Centrist Democrats should stop blaming progressives for Harris’s loss
(A far better opinion piece than Perry Bacon Jr.’s last embarrassing piece I posted yesterday. The Democratic Party cannot give up its commitment to civil rights to gain working class White bigots. We must turn out our vote. We. Could have done a better job of that by education which focuses on less educated young people.)
“Whether to use he/she pronouns in emails wasn’t a factor in the Harris-Trump race.
Center-left and establishment Democrats are trying to marginalize the party’s left wing in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss last month, in some ways mirroring what moderates — including Bill Clinton — did in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
The bashing of progressives started almost immediately after the election — and hasn’t stopped since. Commentator James Carville said Harris could “never wash off the stench” of left-wing rhetoric such as “defund the police.” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Massachusetts) said: “Here we are calling Republicans weird, and we’re the party that makes people put pronouns in their email signature.” Quentin Fulks, who was Harris’s deputy campaign manager, said party activists too often force Democratic candidates to apologize, particularly hurting them with male voters, because, according to him, “men don’t like people who apologize.”
I hope this effort is unsuccessful. It’s based on a false premise. The Democrats’ biggest electoral problem isn’t its less-powerful progressive wing, but rather a centrist establishment that clings to power while constantly losing elections and major policy fights. And, as happened in the 1990s, a rightward move by Democrats on policy could hurt some of the most vulnerable people and groupsin American society.
As election analysis, these takes aren’t particularly strong. Whether to put he/she pronouns in emails wasn’t a factor in Harris’s race against Donald Trump. The “defund the police” slogan was most prominent in 2020 — a year Democrats won the House, Senate and the presidency. Harris didn’t issue a big apology during her campaign. (Election results aside, politicians and anyone else in America who does something that they regret should apologize. I am disappointed I have to use space in a published article in 2024 to note that it’s plenty manly to say, “I’m sorry.”)
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So, if these supposed faults of progressives aren’t really why Harris lost, why are center-left Democrats so fixated on them? For three reasons. The first one (and what I suspect is really driving most of the left-bashing) is that the center-left Democratic establishment wants to shift blame for a painful election defeat that by most objective measures is almost entirely the establishment’s fault.
People who support defunding the police have almost no power in the Democratic Party. Centrists do. Center-left and establishment Democrats unified behind Joe Biden over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) during the 2020 primaries and were largely supportive of him running for a second term until his dreadful performance at a June debate with Trump. Once Harris became the party’s candidate, she heeded calls from the center-left to run a moderatecampaign, emphasizing the importance of the United States maintaining the “most lethal” military in the world and appealing to the wealthy and big corporations.
Party centrists could either acknowledge that their preferred strategies and candidates have failed — or blame progressives. It’s not surprising they have chosen the latter path. Who would want to admit they lost two out of three elections to Trump?
The second reason for the wave of anti-left, post-election screeds is that the center-left wants to diminish progressives’ influence on the party’s values and policy stances. Pinning the left with the 2024 defeat is a way to discredit progressives on even non-electoral questions. We are watching an ideological and policy battle being waged through election analysis.
While progressives have had fairly limited influence on Democratic electoral strategy, particularly in the Harris campaign, they do have power in other aspects of the party. Centrists have often complained over the last four years as the Biden administration forgave student loans, put former Elizabeth Warren staffers into senior positions and took other actions that were on progressives’ wish lists.
And perhaps even more than their policy power, progressives have gained ground in shaping the cultural and social stances of many important sectors of American society, including politics. The Democratic Party is not forcing anyone, particularly a member of Congress such as Moulton, to put their preferred pronouns in emails, support transgender girls playing sports, or adopt other more liberal and tolerant stances.
But since 2014, particularly at the heights of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, it is almost certainly the case that people who live and work in left-leaning environments, such as Moulton, feel strong social pressure to be supportive of progressive social justice rhetoric and causes if they want to be perceived as good, moral people by their peers. And some corporations do require their workers to participate in diversity-training sessions that employees might object to on ideological grounds.
Many centrists have had enough. They want to be able to express their more conservative beliefs and values without being harshly criticized by progressives as insufficiently committed to civil rights and other liberal values. And people in the center-left are much more likely to get a pass from fellow Democrats if their ideological arguments are couched in electoral terms. “Democrats lose when we put our pronouns in emails” is likely easier for Moulton to say in his social circles than, “I don’t see the point of people putting their pronouns in emails.”
But the third reason for the left-bashing is more sincere. Some centrist Democrats support police reform, transgender rights, increased immigration and other causes championed by progressives — but also believe the Democratic Party can’t win national elections while embracing these stances, particularly on issues of race and identity. They rarely say this directly (and it would be better for this intraparty debate if they did). But lots of center-left figures in the party are hinting at, essentially: “Democrats can be for transgender girls playing high school sports or for winning Wisconsin, and I think winning Wisconsin should be a bigger priority right now.”
That is a reasonable position. There is often a tension between winning elections and taking morally correct stances. Abraham Lincoln probably could not have won the 1860 election if he had called for an immediate abolition of slavery. Lyndon B. Johnson had a better chance of being elected president in 1964 than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Perhaps Clinton’s moves to distance himself from civil rights activist Jesse Jackson and other liberals during the 1992 campaign were essential to his victory. Officials in San Francisco who conducted some of the nation’s first same-sex weddings in 2004, including then-District Attorney Kamala Harris, might have hurt John Kerry’s presidential campaign.
It’s hard in an election as close as last month’s to be confident that Harris would have won if she had opposed transgender girls playing sports or if the “defund the police” slogan had never become prominent. Also, taking more conservative stances has real-world downsides. It was bad for gay and lesbian Americans that most prominent Democrats refused to support same-sex marriage until 2012.
But if Democrats had exhausted all other realistic options to win, I might be supportive of them renouncing the party’s support for affirmative action or increased legal immigration. After all, even if Democrats move right on some issues of equality, they are still better than the Republicans.
Democrats are nowhere close to having tried everything else, though. Before throwing social justice causes and activists under the bus, could they consider not running an 81-year-old candidate for president? Or his vice president, who insists on never criticizing him? How about a party chair whose experience is in running successful campaigns, not lobbying for corporations? Or not relying on strategists whose heydays were 16 years ago? How about language that normal people use, instead of stilted phrases such as “opportunity economy”?
Of course centrist-left Democrats want people who disagree with them ideologically to have less power inside the party. Of course they don’t want to take responsibility for Trump winning a second term. But if you’re not a centrist or part of the Democratic establishment, you shouldn’t join this left-bashing. Progressives didn’t lose the 2024 race, and marginalizing them won’t guarantee victories in 2026 and 2028.
The Democratic Party isn’t just an election organization. Its real purpose is to advance good policies that make the United States a better country. The party shouldn’t shun its principles and values to win elections, as centrists are calling for, but instead find the right candidates and tactics so it can win elections while also defending transgender rights, racial justice and other liberal values.
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