Debbie Downer progressives aren't helping

Joe Biden's America isn't perfect, but things are pretty good!

The state of the economy has faded a bit from the discourse as public perception has improved over the past few months. Still, despite the improvement, perceptions remain broadly negative in a way that seems pretty inconsistent with the reality that America has the strongest economic growth in the world right now — featuring low unemployment, rising wages, and falling inequality.

Part of the story is, obviously, the hangover of inflation, which is mostly in the rearview but still colors people’s views.

But another part of the story is the question of the narratives we create about the economy. I think everyone agrees that if Donald Trump were in office right now, conservative media and conservative-aligned social media accounts would be uniformly pushing a positive narrative. By contrast, a lot of progressives have mixed feelings about the idea of doing positive messaging on the Biden economy because they see it as inherently unprogressive. Bernie Sanders and John Nichols published a book a year ago with the title “It’s Okay to be Angry About Capitalism,” and if that’s your view, then presumably you think voters should be angry about the Biden economy rather than grateful. Of course, they mean you should be angry in a left-wing democratic socialist kind of way. But imagine you’re a low-engagement, low-information swing voter. The kind of person who backed Biden in 2020 but had soured on him by 2022 and didn’t vote. Now it’s 2024, and you’re being bombarded with messaging from the left and right simultaneously about how the economy sucks — except the right has a clear “and so you should vote for Trump” plan of action, while the left wants to sell you on a bunch of big new ideas.

It’s a challenging messaging environment for Biden.

This is my endless refrain talking to Brian Beutler on Politix, but it’s just very difficult for Democrats to offer effective messages if highly engaged progressives — who are not that numerous in the electorate but who are pretty influential in setting the terms of debate on social media — don’t want Democrats to say popular things like “the economy is good.”

So I was glad to see Perry Bacon offer a non-strawman version of the argument that it would be genuinely bad for Democrats to convince people the economy is good, because I think this is the subtext of a lot of what ails us and it doesn’t really make sense. Leftists seem sort of stuck in a cosplay version of 19th century revolutionary politics where their theory of change is that they need to rouse people to anger. But it’s 2024. The state plays a significant role in the American economy through regulations, through tax credits, and through government programs. At the same time (and here I agree with Bacon), Americans have a lot of unmet social needs. And I think the key task to meeting those needs is to convince people that progressive stewardship of the country is effective. To convince them that Democrats know what they’re doing and can make prudent decisions about spending and regulation and can design effective programs. If you convince people that everything is terrible, that won’t just be counterproductive in the narrow sense that they are more likely to vote for Trump; it’s counterproductive in the broad sense that they will decide progressives are a bunch of flailing losers who don’t know what they’re doing, and Americans as individuals should adopt a more selfish view of the world.

What happens in 2025

Bacon discusses electoral politics and the various incentives and pressures acting on opinion leaders. But he lands on a very clear view that he’s not just skeptical that happy talk will work, he doesn’t want it to work:

It’s not as if Biden and other Democrats never discuss those values. But the party’s message is too heavily weighted toward celebrating current conditions, with comparably little focus on the structural weaknesses of the U.S. economy and how Democrats would address them in the future. If Biden is reelected, it will be harder to push for higher taxes on the wealthy, more affordable higher education, limits on corporate power, increased labor and union rights, and other much-needed policies if Democrats have spent 2024 saying everything is going spectacularly in the United States economically.

Where I agree with Bacon is that Biden’s strategy will probably fail. But the reason I think it will fail is that (as he says in this piece) there is an influential minority faction of Debbie Downer Progressives who think it’s a good idea on the merits to deliberately sandbag efforts to make people feel good about the Biden economy.

But is it a good idea? I think Bacon’s theory of the case here involves massively overcomplicating the question of what will make it easier to do the things he wants Democrats to do.

When I interviewed former NEC Deputy Director Bharat Ramamurti last fall, he made the point that the big policy agenda item of a second Biden term is destined to be the scheduled expiration of many Trump tax cut provisions in 2025.

• If Republicans control all three branches of government, they will write a reconciliation bill that extends or makes permanent all of these tax cuts and offsets the costs with cuts to clean energy and the safety net.

• If Democrats control all three branches of government, they will force the expiration of some of these tax cuts and use the resulting revenue for some mix of deficit reduction and safety net spending.

• If there is divided government, there’s going to be a more complicated negotiation over exactly what to do.

That’s all that really matters here. If we’re talking outcomes conditional on Biden winning, then the prospects for higher taxes on the wealthy come down to who controls the House and whether Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester manage to hold on. Bacon’s complicated considerations about the post-election narrative just don’t matter nearly as much as who wins the elections.

In terms of pushing for “increased labor and union rights,” I think the situation is, if anything, starker. Biden is running the most aggressively pro-union executive branch we’ve seen since Harry Truman. That doesn’t mean you need to say “everything in life is perfect under the benevolent rule of Comrade Joe,” but it means that labor advocacy needs to have an optimistic pro-Biden spin. Low unemployment is making it possible for workers to be more daring in their demands, and a sympathetic administration is helping strikers win concessions and trying to help motivated workers organize new workplaces. If people think “the Biden economy sucks because Chicken McNuggets got more expensive,” that doesn’t make them want to support more aggressive pro-union efforts.

Note that’s actually true even if they vote to re-elect Joe Biden. Imagine two guys:

• Guy One is psyched about Bidenomics, thinks things are going great in America, and is happy that Joe Biden is less interested than Barack Obama was in the ideas of people with economics PhDs.

• Guy Two thinks the economy kinda sucks, but he’s voting Biden anyway because of abortion and democracy.

Which guy is more likely to urge an aggressively pro-union agenda in the second term?

It’s clearly the first guy. On economics, Biden has moved policy in a progressive direction relative to Trump basically across the board. Right now, people mostly say they feel like that hasn’t worked out well. Whether or not Biden wins reelection, that just doesn’t make a good case for continued progressive change. But if, as memories of 2022 fade and real wage gains pile up, people think to themselves “Joe Biden is making things better,” that makes the case for continued progressive policy.

Conservatives are plenty angry

A big part of the misconception here starts with a kind of hyper-literalism about what it means to be conservative. There’s definitely a sense in which a person who is happy may be a bit skeptical about dramatic changes to the status quo, which could be construed as saying that feeling happy makes people conservative. But is this what we’re talking about when we talk about conservative politics? When I think of someone putting on a MAGA hat or spending their evening glued to Fox News, I don’t think of people who are complacent and afraid of upsetting the apple cart.

The signature idea of right-wing politics isn’t that all is well in the world, it’s that society is going to hell in a hand basket and we need to do something about it.

The more conservative you are, the more sweeping the changes you’re calling for — roll back the Civil Rights Act, eliminate the administrative state, reverse the 19th Amendment. Someone who’s just chill is moderate and put off by extremists on both sides.

It’s maybe true that if you were doing politics in mid-19th Century Europe, conservative politics would have been literally conservative and the idea of dramatic political change would have been almost inherently progressive. But that’s because you’re talking about a continent of autocratic governments with no welfare state or public interest regulation. We now live in a society that is deeply influenced by progressive ideas drawn from liberalism, feminism, social democracy, and environmentalism. The idea of “changing stuff” is completely ambiguous as to the direction of change.

And I think the particular emotion of feeling personally aggrieved is particularly likely to inspire change in a rightward direction.

Because in the modern world, I think the fundamental right-wing belief is “I should be more selfish.” Conservatives are obsessed with “virtue signaling,” the idea that people espouse ideas that are more high-minded than their actual behavior. And this is a real thing that happens in the world. But I think the sensible thing to say about it is that a lot of liberal hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, and it is good and correct for it to be high-status to espouse high-minded principles rather than low selfishness. The idea that we should all own up more boldly to our private indifference to the problems of the poor and the marginal, to the long-term future of the global environment, to the plight of refugees, etc. is bad.

But if you convince the average American voter — in a country where most people are white, most people are employed, most people own homes, and most people own at least some stock — that he personally is a put upon and oppressed victim of nefarious impersonal forces, I don’t think that’s going to inspire him to become more committed to avowing high-minded principles. Part of the disconnect here, I think, is that many on the left are operating in a bit of a bubble of progressive presumptions. Alesina, Stantcheva, and Teso find that making people more pessimistic about social mobility makes people more supportive of redistribution — if they were on the left in the first place. But we know that at least on an abstract level, self-identified conservatives substantially outnumber liberals. In Europe, pessimism about society is a major driver of support for populist right parties, and since Trump has reworked the GOP to be more like a European populist right party, I would expect to see the same thing here.

Comfortable solutions vs real solutions

It seems to me that Debbie Downers often mislocate the doubts about the progressive agenda.

Is the persuadable-but-skeptical doubter of Democrats’ child care policy ambitions someone who doesn’t believe that child care costs are a big problem, or is it someone who thinks that if you give Democrats a bunch of money to spend on a new child care program, they’re going to waste it on something that doesn’t work? My sense is that it’s often the latter. The reputation of progressives as profligate and inept is largely unfair caricature, but it’s in part grounded in reality. Either way, the absolute last thing you want to do is encourage people to become more negative and cynical about the state of the country.

But as is often the case, I think progressives have opted for a bad solution — negativity — not because it’s good politics but because it’s good coalition-management.

Focusing on the idea that we just need to convince people that it’s really bad to have unstable employment or to lack health insurance or to struggle with child care costs is a convenient alternative to the hard work of rigorous policy design and setting priorities rather than ordering everything bagels. So I’m not calling for people to be totally uncritical cheerleaders of the Biden agenda. I think there is more tension between their industrial policy goals and their pro-labor goals than they realize, and there is thus more need for targeted deregulation of non-labor rules if they want to make progress on these dual goals.

Broadly, though, the facts about the Biden economy are positive.

We got back to full employment impressively quickly. We brought down the rate of inflation without a recession. We have the best GDP growth of any major economy, and the carbon intensity of the economy is falling. Wages are now rising, and growth has been strongest for the poorest workers. The employment-population ratio is high. The stock market is high. The safety net has become more robust. It’s not a perfect world, but it’s a world in which progress has been made toward progressive social goals and we are prospering in terms of conventional economic indicators. If you can’t get people to see that as a happy picture, not only does the right benefit in specific electoral terms, but the whole project of pursuing those goals tends to fall into discredit.