How I went from left to center-left

My crisis of confidence in progressive epistemology

I’ve written about the history of left versus right since the French Revolution, about what the left gets right, and about what the right gets right. Now, I want to talk about my own journey from the left of American politics to somewhere closer to the center.

There are, I think, three major factors.

One is that I’ve been interested in politics since I was a teenager in the 1990s, and the whole spectrum of American politics has shifted decisively to the left since that time. An important exception is that raising taxes on middle-class people has become much more unthinkable than it used to be, and (probably not coincidentally) that’s still the topic on which I have my crankiest left-wing views — I think almost everyone should be paying higher taxes.

A second is that some of my views have genuinely become more conservative, just as center-left people warned back when I was younger and more left-wing.

Most importantly, though, as progressives and progressive institutions have gained clout in American life, I’ve grown disillusioned with the quality of the work they’re doing. At a high level of abstraction, the project of secular egalitarians trying to generate a more equitable distribution of income, a cleaner environment, and an overall more peaceful, prosperous, and cooperative world seems both good and pretty left-wing. But my journey has taken me from thinking that leftists are sort of getting housing policy wrong and I’m going to talk them out of it, to thinking that progressive epistemology has some pretty profound problems that are making it hard for people who share my values to govern effectively. I think that’s mostly true of the left-of-Biden pressure groups, but those groups are powerful enough that they now influence governance in some areas, and I think that’s a problem.

But, like many people my age, my political origin story is one of catastrophic right-wing misgovernment.

When the left was right

When I was 17, I came to Washington, DC for a two-week summer camp for political dorks, hosted on the American University campus. This was the Summer of Monica, in which my understanding — and the understanding of a majority of the American people — was that hypocritical Bible-thumping moralists were persecuting a popular and effective president over a consensual affair that had nothing to do with anything.

I later developed a more mature feminist understanding of that dynamic as actually representing some deeply problematic behavior on Bill Clinton’s part, but that’s not how anyone (except my aunt Lisa) saw it at the time. It was seen as part and parcel of the Christian Right’s effort to ban abortion (some things never change) and their genuinely relentless homophobia, which extended to things like refusing to confirm an openly gay ambassador to Luxembourg.

I liked but did not love Bill Clinton as a politician, faulting him for being unable to deliver on health care and for getting himself backed into a corner, where instead of meaningfully reforming welfare, he cut off the poorest of the poor. But it was a very conservative time in terms of public opinion, and I had no sympathy with the left-abstentionists or future Naderites.

By the time I was in college and the 2000 election rolled around, America was still in a place where only freaks and weirdos cared about politics. There was also no age polarization in the electorate back then — Gore did slightly better with seniors than with under-30s — so being a politically engaged young liberal was pretty odd. But I really wanted Gore to win. One of my two college roommates was a lot like me, but the other was apolitical, and one of our proudest achievements was forcing him to obtain an absentee ballot and mail it in for Maria Cantwell. That election was super close, and I like to think that I am personally responsible for defeating Slade Gorton.

I was shocked and appalled by the way that George W. Bush was able to steal the election, but what made an even bigger impression on me was how mainstream Democrats didn’t really contest or fight it.

It seemed to me that since Gore was clearly the preferred choice of the majority of the voters, both nationally and in Florida (remember the butterfly ballot?), the post-campaign should be fought not just in the courts but in the streets. Where were the mass protests? Where were the strikes? Where was the pressure to force Bush to do the right thing and concede?

David Gergen was a prominent political pundit at that time who was also on the faculty at Harvard, and he spoke regularly at Kennedy School events. He assured everyone that Bush would have to govern in a chill, moderate, bipartisan way — like his dad, but with a weaker mandate. That was wrong, incredibly wrong, as we saw when he rolled out his cabinet and his 2001 tax cut. Then came 9/11. I thought I was smarter than the know-nothing leftists on campus and that it was wise to follow the lead of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden, and Tony Blair and say that Bush got the Iraq thing right. That was also incredibly wrong, as we found out.

Later, in 2003, Bush passed another huge regressive tax cut and a bad Medicare reform bill, both with some Democratic votes.

By the time I came to DC after graduation that year, it was clear to me where things stood: Bush was terrible and basically wrong about everything. The case for Iraq was already in shambles, all his economic policies were giveaways to the rich, and his electoral politics was based on rank bigotry against gay people. But even more than that, moderate Democrats were constantly wrong. They were appeasing Bush! They were duping me into agreeing with him about Iraq! They were so spineless they couldn’t even fight back against an election being stolen from their own guy!

The new new left

The years after that, during Barack Obama’s presidency, were my peak years of agreeing with the people in charge.

The Obama administration was not perfect. In particular, the public policy outputs of the Barack Obama era were not perfect. But the main way in which they fell short was that Congress did not always enact Obama’s ideas. Contrary to a certain amount of post hoc myth-making, for example, the Obama White House absolutely did push for a larger and more vigorous fiscal response to the Great Recession. But Congress wouldn’t do it. Obama also pushed for a wise comprehensive immigration reform plan that would have boosted the economy and improved border security — this one came achingly close to passing, but it fell short.

I do not find it shocking that having a really great two-term president, backed by a solid White House team, did not solve every problem in America. But a lot of people seem to have been a bit unreasonably shaken by this, especially after the shock election of Donald Trump.

Even before Trump, though, you could see very clearly among Obama’s then-young millennial base a kind of revolution of rising expectations, with some on the left wondering why the nature of American society had not been fundamentally transformed. On the streets of Ferguson and in the early enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders (before things turned nasty), we saw a tremendous — albeit vague — hunger for new ideas, but I found a lot of this to be frustratingly detached from practical reality. The key to making progress toward progressive goals was to help moderate Democrats beat far-right Republicans in crucial House seats so that bills could pass, not replace Obama with a further-left president whose bills also wouldn’t pass.

Then Hillary Clinton, surprisingly, lost.

I was surprised, too, but I think the correct level of surprise to have about Trump’s win is something more along the lines of “going right on immigration didn’t hurt Republicans in Florida the way most people thought it would” than “it’s time to rethink everything we know about politics and public policy.” And I think most rank-and-file Democrats agreed with that interpretation, which is why Joe Biden became the 2020 nominee. Left-of-center elites, though, were much more profoundly shaken, I think. The influential Roosevelt Institute put out a 2021 report concluding that neoliberal economics and Obama-style racial liberalism had fundamentally failed and needed to be replaced with a “new paradigm.”

I just do not think that this is correct.

Obama and his team were flawed human beings who made mistakes, and while they were running the government, I was often frustrated with their extreme reluctance to admit to any errors of judgment. But I do not think there has actually been any huge conceptual leap since the King/Rustin strategy of pursuing racial equality through broad egalitarian economics. Congress didn’t appropriate enough fiscal stimulus in 2009-2010 and that was a big problem, but “do a stimulus that’s big enough to fill the hole” does not require throwing out standard economics or proving the fundamental failures of Obama’s ideas. Could a different approach to legislative strategy have finagled more money out of congress? My friends who worked in the administration at the time swear that the answer is no, but I think it’s probably yes. But that’s an argument about legislative strategy, not about ideological fundamentals.

So that’s been one of the biggest shifts for me: a leftward slippage of the political spectrum that I think was largely unwarranted. But there are also a few issues where I’ve grown genuinely more conservative.

A dangerous world

The most important issues here, to me, are the related topics of China and climate change. I used to think the engagement with China strategy made sense, and I thought the people who objected to it were mostly driven by economic ignorance about the benefits of free trade. I still think the economic arguments for free trade are sound, but the actual geopolitical situation has evolved to the point where it’s clear that commercial ties between the United States and China were not fostering world peace or the liberalization of Chinese society.

Unfortunately, a lot of what’s happened since the conventional wisdom shifted on China is just unprincipled protectionism.

I think that’s wrong. Reducing dependence on imported Chinese manufactured goods is like trying to make sure we have the capacity to produce more ammunition — it’s not an economic policy at all, it’s a national security policy that involves incurring economic costs. We should be freeing up trade with the rest of the world, especially with our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere. Which is just to say that the China situation has made me more supportive of ideas I would have rejected in the past, like increasing the defense budget, while continuing to feel that the new post-neoliberal ideas, on both the left and the right, are basically wrong.

But this really comes crashing into the mainstream progressive view of climate policy. Since the mid-Bush years, American carbon dioxide emissions have fallen nearly 20 percent, while global emissions have risen by over 20 percent.

Just to clarify that I am not a knuckle-dragging moron, the following standard environmentalist points are all true:

1. On a per capita basis, American emissions are still exceptionally high.

2. On a historical basis, America is still the major contributor to climate pollution.

3. The countries poised to suffer most from climate change are not the ones that have benefitted most from industrialization.

Those three considerations do add up, in my opinion, to a compelling moral case for American climate leadership. That said, the cold hard fact that I’ve come around to is that while it would be worth it for the United States of America to bear significant economic costs to avert climate change, it is literally not possible for us to do that. Given that the United States needs tax revenue, we can and should price the externality associated with our domestic carbon dioxide consumption. And we should fund clean energy innovation, continue to drive down the cost of batteries and solar panels, and make complementary regulatory changes to try to speed the deployment of long-range transmission lines, along with geothermal, small modular reactors, and fusion power. But China is doing a lot of that innovation and deployment right now and also building tons of coal plants, and we have no way of stopping them.

Instead of wrestling with these realities, American environmentalists are too often shopping ideas like denying poor countries financing for their own industrialization or trying to stop the United States from supplying the world with natural gas. These ideas almost certainly won’t work as environmental policy, because countries that want natural gas will just get the gas and the financing from other less friendly countries. And if they did work, the outcomes wouldn’t be desirable — trying to reduce emissions by choking off economic development in poor countries inverts the moral logic of the whole argument.

Hard problems are hard

I, personally, would be thrilled to see the United States impose a border-adjusted carbon tax; reduce the value of almost every income tax deduction; raise taxes on alcohol, marijuana and other public health hazards; impose congestion pricing and VMT fees on our roads; and perhaps even supplement all this with a value added tax. I’m also in favor of some more steeply progressive tax changes — eliminating the egregious step-up basis and carry interest loopholes most notably, but also maybe just bumping up rates by a few points.

I think if you did all that, you’d make a huge dent in several pressing American social problems, and you could also fund a generous child benefit that would make a huge dent in other pressing American social problems.

And I think that if you took this agenda to a conservative American or even to a swing voter, they would tell you that these are the egregious ideas of a wild-eyed leftist. And for most of my life, that was my impression of myself. I had all these unpopular left-wing ideas that I wanted to make the case for, while George W. Bush and the Republican Party were destroying the country. Now, of course, there’s a tension in that — you can advance the unpopular left-wing ideas, or you can stop the Republicans from destroying the country. My synthesis is that you want a dual track strategy:

• Stop Republicans from destroying the country by encouraging Democrats to edit unpopular items out of the platform.

• Try to write columns persuading people that taxing externalities is underrated and that flat-ish consumption taxes are good in an effort to change public opinion.

In other words, I’ve become a squishy moderate in a practical sense, even though I do aspirationally agree with some pretty aggressively progressive ideas.

At the same time, I’ve gotten very interested in a some issues that are bit off the left-right axis of political debate in the United States, most notably the overregulation of the housing sector and various aspects of energy and health care. And I would like to see smart, ambitious progressive politicians run for office in blue states on (moderate) platforms that emphasize housing reform and improving the quality of local public services. I think that kind of growth and reform agenda for Blue America would have significant benefits on its own terms, and I also hypothesize that if blue states were experiencing significant population inflows and economic growth, that would generate a positive halo effect for other progressive economic ideas.

The mainstream progressive movement in the United States has gone in a different direction.

They agree that broad-based taxes are too unpopular to propose, but refuse to give up on the goals of crash domestic decarbonization and creating a Nordic-scale welfare state. And in the name of political pragmatism, they keep coming up with increasingly complex workarounds, like exotic new tax ideas (unrealized capital gains! mansion tax!) and climate policies with hidden costs. I don’t think this is working, politically or substantively, and it has mostly served to avoid necessary conversations about priorities and degrade the empirical rigor of policy analysis as people pretend that tradeoffs don’t exist.

And in large part because of all that, the most profound way that my political views have changed over the years is that I’ve become a lot more skeptical that mainstream progressive epistemic institutions are functioning properly.

At this point, everyone and their mother has disavowed the “defund the police” movement, which is great. But how is it that when this activist rallying cry came up — often backstopped by a lot of inaccurate budgetary claims — the impulse among so many sensible mainstream liberals was to lay low or sane-wash rather than actively contextualize bad analysis? Fortunately, very few Democratic Party elected officials hopped on the bandwagon, despite the pressure to do so. But that meant an opportunity to enact reforms that made sense was lost, and a lot of us were left — reasonably, I think — doubting whether the progressive movement is actually up to the job of thinking things through as novel issues land on the agenda.