Recently, there has been a spate of mainstream Democrats pooh-poohing the progressives and warning that they threaten this fall’s widely expected blue wave in the midterm elections.
Mark Penn and Andrew Stein were on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago claiming gains by leftists as “a 911 call for the Democratic Party and America.” Penn, pollster, and Stein, New York City Council president 33 years ago, are ideal WSJ Democrats, which is to say, Republicans-lite. Thomas Edsall was in the New York Times saying the socialists “threaten to limit potential center-left gains in voting in the midterms.”
And just this week, the Times was absolutely giddy over a razor-thin 0.47-percentage point victory—3,500 votes out of almost 800,000 cast—by “moderate” David Crowlkey over his democratic socialist rival Francesca Hong. Neither candidate broke the 40% mark.
But the problem the Democrats have isn’t with the leftier wing of the party. No, it’s the right wing, the so-called “moderates” who abandoned the party’s long-term policy goals 30 years ago. It was Jesse Jackson who, rightly, diagnosed the problem in the 1988 Democratic presidential debates. He said his opponents—who included Al Gore, Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt and the eventual nominee, hapless and hopelessly bland Mike Dukakis—were all talking about “managing Reagnomics” rather than rolling it back. The managers have been in charge ever since.
Starting with Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, the mainstream of the party moved so far to the right as to become unrecognizable as the party that dominated the government for 50 years. It’s been nearly that long since Ronald Reagan was elected president, and Reaganomics became the foundational philosophy of both political parties.
Here’s a distillation of the core policy goals of the Democratic Socialists of America. Is there anything here that any working-class Democrat of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s would disagree with? Clinton moved the party to the right, and it lost its hold on the white working class because it abandoned the economic goals of the workers and left it to the Republicans to replace them with fake “social” issues. Look at this list and tell me what any proud Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy-Johnson-Carter Democrat would object to:
- Universal Public Services: Implementing a single-payer Medicare for All system, making higher education tuition-free, canceling all student debt and expanding free universal child care.
- Labor and Workplace Democracy: Expanding labor union rights, raising the minimum wage and instituting a 32-hour workweek without a reduction in pay.
- Housing Justice: Establishing universal rent control and expanding massive public investments into multi-income “social housing” to treat housing as a human right.
- Climate Policy: Enacting a Green New Deal to transition the United States to a 100% renewable energy economy while guaranteeing jobs for displaced workers.
- Racial and Social Equity: Defunding traditional police structures in favor of community reinvestment, and eliminating systemic oppression based on race, gender and sexuality.
- Democracy and Foreign Policy: Eliminating corporate influence in politics through publicly funded elections and reducing the U.S. military footprint overseas.
While Americans may be spooked by the term “socialist,” the policy goals of the Democratic Socialists and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party were fundamental Democratic positions through most of the 20th century. The objections to the left-leaning policies have far more to do with the label than the objectives.
If the Democrats seriously want to win Congress this year and the White House in 2028, the moderates better get with on the left side of history and become Democrats again.
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