Are progressives responsible for the Democrats’ political troubles?
Predicting the future is hard, but right now things look bad for President Biden and congressional Democrats. Their agenda is stalled in Congress, the pandemic continues to kill people and disrupt normal life, prices are rising, and perceptions of the economy are bad. No one is surprised that the President’s approval rating keeps hitting new lows.
Naturally, the search for responsible parties is proceeding apace.
One common view is that progressives are to blame for the current problems. Kevin Drum makes the case:
Every other headline these days is about Joe Biden’s disastrous approval rating and the chaotic shape of the Democratic Party. How could Democrats have done this? What’s wrong with them?
Let’s cut the crap and acknowledge the obvious answer. First off, the progressive wing of the party insisted on pushing voting rights laws that had zero chance of passing. Biden knew this from the start and said so. Then Bernie Sanders insisted on an insane BBB bill that would have been unprecedented in the history of the country—and doubly unprecedented with a 50-50 Senate. But he insisted, and every time it got cut back it gave progressives another chance to moan about how they were being betrayed. Eventually it died.
For some reason, after an election that was razor close, progressives managed to delude themselves into thinking we were on the cusp of a revolution. How they did this is as big a mystery as how millions of people deluded themselves into thinking that Donald Trump really won the election. It’s inexplicable.
But that’s what happened.
There is something to this view. Progressive voters and activists often have unrealistic expectations, and progressive politicians sometimes either genuinely share these expectations or at least encourage them for political advantage. I think this is a real problem.
But not all the blame for the party’s current troubles lies with progressives.
To a considerable extent the challenges the party faces are due to the ongoing pandemic, and to the well-known difficulties of governing a polarized country. And even if we focus on the choices of Democratic actors, it is not clear that progressives deserve an outsized share of blame:
- Biden could have done a better job managing the pandemic, calming fears and setting reasonable expectations, and holding Republicans responsible for encouraging vaccine resistance.
- There may have been a bipartisan path open on voting rights, but Biden and more mainstream congressional Democrats seem to bear at least some responsibility for rejecting it.
- The case for blaming progressives is strongest on the Build Back Better legislation, but even here mainstream Senators share responsibility.
It’s worth going through these cases separately to see what we can learn from the past and to identify paths forward.
Pandemic mismanagement is largely on Biden
Let’s start with the pandemic, which is arguably the single biggest cause of public dissatisfaction.
Biden did a good job on the vaccine rollout. He set clear, achievable goals and met them. Unfortunately, he declared victory over the virus too quickly, and much too unequivocally, and then failed to do even the most elementary contingency planning for new variants or waning immunity. He failed to fix the communication problems that have plagued his leading science advisors. (I’m not sure better communication would have done much good, but he should have tried.) He was shockingly optimistic about omicron, to the point of being dismissive, and he failed to put the omicron wave in perspective for Americans battered by two years of pandemic life.
Finally, Biden failed to set reasonable expectations for what the President could accomplish, and what individuals and state governments needed to take responsibility for. And he failed to hold Republicans accountable for encouraging vaccine hesitancy and prolonging the epidemic.
Biden has repeatedly missed opportunities to reframe the narrative on covid. He has correctly emphasized that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. But he needs to go further and shift responsibility for the lack of vaccinations to Republican elites. At his recent press conference on the pandemic he could have thanked Trump for endorsing the vaccine. He could have recognized that many Republican officials have been responsible and encouraged vaccination. At the same time, he could have noted that some Republicans have played politics with vaccination, and he could have asked every Republican in Congress to do the right thing and record a public service message encouraging their constituents to get vaccinated. He should also ask Republicans to join with Democrats to prepare for new variants: to provide funds for research on vaccines, to expand vaccine production capacity, to stockpile masks and tests, etc. If the Republicans refuse, at least Biden would be able to deflect responsibility if there is another damaging variant.
Are progressives responsible?
The pandemic is the biggest source of disapproval for Biden and the Democrats. To some extent this was unavoidable. On the other hand, serious mistakes were made, and in this case it’s not clear that progressives bear much responsibility.
The voting rights mess
The decision by President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Schumer to force a losing vote on the filibuster and ambitious voting rights legislation was certainly unusual, and it may have been a mistake, but it was not inexplicable. Some Democrats believed that a high-profile push on voting rights was needed to keep voters and activists from becoming demoralized. Consistent with this view, Biden’s speech on voting rights was partisan in tone and appeared primarily directed at motivating Democratic voters. (In his speech Biden emphasized voting rights and invoked the history of Jim Crow, an approach that seems designed to appeal to Democrats. Alternatively, he may have been laying the groundwork for a push to restore the Voting Rights Act, which many Republican senators have previously supported. I find it unlikely that Republicans will agree to give up on voter suppression.)
Whether this strategy is justified is unclear. For one thing, it is far from clear that having a handful of Democrats block reform will help to clarify the differences between the parties and motivate the Democratic base. It may just create a perception that Democrats are inept, or that they have betrayed ordinary Americans and are fundamentally no different from Republicans. (This kind of thinking is not uncommon on the left, you can find it among Naderites and at Jacobin, and it’s a huge problem.) In addition, the cost of pursuing a losing messaging strategy depends on what a more bipartisan approach could accomplish, both in terms of policy and messaging.
The most obvious alternative would have been for Biden to endorse a bipartisan effort to fix the Electoral Count Act. There is some bipartisan agreement that the ECA is dangerously broken. However, some Democratic commentators argue that a successful bipartisan effort to fix the ECA would not have done much to prevent election subversion at the state level, and it would have lulled people into thinking that the crisis of democracy is less severe than it really is.
This may or may not be a convincing argument, but it artificially limits the range of alternatives available to Democrats. In his recent voting rights speech, Biden could have tried to take a more bipartisan approach. He could have emphasized that it is important for all Americans – Republicans as well as Democrats – to have confidence in elections. To promote confidence, Biden could have proposed strengthening election processes, including security and audit procedures, as well as fixing the ECA. Such a nuts-and-bolts approach – for example, requiring paper ballots and paper voter rolls, protecting poll workers, codifying audit procedures – would leave much electoral reform undone, but it would reduce the risk of election sabotage at both the federal and state levels.
It seems to me that a bipartisan bill focused on the nuts and bolts of election security is very much worth pursuing. Given the stakes, the limits on Congress’s ability to get things done, and the risk that a few deaths or party defections or even a shift in the political situation could end all hope for reform, it is not clear that it made sense to waste valuable time on messaging.
Are progressives responsible?
To the extent that Democrats did waste time on messaging bills rather than achievable reforms, it is not clear how much responsibility lies with progressives in Congress, rather than with the Democratic caucus as a whole, or more narrowly with Majority Leader Schumer, or with President Biden.
In the aftermath of January 6, Democrats stuck with voting legislation they had drafted when they were in the minority, legislation that did not respond to the events of January 6. This failure to recognize new threats and adjust priorities – if that is what happened – is far from a uniquely progressive failing. However, it is possible that Biden and Democratic moderates in Congress were simply unwilling to fight with progressives over a bill that – rightly or wrongly – was not at the top of their agenda.
Senate Majority Leader Schumer is up for re-election and may have pursued a messaging strategy to ward off potential challenges from the left. I mentioned this previously and Matthew Yglesias makes this case in detail on his substack.
In the case of voting rights, progressives may bear some responsibility for the Democrats’ strategy, but even if we assume that a narrow, bipartisan approach would have been better it seems that moderates and Biden are responsible for either accommodating their progressive colleagues or for pandering to progressive voters on their own account.
The Build Back Better fiasco
The case that progressive overreach has harmed Democrats politically is strongest in the case of the Build Back Better legislation, the Democrats’ large climate and social policy bill.
Given the 50/50 party split in the Senate, it was clear that party-line legislation would be shaped by the most conservative Democratic senators, Manchin and Sinema, and that progressives had essentially no bargaining power. Months spent fighting with Manchin and Sinema was self-defeating. It did nothing to highlight Republican obstructionism. Instead, the interminable infighting simply reminded people how much they hate politics and Congress, and the blame naturally fell on Democrats and Biden since they had control of the government and they were doing the fighting.
It seems clear to me that the Democrats would have been well-advised to take a scaled back bill last fall that met Manchin’s demands. Of course, it’s not entirely clear that was really an available option, but I suspect it was, and the cost of delay has been large.
Where does this leave us?
Mid-term losses for the President’s party are the rule, not the exception, and approval of the President depends on factors largely outside of his control. But even if we focus on policy and messaging choices within the control of Democratic actors, it is far clear that progressive members of Congress bear most of the responsibility for the Democrat’s current predicament. President Biden has failed to challenge Republicans to work with Democrats on the pandemic and voting rights. Senator Schumer may have led Democrats over a cliff on voting rights and BBB for his own electoral advantage. You can say that Biden and Schumer felt pressure to appeal to progressive voters and activists, despite whatever doubts they may have felt about doing so, but they had choices. So did Senators in the mainstream of the party.
Progressive voters and activists are sometimes unrealistic about the appeal of progressive values and policies and about how politics works. This is a serious problem, but not every set back for Democrats is due to progressive naivete or overreach.
I would like to disagree with Eric Kramer on this but the only basis that I can find is that Eric apparently forgot where he was coming “from” when he wrote “it is far (sic) clear that progressive members of Congress bear most of the responsibility for the Democrat’s current predicament.”
Eric
This is a good summation of the issues we have on our side of the political spectrum. Repeatedly, we can not seem to get it to happen on important segments of our bills. It is disappointing when we look at how effective the Repubs are at blocking Dem strategy. There is no breaking (mostly, although in the beginning some did [if I recall accurately] from the party line for Repubs.
Come next year if Dems lose in November in the House and the Senate, McConnell in his Americans and other American’s commentary announced Dems will be beaten as is typical by Repubs and as led by McConnell. We will have fallen short of our goals. Lets at least redeem ourselves by replacing Beyer on SCOTUS with a sound Justice trending our way. This should not include Garland.
It is disappointing we can not get it right. Manchin is who he is. Sinema just obstructs and has no reasoning for it I can acknowledge othr than a claim to be an independent maverick thinker politician.
Yeah, let’s start negotiations at the absolute minimum we will take. What could go wrong?
EMike,
Who do you think was saying “let’s start negotiations at the absolute minimum we will take?” I did not get that even Kevin Drum was saying exactly that despite that he was blaming progressives for our failure. More importantly though for this thread, Eric Kramer was not saying anything like that at all. Running short on time right now, then I will boil it down to just two words – process and realism. If we want to succeed then we must nail both of those down tight.
Drum stated the progressives made demands they knew were not going to get passed. Clearly stating they over reached.
Yep – and Eric disagreed that was at fault while even Kevin did not say Democrats should not aim high and then bargain down to gain passage, but rather Democrats should not ante up with bills that had zero chance of passing. I get this means don’t reach too far out to even survive a bargaining process. IOW, bargaining down is fine but failing to pass anything in the intended direction – not so much. I would have preferred single payer over the ACA, but the ACA was realistic and passed the process. No single payer that would have satisfied the conventional definition of single payer would have survived passage, but I would have preferred a better hybrid along the lines of the Bismarck Plan. However, other single payer advocates would not settle for that and so we got the ACA instead.
Vaguely related.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is among the leading candidates to succeed Justice Breyer
NY Times – Jan 26
(SC Justice Stephen Breyer announces his retirement.)
Senate Democrats Plan to Move Quickly on Successor to Justice Breyer
NY Times – Jan 26
Always the progressive fault. Same old arguments.
“President Biden has failed to challenge Republicans to work with Democrats on the pandemic and voting rights.” Right, and the Republicans have been willing to work with Democrats since…?
The 2 DINO’s have been against all but the infrastructure bill. Manchin has “flip flopped” at every turn of supposedly having said what he would agree too. There is no BBB version that Manchin wanted. And for me, the only issue with the BBB is that it has this stupid BBB name and that is not the progressives problem.
Did you hear Sinema talk about the filibuster? Sure, she was going to agree to something…NOT!
Lastly, the media. Digby’s blog has had some great posts on this subject.
I will say, after Trump showing just how powerful the “bully pulpit” can be that Obama et al kept insisting had no power at all, I can’t believe the Biden white house has not harnessed the power of twitter to control the news cycle and messaging.
I’m sorry, but what I read above from Eric is just too cliche. The argument is always the Progressive ruining it for everyone. What’s that saying: Those dirty Hippies. If it were only that simple. (Shush, don’t mention the money backing the status quo.)
The bully pulpit exists if you have your own cable network backing you up.
Alway’s someone else’s fault. That’s what America is best at, the failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions and the consequences thereof.
Indeed age-old …
TB,
It is essentially the definition of politics to take credit wherever possible and always shift the blame.
Here is one article: https://digbysblog.net/2022/01/23/the-forgotten-first-year/
But this one is even better: https://digbysblog.net/2022/01/21/thats-some-liberal-bias-ya-got-there/
This gets to it also: https://digbysblog.net/2022/01/19/the-invisible-majority/
To summarize. https://digbysblog.net/2022/01/19/stunning-stat/
There are always two possible outcomes for any team in competition – winning and losing. It is almost impossible to win consistently because the more one team wins then the more overconfident they become and the more likely they are to make themselves an easy target for the competition. All a team must do to lose consistently is never learn from their losses.
Change is hard, especially about the future. Of course changing the past is impossible despite the best of revisionist attempts. Not as any estimation of reality, but purely as a demonstration of the mathematics of political inertia, then consider an electoral body composed equally of three partisan preferences, reactionary, moderate, and socialist. Whatever one political partisan group might want to do then two thirds of the whole would oppose them, but whatever action that one political partisan group might want to prevent, then they would find themselves in the majority.
There is nothing new about that idea as I have read it written in different ways countless times over the last half century, but herein more starkly expressed than usual in keeping with the times.
Harold:
I had to approve your initial comment.
Harold,
Here’s to you and welcome aboard. I most certainly hope that you are correct. I will taking winning over looking for excuses for losing any day.