Ascendant progressives face three big obstacles

The emergence of a bipartisan consensus following weeks of protests about racial injustice — that police departments need either complete overhauls or major reforms — is a big moment years in the making for the progressive movement.

Many Republican conservatives who once reflexively called the killing of unarmed blacks “isolated acts” are now suddenly backing law enforcement reforms in reaction to a never-ending series of cellphone videos showing callous or deadly police misconduct — as well as fresh examples of police brutality at recent protests against, yes, police brutality.

George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police on May 25 will be seen as a turning point in American history. Perhaps a major one.

Many activists sense a desire for societal change to address inequities that go far beyond police behavior. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is one of many politicians who agrees, vowing “to rebuild a fairer city that profoundly addresses injustice and disparity.”

And high-profile Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, is renewing her push for a Green New Deal to transform the economy in a way that helps the environment and lifts up underprivileged minorities. She just won a primary with 72 percent of the vote and has emerged as a fundraising juggernaut who can help like-minded candidates win office.

In California, a ballot measure asking voters to reconsider affirmative action — which Proposition 209 banned in 1996 for state contracts, hiring and college admissions — won swift and overwhelming approval in both the Assembly and Senate, supercharged by recent anti-racism protests.

And the state Assembly had another historic moment last month when it approved a measure to study how to provide reparations to African Americans.

So could this national mood translate into vast change beyond police reform if Joe Biden defeats President Donald Trump and Democrats control the Senate and House in 2021?

Here are three reasons to be skeptical about that — and none involve Republican lawmakers’ opposition.

The first is that progressives’ current detente with the conventionally liberal Biden-Barack Obama-Nancy Pelosi-Chuck Schumer wing of the Democratic Party is a fig leaf covering up the fact that the groups have huge differences. The anger of the progressive left toward the last two Democratic Party presidents and Democratic congressional leadership is hard to exaggerate.

It’s not just over old-school Democrats’ insufficiently aggressive agenda — shorthanded as noisome “neoliberalism.” It’s that many longtime party members say American democracy is flawed but still good while many progressives call the U.S. a “failed state” or “failed experiment.” It was then-President Barack Obama who pointed out the party’s disconnect in 2015 when he said many on college campuses “don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African Americans, or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women.”

Obama said that he doesn’t agree that students “have to be coddled and protected from different points of views,” breaking with progressives on the fundamental issue of speech.

The second reason to doubt a series of dramatic overhauls is that millions of registered American independents — a group that in February for the first time outnumbered registered Republicans — are by and large mushy moderates who support incremental change.

A 2019 NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll showed that 62 percent of independents wanted a third political party because of their unhappiness with Democrats and Republicans alike.

But the third reason to doubt we will see a societal transformation has to do with the cynical version of the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. You don’t have to be a Marxist member of the Occupy movement to realize how much government functions in a fundamental way to protect the super-rich.

You just need to contemplate an absurdly complex U.S. tax code in which the amount of taxes the very wealthy pay are a function of the skill of their tax attorneys — and neither Democratic nor GOP presidents have a problem with this.

If tech billionaires in Silicon Valley, finance billionaires on Wall Street and energy billionaires in Texas think there’s a real chance that the progressive movement will come for their wealth — and that a post-Trump Republican Party is a wrecked brand that is too weak with young voters and minorities to regain its past clout — they will act on their fear.

And every four years, we’ll see tycoon presidential candidates in the vein of Michael Bloomberg or Ross Perot who run ridiculously well-funded independent campaign against what they will depict as Democratic extremists on the left and GOP extremists on the right.

If America’s billionaires think the Republican Party is permanently diminished by Trump and the Democratic Party is ready to abandon capitalism, they will be even more blatant in trying to buy power. And they’ll have the resources to make their campaign seem like it’s about empowering cautious moderates — not preserving their fortunes.

So, yes, progressives are having a moment. But there is a ceiling on what they can achieve because large swaths of the public don’t share their agenda — and the nation’s most powerful people hate it.