In case you hadn’t heard, there was a special election primary this week for the House seat vacated by Biden’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Marcia Fudge. On the Democratic side, Shontel Brown, a member of Cuyahoga County Council, defeated Nina Turner, national co-chair of Bernie Sander’s 2020 presidential campaign. The reaction was the same-old lazy journalism we see so often from most major media outlets. Here are a few of the headlines:
In String of Wins, ‘Biden Democrats’ See a Reality Check for the Left, by Alexander Burns at the New York Times
Nina Turner’s Loss in Ohio Means Biden Doesn’t Need to Keep Caving to the Left, by James Hohmann at the Washington Post
Establishment prevails as Brown beats Turner in Ohio special election, by Ally Mutnick at Politico
Why Democrats Still Need Moderates, Anne Kim, at Washington Monthly
The narrative all of these writers have bought into is that Brown represents the “establishment,” or moderate wing of the Democratic Party, while Turner represents progressives or so-called “base” voters in the party. But guess whose campaign web site lists these priorities:
- a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines,
- extending the moratorium on evictions during the covid pandemic
- expanding coverage to achieve universal health care
- passing the George Floyd Justice for Policing Act, the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act
- paid family and medical leave
- universal Pre-K, free community college for all, free four-year public college for families making under $125,000
- aggressive action on climate change with net-zero emissions by 2050 and a carbon-free power sector by 2035
Yes, those are just some of the things supported by the so-called “moderate Democrat” in that particular race, Shontel Brown. In any other era, that would be considered a strong progressive platform. It also just so happens to align pretty well with the platform put forward by the current Democratic president, Joe Biden.
So what separated these two candidates? Brown emphasized working with Democrats to achieve her priorities. On the other hand, Turner told Peter Nicholas that she had no appetite for the candidates in the 2020 presidential election, suggesting that “It’s like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of shit in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still shit.” Turner also nodded in approval when a campaign surrogate called Rep. James Clyburn “stupid.”
What should seem obvious to anyone is that running against Democratic leaders in a Democratic primary is not a great strategy. And yet, that seems to be what the so-called “progressive” wing of the party is intent on doing.
There are, however, some folks who are catching on. The organization Our Revolution – which was founded by Bernie Sanders and initially led by Nina Turner — is starting to rethink their message.
Rather than insisting on “Medicare for All” — Sanders’ trademark universal, government-funded health care plan — or the climate-change-fighting Green New Deal, Our Revolution is focusing on the more modest alternatives endorsed by President Joe Biden. Those include expanding eligibility for the existing Medicare program and curtailing federal subsidies for fossil fuel companies…
“Coming out of Bernie’s 2016 campaign, in some ways the organization was probably more of a bridge organization between the two electoral cycles,” Joseph Geevarghese, Our Revolution’s executive director, said in an interview. “What we’re trying to build is something that is longer term” and “part of the overall ecosystem of the progressive movement.”
“I think we are rooted in a bold, progressive vision, but we’re also pragmatic progressives,” Geevarghese said.
As someone who has been referring to myself as a “pragmatic progressive” since Obama’s first term in office, I got a kick out of that rebranding. Back in 2015 I wrote some of my thoughts about what that label means. Perhaps the most important distinction is that folks like us align with progressive goals, but differ on process and strategies.
Along those lines, I recently read a fascinating piece by Bayard Rustin, the man who is most responsible for incorporating nonviolent protest into the Civil Rights Movement and organizing the March on Washington. In 1965, he wrote that the civil rights movement was evolving from a protest movement into a full-fledged social—or political— movement. He posited that “A conscious bid for political power is being made, and in the course of that effort a tactical shift is being effected: direct-action techniques are being subordinated to a strategy calling for the building of community institutions or power bases.”
There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement which would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts. But this is not the view I want to debate here, for it is waning. Our problem is posed by those who accept the need for political power but do not understand the nature of the object and therefore lack sound strategies for achieving it; they tend to confuse political institutions with lunch counters…
Neither [the civil rights] movement nor the country’s twenty million black people can win political power alone. We need allies. The future of the Negro struggle depends on whether the contradictions of this society can be resolved by a coalition of progressive forces which becomes the effective political majority in the United States…
The task of molding a political movement out of the March on Washington coalition is not simple, but no alternatives have been advanced. We need to choose our allies on the basis of common political objectives…[T]he objective fact is that Eastland and Goldwater are the main enemies—they and the opponents of civil rights, of the war on poverty, of medicare, of social security, of federal aid to education, of unions, and so forth…
The issue is which coalition to join and how to make it responsive to your program. Necessarily there will be compromise. But the difference between expediency and morality in politics is the difference between selling out a principle and making smaller concessions to win larger ones. The leader who shrinks from this task reveals not his purity but his lack of political sense.
I am amazed at Rustin’s prescience. In addition to recognizing the need for coalitions in order to gain political power, he basically defined the next stage of the civil rights movement to be one of addressing what we now call “systemic racism,” all while identifying the early stages of movement towards income inequality.
So according to the lazy journalism practiced by current political commentators, was Rustin a center-left moderate or a progressive? Of course, I would say “neither.” He was obviously a full-fledged pragmatic progressive.
It is beyond time to re-think the old narrative in order to capture what is actually happening in the Democratic Party today.
Good to see you back, Nancy.
Nina Turner’s comment about the choice between Biden and Trump in the 2020 election makes my blood boil, because it reminds me of 2016 and the people said it was better to vote for Jill Stein, some other third-party candidate or simply sit out the election because they couldn’t see any difference between Hillary Clinton and Trump. I’m still convinced they helped to swing the election to Trump. People like Nina Turner learned nothing from that disaster. With allies like these . . .
I have described myself as a “pragmatic progressive” on a number of occasions, and have often been vilified, and on the receiving end of a lot if eye rolls from those I know who see that term as a sellout to their vision of a “true progressive”. I somehow don’t pass the progressive purity test, in their view, simply because I lean in the direction of not doing an “all in, take or leave it approach”. Those comments of Rustin’s that you cite sound like they were written based on today’s news. It is fascinating how timeless those words have turned out to be.
That “all in, take it or leave it approach” is basically the other side of the recent insurrection, isn’t it? It’s just left’s version of it. I’m against chaos. We don’t want total chaos because chaos is awful. We need a certain amount of stability or we’re going to drop back to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy and be dealing with physiological and safety needs again for the majority of the population and that is not a good thing. Do people not realize this?
I feel like we’ve already backslid a lot in recent decades because of government dysfunction. We’re leaving a lot of folks behind such that they’re concerned about the basics because the bargain we’ve had isn’t working for everyone anymore. I don’t think it ever was working for everybody either. It feels like that’s where we need to focus. But I have no idea how you fix this in a country where a good sized chunk of the populace are essentially delusional. We obviously need some rethinking about how we operate our representative government so it’s more representative. But do we really have the time to fix it at this point? I assume that the next time the current batch of Rs capture the government we’re done at this point. :-/ And I don’t see us impeaching half the members of congress without some crazy backlash where the folks who replace them are 10x worse and even more intent on stopping democracy.
Very good to read you again, Nancy.
well said.
Progress is about power. No power, no progress. This seems obvious but apparently not. A great many of my fellow Democrats believe the point is to win debating points, to be right, to score a gotcha on Twitter. It’s an academic model, as though every two years we have a big SAT test, rather than an election. The Republicans understand it’s about power and as a result of that focus, as well as the institutional factors that favor rustics, is how they punch above their weight.
I stumbled upon a useful word that I quite like: consequentialist. Show me how your policy or idea will help the people living under the freeway not half a mile from my home. Show me the real world good. Not the intention to do good, but the actual effect on real people, the real people we are meant as a party to protect.
I told my progressive friends (and family) that things like changing police behavior is not a hashtag fight, this is trench warfare carried out city by city, department by department over the course of years. But hashtags are easy and attending city hall meetings and keeping the pressure on is hard. So we have virtually nothing to show for Defund but lost House seats. Worse, we subsumed the BLM movement which was the legitimate cri de coeur of Black people in the real world.
Bernie and Warren and AOC are toning down their rhetoric and doing a better job of being allies. That’s encouraging. But progressives have a lot of ground to make up with voters. Mistakes happen, the job now is to climb out of the hole.
Good post. One bullet in the list of priorities from the Brown website caught my eye, mostly because I had just read Martin’s post about Republicans and fascism. This bullet
What we progressives are often so blind to is the fact that Americans in rural communities who don’t have any post high school education don’t see free community college and free public college for the lower middle class to be helpful at all. These are people (Americans with the right to be represented) whose self image does not include feeling capable of succeeding at college of any kind. They decry the loss of status for the uneducated American who is valued for having a work ethic, and for having some social values around not wanting someone else to have to take care of them. The bullet above is going to just be seen as a threat of further alienation from a society that places SOOO much value on education and academic expertise. (And no value on the person with no-post-HS that knows how to manage a small farm or a local hardware store.)
The bullet above should say:
“Strong federal programs to grow good jobs that don’t require a degree, free job skill training, free apprenticeship programs, free technical school for all; universal Pre-K, free community college for all who want it, free four-year public college for families making under $125,000.”
Progressives are quick to express their empathy for immigrants who want to be a part of the American dream, and are willing to work for sub-living wages working fields so that we can enjoy fresh food on our tables. But we seem unwilling to express empathy for the n-th generation American who is uneducated but willing to work, and finds himself or herself left out of our global knowledge-based economy. To some people this makes us look like we value immigrants more that uneducated people who have been Americans for generations.
In reality it is just our value-based response to the injustice to immigrants, but we are blind to how it comes across to a significant percentage of our countrymen.
I agree the Democratic messaging is not getting through to rural white working class voters, but I am not sure there is a possible message that is competitive unless we are prepared to lie.
Globalization has been proceeding for decades. Labour market economists (like me) have been wrestling with this issue since the early 1970’s. It was clear then that the job market was going to change. We knew that highly paid jobs for people with commonly held skills were going to disappear. The North American labour market was going to produce more highly paid jobs that required real skill and more lower paid jobs for the unskilled. Whether this change and globalization was a good thing or not is now irrelevant. I would argue that it was for the good, but that debate was decided 50 years ago and there is no going back.
First, where I live (an isolated rural community in Canada still dealing with rust belt issues) community college is the place to go for job skill training and pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs. It may be different in Ohio, but I thought the Brown agenda included these things.
Second, in my experience, most unskilled people looking for highly paid work are not interested in job training or apprenticeship programs when there is no immediate job payoff. When Hillary promised training for displaced coal miners in West Virginia, the response was “Training for what? There are no jobs to train for”. I heard this song played over and over through the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.
Third, in my experience, “strong Federal programs to grow good jobs” for the unskilled is an impossibilty. If there was a way to grow good jobs that do not require some specialized skill, we would have found it 50 years ago.
Finally, any real solution to rust belt issues are hard, produce mixed results at best, and take years to have an impact. The Democratic agenda is not a very good answer because there is no good answer. A good work ethic and a desire to be independent is not enough to earn a good living any more. That is why society places so much value on education. It is the only path forward that is possible.
Democrats cannot compete with that message even though it is the truth because the Trumpian playbook exploits the pain of those who have been left behind. They lie. They blame immigrants or trade deals for the problems. They claim that they can bring high paying jobs for the unskilled back by waving a magic wand and produce a return to the labour market of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
How does a realistic approach that might produce slow improvement compete with a fantasy?
This is quite insightful. And I 100% agree with your final statement. Training barriers to jobs have been coming for ages. While I didn’t finish college I did at least pick up an advanced trade skill (programming) because I happened to like computers. But that’s no everyone’s cup of tea. But if every job which doesn’t pay just minimum wage requires at least some advance training what do you do when a broad swath of the populace doesn’t see the value in getting that sort of training? Is UBI the solution to bridge the gaps? Can we actually bridge the gaps in the short to medium term? Will we be able to make sure the gaps are filled in the long term?
Or maybe we’re just screwed because reality can never compete with fantasy.
What I mean by education is not necessarily finishing college. Acquiring knowledge for the sake of knowledge is a good thing in and by itself but is not necessarily relevant to this discussion. For the labour market we are talking about acquiring marketable skills as you did.
I think some kind of UBI will be essential in the not too distant future. It was one thing when technology replaced 90% of the jobs in my local mill displacing blue collar workers, but when artificial intelligence hits the white collar professions…
There was an interesting episode of EconTalk last. year about apprenticeships which was pretty good (https://www.econtalk.org/robert-lerman-on-apprenticeships/). There’s probably a partial solution hiding in there. My early career was jumpstarted by my work as an intern (paid) doing programming. But it’s not like the US has a large scale formal apprenticeship system outside of particular industries.