WHAT DEMS NEED TO WIN IN 2020: A BIG TENT AND A SHIFT TO THE LEFT

Pay no attention to the tortured handwringing over the alleged foibles de jour of the Democratic Party. Yes, it’s lurching to the left. And yes, its internecine squabbles can be a tad unseemly.  The fact of the matter is that you can’t have growth without growing pains.  And without growth and change, we are left with the party of 2016.  In case you forgot, it didn’t end well.

I understand the anxiety. If Democrats blow it in 2020, we’re stuck with the worst Groundhog Day of our lives: four more years of Trumpian nuclear winter.  So our blood pressure soars when we see a headline like the one in the Washington Post the other day:  “Pelosi struggles to unify Democrats after painful fight over anti-Semitism”.  Ditto for the almost daily prognostications that “socialist” concepts will assure defeat on election day (here, here and here). 

Best to take a collective deep breath and recognize three basic truths:  The election is more than 18 months away; the depth and breadth of our current problems transcend the reach of centrist ideology and Clintonian triangulation; and, the occasional chaos in the House Democratic Caucus is the very positive result of expanding the party tent to include more than white men. 

For sure, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have preferred to have spent the past week doing something other than mediating an internal party battle between the comparative evils of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.  It’s safe to say that no other House speaker has faced that challenge.  That’s because the new Democratic House majority looks substantially different than its predecessors of either party.  There are record numbers of women, people of color and millennials. Of the 43 non-white women elected for the first time, 22 are African American, six are Asian Pacific Islanders, 12 are Latina, two are Native American and one is Middle Eastern/North African. 

In the good old boys’ club days of Congress, freshmen were to be seen but not heard.  With this new big tent group, however, social media savvy has chipped away at the seniority system for determining prominence in Washington.  At 29, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York became a super star months before her election to Congress, a fete fueled largely by her Twitter following. Falling closely behind her is Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American from Minnesota, who was at the center of last week’s flap.  Omar has frequently criticized Israel with language that borrows heavily on anti-Semitic tropes, setting off a furor that remained at the top of the news feed for the past week. 

As an old white guy, judging linguistic nuances of Jewish and Muslim criticism is beyond my pay grade and life experience. It strikes me, however, that the conflict hardly diminishes Democrats. Instead, it is a byproduct of their vision of diversity and inclusiveness.  If you want a big-tent party, expect and accept some rambunctiousness. If you are more comfortable with politicians who look, act and think alike, vote Republican. 

The other inane anxiety attack that some Democrats are having ( to name a few: Ed Rendell, Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown) is that the party is swinging too far to the left. They are quaking in their centrist boots over selective red-baiting by a president who owes his election to Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin troll farm.  It is beyond absurd to label proposals for single payer health insurance, free college tuition, meaningful climate change precautions and higher taxes on the mega rich as the destruction of capitalism.  Although it is highly unlikely that any of those goals will be fully adopted anytime soon, the Democratic Party would be indulging in malpractice if it failed to push strongly in a leftward direction right now. 

Our government has spent the past several decades helping the rich at the expense of everyone else, resulting in a level of economic inequality not seen since the late 19th century.  That is the observation of the New York Times’ David Leonhardt who went on to note that the really radical approach would be to do nothing, or to make inequality worse, as Trump’s policies have.

Peter Beinart, a political science professor at the City University of New York, writing for The Atlantic, observed that the left has not traditionally had much influence on the Democrats. Yet, he said, there were two critical times when it was able to push its programs onto the table: the mid-1930s and the mid-1960s.  Both occasions involved circumstances very similar to what we are now facing. 

Franklin Roosevelt’s progressive New Deal legislation was the result of intense agitation on the left from forces like Huey Long and Francis Townsend. Their populist movement, according to Beinart, drew support from millions of people who demanded labor rights, easy credit and nationalization of banks and industries. As those very non-centrist aspirations won mass appeal, Roosevelt and many Congressional Democrats moved leftward, producing one of the most liberal legislative programs in history:  a pro-labor law, higher taxes on the rich, Social Security, unemployment insurance and aid for low income families.  Most historians have observed that those sweeping changes would not have happened without a mobilized left wing.

A similar dynamic played out in the 1960s.  Julian E. Zelizer, in his book The Fierce Urgency of Now, writes that John Kennedy had no intention of taking up the cause of racial inequality and the plight of the poor.  He was focused on tax cuts and, according to Zelizer, did not want to waste political capital on social justice issues that he thought had no traction in Congress.  His thinking changed dramatically, however, after two years of intense civil rights struggles and sustained pressure from the left.  After his death, Lyndon Johnson picked up Kennedy’s progressive agenda, resulting in the eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act, federal aid for education, food stamps, job training, Head Start, Medicare and Medicaid. 

There has not been anything even remotely close to that kind of progressive legislative reach since. Clearly, now is the time for a third wave of bold, sweeping changes to address profound social problems.  But that will not come from a Democratic Party beholden to Wall Street and the status quo. Polling shows significant public support for so-called socialist concepts like single payer health insurance, free college tuition, tax increases for the rich and sweeping steps to combat climate change.  

Just as in the ‘30s and ‘60s, the left is unlikely to capture the entirety of its agenda.  But without forcefully pushing it and agitating for it, none of it will see the light of day.  In this moment, the center of the road is an unproductive and lonely place to be.