How the Left Doomed Itself

By Fred Bauer

Sunday, December 01, 2024

 

If Republicans listen carefully, they might hear some lessons in the ongoing Democratic wailing and gnashing of teeth. The current impasse of political progressives can teach Republicans something about the dangers of partisan discipline as they prepare to assume power in Washington.

 

Some on the right have envied the ability of the identity-politics Left to seize the commanding heights of progressive politics and enact a top-down social revolution. The prophets of the Great Awokening might have been few, but through sheer discipline they were able to capture one institution after the next. By this way of thinking, the Great Awokening could offer a template for a “based” counterrevolution, in which a Rightist vanguardist faction can enact its own revolutionary reckoning.

 

As I observed in National Review three years ago, however, the fantastic leverage of the “woke” vanguard also meant that its hegemony could be sweeping but brittle. The constant purges and rictus paranoia at the commanding heights caused elite institutions to become increasingly estranged from the body politic at large. From public outrage over the antisemitic demonstrations at elite universities to Donald Trump’s triumphant return to the White House, the bill for that revolutionary borrowing against institutional credibility has begun to become due.

 

The triumph of discipline has also caused challenges for the Democratic Party itself. Democrats on the Hill pushed their narrow majorities to the limit in the last Congress, as seen in the grab bags of the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act. Over the past decade, Democrats have been the team of factional discipline in Congress, both showing discipline and trying to reorganize Congress so that partisan majorities have more control. When Harry Reid called for the detonation of the nuclear option on most nominations in 2013, Democratic senators by and large complied. At the behest of leadership, most Democrats saw no problem with an abrupt volte face on the legislative filibuster — going from defending it in 2017 (when they were in the minority) to attacking it in 2021 (when they had the majority). Majority Leader Chuck Schumer even had his caucus walk the plank on a failed nuclear option vote in 2022, which faltered only because two Democrats opposed it. These two apostates — Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — are no longer even Democrats. This failed vote helped make support for the nuclear option a de facto litmus test for Democrats circa 2024.

 

Yet the very success of central command at imposing litmus tests on rank-and-file Democrats has also hurt the party’s ability to win governing majorities. Connecticut senator Chris Murphy complained the other day that his party had a “practical ceiling” of 52 seats in the Senate. In 2006, Democrats recruited candidates of a range of viewpoints to help recapture the chamber. In that year, Bob Casey defeated Republican Rick Santorum by running as a “pro-life” Democrat. Over time, Casey’s record became indistinguishable from that of a generic Democrat on abortion and most other issues (he garnered a “100 percent” score from Planned Parenthood for the most recent Congress). Like his class of 2006 colleagues from Ohio and Montana, Casey lost reelection this month.

 

This elite capture also caused Joe Biden’s team to misread his political mandate. Biden won only narrowly — by under 50,000 votes across three battleground states (Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin). His party barely won the House and captured the Senate only through a vice-presidential tiebreaker. Yet the coordinated messaging apparatus of the Democratic Party convinced the president that he was the FDR of the 21st century. Biden’s attempts to gratify this full-spectrum progressive coalition — particularly in its opposition to border controls — ended up breaking his presidency. When it elected him in 2020, the public wanted to turn the page on the coronavirus era — not enact an “equity” revolution.

 

The centralization of Democratic politics also discouraged any real primary challenge to Biden and facilitated a Kamala Harris coronation once progressive kingmakers pushed the aging president aside. Climbing the rungs from San Francisco DA to vice president, Harris completely internalized the new Democratic motto of “violate no progressive litmus tests,” but her adherence to that doctrine caused her campaign to be fundamentally vacuous.

 

Without the antibodies of internal debate and pluralism, the progressive coalition suffered a major political defeat earlier this month. Republicans could fall into a similar trap if they repeat those mistakes. As the GOP heads into a trifecta starting in January, there will be the pressures of partisan conformity and obedience — for members of Congress, other elected officials, and journalists to shut up and get in line. While that vision of centralized control seems anything other than populist, it also has long-term strategic costs. Successful durable American political coalitions are diverse, and endless litmus tests to prove loyalty to the “cause” become bricks for the cells that the proprietors of the commanding heights erect around themselves.

 

The case of the most recent two-term Republican president, George W. Bush, might be instructive here. He is the only Republican in almost 40 years to have won a majority of the popular vote, and the 2004 election boosted Republican majorities in Congress, too. Bush, however, read into this result a “mandate” for an attempted partial privatization of Social Security, which dragged down his poll numbers, and voter frustration with Republicans led to the electoral repudiations of 2006 and 2008.

 

Compared to 2016, Donald Trump enters the White House with a considerably stronger position. The Trump-aligned policy bench is much deeper, and he had a more decisive victory at the polls. Yet achieving some of the things that populists claim to want will require not only working across divides within the Republican coalition but also picking up Democratic support in Congress. Making the most of that policy opportunity calls for some strategic flexibility. It also demands a clear-eyed assessment of the 2024 election itself. Dissatisfaction with the turmoil of the Biden years helped restore Trump and other Republicans to power — which might reveal the limits of a shock-therapy program for 2025 and beyond. A populist realignment nimble enough to deliver for ordinary families might have better odds of success than does a program that repeats the strategic missteps of its predecessors.