Building a movement
by Tom Sullivan
“There’s something about the fast-moving, ground-shaking political moment we’re in that defies the nomenclature we have,” Sarah Jaffe writes at New Republic. Hers is one of a trio of articles there this week that, as a group, map out the ground on which the left and the Democratic Party are either a) fighting, or b) building.
Bob Moser considers centrist New Democracy as a “risible relic with a fancy budget.” These are mainstream players with enough budget to persist in Washington way past their use-by dates, “a reassertion of the wealth-first economics, go-slow social progressivism, and hawkish foreign policy” that finished off the Democrats’ New Deal legacy in the 1990s. They are also (largely because they attract money) still taken seriously by the Washington establishment.
They are also the ones who, like clockwork, warn the sky will fall if Democrats get the least bit edgy in whom they promote for the presidency. Or else it’s McGovern Redux, as a recent Politico Magazine think(?) piece warned.
Moser writes:
The “no more McGoverns” argument has been recycled and appropriated by anti-liberal Democrats—with nips and tucks to suit the needs of the moment—in practically every presidential election since 1972. They wielded it like a tiki torch against Jesse Jackson’s populist insurgency in 1988, and invoked it to torpedo Howard Dean in 2004. And after its ironclad logic failed to derail Barack Obama in 2008, the “McGovern threat” was revived with a vengeance against Sanders in 2016.
The goal of these disinformation campaigns has always been the same: to frighten the left into falling in line with the moneyed masters of the party. And at a moment when the party is finally abandoning the New Democratic formula—suck up to big business and the military-industrial complex, pander to white supremacy, and win!—fear-mongering is the only thin reed of hope the “moderates” have to retain their supremacy in the party.
Republicans in 1980 “went with their hearts and minds,” Moser writes, in backing Ronald Reagan, and his politics dominated for nearly 30 years. Democrats who advocate caution and timidity now are not going to fare well in 2020.
Graham Vyse examines how Sen. Elizabeth Warren represents the soul of a party that has moved “decisively to the left.” Congressman Jamie Raskin, vice chair of Congressional Progressive Caucus, believes Warren represents a “kind of a return to the progressivism of the early 20th century” and is now “the center of gravity within the Democratic Party.”
Indeed, that was Warren’s declaration to progressive activists at Netroots Nation last August: “We are not the gate crashers of today’s Democratic Party. We are not a wing of today’s Democratic Party. We are the heart and soul of today’s Democratic Party.”
The American Prospect‘s Bob Kuttner calls her “the best progressive Democratic politician I’ve seen since Bobby Kennedy.” From blocking Barack Obama’s nomination of Larry Summers to chair the Federal Reserve to her confrontations with bankers, Warren has succeeded in “making pocketbook populism feel mainstream.” Not to mention how she’s become “a great inside player.”
Here again, party centrists sense their Beltway sinecures under threat:
Moderate Democrats won’t all agree that Warren has become the center of the party. But Warren elicits respect from unusual sources, including the man Bloomberg Businessweek once called “Wall Street’s Favorite Democrat”: Congressman Jim Himes, chair of the centrist New Democrat Coalition. Asked about Warren’s presidential prospects—and Walter’s contention that “the Warren platform” could end up as a litmus test for 2020—he said, “I think it’s possible. There’s a lot of energy on the left wing of the Democratic Party.” Though he hails from a district with “a huge amount of financial services,” the congressman offers plenty of praise for one of Wall Street’s harshest critics. “I’ve never sort of tallied it, but I agree with Elizabeth Warren on much of what she says,” he said. “I agree with a lot of what she puts out there.” He added, “The press desperately wants to foment or preserve the notion that there’s this massive split between the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren gang and the Clinton gang—between the progressives and the moderates—and it’s just not true.“
Third Way’s Jim Kessler is less generous, telling Vyse, “She represents a wing of the party, and she represents it well.” His pick? Joe Biden. But, Kessler admits, Warren might have greater appeal.
That’s why her politics are intriguing to Democrats of many stripes. “The contest between Sanders and Clinton reflected progressive populism and liberal feminism,” Raskin said. “Elizabeth Warren is someone who merges them both. You could view her as the synthesis of the divides in the party we had in the 2016 election—a candidate who would leave nothing out and leave nobody behind.” Polling shows her agenda, which overlaps significantly with Sanders’s, isn’t just popular with Democrats. Most voters supported a $15-an-hour minimum wage, according to Pew survey last year. “Broad, bipartisan majorities support debt-free higher education,” a Demos poll found last October. The notion that the system is rigged in favor of big corporations certainly isn’t out of step with public opinion. Like all progressives, Warren has work to do selling single-payer healthcare, which doesn’t yet have clear majority support. But enthusiasm for Medicare for All is growing among Democrats in Washington and across the country.
Which is to say Third Way and the New Democrat Coalition (New Democracy) are still trying to peddle a politics that is past its use-by date. And why the campaign of “a white, centrist, Harvard-educated war hero” seems so out of touch with the times as to not even evoke a sense of nostaliga.
Sarah Jaffe observes that what we see on the ground since November 8 is something new that horse-race journalism fails to capture. Left-wing activists have begun to win local races in unlikely places. Randall Woodfin, for example, who won a mayoral race in Birmingham, Alabama last week.
But these are not simply Sanders- or Warren-wing victories. The simplifying narratives employed in the press to explain the new energy in the grassroots not only shortchange what work has gone into building a new wave of activism. Jaffe believes “telling the story wrong lessens the chances that these unlikely wins can be replicated elsewhere.”
What is bubbling to the surface is the result of years of activism and movement-building:
Larry Krasner, a civil-rights attorney who won a shocking victory in May’s Democratic primary to be Philadelphia’s district attorney, told The Dig podcast that his work as a lawyer defending movements gave him a campaign army when he decided to run. “I think activists and organizers do politics better than politicians,” he said. “And that means that those of us who have been down with their causes and have supported them for a long time have credibility.”
In some places, newer faces on the scene have established credibility by leading newer movements. Atlanta’s khalid kamau (a Yoruba name, and thus lowercased)—a DSA member and co-founder of Atlanta Black Lives Matter and “fight for $15” stalwart—stunned the local Democrats by winning a city council seat in April.
The more radical demands of the newer movements have shifted the left’s political horizons and sharpened its demands. And its organizing skills and social-media savvy laid a path for activists like Krasner and kamau to move from relative obscurity to national name recognition. “Social movements expand the range of the possible and transform public opinion,” says Joe Dinkin of the WFP. “Larry never could have won had the Black Lives Matter movement not existed these last several years. The Black Lives Matter movement transformed how Americans thought about policing and about mass incarceration.”
People who have been engaged for years now have greater credibility with broader coalitions of support than they have for years. Those coalitions are not impressed by “just some person who has never spoken to these groups before, but all of a sudden is an advocate.”
The movement that supported Sanders in 2016 was simply too broad to lend itself to easy labeling, ranging as it did from the socialists of DSA to left-leaning Democrats who hadn’t been moved to hit the streets under President Obama. “There’s a much larger scale of people who are open to a left politics that’s a bit more moderate than your average DSA member but to the left of the Democratic party mainstream,” says Robertson. There are also those—like Randall Woodfin himself—who backed Clinton in the primary, but are to the left of the Democratic mainstream and have fought since the inauguration against Trump’s policies.
“In the age of Trump, most Democrats are in no mood to wait around and make slow progress when so much is under attack—voters want what they believe in and they want it now,” says Dinkin of the Working Families Party. “Trump has been part of awakening a new fervor and even militancy in voters.”
The problem national Democrats have is still believing top-down organizing will still work for them. All the energy is flowing from the bottom up.
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