The progressive dream is dead
11/08/2024 21:55
Democrats' liberal wing has wrecked the party, and the nation suffers for it.
Bernie Sanders didn’t run for president in 2024. But he was a specter haunting the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris and probably contributed to her drubbing by Donald Trump.
Democrats are in shock and disarray as they try to figure out how their candidate lost to a convicted felon with a long history of demeaning women, minorities, Muslims, and other important voting blocs. It shouldn’t be that surprising. For the last decade, Democrats have been trying to span a chunk of the electorate that ranges from the super liberal to center-right. The rubber band isn’t that flexible.
Democrats who court America’s most liberal voters — typically dubbed "progressives" — alienate the moderates and mild conservatives they need to win national elections. There’s no single explanation for Harris’s loss, which came after President Joe Biden displayed his infirmity to a primetime TV audience in the June debate and withdrew, forcing Harris to run a truncated campaign. But Harris’s baggage as a Bernie Sanders acolyte touting monstrous amounts of government overreach surely helped turn off centrist voters she desperately needed and failed to capture.
Harris’s 2019 presidential campaign was a huge factor in her 2024 sequel. In 2019, she backed trendy progressive ideas, including the Green New Deal (GND) and Medicare for All (MFA). The GND was a sweeping effort to remake the energy and transportation industries to address global warming, enact social justice, provide universal healthcare, and subsidize millions of jobs. MFA was a government health plan that would cover everybody and eliminate employer-sponsored plans many people were happy with. Both were laughably impractical because they would cost umpteen trillion dollars and massively disrupt major chunks of the economy.
Backers of both plans characterized them as vision statements rather than serious legislative efforts. Fine. But the vision was dreadful. It was a utopian fantasy in which the government steps in to correct wealth and income inequality while solving global warming and the healthcare affordability problem along the way. Valid causes. Terrible approach. Americans vastly distrust government and think the only thing worse than a capitalist oligarchy is more federal bureaucrats fanning out to solve problems.
Those progressive ideas caught on because Sanders tapped a nerve. His 2016 presidential bid was surprisingly successful. Sanders, who identifies as a socialist but ran as a Democrat, seemed like a fringe candidate when he launched his 2016 campaign, but he drew large crowds, received millions in small donations, and won 40% of the delegates in the Democratic primaries. Hillary Clinton won the nomination, but Sanders revealed that there’s a solid group of voters open to massive wealth redistribution and an even beefier government hand in the economy.
Other Democrats became copycats in the 2020 presidential campaign. Harris was one of at least eight candidates who backed major elements of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. Harris dropped out before any voting, but Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who backed both of those progressive plans, won 30% of the Democratic delegates combined. Biden, who supported more modest reforms, won the Democratic nomination and then the White House.
When Harris replaced Biden as the 2024 nominee, she broadly indicated that she no longer supported the progressive policies she championed just five years earlier, including the ban on oil fracking that was a centerpiece of the GND. But she never explained why she flip-flopped. The reason was obvious: She couldn’t get elected in the 2024 general election if she ran as the Bernie Sanders progressive she was in 2019, so she had to adopt new policies more tolerable to moderates and Independents.
It didn’t work. “Democrats have a big problem, which is that they are culturally out of step with the majority of Americans,” Sarah Longwell, political strategist and publisher of the Bulwark news site, said during a Nov. 6 podcast. Harris’s loss “has more to do with Democrats and their brand and people rejecting their ideas on the economy.”
Bernie Sanders actually seems to think the Democratic Party needs to cater more to progressives, not less. He issued a post-election statement blasting “a Democratic party which has abandoned working class people” and ranting about “big money interests and well-paid consultants.” As always with Sanders, the end goals — better wealth equality and higher living standards for working people — are legit, while the means of getting there are not.
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If Sanders did some simple math, he’d realize that at the progressive high-water mark, in 2016, he won 40% of the vote within a party that represents 33% of the electorate. That’s only 13% of the total vote. Sure, there might have been some Independents who couldn’t vote in the Democratic primaries who favored Sanders’s progressivism, but that would only bump him up by a point or two. Clinton and Biden, both more moderate than Sanders, won the presidential nominations in 2016 and 2020, and Biden beat Trump in 2020 by running as a centrist.
Biden moved left as president. One of his first moves was to cancel the permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a largely symbolic sop to the same progressives who wanted to ban fracking. Then gasoline prices hit $5 per gallon and voters associated Biden’s hostility toward fossil fuels with soaring prices taking more money out of their pockets. Then Harris became the party’s presidential candidate, reminding voters all over again that she wanted to ban fracking just five years prior. It wasn’t much of a stretch for voters in 2024 to infer that progressive policies mean higher prices and other hits to their living standards.
Democrats don't need to abandon their progressive constituents, but they would do themselves a favor if they stopped pretending that massive federal programs are magic-bullet solutions, if only everybody else would see the light. The reality they remain willfully blind to is that America is a center-right country that sees a massive federal bureaucracy that can't even keep gas prices in check. Why entrust anything else to them?
There’s a gigantic hole in the US two-party system, and it’s right in the middle. Trump wants to return to protectionist policies of the 1890s and dump more oil into a burning world. Democrats try to be a little bit of everything to everybody and end up pleasing nobody. Neither party stands for sensible action prioritized by the urgency of the problem and the guts to say no to fools. The nation suffers for it.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman.
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