom—not communal obligation.
Furman revolted against the behavior of business leaders who came to call at the White House. With their privileged access, they groveled for favors that would further their dominance. They wanted everything planned. Everyone can plainly see the lack of competition in many sectors—the way that there are five big banks, four big airlines, one dominant social-media company, one maker of EpiPens. CVS and Walgreens, for instance, have a strikingly similar set of major shareholders.
The same is true for Apple and Microsoft. Furman argues that such business concentration is a leading cause of inequality and wage stagnation. Warren has come to believe in this same idea. Last June in Washington, she gave an important speech, naming a long new list of enemies—oligopolistic companies like Comcast and Google and Walmart, which she blamed for sapping the life from the American economy.
Warren has not committed to running for president, either publicly or, according to close associates of hers, privately. But if she does run, she will likely seek to channel working-class anger toward behemoth firms, their executives, and the government officials who coddle them. The approach exudes a Trumplike hostility to Washington elites, but not necessarily to government. Criminal-justice reform is an effort to secure liberty and equality from an abusive apparatus of the state.
A turn toward populism will never be enough to win back a state like West Virginia, which is now deep-red. And there are legitimate questions about whether a strident former Harvard professor, no matter her Oklahoma roots, can effectively purvey that message to a sufficiently broad audience. Empathy with economic disappointment, and even anger over the status quo, might reduce the sense that Democrats are perpetrators of the status quo.
A populist critique of Trump would point to his fraudulence as an enemy of the system, a fraudulence that perfectly illustrates everything wrong with plutocracy. This March, I met him in his ornate lair just off the floor of the Senate. When I entered his office, Schumer was compressed into the corner of an antique sofa, his tie loosened and his feet resting on a coffee table. The populists have never considered Schumer one of their own.
But as he riffed about the trajectory of the party, he mouthed their talking points. He has included Warren and Sanders on his Senate leadership team, and traveled with Sanders to rally support for Obamacare in Macomb County. Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read.
Clinton had developed what was in many ways a populist agenda, but she apparently could never get past her own self-consciousness about Wall Street speeches and fund-raising in the Hamptons to make these issues her own. The party has been crushed—not just in the recent presidential election, but in countless down-ballot elections—by its failure to develop a message that can resonate with people beyond the core members of the Obama coalition, and by its unwillingness to blare its hostility to crony capitalism.
The makings of a Democratic majority are real. Demographic advantages will continue to accrue to the left. The party needs only to add to its coalition on the margins and in the right patches on the map. Doing that does not require the abandonment of any moral principles; persuasion is a different category of political activity from pandering.
On page 60 in this issue, Peter Beinart describes how Democrats might alter their language and policies regarding immigration to broaden appeal without sacrificing their principles. Victories in the culture wars of the past decade seemed to come so easily to liberals that they created a measure of complacency, as if those wars had been won with little cost.
Trumpism has exploited racism, and fury at economic grievances, successfully welding both forces together. But while he rescued the banks and let financial executives off the hook for their role in the crash, wages for millions of Americans stagnated or declined.
America is now a society in which one in every 11 black adult is either in prison, or on parole or probation — racial injustices that Black Lives Matter has urgently underlined. The Democratic establishment has proved itself politically bankrupt and unable to meet these challenges. The party lost against Trump in , and has at best scraped a stillborn administration this time around. We will all pick up the tab for this failure. The world cannot afford another four years of inaction.
That does not mean there is no hope. The so-called Squad of progressive Congressional Democrats — whose most famous member is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — has doubled in number, including the election of former nurse Cori Bush in Missouri and the first queer black Congressman, Mondaire Jones, in New York. The old Democratic establishment has failed to inflict the final reckoning on Trumpism that is deserved.
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