"Democrats have moved leftwards... a lot"
May. 11th, 2022 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eyelessgameI saw a factually correct column this morning on the degree to which Democrats have moved left in the last decade. (It was underappreciated in comments that it was a companion piece to another column from last week on how far Republicans have moved right from the already-far-right insurgent outlier they were a decade ago.)
I can't disagree with it on the facts at all, and I found myself interested on the reasons why this has happened. Most of the 2012 Democratic Party platform was talking about economic policy, for example; the 2020 platform was twice as long, had significantly more leftward economic policy, and a large amount of new social policy and positions that were definitely not mainstream Democratic Party positions in 2012.
I had several reactions - the preface to which is the Spider Robinson quote that competes for what goes on my tombstone: "the world turns upside down in ten years, but we turn upside down with it, so we don't notice". It's useful now and then to take stock of what we were saying ten years ago, because it is indeed very different than what we say and believe today.
But I have at least five takes on why it happened.
First of all: there is an upended incentive for whom to court with the platform. The post-WWII consensus was that the center-left and center-right were where most people were, where most politicians were, and the way to craft sustainable policy was for each side to write policies that the other side would engage with, negotiate over, and then grudgingly accept, at least until they regained the majority and could tweak things back more to their liking.
As such, Democrats would write a moderate platform - sometimes even to the right of their own positions - because they had the sense that there were more reachable voters and politicians to their right than to their left, and it was best to call out to them and expect to negotiate with them, that this would be effective, while more extreme positions would lose more than gain, and half a loaf was better than none.
That, it is fair to say, has stopped being the case. The center-left that still runs the Democratic Party is painfully and gradually (but generally successfully) recognizing that there are more reachable voters and politicians to their left (the firm/strident/far left) than there are to their right (the center right) - because there are zero reachable center-right people now. Any conservative who might wish to compromise cannot even conceivably do so, because their own voters would instantly and permanently abandon them.
As such, there is no real hope for the foreseeable future of government through consensus. A platform that championed positions that both Democrats and Republicans could support at the same time would be a blank sheet of paper. The consensus is gone, and the sole hope for progress or enactment of anything is through partisan supermajorities, not negotiation. Half a chance at a loaf is better than futile attempts to reach the unreachable.
----
Second. The reality of economic populism (that insufficiently regulated capitalism - or sectors of wholly unregulated capitalism - shovels wealth to the wealthy and reduces everyone else to paupers) has over the past forty years resulted in what it always results in. (Liberalism exists not because Marx was wrong but because he was right - liberalism is the only thing that can protect market societies from Marxist revolution, and conservatives and libertarians have to re-learn this, it appears, every generation or two, to the great and possibly fatal cost of all society.) Even Republicans are being populist - destructively, because conservative populism is fascism - because they have to be, because every ordinary voter now realizes that none of the wealth being generated is showing up in their wallets.
So there's simply no room left to call for liberal-consensus solutions that would preserve capitalism as it is. The baton passes leftward because we can no longer hold it. The economic order has failed, because as productivity continues to increase and the economy continues to grow all of the gains continue to go only to the top.
Just as liberals warned, when Reagan was elected, would happen in the ensuing decades. We've watched it happen as Reagan's seductive bullshit spent the last forty years upending the liberal consensus that had allowed capitalism to operate successfully.
----
Third is simple: Bernie Sanders. His positions are not actually to the left of what Democrats believe, but his rhetoric has been powerful and strident. He yanked the party in what I believe was a necessary direction (that we were going anyway, and for the rest of all these reasons) but he helped transform the Democratic Party in, frankly, positive and appropriate-to-the-times ways.
He was of course a lousy candidate, would have been ineffective as president, and it is a good thing he did not become the nominee - BUT his campaigns were, at least in this respect, a fantastic demonstration of the way politics should be done - voices and issues raised in the primary by insurgent candidates who raise excitement and passion, even if those candidates don't prevail, should be, and are, incorporated into the platform and the views of the party at large.
It is my fervent wish that the left who supported him would recognize, and take, the win that the massive and transformational party platform changes represent - and it is my enduring frustration that many of them do not, and continue to rail against the phantom menace of "corporate Democrats" when the party platform and party rhetoric is so hostile to that centrist former coalition politics that Sanders correctly recognized would no longer work.
----
Fourth: social issues are centered in the Democratic platform and policies for the simple reason that huge numbers of voiceless people have, in the past decade, found their voice and a plethora of amplifiers. There is much horror from the effects of social media and the internet, but one very positive thing that has come from it is that every group who has experienced social obloquy or discrimination, who has been isolated, felt alone and powerless, who would formerly feel they had to cringe and chuckle at every aggression against them... now every one of them knows they're not alone, that they shouldn't have to just endure what ignorant people have said about them, that they can be here, be proud, be themselves, and they have the right to demand the respect and rights everyone is supposed to be entitled to.
People who finally have a voice are pissed that they've had to put up with this for so long, and are demanding change right now. And they're not wrong. But they're also not at all guaranteed to win, if they don't push shrewdly and intelligently - but we all knew that. And the party has embraced it, and has done so suddenly, where "mainstream" of a decade ago has become unacceptably reactionary today.
----
Fifth and last, though, is this.
Democrats were guilty of a flawed optimism all the way up to November 8, 2016. We believed, even in the dark days of Reagan and W, that the long arc of the universe moved in our favor, at least on social issues. That as the society became more advanced and cosmopolitan, as lives became more complex and layered and richer, as we communicated and traveled and learned more just because life afforded that opportunity when not actually demanding it of us, that inevitably society would become more tolerant, more accepting, embracing more diversity, affording more equitable acceptance and opportunity for everyone.
Even in 2015 we all thought - never mind thought, we were fully confident that - it was going to just gradually fix itself, on its own. Obergefell was such an enormous and instantly-embraced victory, such a powerful indication that we were on the home stretch, that we had conservatives literally writing columns saying "can't we have a little time to adjust? Are we even permitted to negotiate the terms of our own surrender?"
I remember that lament, in response to Obergefell.
That optimism shattered when we saw just how evil so many of our fellow citizens were. When we saw them rip off the masks and what they would embrace - how much bigotry they still felt, and ached to express. How much cruelty, how much oppression, how much hierarchy they still wanted to impose. When they said "you can't legislate morality", they were talking about themselves.
And it has gone backward, shockingly fast. We have had reality slap us in the face, over and over, that this gradual improvement is not guaranteed.
And it has this knock-on effect: ultimately, even if the shattered political consensus is the unequivocal fault of deliberate machinations by Gingrich and his ideological cronies, even if those of us on the center-left still very much believe that the best society we can build is one of a centrist political consensus... I think a lot of us who care to eradicate bigotry don't ever want consensus politics to come back, because we can't see ourselves compromising with what we now know the rest of the country to be.
I can't disagree with it on the facts at all, and I found myself interested on the reasons why this has happened. Most of the 2012 Democratic Party platform was talking about economic policy, for example; the 2020 platform was twice as long, had significantly more leftward economic policy, and a large amount of new social policy and positions that were definitely not mainstream Democratic Party positions in 2012.
I had several reactions - the preface to which is the Spider Robinson quote that competes for what goes on my tombstone: "the world turns upside down in ten years, but we turn upside down with it, so we don't notice". It's useful now and then to take stock of what we were saying ten years ago, because it is indeed very different than what we say and believe today.
But I have at least five takes on why it happened.
First of all: there is an upended incentive for whom to court with the platform. The post-WWII consensus was that the center-left and center-right were where most people were, where most politicians were, and the way to craft sustainable policy was for each side to write policies that the other side would engage with, negotiate over, and then grudgingly accept, at least until they regained the majority and could tweak things back more to their liking.
As such, Democrats would write a moderate platform - sometimes even to the right of their own positions - because they had the sense that there were more reachable voters and politicians to their right than to their left, and it was best to call out to them and expect to negotiate with them, that this would be effective, while more extreme positions would lose more than gain, and half a loaf was better than none.
That, it is fair to say, has stopped being the case. The center-left that still runs the Democratic Party is painfully and gradually (but generally successfully) recognizing that there are more reachable voters and politicians to their left (the firm/strident/far left) than there are to their right (the center right) - because there are zero reachable center-right people now. Any conservative who might wish to compromise cannot even conceivably do so, because their own voters would instantly and permanently abandon them.
As such, there is no real hope for the foreseeable future of government through consensus. A platform that championed positions that both Democrats and Republicans could support at the same time would be a blank sheet of paper. The consensus is gone, and the sole hope for progress or enactment of anything is through partisan supermajorities, not negotiation. Half a chance at a loaf is better than futile attempts to reach the unreachable.
----
Second. The reality of economic populism (that insufficiently regulated capitalism - or sectors of wholly unregulated capitalism - shovels wealth to the wealthy and reduces everyone else to paupers) has over the past forty years resulted in what it always results in. (Liberalism exists not because Marx was wrong but because he was right - liberalism is the only thing that can protect market societies from Marxist revolution, and conservatives and libertarians have to re-learn this, it appears, every generation or two, to the great and possibly fatal cost of all society.) Even Republicans are being populist - destructively, because conservative populism is fascism - because they have to be, because every ordinary voter now realizes that none of the wealth being generated is showing up in their wallets.
So there's simply no room left to call for liberal-consensus solutions that would preserve capitalism as it is. The baton passes leftward because we can no longer hold it. The economic order has failed, because as productivity continues to increase and the economy continues to grow all of the gains continue to go only to the top.
Just as liberals warned, when Reagan was elected, would happen in the ensuing decades. We've watched it happen as Reagan's seductive bullshit spent the last forty years upending the liberal consensus that had allowed capitalism to operate successfully.
----
Third is simple: Bernie Sanders. His positions are not actually to the left of what Democrats believe, but his rhetoric has been powerful and strident. He yanked the party in what I believe was a necessary direction (that we were going anyway, and for the rest of all these reasons) but he helped transform the Democratic Party in, frankly, positive and appropriate-to-the-times ways.
He was of course a lousy candidate, would have been ineffective as president, and it is a good thing he did not become the nominee - BUT his campaigns were, at least in this respect, a fantastic demonstration of the way politics should be done - voices and issues raised in the primary by insurgent candidates who raise excitement and passion, even if those candidates don't prevail, should be, and are, incorporated into the platform and the views of the party at large.
It is my fervent wish that the left who supported him would recognize, and take, the win that the massive and transformational party platform changes represent - and it is my enduring frustration that many of them do not, and continue to rail against the phantom menace of "corporate Democrats" when the party platform and party rhetoric is so hostile to that centrist former coalition politics that Sanders correctly recognized would no longer work.
----
Fourth: social issues are centered in the Democratic platform and policies for the simple reason that huge numbers of voiceless people have, in the past decade, found their voice and a plethora of amplifiers. There is much horror from the effects of social media and the internet, but one very positive thing that has come from it is that every group who has experienced social obloquy or discrimination, who has been isolated, felt alone and powerless, who would formerly feel they had to cringe and chuckle at every aggression against them... now every one of them knows they're not alone, that they shouldn't have to just endure what ignorant people have said about them, that they can be here, be proud, be themselves, and they have the right to demand the respect and rights everyone is supposed to be entitled to.
People who finally have a voice are pissed that they've had to put up with this for so long, and are demanding change right now. And they're not wrong. But they're also not at all guaranteed to win, if they don't push shrewdly and intelligently - but we all knew that. And the party has embraced it, and has done so suddenly, where "mainstream" of a decade ago has become unacceptably reactionary today.
----
Fifth and last, though, is this.
Democrats were guilty of a flawed optimism all the way up to November 8, 2016. We believed, even in the dark days of Reagan and W, that the long arc of the universe moved in our favor, at least on social issues. That as the society became more advanced and cosmopolitan, as lives became more complex and layered and richer, as we communicated and traveled and learned more just because life afforded that opportunity when not actually demanding it of us, that inevitably society would become more tolerant, more accepting, embracing more diversity, affording more equitable acceptance and opportunity for everyone.
Even in 2015 we all thought - never mind thought, we were fully confident that - it was going to just gradually fix itself, on its own. Obergefell was such an enormous and instantly-embraced victory, such a powerful indication that we were on the home stretch, that we had conservatives literally writing columns saying "can't we have a little time to adjust? Are we even permitted to negotiate the terms of our own surrender?"
I remember that lament, in response to Obergefell.
That optimism shattered when we saw just how evil so many of our fellow citizens were. When we saw them rip off the masks and what they would embrace - how much bigotry they still felt, and ached to express. How much cruelty, how much oppression, how much hierarchy they still wanted to impose. When they said "you can't legislate morality", they were talking about themselves.
And it has gone backward, shockingly fast. We have had reality slap us in the face, over and over, that this gradual improvement is not guaranteed.
And it has this knock-on effect: ultimately, even if the shattered political consensus is the unequivocal fault of deliberate machinations by Gingrich and his ideological cronies, even if those of us on the center-left still very much believe that the best society we can build is one of a centrist political consensus... I think a lot of us who care to eradicate bigotry don't ever want consensus politics to come back, because we can't see ourselves compromising with what we now know the rest of the country to be.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-11 07:53 pm (UTC)“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
(Snopes has verified that this is a correctly attributed quote: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-white-man/)
no subject
Date: 2022-05-11 07:55 pm (UTC)People on both sides of the political aisle voted for him consistently because he kept his promises, had time to listen to everyone, and could walk into any general store in the state and start greeting people by name.