Progressive donors to the left of him, cynical centrists to the right — a theory of why President Biden's popular agenda is so unpopular. jonathanchait writes
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Eleven months into his term, and a year from a midterm election that appears likely to end his legislative majority, the cold reality for Biden is that his presidency is on the brink of failure. Business lobbyists swarmed over Washington, ripping chunks out of his Build Back Better program. The scope of his agenda kept shrinking in tandem with his poll numbers. Initially, the drop seemed attributable to temporary factors. Maybe the cause was the Delta wave that crested this past summer.
So many of the Democratic Party’s woes can be traced back to a statistical error. After Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, exit polls showed he had prevailed despite losing the white vote by 20 points. The implications were enormous for both parties. Racial minorities were casting a rising share of the vote, reshaping the electorate in ways that seemed to doom the Republican Party and its heavily white coalition.
Sanders’s strong, if ultimately unsuccessful, challenge to Clinton appeared to validate the theory that the electorate was quickly moving left. That premise was one reason so few political strategists in either party took Trump’s chances seriously. How could he win when he was alienating such a huge share of the voters he needed?
The assumption that the left had gained control of the party became so self-evident that the very idea that a retrograde figure like Biden could win its nomination seemed like a sad joke. A whole genre of columns literally begged Biden not to run for president, to spare himself the embarrassment of the inevitable rejection by a party that had moved on. Even the insider-y publication Politico deemed Biden “a deeply flawed candidate who’s out of step with the mood of his party.
The grim irony is that, in attempting to court non-white voters, Democrats ended up turning them off. It was not only that they got the data wrong — they were also courting these “marginalized communities” in ways that didn’t appeal to them. For the reality is that the Democratic Party’s most moderate voters are disproportionately Latino and Black.
The split within the Democratic Party runs along educational lines. The party’s college-educated cadre holds more liberal views and is increasingly estranged from its working-class counterparts. Those non-college-educated voters are disproportionately Latino and Black, but their worldview bears similarities to that of the white working-class voters who have left the party.
These groups have churned out studies and deployed activists to bring left-wing ideas into the political debate. At this they have enjoyed overwhelming success. In recent years, a host of new slogans and plans — the Green New Deal, “Defund the police,” “Abolish ICE,” and so on — have leaped from the world of nonprofit activism onto the chyrons of MSNBC and Fox News. Obviously, the conservative media have played an important role in publicizing the most radical ideas from the activist left.
The Ford Foundation is an instructive case study in this change. Ford’s president, Darren Walker, had helped develop and promote a prison-reform proposal that would have closed Rikers Island, a facility notorious for mistreating prisoners, and moved the inmates elsewhere. In a 2019 blog post headlined “In Defense of Nuance,” Walker defended his work from criticism by prison abolitionists that the reform did not go far enough.
Polling showed the public opposed this idea by a 40-point margin, and even Democrats narrowly opposed it. And yet candidates and the news media reporting on these demands tended to take at face value the claim that they represented the authentic desires of the party’s voters. When border decriminalization came up at a Democratic presidential debate a few days later, every candidate but two endorsed it.
Yet activist groups of all stripes rushed to join the defund movement, including Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and dozens of climate groups. Those endorsements have continued to blow back in the faces of Democrats.
The progressive-foundation complex was designed to lift up a candidate like Warren. Instead, it swallowed her in a trap, luring her deeper and deeper into a worldview increasingly alien to the voters she needed to win. Biden’s victory in the primary temporarily wrested control of the party out of the hands of its activists and placed it back with its voters. Yet as the year comes to a close, he has only been able to pass an infrastructure bill whittled down small enough to satisfy Republicans, the Build Back Better plan has been cut to ribbons, and his approval is in tatters.
Biden’s legislative strategy has closely hewed to Shorist principles. Biden has tried to keep the political conversation framed as closely as possible around issues in which he and his party have an advantage: handling the pandemic and rebuilding the economy.
Those divisions erupted into view again in early November. After Democrats suffered a defeat in normally blue Virginia and a near defeat in deep-blue New Jersey, the party’s centrist wing had a ready explanation: They had veered too far from the center, catering to their activists rather than the people who had elected them. “We can’t go too far left,” warned Joe Manchin. “This is not a center-left or a left country.
The centrists did not, for the most part, object to the spending. What they ruled out was the policies Biden had come up with to pay for the spending. Most of the money would come from tax hikes on corporations and people earning more than $400,000 a year, cracking down on tax cheats, and letting Medicare negotiate what it pays for pharmaceuticals, which cost Americans more than twice as much as in peer countries. All those measures actually made the popular spending plans even more popular.
The Reverend Al Sharpton called at least one member of Congress to convey his fears that eliminating the carried-interest loophole — a tax-avoidance scheme cooked up by Wall Street that Bloomberg News called “one of the most reviled loopholes” in the tax code — “would hurt Black businesspeople trying to build wealth,” as Politico reported.
To treat this all as simple graft is to dismiss the crucial channels through which this worldview reproduces itself into genuine belief. Much of the nation’s elite resides within a bubble nearly as remote from the perspective of the average American as the hothouse atmosphere of any left-wing Twitter feed. Within this bubble, the equation of the perspective of the wealthy with that of the country as a whole is simply a casual background assumption.
Embattled Democrats have not staged any high-profile gestures to distance themselves from their party on policing, abortion, or guns. Manchin is not walking around toting copies of the lesser-known offensive editions of Dr. Seuss. Instead, moderate Democrats, noted Politico, “tout the Chamber’s backing to bolster their bipartisan cred in swing districts.
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