Coalitions and Word Games: Progressivism, Socialism, Liberalism.
What to do about the Progressive Coalition?
As the dust settles, the nation burns, and we all forget Joe Biden exists as his campaign promised all along, I think that a particular aspect of the 2020 primary needs to be re-litigated: what precisely did it mean that Warren and Bernie ran against each other?
There are a number of trite explanations that I don’t find satisfactory that I will recapitulate here. They are unified by the central belief that it meant nothing. It was a mere conflict of personality - there was a miscommunication between the two, Bernie believed Warren wouldn’t run and had made up his mind by the time she did, she resented something about a conversation that may or may not have happened, etc. There are also the lines more common on the Bernie side of things that imply that Warren was duplicitous in some way, that she betrayed The Left, or is not a True Progressive. In this line of reasoning, there was a happy Progressive family that was shattered by a betrayal by the Senator from Massachusetts. “Lyin Liz Wrecker Warren,” indeed. Lastly, there are some of the darker stories told by the Warren side of things in which Bernie was simply too arrogant to get out of the way.
I think the best explanation is the simplest; each thought that they would make a better President than the other, and that difference of opinion projected itself onto two different coalitions in American politics. Over the course of the primary we saw that the nascent democratic socialist movement and ‘Warrenism’ are two distinct American political traditions. They have different bases, different aims, different methods. The issue is that they sit under the same ideological umbrella shared by the two groups for quite a while, termed “Progressivism.” While both find themselves on the ‘left’ of the Democratic party, that means remarkably different things to them.
The Difference:
To briefly restate the differences emerging from the primary:
Warrenism is the old ghost of American Liberal Reform in its latest incarnation. You can draw a very direct line from Warren back to the liberal lions of the Senate in the 1970s, to the regulatory state built up under the New Deal, to the Progressives of the early 1910s and to Civil Service Reform advocates in the 1800s. You can also see its more compromised reflection in the liberal wing of the Democratic party to Senator Warren’s right. It is the belief, fundamentally, that adjusting the rules under which economic social relations exist will create positive outcomes.
‘Bernie-ism’ meanwhile is something a little different. If you want American precedents, you can look not only to the Socialist, Communist, and militant labor movements but also to broad social democratic guarantees like Social Security and Medicare achieved by the Democrats when they made a reasonable impression of being a labor party. Whether explicitly socialist or not, it seeks to remake those relations themselves, and to change the material undergirding of society.
They had separate coalitions. While this was perhaps overemphasized in the Discourse, liberal reform was a more upper middle class phenomenon, most beloved of advanced degree holders and professionals. It was also, in some ways, the leftmost pole of the same coalition represented by more mainstream liberal candidates in the primary - Warren shared donors and traded voters with Harris, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and others. The Sanders coalition included many downwardly mobile members of the middle class, but also had a more robustly working class character. To borrow Lind’s double horseshoe schema (while disagreeing with his conclusions) the Sanders coalition grew out of an alliance of the urban working class and professional class, while Warren’s ideology rests firmly in the professional class base that has advocated for liberal reform since the 19th century - professionals and professional idealists.
A lot of this tension got laundered into a fight over who was “more progressive” - a euphemism for being further left. In the spring, each campaign dueled over who could advocate for canceling the most student debt or adopt the most ambitious civil rights proposals. Supporters online, keen to seek out deviancy from a supposedly uniform ideological standard, pounced on policy differences from Sanders’ shyness about nuclear energy to Warren’s insistence on only leveling taxes against the highest income brackets. Staffers, volunteers, and online supporters all thought that the key was to distinguish either candidate as being, “really the progressive option.” In reality, of course, by seeking to do so they left themselves open to the anti-ideological “cmon, man!” of the eventual winner.
This pathological spiral was driven by two factors - the simplistic left-right conception of politics, and a calvinistic desire for purity latent in Progressive activist circles. In order to be a good political actor (read, person) everyone involved needed to support the most progressive option, and progressivism existed on a one dimensional spectrum between centrist $hill and radical bomb thrower. Plenty of examples abound - from the average, lovable, but unhinged ‘Berniecrat’ uncle in your Facebook feed to the hysteria over “red-brown” socialists from writers in prestige magazines.
The trouble arrived when two sides realized that they actually wanted different things from their presidential candidates. Warren supporters were outraged at Bernie’s lack of early plans, his lack of desire to campaign on political reform issues like breaking the Senate filibuster, and the fact that he, as an ‘old white man,’ represented institutionally supported categories. Bernie supporters honed in on Warren’s earlier embrace of traditional fundraising, her coziness with the Democratic Party, and her evident lack of commitment to Medicare for All. Who was the Progressive in all of this? Are targeted plans superior to universal public goods in a left-right schema? Is political reform or economic redistribution more important? The only paradigm available in politics - ‘who is more lefter and who is more righter,’ who holds positions that are objectively centrist or objectively right wing or objectively left wing, shorted out.
The answer is, paradoxically, that the two traditions stuffed under the ‘Progressive’ umbrella are in roughly the same place in a left-right schema. Warrenism is the left wing of liberalism and Bernie-ism is the right wing of something else entirely. They’re political expressions of two different sets of material and social relations - the idealism of the professional class and growing working class anger at the downward trajectory of the country - forced by the circumstances of American political history (and the absolute destruction of the labor left between 1980 and 2016) into a tight coalition with each other. Each is extreme and moderate in its own way. Warrenism is moderate in its means and niche by its desires (liberal reformist talking points are well received in prestige media, but spout some YIMBY talking points to your average American and see how far you get). The new socialism seeks genuinely quite popular measures by self-conscious extremism. Set aside the fight over the incredibly popular policy of universal healthcare - there are solid majorities for co-determination, municipal governments across the country are exploring municipalizing power utilities. But by nature and by choice the new socialist left seeks these goals by a direct contest with entrenched power and legitimacy - something for which voting Americans are not ready, and of which non voting Americans are skeptical. Each is placed in a position of remove from the hegemonic center, each wants some vision of ‘progress’ in America - equality, prosperity, and liberty. In this position of weakness, they have allied in legislatures and in issue advocacy coalitions under the banner of ‘reform.’
So we’re different. What do we do about it?
There have been two basic, unconscious reactions to this emerging distinction in the wake of the primary; a panicked, protest-too-much ‘ignorance’ of the problem, and people who advocate for splitting.
A lot of the existing infrastructure of the broad left has unconsciously defended this coalition, hoping to sweep the real differences under the rug. You can see it in the panic with which legacy Progressive groups urged Warren and Bernie to be civil to each other in late 2019 and the palpable relief with which Sunrise and affiliated groups (including loose networks of young activists) took to twitter to defend Senator Markey, happy to have a unifying campaign for both liberal reformists and the nascent socialist left. He did, after all, help author the Green New Deal. Many of the organizations built before 2020 depend on the previously unexamined assumption that liberals and the left are natural allies - from at least aspirationally grassroots groups working on the local electoral level (WFP) to policy advocacy groups like the PCCC (pro-Warren) to many of the electoral coalitions built by leftist primary challengers. With all of them there is the faintest whiff of panic, hurried reassurances that ‘we all want the same things here,’ contingent with the knowledge that the work they were doing was perched on top of a relatively precarious ideological house of cards.
But there is a ground swell of discursive pressure on the Progressive coalition. Blue-check twitter accounts remind us that “Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Owe You Anything;” Jacobin articles drawing a dichotomy between ‘Justice Democrats style coalition elections,’ and building a socialist party surrogate. Professional liberal reformers resent the need for such a reputable cause as liberal reform to associate with the rowdy appeals to “self interest,” and “the working class” at all - just look at some of the spicier quotes offered by Sean McElwee whenever he’s about to do a new funding round for DFP. An increasingly shrill cadre of ‘post-left’ thinkers who already view the current socialist formation as a hopeless compromise with the professional class have resolved to sit on their hands until a suitably culturally conservative proletariat organizes itself. All this to say that there seems to be some notion that we would all be better off by ourselves.
Neither seems productive to me.
The problem with ignoring it is straightforward - it produces an intellectual contradiction that causes a lot of counterproductive infighting, and de-focuses the broad progressive left. You can see it in the frustrations the socialist left often has about Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez. AOC has been very careful to construct a coalition that bridges this divide, striking cultural stances that appease professional class activists and organizers, while holding true to a substantive, class based politics. Accusations of her “selling out” are usually prompted by use of language tuned towards the cultural sensibilities of the other half of the coalition, and offends the socialist left’s claim of ownership to the “progressive” label. But of course, we don’t have exclusive ownership over it. She has to keep a lot of people happy, and while she has done one of the most successful jobs of it so far, it is no easy task.
You can also see this friction in various articles. Consider this very perceptive, detailed, and accurate article by David Duhalde about coalition work in primaries. Duhalde goes into intimate detail about the Progressive 501c4 table, and how it was able to secure big wins. This is true! In fact, I’ll detail a little bit below why I think this is essential. But there’s still something missing there, an assumed unity of interest that I don’t think is there. DSA, for example, would not actually be that interested in electing someone like Marie Newman or Alex Morse tout court. It’s still in their interest to be happy about this, but you need to understand that socialism is a different phenomenon than Progressive coalition work
The problem with splitting is also simple, if difficult; neither party is in a position to forsake the coalition at this point in time. We should take cues from our fellows in the professional practitioners of politics and cling to each other for dear life! While the reformers may entertain fantasies that their ideas will be taken seriously by the establishment and by ‘future former republicans’ in the suburbs and while the DSA may believe that a fully organized and unified working class is just around the corner, the current state of left/liberals in politics should make the necessity blindingly clear. To put it plainly - we’ve barely figured out how to win together, much less separately. While the wins of the past few years have been impressive, the socialists and socialist proximate progressives we have sent to state houses, city halls, and congress are barely a blip on the radar in terms of being able to determine policy. Still all too frequently, the choice will not be between a liberal reformer and a socialist, but instead between a set of people who owe their entire political careers to FIRE sector donations and machine politics. The incumbent challenges - from Marie Newman to Zohran Mamdani - that have succeeded have been coalition efforts, with more or less effort coming from one end of the scale. And the 2020 presidential primary should be a sobering reminder to both sides of how weak we really are against an establishment that is implacably dedicated to our destruction.
Continuing to work in coalition is essential, but claiming a unified “progressivism” masks the basic realities of what is going on. It’s quite difficult in 21st century politics to articulate a difference without criticism, but I believe it’s a crucial intellectual task going forward. Socialists and left liberals need to get along for the foreseeable future, and the best way to do that is to stop pretending we’re the same.