How Democrats Went Wrong: Not All Progressives Are Progressives

The Democratic Party doesn’t understand its coalition.

A lot of people are writing about where the Democrats went wrong. There’s a lot of agreement about the mistakes the party made. It neglected and ignored ordinary voters. It took a lot of positions America found off-putting, if not crazy.

The interesting question is why its party leaders did this.

Why did the party embrace an obviously losing strategy? Why does it find it impossible to stop this slide toward a self-evidently destructive course?

Here’s the problem: The Democratic Party doesn’t understand its coalition.

Democrats like to think in terms of their coalition as it exists on paper. This is the New Deal coalition first established under Franklin Roosevelt. Demographically, it was an alliance of working people, professionals, the middle-class, Black voters, and marginalized groups. Its internal factions were advocates for the various causes and organizations that some Democrats like to call “The Groups.” Ideologically, it was a union of progressives and Jacksonian populists.

The Democrats’ great accomplishment was to successfully combine into one coalition groups that previously stood on opposite sides of the aisle. Progressives—professionals and upper-middle-class social reformers—had previously fueled the Republican Party under leaders like Teddy Roosevelt. Jacksonians—mostly working and rural Americans based in the old Solid South—were the Democratic Party’s original base. Combining them created a new foundation, New Deal liberalism, and a new Democratic Party philosophy holding Democrats could use social science and planning (progressivism) to benefit working people, the marginalized, and least well off (Jacksonian populism).

Why abandon this formula? Because a growing group inside the party broke the alliance. The supposed progressives who were not progressives.

It’s important to understand who progressives actually are. It’s a word a lot of people like to claim, using it to mean anyone who wants to be nice, help the poor, or support the various causes of “the left.” In reality, progressives are half of the people we call liberals. “Liberal,” in turn, means here not just a euphemism for the Democrats but the classical liberalism of creating a society around rationalism and liberty. It means support for ideas like democracy, personal freedom, market capitalism, rationalism, free speech, freedom of religion, and self-government. It holds that a society built around these pillars won’t be perfect, but will be more free, fair, and prosperous than any alternative. Since these ideas are the same Enlightenment ideas around which America’s Founders created our Constitutional republic, liberal essentially means the people who enthusiastically support the promise and idea of America.

Progressives are the “left” half of the liberals, believing we can best execute the liberal plan with some planning and central management. The “right” liberals are the libertarians and old business Republicans, who believe the best way to execute the liberal plan is with more decentralized decision-making allowing the most efficient and fair solution to come bubbling up from personal choice. These two halves, accustomed to thinking of each other as enemies, are in fact close cousins. They’re different brands of liberals with minor disagreements, but both committed to the same liberal Enlightenment vision of the American Constitution, democracy, market economy, personal freedom, and self-government.

Then there are the left utopians.

Left utopians are not liberals. In fact, they think liberalism is a problem. Liberalism to left utopians doesn’t lead to fairness or to freedom but locks in oppression and privilege. They believe market capitalism creates unequal hierarchies. They believe freedom of speech and religion are often weapons that support the powerful and bad ideas. They believe rationalism is a fantasy because people are not fair or rational. They believe democracy (if they’ll admit it) is too often a mirage that powerful groups game to maintain their privileged place. Not only are left utopians not liberals, they hope to rip a lot of liberalism down to replace it with what they believe will be a better, more just, and more fair society.

Many left utopians may label themselves progressives, but they’re not talking about the progressivism of the official Democratic Party.

One underappreciated feature of a two-party system is both major parties always end up with an unacknowledged shadow coalition attached to their official coalitions. This is because a two-party system gives people only two major parties to choose from, which inevitably wind up including everybody whether or not the parties want them. The best way for marginal groups or people with radical or utopian perspectives to influence society is to attach themselves to the major party that fits closest to their agenda. Instead of railing at society from outside, they work inside the system to influence or transform it.

This means both parties always end up with many small groups of ideological hangers-on who don’t actually support what the party represents.

Republicans have long grappled with a version of this situation too. Republicans have their own radicals and utopians. Unlike the Democrats, however, Republicans always made great efforts to distance themselves from their radicals and marginalize them. In part, this is because, unlike Democrats, Republicans always viewed their party as an ideological coalition—an uneasy alliance of libertarians, foreign policy hawks, and social conservatives united for different reasons around a common cause. Republicans therefore were diligent about keeping their party crashers, like the Birchers, working for the team while gently pushing them outside the halls of power. Republicans also knew from hard experience that Democrats would punish them harshly when they did not.

(Whether this might be changing inside the Republican Party now is a topic for another article.)

Democrats have tended to view liberals, on the other hand, as one big family. If you supported the team and its causes, you were a liberal in good standing. This ironically is in part because the Democratic coalition was always more squabbling and fractious. The various Groups were always in-fighting over priorities and resources, making disagreements among family normal. Democrats were used to including anyone who worked for the party as a liberal. The Democrats’ hangers-on therefore never stood out as utopians or radicals, but got treated like overly-enthusiastic liberals instead.

This is particularly a problem among progressives. Technocratic progressives love to romanticize the passion and commitment of left utopians. They admire their purity. They like their vigor fighting for the cause. They see in them their own youthful passions, lost long ago amid wonky white papers and spreadsheets about technocratic efficiency. Many progressives therefore delude themselves that these left utopians are just like them, just more youthful (although many aren’t that young!), committed to the cause, and naïve about how the cold world works.

Left utopians, on the other hand, have always been quite clear they’re not actually Democrats or progressives. They say openly that they don’t like progressives, who they consider weak neoliberals. They believe Enlightenment liberalism encodes Western systems of oppression. They think markets are untrustworthy and capitalism an unfair system of unofficial serfdom. They only like democracy, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech, when those systems empower the right kinds of moral people instead of becoming swords that oppressors use to entrench themselves in power. When they said abolish the police, they meant it. When they cheered for Hamas, they meant that too. Leftist utopians reject the liberal framework as an impediment to the truly radical change they believe society needs for liberation.

Radicals and utopians aren’t always bad for democracy, or even for its major parties. They’re useful as outside agitators for unpopular issues. They raise uncomfortable truths. They force major institutions to deal with hypocrisies or issues they’d rather ignore. They hold the feet of officials to the fire to force them to actually do what they claim they want to do. They’re amazing shock troops when boots are needed on the ground. The problem comes when someone lets them inside the halls of power and gives them keys.

This is what Democratic progressives in recent decades began to do.

It was left utopians who pushed Democrats to stake out unpopular causes. It’s left utopians who worked to push out the old Jacksonians, despite being the very workers they give lip service to. It’s left utopians who pushed the party to violate liberal norms. It’s left utopians who go to war inside facially liberal institutions to punish and push out progressives for championing liberal progressive ideas. Progressives empowered this radical and utopian group and offered them its helm.

It's a classic liberal mistake. Wherever there are radicals, utopians, or revolutionaries, you find liberals helping in the belief they’re just passionate liberals trying to make a nicer liberal society. In the French Revolution, liberals empowered Robespierre only to be shocked when he instituted a Reign of Terror that sent them to the guillotine. The liberals in Kerensky’s government ended up handing power over to the Bolsheviks, who it turned out didn’t actually to want to participate in a new liberal government but seize power as the vanguard of a revolution.

Why do progressives do this?

One reason progressives conned themselves is because, over the last few decades, utopians somehow managed to secure control of the elite universities that credential young progressive professionals. To run America’s institutions, you must first pass through gatekeepers that left utopians control. By the time progressives take jobs atop America’s heights, they’re accustomed to thinking left utopians are their friends, and that their ideas are both normal and progressive.

The darker reason, however, is self-interest and cowardice. Progressive tend to be professionals, and thus careerists. They reached their positions as careful and conformist box-tickers who don’t rock boats. Standing up for liberal progressive ideas against the utopian left would take bravery and sacrifices many aren’t eager to make. The utopian left understands perfectly this is a war for control, and if you attempt to push them out, they push back while other progressives help them. This is what happened to the few progressives who dared to stand up for liberal ideas like the Glenn Greenwalds, Matt Taibbis, and Tulsi Gabbards we now consider “right” for daring to question the utopian left. Even Bernie Sanders and his “Bernie Bros” are treated as suspect for daring to push for ideas his party officially believes.

The greatest irony is the true majority alliance in America is, in fact, the liberals, meaning liberals in the classic sense—people who believe in the American idea of liberty, democracy, markets, and self-government. When this majority gets together, it governs well and ensures every group in America is afforded opportunity to thrive. It makes government work, builds things, and spreads personal freedom and prosperity to everyone. Combined, liberals make up the dominant party in America, a “normie” party pushing to govern well and make things work. It represents working people and the middle class, which support them. When things start going wrong, it’s because liberals of the Enlightenment are no longer sticking together and have given the wrong people control. That America’s natural majority chooses to act as a weak and divided minority is tragic. It’s also a choice, one grounded in ideological blinders, self-interested behavior, and irrational hated for true allies alongside the irrational affection for enemies.

It’s why I’m not confident Democrats are capable of changing course. For the Democrats to change, the progressives who lead the party must first wake up to this uncomfortable realization: They handed their party to utopian interlopers. The people they’re conditioned to hate, right liberals, are in fact close cousins and natural friends. The people they consider brothers and sisters are not. Then they must act on this realization, taking the professional and reputational risks necessary to wrest back control under sustained mortar fire from utopians who understand the stakes.

Because Democrats choose not to do this, Republicans now get their shot at reordering America while Democrats watch. We’ll find out if this supposedly new Republican Party is serious about building a new coalition to repair America around its Founding Enlightenment ideas. Republicans will find out if they’re truly serious about building a normie party based around America’s majority ideas. It’s entirely possible—some think likely—Republicans will instead start making the same mistakes in the opposition direction, and their time in the sun won’t go any better than it has for Democrats. Time will tell.

We all can see where America needs to go. What we don’t yet know is which Americans have the vision, courage, and energy to get us there.

What do you think about the role of left utopians in the Democratic Party? Join the conversation in the comments.