The Culture Of Compromise... And Looking Ahead To 2022

On Monday morning, the Washington Post published an increasingly rare solo-piece-- rather than team effort-- this one by Annie Linskey: Biden's Flexibility Could Mean Bloody Fights. So! Someone has noticed! "He remains vague on policy." You think? Linskey started her piece by going right to the heart of why there is so much mistrust of the Biden campaign on the left and why even some of the most fervent Trump detractors are reluctant to commit to the hold-you-nose electoral strategy. "When Joe Biden released economic recommendations two months ago," she wrote, "they included a few ideas that worried some powerful bankers: allowing banking at the post office, for example, and having the Federal Reserve guarantee all Americans a bank account. But in private calls with Wall Street leaders, the Biden campaign made it clear those proposals would not be central to Biden’s agenda. 'They basically said, Listen, this is just an exercise to keep the Warren people happy, and don’t read too much into it,' said one investment banker, referring to liberal supporters of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). The banker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks, said that message was conveyed on multiple calls... The Biden campaign said the economic recommendations were produced jointly by supporters of Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and were never intended as official policy."

This reluctance to be pinned down on policy details is central to Biden’s campaign, which has focused on a pledge to “restore the soul of the nation” rather than any particular legislative holy grail. While Biden has issued a raft of proposals, he’s often taken an all-things-to-all-people approach, sometimes making strong public declarations while relying on aides to soothe critics behind the scenes.

That strategy, reflecting a decades-long career in which Biden has seen himself more as mediator than ideologue, has helped him unify the party’s liberal and moderate wings behind the shared goal of defeating President Trump. But it also is laying the groundwork for bitter internal battles, should Biden win the presidency, on topics from race to climate to trade, while Wall Street leaders plan to have their way with a president many expect to be unusually susceptible to outside pressure.

...“We knew we weren’t going to get Medicare-for-all,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). “The question then for me was: How do we get some foundational pieces of Medicare-for-all, even if the words ‘Medicare-for-all’ aren’t there?”

Biden’s team agreed, for example, that low-income Americans would be automatically enrolled in Biden’s public option and that Medicare, not a private company, would run it-- significant concessions that nonetheless fell under Biden’s original framing.

“A good tell about how Biden would operate is there’s room for him to run as long as he doesn’t feel like he’s overturning his brand of moderation,” said one liberal who negotiated with Biden’s team.

Sounds like a bloody 4 years are coming up-- with a 2022 catastrophe in the making, when voters-- furious that the Biden administration, along with a Democratic-controlled Senate and House, are unable to deliver on anything of importance to working families. The 2010 midterm disaster will look like paradise compared to the Republican resurgence in 2022. The Biden campaign is about two things: a wrecked old man who wants it to say he was president on his tombstone and a coalition of conservatives and wary normal people who want to get rid of Trump. Policy-wise, there is no there there and 2021 is not going to be pretty as disparate groups fight for a piece of the pie.

Last week, reviewing John Nichols' book, The Fight For The Soul Of The Democratic Party, for Jacobin, Paul Heideman, asserted that this predicament is nothing new since The Soul of the Democratic Party Has Always Belonged to Capital. When did the Democratic Party go bad. Many say it was "with Bill Clinton and the Third Way in the 1990s" while other say it was "with Carter’s embrace of austerity" while other "more conspiratorially inclined parts of the left have argued, when JFK was assassinated? Or has the party never been anything more than 'history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party?' Where you draw the line says a good deal about your politics." Nichols, he wrote, "draws the line very early indeed, with the removal of Vice President Henry Wallace from the ticket in 1944. The book is written explicitly as an intervention into current debates over the future of the party, and its argument that for most of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party was degenerating, is reflective of the radicalism of one pole of that debate. For Nichols, Wallace represents the real soul of the New Deal Democratic Party. A proud progressive, dedicated anti-racist, and passionate anti-fascist, Wallace attempted to continue Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy, only to be stymied by more conservative forces inside the party. This narrative occupies the book’s first half, while the second half covers the history of the party in the seven decades following Wallace’s defeat in 1944. The result is a readable introduction to both Henry Wallace, one of the most interesting American politicians, and the Democratic Party’s long history of betraying progressive ideals."

Did someone mention "the Democratic Party’s long history of betraying progressive ideals?" There is no better emblematic case of that than Joe Biden, you know... the guy all your progressive friends are telling you have to vote for in November (as part of the existential fight against fascism). In the same issue of Jacobin, Luke Savage is as pessimistic about a Biden presidency as I am. Does no one else see the disaster on the horizon. I explained it to one of my favorite Members of Congress the other day. She didn't say she disagreed with my prediction of a 2010 midterm-redux in 2022, only "Let's get there first," meaning electing Biden and a huge load of conservative Democrats to Congress first. Thanks, but no thanks. She wanted me to help her raise money for Blue Dogs and New Dems running for the House. I love her but... give me a break. Blue America works to defeat conservatives, whether Republicans or fake Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Savage takes issue with the idea that Biden, like Ed Markey, is a flawed liberal who could-- again, like Markey-- embrace the Sunrise Movement and everything would be hunky-dory. Markey-- who hold the #1 lifetime position at Progressive Punch-- may be a flawed liberal, but Biden isn't and never was a liberal. He's a conservative-- a really, really bad conservative-- as bad as his hair plugs and fake teeth. As imperfect as the results show ProgressivePunch's system is, it's the best measurement Ive found and, as you see, Markey's record is significantly better than either Elizabeth Warren's or Bernie's.

The 10 best Dems in the Senate

No, I don't believe for one second that Markey's more progressive than either, just that he's at #1-- which says something-- where as the senators more ideologically aligned with Biden-- both now and when he was amnestying atrocious senator himself-- are in a whole different category of Democrats:

The 10 worst Dems in the Senate

Chuck Schumer plucked Kyrsten Sinema-- then head of the Blue Dogs and sporting the single worst voting record of any House Dem-- out of the House and gave her the Democratic Senate nomination in a year when a Democrat was going to win in Arizona. He just did the same thing with another Arizonan likely to prove as far right as Sinema, Mark Kelly. And it doesn't stop there. Schumer has guaranteed the most conservative Democratic-controlled Senate in anyone's lifetime: Hickenlooper (CO), Cunningham (NC), Harrison (SC), Bollier (KS), Ossoff (GA), Heger (TX), McGrath (KY), Gideon (ME), Gross (AK), Greenfield (IA)... And Cheri Bustos is doing a similarly horrible job in the House. The Red-to-Blue program is nearly identical with the list of New Dem and Blue Dog endorsements. It will be a Biden Congress.

Markey did, after all, vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq and support NAFTA. He even backed the USA PATRIOT Act back in 2001 (though voted against its reauthorization in 2005, 2010, and 2011). That he nonetheless won the respect of so many young left-wing voters therefore does yield an important lesson for other Democratic candidates and elected officials.

As former Sanders organizer Claire Sandberg put it earlier this week: “Corporate Democrats want to make the Left out to be purity-obsessed and unwilling to compromise, but the Left rallied around a longtime politician with a mixed record because he actively courted their support and became a champion of one of their major legislative priorities.”

Where I differ from [Michelle] Goldberg is in thinking that this is the kind of lesson a politician like Joe Biden either wants to or could conceivably learn. Near the end of her piece, Goldberg writes: “I hope Joe Biden listens. Young voters favor him over Trump by large margins, but their lack of enthusiasm could dampen turnout.” She quotes Sunrise’s Executive Director Varshini Prakash: “The best thing that Joe Biden could do would be to speak in clear, exciting visionary terms about exactly what he plans to do to tackle the climate crisis, racial inequality, and economic inequality.”

It’s a capital suggestion-- and one Biden is certain to ignore. That’s because, whatever officially appears in the Democratic platform (Goldberg, for example, cites the recommendations of the Sanders/Biden joint task force) is entirely secondary to the political coalition Biden is trying to build, and the one he built to win the Democratic nomination.

Much like Hillary Clinton did in 2016, Biden is aiming to win the presidency by motivating conservative-leaning suburban voters and some Republicans-- with more traditional (and liberal- and progressive-minded) Democratic constituencies turning out in sufficient numbers where it counts. The former group was largely the target audience for this year’s DNC, which  pandered endlessly to the sensibilities of anti-Trump Republicans and rich suburbanites. The latter, meanwhile, gets lectures about how they need to be more enthusiastic while young voters get virtual Biden/Harris lawn signs in Animal Crossing instead of Medicare For All.

Centrist Democrats do want the support of young and left wing voters, of course. But they uniformly want it on their own centrist terms.

All this may be a strategic choice on Biden’s part, but it’s also a feature endemic to the faction that controls the Democratic Party as a whole. Biden’s nomination, which party power brokers ultimately did everything they could to ensure, represented a very conscious repudiation of the alternative course offered by Bernie Sanders-- one which was decidedly less interested in the votes of suburban conservatives and, perhaps more importantly, which pledged to reject the dictates of the donor class that Democratic elites have long embraced.

As such, there is simply no incentive structure in place to shift Biden from his current course.

In Massachusetts, a hitherto quite conventional liberal politician recognized that it would be in his interest to harness the energy and power of young activists. He embraced their agenda and saved his career in the process. Whether Markey’s shift represented a sincere change of heart or pure political self-interest is a secondary matter: he faced an existential challenge and pivoted towards the only constituency he believed could save him from defeat. The young left, which Biden’s candidacy has always been about marginalizing and repudiating, enjoys no such leverage with Biden.

Goldberg is absolutely right to argue that the Markey campaign yielded real lessons for centrist Democrats. The problem is assuming those are lessons that centrist Democrats are under any real pressure to learn.