The fight is on for progressives to push Biden to the left. They might just win
Joe Biden has had a hard time capturing the hearts of progressive Democrats. Like the media, progressive Democrats tend to see him as a centrist – a status quo candidate who just wants to return the US and the world to the preTrump era. Even Biden’s collaborations with Bernie Sanders, including the recently announced unity taskforces, are often dismissed as pure window-dressing. But this kind of blithe dismissal of the presumptive Democratic nominee misreads both the politician and the times.
It is true that Biden was never a very progressive Democrat, but neither was he a particularly conservative one. He has been a classic “centrist Democrat”. But it’s important to note that this places him not in the political center of the US electorate, but in the center of the Democratic party – a party that has shifted left significantly since 2016, as has Biden.
Biden is a realist. He knows when the times are a-changin’. That’s why he joined Barack Obama in 2008 and why he has moved to reconcile with Sanders in 2020. After two powerful primary campaigns, Biden is smart enough to acknowledge that Sanders represents the direction the party’s base is moving to, and that he could shape that transformation.
As Gabriel Debenedetti argues in his excellent New York magazine article on the Biden campaign, the Covid-19 pandemic has opened Biden’s eyes to the need for a more radical approach to policy and governance. As Biden told a group of donors: “The blinders have been taken off because of this Covid crisis.”
Crises can lead to fundamental changes. While we mainly focus on the darkest consequences, such as Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in the wake of the Great Depression, that same crisis also gave rise to the greatest progressive project in US history: Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal. While heralded as a “radical” by many today, FDR was in many ways a realpolitiker, politically expedient and adjustable to the mood of the times.
But perhaps the best comparison would be FDR’s protege Lyndon B Johnson, the southerner who, in an atmosphere of intense polarization over civil rights and in the wake of the national trauma of the assassination of John F Kennedy, introduced some of the most important civil rights legislation in US history. As with Johnson, the current crisis provides Biden with an opportunity to step out of the shadow of his charismatic and inspiring Democratic predecessor, Obama, and become a much more transformative president.
To be clear, this is not a foregone conclusion. Moderates, both Democrats and Republicans, also see Biden as a great opportunity, in their case to reestablish the status quo. Many of them have been around Biden for years, if not decades, and play important roles in his campaign – I’m looking at you, Larry Summers.
But the recently announced unity taskforces – on the climate crisis, criminal justice reform, economy, education, healthcare and immigration – show a more mixed picture. First, they much better reflect the ethnic and gender diversity of the contemporary Democratic party and its electorate – with many prominent African American and Hispanic members as well as twice as many female than male co-chairs. Second, they include many prominent progressives, including Sanders surrogates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal – hardly politicians who will accept a token role.
While some “Bernie or bust” keyboard warriors will invariably denounce these progressives as sellouts, and some jaded progressives as naive, they are actually realists who should be supported and strengthened. Few politicians understand the signs of the times better than Ocasio-Cortez. She knows that the country and the party are changing, and she understands that the Covid-19 crisis provides a unique opportunity to accelerate that change.
Moreover, these progressives realize that Biden does not have a set ideology, but is in many ways an empty vessel whose domestic policies and priorities are still very much in flux and in play. In other words, progressives have two fights to fight: one for a President Biden, against the Republicans, and one for a progressive Biden presidency, against the moderate Democrats.
Cas Mudde is a Guardian US columnist and the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor in the school of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia. His latest book is The Far Right Today