The left’s best play: Don’t trash Biden, help him
The all-or-nothing folks will say moderates will sell you out and half a loaf is much worse than none. This doesn’t help Democrats, America or the left.
Some prominent figures on the American left don’t want to waste time celebrating deliverance from authoritarian rule or figuring out how to make the most of a Biden administration pledged to an accelerating program of renewable energy, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, paid family leave, support for unions, restoring voting rights and a host of other progressive measures.
As Donald Trump fades in the rearview mirror, the all-or-nothing caucus has more urgent concerns. Its idea of the left requires trashing the winner because he was embraced by party elites and, embarrassingly, won primaries against candidates further to the left. Its first mantra is: Moderates will sell you out. Its second: Half a loaf is much worse than no loaf at all, because it will delude the naive masses into believing that things are moving in the right direction.
Left-wing Yale professor Samuel Moyn, whose cynicism about liberals runs a close second to Rush Limbaugh’s, tweets approvingly an article from The New Republic headlined, “Joe Biden’s Cabinet Is a Lost Cause for the Left,” failing to note that Biden’s appointments to address climate change put the United States back in line with the European Union and other sane governments working to lower carbon dioxide emissions faster than ever before.
And even as Biden has announced the Democratic Party’s most progressive economic and climate teams ever, Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder and editor of Jacobin magazine, frets aloud that “the Democrats are continuing their steady rebrand from the party of FDR’S New Deal and economic redistribution to the party of diversity and cultural posturing.”
Rather than leverage progressive strength to move Biden policies leftward, Sunkara deplores the way Biden’s appointments “foreground identity” at the expense of real policy: “Instead of Democratic leaders actually nourishing the tired, poor and huddled masses with a robust welfare state, we’re told to eat diversity instead.”
It’s as if Biden never promised “a plan to create millions of good-paying jobs” in infrastructure, health care and renewable energy. It’s as if he opposes progressive taxation. It’s as if he never
promised “further immediate relief to working families, small businesses, and communities,” including providing “state, local, and tribal governments with the aid they need so educators, firefighters and other essential workers aren’t being laid off,” “a comeback package for Main Street businesses and entrepreneurs,” and to immediately “put people to work by enlisting them to help fight the pandemic, including through a Public Health Jobs Corps.”
None of this is a secret. It’s all on his website.
The sure road to irrelevance under a government that brings together disparate forces is to inflame rage at the moderates more intensely than one mobilizes forces to strengthen “the left wing of the possible,” in Michael Harrington’s memorable phrase.
The unreconciled “we told you so” folks are ever ready to call “Gotcha!” It’s as if the evidence demonstrates (contrary to fact) that progressive congressional candidates are sure to win in moderate distracts.
The chorus must always be tuned up, ready to go, to signal to hyper-alert Democrats that their party is, at bottom, nothing more than the neoliberal Tweedledee to Trump’s aspirationally fascist Tweedledum.
What the “we told you so caucus” does not understand is that the whole Democratic Party – moderates as well as the left – shares a stake in helping Biden succeed. Only if he delivers quickly, beginning next month, can progressive politics come to life.
If the Democrats win the two Georgia runoffs on Jan. 5, the odds for deep reform are even better, though even if Republicans keep control of the Senate, some doors for progressive change will remain open. Shouting insults at Biden is not the way to make the most of the Democrats’ strength. Neither is cuing up the circular firing squad.
Democratic power can only be anchored, over the longer haul, by showing that Democratic government works for a majority. The only way to peel away some of the less fanatical Trump supporters, over time, is to deliver – to put money in their pockets – to demonstrate that Biden policies stand to shore up a big tent that has room for them, too.
Todd Gitlin, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and chair of its PH.D. program in Communications. His 17 books include “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.” Follow him on Twitter: @toddgitlin