The American Left is a Historical Success Story

Mark Schmitt wrote for Democracy Journal about the American left's successes over the last 20 years.

The scope of this new progressive story is roughly the last 20 years, from the Bush-Gore election and recount—and, yes, the Seattle protests and their later echo in the Occupy movement as well. As on the right, it began with building institutions and organizations, some at the D.C. elite level, but more essential are state and local organizations that both mobilize voters and work on policy. But beyond institutions, it’s also a story of putting new ideas and issues on the agenda: the rethinking of old assumptions about economic policy, whether on antitrust enforcement, federal deficits, inequality or child care is as consequential as the Reagan-era embrace of supply-side economics, and has the additional advantage of being right. (See this excellent survey by J.W. Mason, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, itself a hub of the new economic thinking.) There’s also been deliberate, thoughtful work on language and narrative, such as the “Race-Class Narrative” developed at the think tank Demos, to bridge the idea that racial equity and economic fairness are in conflict.

A key aspect of this history is the development of a whole new generation of talent, notably the young economists staffing Biden’s National Economic Council, or leaders of progressive state coalitions and budget policy groups, all of them free of the narrow assumptions and caution of the Clinton and Obama eras—some by virtue of youth, others because they lived through those eras and understood why we fell short. With some distance, it looks a lot like the arc of the right from the 1960s into the Reagan era.

One way to see the eight Obama years, then, is as a transitional phase in this two-decade history. The foundation of institutions and ideas wasn’t in place yet, or was unready for the magnitude of the Great Recession. There’d been a wave of organizing, but it was still too personalized around Obama himself, rather than any agenda. That Biden is less charismatic than Obama, that we expected a little less of him, is in turn a great strength, because it allows the full progressive movement a chance to spread its wings and test ideas.

Some of this story may be too recent or incomplete to study now, and it could all be a historic blip if Biden proves unable to pass any more big bills and Trumpist Republicans reclaim power in 2022 or 2024. But the American Rescue Plan alone is remarkable shift in the role of government, with provisions that will unfold over several years, Biden’s other proposals are extremely popular even if bogged down in Senate nonsense, and blue states and cities are continuing to move forward. The assumptions and possibilities have changed. The story of the consolidation and rebuilding of the left side of American politics, within as well as outside of the Democratic Party, may well turn out to be the essential historical success of our time.