Over at MyDD, Chris Bowers gets the new year rolling with a post about the gradual displacement of “liberal” by “progressive” as the key self-identifier of Americans on the left and center-left of our political system. Chris’ history lesson on the subject is basically sound if a bit incomplete. He’s correct in saying that late-nineteenth century Democrats (at least up until the fusion with Populists in 1896) were “liberal” in the European sense of favoring laissez-faire economic policies; there’s a good reason that ur-libertarian Ayn Rand regarded Grover Cleveland as the beau ideal of American political history. But they did not always think of themselves as such, given their espousal of states-rights and constitutional strict-construction doctrines; regular southern Democrats in particular called their party “conservative” through most of the nineteenth century.Likewise, “progressive” was not universally used as the self-identifier of the center-left prior to the New Deal. The term was often used by business interests who thought of advanced capitalism as a historically determined trend. And many Populists, who often argued they were restoring a pre-capitalist Jeffersonian political order, certainly didn’t embrace the label of “progressive,” either. Chris is spot-on in noting that “progressive” became tainted by its association with the pro-communist (or at least anti-anti-communist) Left, especially in 1948. And he’s also right in acknowledging that the revival of the “progressive” self-identification occurred almost simultaneously in two very different parts of the Democratic Party in the 1990s: the anti-war, anti-corporate, anti-establishment Left, and the New Democrat movement in the center-left. I have one quibble with Chris’ suggestion that New Democrats started using the term “progressive” (most notably with the establishment of the Progressive Policy Institute in 1989) “as a means to avoid being labeled as ‘liberal.'” That suggests the terminology was purely cosmetic and non-ideological. In fact, the early New Democrats argued that “liberalism” had become temperamentally reactionary, consumed with defending the dead letter of every single New Deal/Great Society program and policy, while sacrificing the spirit of innovation that made “progressives” progressive. The whole international “Third Way” phenomenon was not designed to produce a moderate middle-point between Left and Right, but instead a reformulation of the progressive mission of the center-left at a time when the Right was successfully battening on popular discontent with outworn social democratic programs. That’s why many of us from the New Dem tradition heartily dislike the “centrist” or “moderate” labels, even though they are hard to escape as a short-hand for intra-party politics. (I could, but won’t, go off into a digression about the unusual nature of the American left, which never even flirted with Marxism, and never really embraced European-style democratic socialism, despite some social-democratic features of the Populist program and the New Deal).As for Chris’ ultimate question about the advisability of “progressive” as a unifying, if not always clarifying, self-identifier for the American left and center-left, I’m certainly comfortable with the P-word as opposed to the L-word. Outside the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom (and perhaps to a very limited extent, Germany), the term “liberal” is invariably associated with the political right, while “progressive” has begun to replace “social democratic” as the preferred general term for the left and center-left (the latter process being hastened by the collapse of communism). A particular irritant in any transnational discussion of political terminology has been the variable meaning of the term “neo-liberal,” which outside the US denotes the Thatcher-Reagan revival of the political right based on dogmatic market capitalism, while here it lingers as the chosen self-identifier for those proto-New Democrats of the 1980s associated with the germinal thinking of the Washington Monthly in those days, which reached its brief zenith in Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign. Even if “progressives” often disagree on a host of issues, the term reminds us of our common moorings in a tradition that is hostile to inherited or state-backed privilege, committed to equal opportunity, cognizant of the ultimate solidarity of all human beings, and determined to both accept and shape the forces of change through collective action. That’s why I’m a progressive, anyway.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 26: The Obama Coalition Revisited
It’s pretty obvious Kamala Harris’s candidacy changes the 2024 presidential race more than a little, and I wrote at New York about one avenue she has for victory that might have eluded Joe Biden:
During her brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, Kamala Harris was widely believed to be emulating Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign strategy. She treated South Carolina, the first primary state with a substantial Black electorate, as the site of her potential breakthrough. But she front-loaded resources into Iowa to prepare for that breakthrough by reassuring Black voters that she could win in the largely white jurisdiction. She had the added advantage of being from the large state of California, where the primary had just been moved up to Super Tuesday (March 3). For a thrilling moment, after her commanding performance in a June 2019 debate, Harris seemed on track to pull off this feat, threatening Joe Biden’s hold on South Carolina in the polls and surging in Iowa. But neither she nor Cory Booker, who also relied on the Obama precedent, could displace Biden as the favorite of Black voters or strike gold in the crowded Iowa field. Out of money and luck, Harris dropped out before voters voted.
Now Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for 2024 without having to navigate any primaries. But she still faces some key strategic decisions. Joe Biden was consistently trailing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he was underperforming among young and non-white voters, the very heart of the much-discussed Obama coalition. Can Harris recoup some of these potential losses without sacrificing support elsewhere in the electorate? That is a question she must address at the very beginning of her general-election campaign.
There’s a chance that Harris can inject a bit of the Obama “hope and change” magic into a Democratic ticket that had previously felt like a desperate effort to defend an unpopular administration led by a low-energy incumbent, as Ron Brownstein suggests in The Atlantic:
“Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch …
“In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.”
Team Trump seems to believe it can offset these potential gains by depicting Harris as a “California radical” and a symbol of diversity who might alienate the older white voters with whom Biden had some residual strength. Obama overcame similar race-saturated appeals in 2008, but he had a lot of help from a financial collapse and an unpopular war presided over by the party of his opponent.
Following Obama’s path has major strategic implications in terms of the battleground map. Any significant improvement over Biden’s performance among Black, Latino, and under-30 voters might put Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina — very nearly conceded to Trump in recent weeks — back into play. But erosion of Biden’s support among older and/or non-college-educated white voters could create potholes in his narrow Rust Belt path to victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
These strategic choices could definitely affect Harris’s choice of a running-mate, not just in terms of potentially picking a veep from a battleground state, but as a way of amplifying the shift produced by Biden’s withdrawal. Brownstein even thinks Harris might consider following Bill Clinton’s 1992 example of doubling down on her own strengths:
“The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. ‘I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down’ with Whitmer, [Democratci consultant Mike] Mikus told me. ‘I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.’ I heard similar views from several consultants.”
Whitmer’s expressed disinterest in the veepstakes may take that particular option off the table, but the broader point remains: Harris does not have to — and may not be able to — simply adopt Biden’s strategy and tweak it slightly. She may be able to contemplate gains in the electorate that were unimaginable for an 81-year-old white male incumbent. But the strategic opportunity to follow Obama’s path to the White House will first depend on Harris’s ability to refocus persuadable voters on Trump’s shaky record, bad character, and extremist agenda. Biden could not do that after the debate debacle of June 27. His successor must begin taking the battle to the former president right now.