It appears my post on the importance of not backing down from a strong progressive program has been controversial. Good—it was meant to be. There were a lot of good arguments made in response and I want to draw on some of them as I deepen the case for a bold progressive Democratic campaign in 2020.
We live in a moment in our politics that is radically different than what many of us have experienced. So it’s no accident that it’s by and large younger people who can see what many of their elders cannot see.
Still the period in which we live is not without historical precedent. Indeed if you look back at the history of our country there have been periods like our own in-between a number of periods, like the one we boomers grew up in. For most of my life, as for most of the life of our country, one political tendency was dominant and most offices were held by one of the major parties while the other party criticized it around the edges, winning elections when economic problems temporarily undermined support of the dominant party or when wedge issues temporarily divided it. That was the case for the first 20 or so years of my life as Democrats dominated our politics and Republicans more or less worked within the parameters of the ideas held by the Democratic majority. Republicans occasionally won when the Democrats were divided (e.g. by the Vietnam War and Wallce in 1968) or when the Republicans ran a war hero who basically accepted the central ideas of Democrat although he mostly did not move them forward (Ike). Although it wasn’t obvious at the time, in 1980 the Republicans became the dominant party. Since then Democrats have rarely held the Congress and only won the presidency in 92 and 96 when Ross Perot divided Republicans. (It was not quite obvious that Republicans were the dominant party during those years because it took a little time for the Southern Democrats to become Republicans. But by 1980 they were already voting for Republicans for the presidency and inmany senate races and by 1994 the realignment was complete. And now the descendants of the Southern Democrats run the Republican Party.)
Much the same was true between 1828 and 1860 when Jacksonian Democrats became the majority party and Whigs won only when they ran war heroes or at times of economic distress.
Period of one-party dominance have generally periods of diminished political tensions. With one party dominant in the party system and the other a junior participant in the same system, ideological division is minimal and, given our two-party system, both parties tended to move toward the center. Because of regional differences, the parties even tended to blur. In the post-world war II era there were Northeastern Republican who were more liberal than many of the Southern Democrats. We boomers group in his kind of politics. So we instinctively think that general elections are about moving to the center. This understanding of our political circumstances connect up with the features of liberalism I identified in the last post to make us profoundly worried when our party move to the left. We think we need to appease the opposition to win.
But there have also been periods in which the country was deeply and closely divided. This was especially true in the post-civil war era after the end of reconstruction. This was a time of intense inter-party strife. Instead of moving toward the center the parties heightened the divisions between them because partisan divisions were so great and swing voters so few that the path to victory required them to turn out their base of support. (It was also a time, like our own, when partisan division was reinforced by regionalism.) And that was true even though the party system between 1872 to 1896 was not really divided by economic ideology but, in effect, by the continuation of the Civil War by other means with Northern Democratic immigrants in big cities allied with Southern Democrats against Republican in small cities and rural communities.
Similarly, the party strife that began in Washington’s second term and that continued until Jefferson’s victory in 1800 was also a time of incredible inter-party strife. If you think Democrats and Republicans are nasty to each other now, read Richard Buel’s book on this period and savor the savage criticisms they threw against one another then.
We are now living in a period of intense and close party division. Trump didn’t create it although he has certainly taken advantage of it and heightened it. We can trace the creation of it to the institution of primaries that empowered those on the extremes in the Republican and more recently Democratic parties; the rise of extremist right-wing talk radio which led the party to more openly embrace racism, sexism, and anti-immigration sentiment as a way of securing white working class votes; Newt Gingrich’s, and later Mitch McConnell’s, willingness to violate the norms of rhetoric and congressional practice in order to maximize their power, and most importantly the decision on the part of the corporate elite in the 1970s to help create an Republican Party that sought power on the backs of white working class cultural conservatives in order to break the post-war economic consensus and cut taxes, drastically reduce regulation, and undermine the labor movement.
The result has been an extraordinary growth in economic inequality that has recently surpassed that of the gilded age, the decimation of the industrial working class, and stagnation in wages for other working people at the same time that the price of health care, housing, and higher education has skyrocketed. Half the country is suffering from an continuing economic crisis. Even older upper middle class people have to worry about extended work hours, the threat of corporate downsizing and the cost of higher education for their kids. And many younger people, even in the professional managerial class cannot see how their lives will ever be as prosperous as their parents. Not only did these economic policies enrich the plutocrats but the economic distress and anxiety they generated made the appeal to racism and sexism and anti-immigrant sentiment even more powerful. That has enabled Trump to advance his fascist disrespect for the norms of our democracy with impunity.
Trump’s neo-fascist movement maintains a strong hold on the old middle class and many members of the white working class voters. But he’s alienated much of the upper middle class, especially women; people of color; labor unions, and about 60% of young people.
And so we now we have a country that is very closely divided. I’m not all surprised when I hear people tell me that folks in other states and parts of Pennsylvania don’t think like we do in Philadelphia. I travel this whole state frequently. I talk to people who support Trump quite often, Do you think I’m surprised by that?
But I also am not worried by it. The 2020 election is going to be close. Lots of people hate us from the corporate elite to the racist, exist middle class. But, as FDR said in 1936, we have to welcome their hatred and not be afraid to generate more of it.
Why? Because we can’t win their votes. And we don’t have to. We are a majority of the country, a small one but one nonetheless. And very few people are undecided. The undecided are largely disengaged from politics and they will ultimately split much like everyone else as they usually do.
So just like it was during the late 19th century the goal of political campaigns must be to mobilize our base of support and get them to the polls.
That’s the first reason that why we cannot adopt a moderate centrist campaign. We need to give people, especially young people who are really frustrated with their situation and poor people, white and black, who have been so screwed over in the last 30 years that they no longer think that they can get anything out of politics, a reason to come out and vote. They are angry. And we need to channel and express that anger. And at the same time, we need convince them that we are serious in wanting to lift them up. Especially after Trump, they won’t be convinced that the typical blow-dried, Senatorial-style Democrats with their common sense moderate ideas really care about them. More “extreme” policies is the Democratic equivalent of Trump’s vulgarity. It’s how Democrats can show the base that they are authentic.
While I don’t expect those same policies will help all that much with Trump’s white working class supporters—whose racism, sexism and anti-immigrants run deep and will not be overcome until we have real economic change— it might help marginally and that could make the difference in some key Senate and House races.
And as long Warren and Sanders keep putting forward economic proposals that place the tax burden on corporations and the billionaires, not professional managerial class people, there is little chance that they this important group will vote for Trump. They are disgusted by Trump’s fascist leanings. And, as we saw in the Philadelphia suburb and upper middle class parts of our city in the recent election, they are eager to come out to vote for progressive candidates. Some, who have taken far too seriously the ideas about the economy they learned in college or in the financial pages of the Journal or Times, may be nervous about the economic policies put forward by Sanders or Warren. But as they learn more about how those proposals benefit them, they will begin to overcome their fear of change. And at any rate, they will rush to vote agasint Trump no matter who the Democrat is or what she says
And that brings me to the second reason why we need Warren / Sanders to push the envelope on policy. We do need deep structural change in this country to make our economy work for everyone again. It’s immensely hard to do. It’s not just the threat of corporate power in both direct (campaign contributions) and more importantly indirect forms (the threat of a capital strike.) And it’s not just the difficulties of overcoming the structural features of our politics—the filibuster and Supreme Court—that the next Democratic president will have to challenge. It’s also the power of the ideas held by the Washington experts who always listen more carefully to the corporations than the left-wing policy analysts who challenge their ideas
But the horror of Trump, and the extreme way he has governed, gives us a major advantage in this election and the opportunity to challenge those ideas. We desperately need to see a candidate who embraces a bold program defeat Trump in order to continue the ideological shift to the left that is already well advanced. And we need that candidate to help empower a movement of people who will push the Democratic majority in Congress to follow that president’s lead.
Neither Biden nor Buttigieg nor Klobuchar and certainly not Bloomberg can be that president. We can talk more about whether Sanders or Warren is the one to lead us—I’m not sure and I’ve contributed to both. But it has to be one of them.