Before the Bernie Sanders crusade, whose dream of victory was extinguished in New York’s primary on Tuesday, the future of the Democratic Party seemed likely to resemble the final six years of the Obama era, only more so: a party increasingly ideological and left-wing on social issues and more incrementalist and technocratic in the economic realm.
This combination fits perfectly with the politics of the party’s donor class, cosmopolitan social liberals who benefit from low-skilled immigration and free trade and don’t want their taxes raised too high. It fits reasonably well with the trajectory of public opinion, which has shifted leftward on culture-war issues but didn’t exactly greet the 2009-10 wave of liberal legislation with open arms. And it fits with the seeming fiscal constraints imposed on liberalism after Obamacare — the cost of New Deal and Great Society programs, the aging of American society and the prospect of structural deficits for as long as baby boomers are taking Medicare.
But what it doesn’t fit with, it turns out, are the desires of the many, many Democratic voters who made Sanders a contender, a prolific fund-raiser and an extraordinary phenomenon even in defeat.
The Sanders insurgency is hardly the first of its kind: As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie points out, it follows in a long tradition of progressive candidacies that inspired but ultimately lost, with Howard Dean and Bill Bradley being the most recent examples.
But on his way to winning more caucuses and primaries than Dean or Bradley, Sanders has proved two important points about his party’s voters. First, they are quite ambitious. Many of them see the liberal policy victories of the Obama years (the health care law, Dodd-Frank, Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act) as first steps rather than capstones to the liberal project. Many of them regard Hillary Clinton’s leftward progress on issues like immigration and criminal-justice reform as admirable but wildly insufficient. And they’re eager for ideas — single payer! free college! a $15 minimum wage! — that would stamp their party as thoroughly rather than just partially left wing.
Second, their ambitions have demographic momentum on their side. The leftward, ever leftward impulse is concentrated among the party’s younger constituents, with whom Sanders has rolled up ridiculous margins. So there’s every reason to expect that a future left-wing insurgency could surpass his success even as he surpassed Bradley’s and Dean’s.
Especially since Sanders was in many ways a non-ideal standard-bearer for a left-wing youth movement. He had his own past deviations (on guns and immigration) from the present liberal line, he struggled to win over African-American and Hispanic voters even though many of them sympathize with his economic vision, he seemed like too much of a long shot to win endorsements from the party’s most liberal interest groups, and his obvious lack of interest in foreign policy prevented him from fully exploiting his opponent’s major weakness.
Elizabeth Warren, to pick one example, would have had fewer of these problems if she’d decided to run, and given how well Sanders has done it’s reasonable to suspect that Warren could have actually defeated Clinton. Now that it’s clear that the opening is there, a candidate of full-spectrum progressivism could plausibly enter the next contested Democratic primary as a favorite.
The interesting question, then, is how that candidate will deal with the real-world constraints that seem (or seemed) to limit progressivism’s ambitions.
One answer, Bernie Sanders’s answer, was to promise the thing that every major Democratic politician since Walter Mondale has abjured: major tax increases, not only on the rich (who would be taxed at a rate upward of 70 percent under his plans), but on everybody, middle class and working class and upper middle class alike.
This promise had the virtue of solving, at least on paper, the problem of how you pay for a welfare state even larger than the one we currently can’t quite afford: just tax, tax and tax some more.
But it had the disadvantage of being an extremely hard sell politically beyond Sanders’s core enthusiasts. Such an agenda wouldn’t just be unpopular with the party’s donor class (though it would); it would threaten the stability of the larger Democratic coalition, which depends heavily on middle- and upper-middle-class support and whose leaders have repeatedly backed away from middle-class tax increases lest they give Republicans an opening.
The Obama approach, and now the Hillary Clinton approach, of gently squeezing the 1 percent has become the consensus Democratic position for a reason: It’s very popular with voters (including many Trump-voting Republicans). Whereas Sanders-style tax increases probably wouldn’t even be popular with his own youth army in a few years, once their incomes had ticked up a bit.
Given all of this, the progressivism of the near future might end up forgoing tax increases on that scale and embracing a kind of “deficits don’t matter” liberalism instead. Progressives could follow the example of Republican supply-siders, by promising that government spending would pay for itself in huge, soaring economic growth and the higher tax receipts that follow. Or they could take the view that today’s low-inflation, low-interest-rate environment is the new normal, that global instability will make the dollar a safe-as-houses investment no matter how large our structural deficits become, and that in this environment borrowing and spending and borrowing and spending is actually the prudent and sensible thing to do.
(For the record: I think both views are wrong, but after seven years in which the markets have stubbornly refused to panic over Washington’s deficit follies, the second view seems less crazy than it once did.)
Swinging in a deficits-don’t-matter direction would alienate at least some of liberalism’s leading economists and wonks. There was a huge outcry from that cohort when the Sanders campaign pointed to a wildly implausible estimate of his agenda’s likely growth effects.
It’s less clear, though, how deeply it would alienate the party’s donor base. (Are Wall Street or Silicon Valley Democrats all deep-dyed Simpson-Bowles supporters, or just deficit hawks of convenience like most people?) And it’s doubtful that it would alienate the party’s voters in the slightest.
Which leaves this question for Bernie Sanders’s would-be successors to consider, as they contemplate how to pitch an expensive agenda to a tax-sensitive party and country: How many divisions have the wonks?
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ROSS DOUTHAT>
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