Democrats need to debate ideas, not people

Endless establishment retreads are not the same as the center of public opinion.

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders at a 2019 Democratic presidential debate. (Photo by Win McNamee)

Both Democratic Party insiders and their left-wing critics tend to see the notion of a “left” and a “center” faction of the party as primarily denoting two different groups of people.

So to those in the left faction, the suggestion that progressives bear any responsibility for the past 10 years of political setbacks is absurd — the moderates have been in control of the party this whole time. Which is to say that after Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton, he gave her a senior cabinet job and brought back a lot of old Clinton administration alums for key jobs. Then Hillary was the nominee in 2016, followed by Obama’s V.P., who himself was a major figure in 1990s moderate Democrat politics. Then the 2024 nominee was Biden’s V.P., and her campaign was basically Biden’s old campaign, with a few Obama staffers brought back in.

The insiders also see it this way.

In their telling, they’ve been fighting a long counterinsurgency against Bernie Sanders and his allies, which is conceptualized as a question of trying to keep this specific group’s hands off the wheel. Hakeem Jeffries insists on being weird about Zohran Mamdani. While I’m skeptical that Graham Platner can beat Susan Collins (because Collins is extremely hard to beat), Chuck Schumer seems to think the solution to this problem is to nominate Janet Mills instead. And while I certainly believe that moderates do better at winning elections, is Mills actually more moderate? It’s true that Platner is a Bernie guy and says the magic word “oligarchy,” and the platform he’s running on is definitely progressive. But so is the platform Schumer has his caucus working with! None of the spending commitments on Platner’s website are nearly as extensive as the Build Back Better bill that Schumer tried to pass. This is about people, not policies.

And that’s where I think the voters see things differently from political elites on both sides of the factional divide. They’re just not as tuned in to the subtle factional cueing.

What they can see is that there was an issue space occupied by Obama through his first term, and most of his second, that was defined by stances like prominently championing deficit reduction, an all-of-the-above energy strategy, education reform, and free trade agreements. Hillary Clinton and her successors vacated that issue space. As I wrote in a July 2020 Vox piece, Joe Biden’s campaign agenda was strikingly more progressive than Obama’s, to an extent that was somewhat obscured by how angry the left wing was at him during the primary.

Fundamentally, I think the factional identity markers and personalities that are so important to political elites are just much less important than the question of what politicians actually say.

A couple of weeks ago, when Ezra Klein said he’d like to see Democrats recruit some pro-life candidates in red states, he got a lot of pushback. When Bernie Sanders endorsed a pro-life mayoral candidate in 2017, he also got a lot of pushback. When Ruben Gallego criticized the cancellation of Joe Rogan as an own-goal by Democrats, that was Ruben Gallego the moderate who (along with Mark Kelly) holds down the reddest Democratic Senate seat.

But of course, back when Rogan was getting canceled, it was specifically moderate Democrats complaining that it was inappropriate of Sanders to seek his endorsement. And at that time, Gallego was a progressive — a potential (and eventually actual) primary challenger to Kyrsten Sinema.

Fundamentally, a Democratic Party that courts the support of Joe Rogan and that proudly maintains a big tent on abortion rights while being led by self-identified progressives is going to be more appealing than one led by self-identified moderates who are constantly purging people over progressive litmus tests. It’s taking the positions that matters.

The long insurgency

I have a version of this take in my head where I am primarily annoyed at left factionalists. After all, isn’t it hypocritical that the same people who screamed bloody murder at Joe Manchin for not wanting to end American oil and gas extraction, ban assault rifles, and give cash assistance to non-working single mothers are now excited about a Maine oysterman who is not promising to do any of those things?

And the answer is, yes, it is hypocritical. It is hypocritical and annoying that progressive factionalists give a pass to their own people over policies they claim to believe are of surpassing moral importance when it serves the purpose of their power play.

On the other hand, it is sort of fundamentally more the responsibility of the people in charge to think rigorously and behave in a disciplined way.

I remember talking to a senior labor leader back in 2015 about the Democratic Party primary. He said he wished Joe Biden would get in the race, because he thought Hillary was bad, but also that Biden probably wouldn’t run. So what about Bernie? Well, obviously he liked Bernie more than Clinton, but Bernie obviously wasn’t going to win so he couldn’t endorse him. What he thought he’d do was take advantage of Bernie’s presence in the race to extract policy concessions from Clinton — get her to break with Obama over the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And that’s how it’s been ever since, not just on T.P.P. but essentially across the whole broad suite of issues.

The people — Clinton, Jeffries, Schumer — who want to be considered the savvy, electability-minded pragmatists are so paranoid about losing control over the party that they’re unwilling to say no to anyone or to articulate what they believe to be winning ideas.

Or at least they’re mostly unwilling to do so.

The establishment could just be smarter

I think one of the most underplayed stories of the Biden years is that after a lot of foot-dragging and back-and-forth and paralysis, Biden just said we had to shut down the asylum system until things got back under control.

This move, plus stepped-up cooperation with Mexico, seems to have worked pretty well and largely staunched the flow of irregular arrivals exploiting asylum loopholes. It was also a dramatically more humane and more economically sensible approach to immigration than what Trump is doing. And strikingly, there actually wasn’t some huge intraparty backlash to Biden stepping up and actually acting like a moderate. He wasn’t greeted with universal acclaim, obviously. But it was basically fine … just too late.

The reason I bring this up is that when I talk to politically influential people who are broadly aligned with me on these questions, the tendency as conversation goes on is to start saying negative things about Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar.

I don’t think either of them have the solution to Democrats’ political problems. But it is still important to be clear that Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are not the cause of Democrats’ political problems. The cause is Joe Biden and, to a lesser extent, Democratic leaders in Congress.

Biden was slow to act on the border, even though when he did act, it worked and there was no huge rebellion against him. And he just did nothing, at all, to address the widespread sense that an important class of American institutions had gone kind of off the rails with identity politics. On higher education, the Biden administration was not on any level pursuing a sensible reform agenda. I would sometimes bug people I knew working in Biden’s Education Department to say they should weigh in against things like math detracking or test-optional admissions policies. And plenty of people working in the administration agreed with me! But there was no interest from the top in taking positions that would divide the coalition. Often, the excuse they would offer is that these were not federal policy questions, even though the Biden Education Department was perfectly happy to talk about local library-book controversies.

There’s a discourse that chalks all these problems up to left-wing junior staffers. And certainly that was a problem with the Biden administration. But there were plenty of not-so-left-wing staffers too. Ultimately, the senior staffers made a strategic decision that they absolutely did not want to divide their coalition if they could possibly help it. And that made it impossible to advance a genuinely moderate view of what ailed America in the early 2020s.

Winning is winning

At the same time, we’ve seen Gallego remake himself from progressive insurgent to moderate stalwart because he’s a smart guy and can count votes. He’s also come up with a brand of moderate politics that makes a lot more sense substantively and politically than Sinema’s.

I’ve noted this before, but John Fetterman, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, and Jared Golden were all Bernie Sanders supporters in 2016. Rebecca Cooke was also a Bernie backer, and she’s now running in Wisconsin as a Blue Dog with Sanders’s support. Good for her, and good for him for continuing to support her.

Or look at Mamdani in New York. This is a guy who’s running like he’s aware that his record on crime and public safety issues is a problem. He’s articulating more moderate positions and apologizing for past statements. The whole discourse has now moved into “What does he really believe?” territory, and you know you’re winning the argument politically when your opponents are conceding that what you’re saying makes sense and just insisting that you’re lying. I don’t know what’s in Mamdani’s heart, but I do know he was advised by Sanders — himself a former mayor — that there is no way to be a successful mayor without a good working relationship with the police department. That’s good advice! I don’t know if Mamdani can pull it off, but he’s definitely trying, which is good.

And I’d rather see Schumer try to impart good advice to Platner than drag an old and clearly somewhat reluctant candidate into the race without any specific account of why she’s better.

Thinking ahead to 2028, I think it is 100 percent possible that if A.O.C. were the nominee, she would make terrible strategic decisions and lose badly. It’s also true that she’s taken some past votes that she’d get slammed for.

But basically everyone in Democratic Party politics today has taken some unwise stands and votes that they’re going to get reamed out for politically. The good news is that so has basically everyone in Republican Party politics. Whoever the nominee is, they’re going to have to work out a smart, broadly appealing platform and probably come up with a way to wriggle out of some prior statements. But everyone needs to do some wriggling. J.D. Vance said he thought Trump could be America’s Hitler and that the best-case scenario was the second coming of Richard Nixon. And look at him now.

The arguments about a bigger tent on cultural issues have flipped around several times during the course of my career, but we’ve now landed on neither faction doing it. Everyone agrees that the next Democratic energy agenda needs to be focused on affordability, but neither side has actually written up an agenda that would accomplish that. I think, in a sense, the correct answers on these issues are widely known, but both sides are paralyzed by the quest for tactical factional advantage. But we need to move beyond that and actually start doing what needs to be done.