By David Marcus
Tuesday, June 04, 2019
Incubation Under Obama
Barack Obama was a problem for the New Progressive
movement. At Occupy Wall Street, many of his policies were attacked, but still
with a kind of deference due to him being the first black president. And while
Obama may have always been more leftist than he let on — for example, his
abrupt “evolution” on gay marriage — he presented himself as a moderate.
Progressives, especially white progressives, had to be
careful in attacking him. Some notable black progressives such as Tavis Smiley
and Cornel West felt more comfortable taking aim, but in general the New
Progressive movement had to bide its time.
During the four years from 2012-2016, the movement made
spectacular cultural inroads with everything from movies to news to advertising
to corporate culture. By the end of this period, terms like intersectionality
and privilege theory had become household words.
In a recent and remarkable Twitter thread,
Zack Goldberg shows graphs of searches on LexisNexis for far-left terms like privilege,
intersectionality, and a host of others. They go from barely a blip to
soaring heights in this period. The beginning of the upswing in almost every
case is about 2010, but it wasn’t until 2012, just as the embers of Occupy were
dying out, that the vast increases occur.
By the end of 2012-2016, a socialist very nearly became
the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, and the New Progressives were
poised to capture real political power.
Changing Racial Attitudes
In February 2012, not long after the barricades came down
in Zuccotti Park, Trayvon Martin, a black 17-year-old in Florida, was
tragically gunned down by George Zimmerman. Martin’s crime? Looking suspicious
to Zimmerman.
It was the first of many media-highlighted incidents that
cost young black men their lives. Some were even caught on video owing to the
promulgation of camera phones. These events, along with a spate of police
shootings, spurred the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement and marked a
sharp and devastating decline in how Americans felt about race relations.
According to Gallup, at the start of 2013, 72 percent of
white Americans and 66 percent of black Americans said relations between whites
and blacks were “very good” or “somewhat good.” These were the highest combined
numbers ever recorded. By 2015, these numbers went down to 51 percent of whites
and 45 percent of blacks, in the sharpest dips in the polling that goes back to
2001.
While these racial attitudes were changing, a growing
movement in education, corporations, and social media was bringing
intersectional ideas based on privilege theory to the fore and beginning to get
some backlash. Where once Americans had a tacit agreement that treating
everyone equally was the key to better race relations, the New Progressives
rejected this notion, insisting that systemic racism made individuals’ good
intentions or actions more or less irrelevant.
Harkening back to the Occupy General Assembly’s
progressive stack, what emerged was an attempt to redistribute speech. In
practice, this gave the New Progressives license to de-platform, or silence,
speakers who would not show deference to the new identity rules. Calls to fire
professors, shut down speaking events, and boycott insufficiently leftist
companies started to define the New Progressives and further separate them from
traditional American liberalism.
The Expansion of Identity Politics
In May 2014, Kevin Williamson penned an op-ed in the
Chicago Tribune titled, “Laverne Cox is Not a Woman.” Cox was the star of the
TV show “Orange Is The New Black,” and at the time was the most famous
transgender person in America.
Cox embraced a new concept of transgenderism. This
concept, which Williamson and others (myself included) reject, holds that a
trans person does not merely live as, and appear to be a member of, the
opposite sex, but in fact is a member of that sex solely on the basis of
believing or “knowing” that they are. Williamson rejected this idea in his
article. For his trouble, he was shouted down as a bigot, and the Tribune
pulled his piece from their pages and website.
This was a major victory for the New Progressives. In the
blink of an eye, sex, one of the most foundational elements of humanity, had
been turned on its head. This was not a change anyone voted for. There was no
meaningful public discussion about it. In fact, as seen above, it wasn’t
allowed by a major outlet, instead it was simply decided upon by cultural
elites who called any pushback against their radical ideas bigotry.
To justify this illiberal policing of speech, the New
Progressives argued that any speech that “misgenedered” a trans person was
tantamount to violence against vulnerable trans people. Using this prototype,
over the next several years, all kinds of speech was condemned as violence and
therefore deemed appropriate for censorship.
Soak the Rich
While the identity politics of the New Progressives was
taking over in our nation’s cultural spaces, the socialist fixation on income
inequality was gaining important adherents in our politics. Two primary figures
emerged to beat this drum, both U.S. senators. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and
Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts used the concept of income inequality to
marshal support in the Democratic Party in favor of socialism and away from the
neoliberalism of Bill Clinton, and even Barack Obama.
On this fight, the New Progressives found some unlikely
allies on the right. Since at least 1992, when Ross Perot ran a centrist
anti-globalism campaign against Clinton and George H.W. Bush, both of whom were
more or less globalists, anti-globalism has been an outlier in both parties.
With the emergence of Sanders in the Democratic Party, this began to change.
The idea of drastically, rather than moderately,
increasing taxes on corporations and the richest Americans got a foothold in
mainstream Democratic politics. Perhaps more importantly, the word socialist
began a rehabilitation tour in the United States. Even though the financial
crisis was over by 2012 and living standards were increasing, Warren and
Sanders still insisted that American wages needed to be more equal. For many on
the left, this became quite persuasive.
From Big Corporation to Small Christian Business
Although the Citizens United decision and a
conservative Supreme Court to protect it assured that the New Progressives
could not block corporations from engaging in political speech, they soon found
a new kind of business to target with illiberal attempts to limit First
Amendment protections. In this case, Christian small business owners who
refused to accept creative jobs that expressed acceptance of gay marriage were
attacked.
The crux of these cases had nothing to with actually
serving gay customers, but a baker or photographer using her creative skills to
create a positive statement about people of the same sex getting married. These
Christian shopkeepers argued that if the state forced their participation in
gay marriage, it was compelling them to make statements against their religious
principles.
The shopkeepers were backed up by the 1994 Religious
Freedom Restoration Act sponsored by Chuck Schumer, then a House
representative, and signed into law by Clinton. This law said if the government
had a reasonable interest in limiting religious liberty, it must do so in the
least restrictive way possible. There were myriad ways for gay couples to get
the services they needed from businesses without religious objections;
therefore, what interest did the government have that allowed them to take the
drastic step of compelling speech?
The New Progressives had now launched a two-front war on
the First Amendment. In regard to large corporations, they sought to limit
speech. In the case of smaller, Christian-run corporate entities, they sought
to compel speech. Compelling speech was also taken up by the emerging trans
movement in demands that “preferred
pronouns” be used in public settings, even in some cases in Canada, Europe, and
New York City passing laws that punished using the wrong pronoun.
But even as universities and media style guides adopted
this new normal, new voices started to appear who refused to engage in
compelled speech. Bloggers, professors, and YouTube stars that questioned the
quick-paced changes in speech regulation began to form a constellation of
resistance to the New Progressives. Only later did this resistance come to be known
as the Intellectual Dark Web.
Enter Bernie
The most significant event during this period of
incubation for the post-Occupy, New Progressive moment was Sanders’s candidacy
for the Democratic presidential nomination. Of the three main Occupy platform
planks — identity politics, income inequality, and anti-corporatism — Sanders
checked the latter two boxes in ways no candidate ever had before.
For the presumptive and eventual nominee, Hillary
Clinton, this socialist challenge was uncharted territory. Never before had a
mainstream Democrat had to seriously engage such far-left ideas, and it left
her positions in a fragile state. Nowhere was this clearer than in regard to
the Obama administration’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. Clinton, who had
once called the deal the gold standard, suddenly came out against the TPP in
the fall of 2015 while campaigning against Sanders.
This shift flew somewhat under the radar because Donald
Trump, who at that point had become the presumptive Republican nominee, also
opposed the trade deal, although perhaps for somewhat different reasons. But
this was part of a larger trend of Hillary Clinton throwing mainstream
Democratic ideas, and to some extent her husband’s legacy as president, under
the bus. That plan did not work out very well for her.
While covering the 2016 Democratic National Convention in
Philadelphia, I saw the largest protests I had seen since Occupy. It is
important to understand the virulent anger these left-wing protesters felt
towards Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Trump wasn’t the only one
chanting “lock her up” in 2016. The overwhelming sense was that a new, young
progressive movement was rising either in opposition to the Democrats, or with
an eye to taking over their party and platform.
The Democratic Party establishment attempted a kind of
rhetorical appeasement. Phrases and ideas from the New Progressives were
adopted, but in slight ways. This was meant more to bring them into the fold,
maybe even to a seat at the table, but not to acquiesce to them. Had Hillary
Clinton become president, this plan might have worked, but indeed she did not.
On the night of November 8, 2016, Trump shocked the
world, and won the presidential election. It was a transformational moment in
American politics. It opened the door for the New Progressives to increase
their influence and venture into campaigning for political office. No longer
merely a cultural force to be contended with, they had become a viable
political faction in America.
The incubation period was over. The moderate forces in
the Democratic Party had lost, and they no longer had the power of Obama’s
charm and historical accomplishment to keep the new radically leftist movement
conceived at Occupy at bay. Everything changed that night, and the New
Progressives were poised and prepared to take advantage of it.
In Part 3, we will look at how the New Progressives used
Trump’s victory, and the vituperative anger so many Americans felt towards him
to establish a foothold in the highest levels of American power. Had their time
finally come? If so, would they push the Democrat Party so far left that its
center would not hold?
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