The two kinds of progressives

Moralists vs. pragmatists

I always enjoy Eric Levitz’s writing, and our views are quite similar. But even though I found his recent piece “The 28 Types of Progressives” illuminating, I didn’t think it really captured the essence of today’s most salient intra-progressive disagreements. It wasn’t so much that I thought anything he said was wrong, but I think that in 2023, a survey of the political landscape that “focuses exclusively on the ‘economic’ dimension of ideological disagreement” misses some crucial points.

Personally, I love economic issues and I wish the kind of typology he glosses there described the political landscape. But voting behavior is increasingly driven by alignment on social and cultural questions. I think that’s true not only of the mass public but of elite actors, writer types, and intellectuals, too. For a good sense of what I think is actually the most important divide in the broad center-left camp, it’s instructive to listen to the April 23 episode of Georgetown University historian Thomas Zimmer’s podcast with Johns Hopkins political scientist Liliana Mason as a guest. The thesis of the episode is that it’s wrong to frame “polarization” as a problem because the real problem is that Republicans are bad. On climate change, for example, Zimmer says the parties clearly have moved further apart. But, according to him, “Democrats aren’t moving toward an extreme position,” they’re moving toward an expert consensus, while Republicans are “driving into fantasyland.”

Then Mason follows up by talking about the impossibility of compromise on what she sees as fundamental questions of rights.

“You can compromise on what level of taxation we should have,” she says. “You can compromise on things like, you know, how much aid we should give to foreign nations.” By contrast, “the problem is when we’re talking about whether an entire group of human beings in the country who are American citizens should be eradicated. There is no compromise position there. We can’t compromise on whether Black Americans should be treated equally as white Americans.”

And to be clear, Mason isn’t talking about a hypothetical situation where an extremist party gains critical mass and it’s impossible to compromise with them.

That’s her characterization of the present-day Republican Party’s stance on transgender rights and racial equality. Zimmer has occasionally tweeted unkind things about me in ways that I’ve found somewhat puzzling, and this episode helped me understand where he’s coming from. Because this idea they are articulating — that there is a set of identity-linked issues that are beyond the scope of normal political give and take — strikes me as truly the most fundamental divide in progressive politics today. A divide so important that it transcends disagreements about everything else, precisely because the claim being made on the Zimmer/Mason side of the line is that the imperative for a principled stand on these topics trumps all other considerations.

A very new idea

To put my cards on the table, I think Mason has this wrong.

But more than debating the merits of her view, what I’d really like to emphasize is how novel the position she’s outlining is. When Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008, they both opposed same-sex marriage equality. Plenty of more progressive people (like me) disagreed with them about that and said so in public (again, me). But very few people professed to find it morally shocking that practical politicians would pander to public opinion on this issue. I think most of us perceived certain winks and nods designed to indicate that leading Democrats actually agreed with us, and of course, as public opinion shifted in our direction, so did the views of leading Democrats — most of whom claimed to have been for equality the whole time.

LGBTQ rights groups, of course, spent Obama’s whole term pushing him to be bolder on the marriage issue. But despite Obama’s unwillingness to embrace their view, they were not agnostic during the 2008 campaign. The fact was that Obama and McCain disagreed on LGBTQ issues, and they chose to back the better candidate.

One cycle earlier, in the 2004 primary, Howard Dean distinguished himself by his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. But the earliest foundation of his campaign was laid by the gay community. As Thomas Edsall reported at the time, “with just one exception, every fundraiser Dean attended outside Vermont in 2002 was organized by gay men and lesbians, as were more than half the events in the first quarter of 2003.” Stephanie Schriock is a top Democratic consultant who managed Jon Tester’s 2006 campaign and Al Franken’s 2008 campaign before doing a stint as executive director of EMILY’s List. But first, she was Dean’s finance director. And she said the gay community “was the first to recognize Dean's strength of character after his leadership on Vermont's civil union legislation, and because of that, they were the first to open up their homes for events and ask their friends and colleagues to give money to this endeavor.”

His leadership on what, exactly? On civil union legislation. Oldsters may recall that when marriage equality was very unpopular, civil unions were an effort to forge a compromise position on a question of fundamental rights. The idea was that gay and lesbian couples could have a kind of special status that carried most of the practical benefits of marriage without being marriage as such. In short, a compromise. On people’s fundamental rights. With the idea being that via compromise, they could get more rights.

Before that, Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, a completely sordid act of political opportunism that earned him plenty of criticism from the left. At the same time, Clinton enjoyed plenty of organized gay political support. This was a time when Senate Republicans were blocking the confirmation of an openly gay ambassador for literally no reason other than bigotry, and the Clinton administration did things on gay rights like adopt a non-discrimination policy in the federal workforce, promote hate crimes legislation, and advocate for an employment non-discrimination act. Clinton’s record on these issues was deeply unsatisfactory, but his administration was offering something rather than nothing, and on that basis he and Al Gore earned a lot of support from the gay community.

The civil rights movement compromised a lot

Overall, the gay rights movement won faster victories with fewer compromises than you might have expected based on the record of previous movements for equal rights.

The other day I was reading a speech FDR gave during the 1944 campaign in Chicago. Chicago was, more or less, the epicenter of Black political power in the era before the Voting Rights Act, and the Chicago African American community had traditionally voted Republican but flipped to the Democrats because New Deal economic programs were popular.

As a result, in a speech that was mostly about his proposed Economic Bill of Rights, FDR offered this rather pathetic pitch for his civil rights record:

And with all that, our Economic Bill of Rights—like the sacred Bill of Rights of our Constitution itself—must be applied to all our citizens, irrespective of race, or creed or color.

Three years ago, back in 1941, I appointed a Fair Employment Practice Committee to prevent discrimination in war industry and Government employment. The work of that Committee and the results obtained more than justify its creation.

I believe that the Congress of the United States should by law make the Committee permanent.

FDR’s civil rights record was, frankly, bad. He did less on voting rights and lynching than many of his Republican predecessors, and only established the Fair Employment Practice Committee under considerable pressure from A. Philip Randolph. And the FEPC itself was a very weak agency. Roosevelt has a noteworthy role in history as the first Democrat to do anything at all on civil rights, and (not coincidentally) the first Democrat to win the majority of the Black vote. But what he did was very little.

That said, enfranchised Black voters did vote for him, and Randolph absolutely accepted compromises. He threatened a mass protest unless the federal government acted on discrimination in wartime industries, and when he won the FEPC, he took yes for an answer. He didn’t compromise in the sense of giving up on the struggle for civil rights. That went on for decades. Randolph corresponded with Harry Truman about segregation in the military, and he won that battle in 1948. Brown v. Board of Education happened in 1954 (and itself followed several earlier court cases about segregation in graduate schools and colleges) and eventually entailed the Eisenhower administration sending troops to Little Rock. There was a weak Civil Rights Act of 1957 and a slightly less-weak Civil Rights Act of 1960 and eventually the big Civil Rights Act of 1964, then the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and then in 1968 the Fair Housing Act.

Throughout it all, the civil rights movement was pressing for more, and there were always people urging them to be more moderate and more compromising, saying “you’re going too fast.” And they rejected that. But they also clearly weren’t totally uncompromising, either. They treated all kinds of half-measures as meaningful and lots of deeply flawed politicians as worthy of support. There was no categorical distinction between civil rights and economic issues; it was all politics.

The de-centering of economics

Over the past 20–30 years, the voting base of the Democratic Party has become a lot more educated and upscale.

One might have predicted that would lead to the adoption of a more moderate stance on economic issues, but that hasn’t really happened. Instead, as political scientist Matt Grossman recently told Tom Edsall, there’s no “evidence that the Democratic Party has abandoned redistributive politics or changed its positions on business regulation. Instead, they are increasingly emphasizing social issues and combining social concerns with their traditional economic concerns.” Indeed, I would say that rather than moderating on economics, many Democrats have if anything moved left and become more forthright in arguing that the country ought to try to shift to something much closer to a European welfare state.

At the same time, it’s not a coincidence that the Biden administration has enacted only small increases in the generosity of the welfare state, even though they’ve proposed huge ones. Democrats didn’t have the votes to enact the full Biden agenda, and running up against hard fiscal constraints, they chose to spend more on climate change than on welfare state expansion. And I think you can see how, from the point of view of a working-class person who (like most people) does not care that much about climate change, this can look like an abandonment of the traditional economic agenda.

That’s especially true if thought leaders are putting forward the idea that economic issues have, in some sense, lower moral stakes than other issues.

In particular, I think it’s worth considering the impact of this way of thinking on cross-pressured voters. Imagine a Texan who favors Medicaid expansion but thinks student athletes should play on chromosomally-appropriate sports teams. Well, you could tell that person that Medicaid has enormous concrete stakes for 1.4 million uninsured Texans while the sports issue impacts a tiny number of people.

But if progressives take the view that identity issues are fundamental moral principles and are too important to brook any compromise, that encourages people with the non-progressive view to see it the same way. And when you’re on the unpopular side of the fundamental issue of conscience, that just means you lose elections and lose on both policy issues.

Purity privilege

Of course, not all Democrats see it that way. Joe Biden is old-fashioned and talked during the primary about how when he first got to the Senate, he was serving alongside segregationists and learned to work with them on other issues. He took a lot of criticism for that in some quarters, but he won the primary, won the election, and has passed some bipartisan bills.

Or to take an even sharper example, John Bel Edwards has signed some very draconian anti-abortion bills in Louisiana. I think he’s dead wrong on the merits of this topic. And in most of the country that would be terrible politics, too — abortion rights are generally more popular than the Democratic Party, and Democrats do well post-Dobbs to talk a lot about their support of a woman’s right to choose. But there is state-to-state variation, and in lots of Southern states, abortion is less popular than the Democratic Party due to the presence of significant numbers of anti-abortion African Americans. So in Edwards’ case, by giving ground on abortion, he’s been able to expand Medicaid and accomplish other things. Unlike with Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, I have absolutely no problem with abortion rights advocates slagging Edwards, because he is genuinely right-wing on this issue. But my old-fashioned view is that nothing is beyond compromise.

It’s a minor miracle for a Democrat to have won a statewide election in Louisiana. Edwards has accomplished important things as governor, and if he could somehow manage to win a Senate race, his value-over-replacement senator would be incredibly high.

I think the growing popularity of the Mason/Zimmer view reflects the demographic realignment of the parties. As Democrats have become more upscale, they haven’t shifted their policy platform on economics to the right. But they have become less interested in forming big tent electoral coalitions to maximize the odds of welfare state expansion and more interested in ideological purity and uncompromising moral stands. Because the uncompromising moral stand is more appealing if you are not personally counting on Medicaid expansion to make a concrete difference in your life.