In early January, as Democratic voters began to focus more intently on the approaching primary season, New York magazine published a profile of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The writer, David Freedlander, spoke with her about the divisions within the Democratic Party, and asked what sort of role she envisioned for herself in a possible Joe Biden presidency. “Oh, God,” Ocasio-Cortez replied (“with a groan,” Freedlander noted). “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.”
This was in some respects an impolitic, even impolite, thing for the first-term politician to say. AOC, a democratic socialist, had endorsed Bernie Sanders the previous October, so it was no secret where her loyalties lay. Still, Biden was at that point the clear front-runner for the presidential nomination, and freshman members of Congress don’t usually make disparaging remarks about their party’s front-runner. Her comment thus carried a considerable charge—a suggestion that if Biden were the nominee, this luminary and her 6.3 million Twitter followers might not just placidly go along.
And yet, she is correct. In a parliamentary system, Biden would be in the main center-left party and AOC in a smaller, left-wing party. So her comment was an accurate description of an oddity of American politics that has endured since just before the Civil War—the existence of our two, large-tent parties battling for primacy against each other, but often battling within themselves. (...)
The current divide is not about one war. It is about capitalism—whether it can be reformed and remade to create the kind of broad prosperity the country once knew, but without the sexism and racism of the postwar period, as liberals hope; or whether corporate power is now so great that we are simply beyond that, as the younger socialists would argue, and more radical surgery is called for. Further, it’s about who holds power in the Democratic Party, and the real and perceived ways in which the Democrats of the last thirty years or so have failed to challenge that power. These questions are not easily resolved, so this internal conflict is likely to last for some time and grow very bitter indeed. If Sanders wins the nomination, he will presumably try to unify the party behind his movement—but many in the party establishment will be reluctant to join, and a substantial number of his most fervent supporters wouldn’t welcome them anyway. It does not seem to me too alarmist to wonder if the Democrats can survive all this; if 2020 will be to the Democrats as 1852 was to the Whigs—a schismatic turning point that proved that the divisions were beyond bridging.
When did it begin, this split in the Democratic Party over these most basic questions of our political economy? One could trace it back to William Jennings Bryan and the Free Silver Movement (an early rebellion against the eastern bankers), or perhaps even earlier. But if pressed to name a modern starting point, I would choose the mid-1980s: the crushing 1984 defeat of Walter Mondale, and Al From’s creation the next year of the Democratic Leadership Council, which was founded to move the party away from statism and unions and toward positions friendlier to the free market. Mondale was the last old-fashioned Keynesian to capture the Democratic nomination. Ever since, the party’s nominees have offered, to one degree or another, hybrids of Keynesianism and neoliberalism.
Bill Clinton, the 1992 nominee, probably tilted more toward neoliberalism than any other Democrat, although wholesale dismissals of him as a neoliberal sellout aren’t fair or accurate. People forget, for example, that he rolled the dice on government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996 because he refused to sign a budget Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole pressed on him with enormous domestic spending cuts. It was by no means a given when the first shutdown started that he would win that fight politically (which he did, even if he lost in another way, because of the intern he met who brought him pizza while the White House staff was furloughed). Clinton was a Keynesian at times, but in broad strokes, on trade and financial deregulation, he pushed the Democrats much closer to that then-aborning creature, the global financial elite.
Like Clinton, Al Gore had been a “New Democrat,” as the more centrist Democrats of the day called themselves, most of his career, but as the nominee in 2000, he tried on both suits. I was at the convention in Los Angeles for his surprisingly high-octane, populist speech announcing that his campaign would rest on the idea of “the people versus the powerful.” But over the next few weeks, the powerful must have started calling. Gore toned that rhetoric down. We never got to see him govern, of course, as he won the election by 500,000 votes but lost it by one at the Supreme Court. John Kerry continued in a similar style in 2004. He proposed new health care and jobs spending, to be paid for by rescinding the Bush tax cuts. He also pledged to cut the deficit in half in four years. But the 2004 election turned more on national security—Iraq and the September 11 attacks—than the economy, and he narrowly lost.
None of these candidates really had to worry about “the left.” It certainly existed. There was a fairly robust movement against free trade, backed by the labor unions, though it never succeeded in nominating a president. And there were numerous columnists and policy intellectuals who protested every time a Democratic president or congressional leader emphasized the importance of deficit reduction, or otherwise embraced austerity. But electorally, Democrats could get by just paying occasional lip service to the economic left.
Then came the meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession. As thrilled as millions were by Barack Obama’s election victory, the activists and intellectuals who cared most about breaking the neoliberal grip on the party were appalled by his appointments of Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and Rahm Emanuel (not an economic adviser per se but a brutish enforcer of centrist orthodoxy), among others. To be fair, Obama had never done anything to indicate, on the campaign trail or in his short career, that he would govern as a left populist. Adam Tooze, in Crashed, his authoritative book on the financial crisis, notes that in April 2006, Senator Obama was selected for the rare privilege of speaking at the founding meeting of the Hamilton Project, a group of centrist economists brought together by Robert Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury secretary and the bête noire of the left populists. Presidential ambitions no doubt on his mind during this important audition, he carefully walked the Keynes-neoliberal line: he reminded his audience of the people the global economy had left behind in Illinois towns like Decatur and Galesburg, yet he also nodded toward two Hamilton Project priorities when he spoke of “keep[ing] the deficit low” and keeping US debt low and “out of the hands of foreign nations.”
In the early years of Obama’s presidency, the only anger most of the media noticed emanated from the right, in the form of the Tea Party movement, supported financially by figures like the Koch brothers and promoted by the Fox News Channel. The angry left, lacking such resources, was less visible, but it was always there. It found its avatar in Elizabeth Warren, named by then Senate majority leader Harry Reid to chair a congressional oversight panel on emergency economic relief. It was from this perch that she became such a thorn in Geithner’s, and Obama’s, side—and such a star of the progressive left.
Outside of official Washington circles, the impatience, and the insurgency, were building, especially among young people born since about the early 1990s. They had grown up under a capitalism very different from the one Baby Boomers experienced; they’d seen a rigged game all their adult lives—a weak job market and heavy college debt for them, more and more riches for the one percent, and no one seeming to do anything about it. In 2010 a young leftist named Bhaskar Sunkara started Jacobin, a socialist journal that became an immediate surprise success. The next year, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations began, making it clear that anger was real and widespread, and eventually having a strong influence on debate within the Democratic Party. The Democratic Socialists of America, founded in 1982, saw its membership rise from 6,000 in 2016 to 40,000 in 2018. Two other movements of the left, while not mainly concerned with economics, became potent political forces—the Black Lives Matter movement, founded in 2013, and the movement seeking permanent legal status for the so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.
This was in some respects an impolitic, even impolite, thing for the first-term politician to say. AOC, a democratic socialist, had endorsed Bernie Sanders the previous October, so it was no secret where her loyalties lay. Still, Biden was at that point the clear front-runner for the presidential nomination, and freshman members of Congress don’t usually make disparaging remarks about their party’s front-runner. Her comment thus carried a considerable charge—a suggestion that if Biden were the nominee, this luminary and her 6.3 million Twitter followers might not just placidly go along.
And yet, she is correct. In a parliamentary system, Biden would be in the main center-left party and AOC in a smaller, left-wing party. So her comment was an accurate description of an oddity of American politics that has endured since just before the Civil War—the existence of our two, large-tent parties battling for primacy against each other, but often battling within themselves. (...)
The current divide is not about one war. It is about capitalism—whether it can be reformed and remade to create the kind of broad prosperity the country once knew, but without the sexism and racism of the postwar period, as liberals hope; or whether corporate power is now so great that we are simply beyond that, as the younger socialists would argue, and more radical surgery is called for. Further, it’s about who holds power in the Democratic Party, and the real and perceived ways in which the Democrats of the last thirty years or so have failed to challenge that power. These questions are not easily resolved, so this internal conflict is likely to last for some time and grow very bitter indeed. If Sanders wins the nomination, he will presumably try to unify the party behind his movement—but many in the party establishment will be reluctant to join, and a substantial number of his most fervent supporters wouldn’t welcome them anyway. It does not seem to me too alarmist to wonder if the Democrats can survive all this; if 2020 will be to the Democrats as 1852 was to the Whigs—a schismatic turning point that proved that the divisions were beyond bridging.When did it begin, this split in the Democratic Party over these most basic questions of our political economy? One could trace it back to William Jennings Bryan and the Free Silver Movement (an early rebellion against the eastern bankers), or perhaps even earlier. But if pressed to name a modern starting point, I would choose the mid-1980s: the crushing 1984 defeat of Walter Mondale, and Al From’s creation the next year of the Democratic Leadership Council, which was founded to move the party away from statism and unions and toward positions friendlier to the free market. Mondale was the last old-fashioned Keynesian to capture the Democratic nomination. Ever since, the party’s nominees have offered, to one degree or another, hybrids of Keynesianism and neoliberalism.
Bill Clinton, the 1992 nominee, probably tilted more toward neoliberalism than any other Democrat, although wholesale dismissals of him as a neoliberal sellout aren’t fair or accurate. People forget, for example, that he rolled the dice on government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996 because he refused to sign a budget Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole pressed on him with enormous domestic spending cuts. It was by no means a given when the first shutdown started that he would win that fight politically (which he did, even if he lost in another way, because of the intern he met who brought him pizza while the White House staff was furloughed). Clinton was a Keynesian at times, but in broad strokes, on trade and financial deregulation, he pushed the Democrats much closer to that then-aborning creature, the global financial elite.
Like Clinton, Al Gore had been a “New Democrat,” as the more centrist Democrats of the day called themselves, most of his career, but as the nominee in 2000, he tried on both suits. I was at the convention in Los Angeles for his surprisingly high-octane, populist speech announcing that his campaign would rest on the idea of “the people versus the powerful.” But over the next few weeks, the powerful must have started calling. Gore toned that rhetoric down. We never got to see him govern, of course, as he won the election by 500,000 votes but lost it by one at the Supreme Court. John Kerry continued in a similar style in 2004. He proposed new health care and jobs spending, to be paid for by rescinding the Bush tax cuts. He also pledged to cut the deficit in half in four years. But the 2004 election turned more on national security—Iraq and the September 11 attacks—than the economy, and he narrowly lost.
None of these candidates really had to worry about “the left.” It certainly existed. There was a fairly robust movement against free trade, backed by the labor unions, though it never succeeded in nominating a president. And there were numerous columnists and policy intellectuals who protested every time a Democratic president or congressional leader emphasized the importance of deficit reduction, or otherwise embraced austerity. But electorally, Democrats could get by just paying occasional lip service to the economic left.
Then came the meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession. As thrilled as millions were by Barack Obama’s election victory, the activists and intellectuals who cared most about breaking the neoliberal grip on the party were appalled by his appointments of Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and Rahm Emanuel (not an economic adviser per se but a brutish enforcer of centrist orthodoxy), among others. To be fair, Obama had never done anything to indicate, on the campaign trail or in his short career, that he would govern as a left populist. Adam Tooze, in Crashed, his authoritative book on the financial crisis, notes that in April 2006, Senator Obama was selected for the rare privilege of speaking at the founding meeting of the Hamilton Project, a group of centrist economists brought together by Robert Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury secretary and the bête noire of the left populists. Presidential ambitions no doubt on his mind during this important audition, he carefully walked the Keynes-neoliberal line: he reminded his audience of the people the global economy had left behind in Illinois towns like Decatur and Galesburg, yet he also nodded toward two Hamilton Project priorities when he spoke of “keep[ing] the deficit low” and keeping US debt low and “out of the hands of foreign nations.”
In the early years of Obama’s presidency, the only anger most of the media noticed emanated from the right, in the form of the Tea Party movement, supported financially by figures like the Koch brothers and promoted by the Fox News Channel. The angry left, lacking such resources, was less visible, but it was always there. It found its avatar in Elizabeth Warren, named by then Senate majority leader Harry Reid to chair a congressional oversight panel on emergency economic relief. It was from this perch that she became such a thorn in Geithner’s, and Obama’s, side—and such a star of the progressive left.
Outside of official Washington circles, the impatience, and the insurgency, were building, especially among young people born since about the early 1990s. They had grown up under a capitalism very different from the one Baby Boomers experienced; they’d seen a rigged game all their adult lives—a weak job market and heavy college debt for them, more and more riches for the one percent, and no one seeming to do anything about it. In 2010 a young leftist named Bhaskar Sunkara started Jacobin, a socialist journal that became an immediate surprise success. The next year, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations began, making it clear that anger was real and widespread, and eventually having a strong influence on debate within the Democratic Party. The Democratic Socialists of America, founded in 1982, saw its membership rise from 6,000 in 2016 to 40,000 in 2018. Two other movements of the left, while not mainly concerned with economics, became potent political forces—the Black Lives Matter movement, founded in 2013, and the movement seeking permanent legal status for the so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.
All this activity might have remained inchoate had Sanders not decided to run for president against Hillary Clinton in 2016 (he deferred at first to Warren, who declined to run). Sanders had been inveighing against the banks and rigged political system in exactly the same language for years, but his general ineffectiveness on Capitol Hill, and his comprehensive lack of interest in schmoozing, reduced him to background noise as far as most of Washington was concerned. Now, however, people were coming out by the tens of thousands to hear him speak bluntly about the banks and the billionaires in a way Clinton never would have. And he gave this movement a figurehead, a cynosure around which to rally; his conveniently uncommon first name seemed to dance joyfully out of his supporters’ mouths.
There is no harsher spotlight in the world than the one shone on major-party candidates for president of the United States, and he handled it with a skill that not everyone thrust into that position could. His critics—and I have been one, especially when I felt in 2016 that he attacked Clinton too viciously for too long, well after he was mathematically eliminated cannot deny him that. Whatever happens with this nominating process and election, he has gone from being an afterthought backbencher to a historical figure.
To what extent was all this left-wing anger at mainstream Democrats justified? It’s a complicated question. The left was correct that Obama could have been far more aggressive on mortgage rescues and penalties imposed on the banks that brought on the financial crisis, as well as in its criticisms (which I joined) of Obama’s lamentable embrace of deficit reduction. It is also correct that Democrats have, since the 1990s, gotten themselves far too indebted to certain donor groups, notably Wall Street and the tech industry.
Yet the left, in its critiques, sometimes acts as if Republicans don’t exist and have no say in political outcomes. Leftists tend to interpret the policy failures of the Obama era as a function of his own lack of will, or his reliance on corporate interests, rather than what they more often were, in my view—a reflection of the facts that in the Senate, a unified and dug-in minority can thwart a majority, and even a majority can pass legislation only as progressive as the sixtieth senator will allow because of the super-majority voting rules. I recall several conversations with administration officials who had worked for months on certain policy matters but who knew that the ideas would never get through the Senate. And presidents just don’t have endless political capital.
I’ve always found this a useful heuristic: imagine Obama in his first term with LBJ-like majorities in Congress, sixty-eight senators and nearly three hundred House members. What would he have passed? It’s useful because our answers define the limits of mainstream liberalism—what it would be willing to push for, and the interests it would be hesitant to take on.
There is no harsher spotlight in the world than the one shone on major-party candidates for president of the United States, and he handled it with a skill that not everyone thrust into that position could. His critics—and I have been one, especially when I felt in 2016 that he attacked Clinton too viciously for too long, well after he was mathematically eliminated cannot deny him that. Whatever happens with this nominating process and election, he has gone from being an afterthought backbencher to a historical figure.
To what extent was all this left-wing anger at mainstream Democrats justified? It’s a complicated question. The left was correct that Obama could have been far more aggressive on mortgage rescues and penalties imposed on the banks that brought on the financial crisis, as well as in its criticisms (which I joined) of Obama’s lamentable embrace of deficit reduction. It is also correct that Democrats have, since the 1990s, gotten themselves far too indebted to certain donor groups, notably Wall Street and the tech industry.
Yet the left, in its critiques, sometimes acts as if Republicans don’t exist and have no say in political outcomes. Leftists tend to interpret the policy failures of the Obama era as a function of his own lack of will, or his reliance on corporate interests, rather than what they more often were, in my view—a reflection of the facts that in the Senate, a unified and dug-in minority can thwart a majority, and even a majority can pass legislation only as progressive as the sixtieth senator will allow because of the super-majority voting rules. I recall several conversations with administration officials who had worked for months on certain policy matters but who knew that the ideas would never get through the Senate. And presidents just don’t have endless political capital.
I’ve always found this a useful heuristic: imagine Obama in his first term with LBJ-like majorities in Congress, sixty-eight senators and nearly three hundred House members. What would he have passed? It’s useful because our answers define the limits of mainstream liberalism—what it would be willing to push for, and the interests it would be hesitant to take on.
by Michael Tomasky, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Tom Bachtell
[ed. Sorry for all the politics lately, but it and the virus are saturating the news.]
