Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party (sorry for the delay writing this)
In 2016, the Republican Party went against all conventional and political science wisdom by nominating someone with only a tenuous relationship to the party. I began a blog called The Unmutual Political Blog with a series called, "Trump to Political Science: Drop Dead," while my discipline was still in denial about Trump's chances. This year, the Democratic Party looks like it may follow suit by nominating someone who doesn't actually list his affiliation as being a member of the Democratic Party. Will Sanders win the nomination? At this point, I don't know and neither do you, but he has a better chance than I have thought before, and a better chance than conventional political science would say. And at least if he wins, I can laugh one more time at that terrible book, The Party Decides. What's going on, and what does this mean? It is time to grapple in a serious way with the Sanders issue. He functionally tied for victory in Iowa with another huh? type of candidate, he has a high likelihood of winning New Hampshire, and that's a recipe for victory. Nevada and South Carolina don't look as comfortable for him, but right now, he is well-positioned for the nomination. This requires some political science, and rethinking on my part. Some big questions, and some historical questions require answering.
I am not, generally speaking, a big fan of Stephen Skowronek's work. He is best known in political science for his model of presidents and how they fit into a sort of cycle of political time. Some presidents are transformational. Some carry on legacies of existing presidents, and so on. Oh, and there's a two-by-two table, 'cuz we political scientists love two-by-two tables. It is based on thorough historical analysis, but I just don't dig it. However, I find myself thinking about modern liberalism.
A reminder about definitions, which alas, I need to do these days because not everyone gets this. The word, "liberal," has a meaning in American politics that is different from its meaning in British and European politics. The etymology of the term is rooted in "liberty," and as originally conceived, it meant freedom and small government. However, in American politics, that's not what liberalism means anymore. Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay long ago conceiving of two kinds of liberty: positive and negative liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from government intervention. I am free to write this blog because the government doesn't stop me from doing it. Positive liberty, though, requires the resources to take advantage of the negative liberty. So, consider another example. Both a poor person and a rich person have the negative liberty to sleep under a bridge. But, only the rich person has the positive liberty to sleep in a posh hotel. That positive liberty becomes more critical when it comes to things like, well... healthcare.
When the Great Depression struck, Franklin Delano Roosevelt reoriented the Democratic Party around an ideology of positive liberty, and that became the ideology that Americans call, "liberalism." Liberty, liberalism... See? You need to understand the history to get how it happened. Not so complicated, is it? Anyway, that became American liberalism.
American liberalism became an ideology of capitalism with a welfare state to support positive liberty. A social safety net, but still fundamentally capitalist. Built into that ideology was a set of goals for what the safety net should cover. You get New Deal liberalism, and its extrapolation into Great Society liberalism, which was not conceptually all that different. It expanded the safety net, and added civil rights, which was the bigger conceptual change, although Martin Luther King didn't see that as fundamentally different, conceptually.
In terms of the structure of the welfare state, though, the big piece that went missing for so long was healthcare. Generation after generation of liberal politician tried and tried and tried, but... they never got there. Johnson got Medicare, but that's just for the oldsters.
Then came Nancy Pelosi. Yes. She could. (Oh, was there another guy?) So, I'm being a little snarky with the credit here, and there was a chapter in my last book-- Incremental Polarization-- arguing that Pelosi deserved the lion's share of the credit for passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but in 2010 (after a hard slog in 2009), Congress passed and the President signed legislation expanding Medicaid and providing subsidies for health insurance to those who couldn't afford it, while prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.
This was not single-payer, but despite the delusions of clueless people like Bernie Sanders, single-payer has zero chance of passing. Like... ever. While discussing the issue, President Obama said that he believed a country starting from scratch should start with something like single-payer, but the US was not starting from scratch. He was being pragmatic.
Whether you agree or disagree with expanding the welfare state, Obama's pragmatism was far more intelligent, strategically, than any words that have ever escaped Sanders's mouth. And the result was, given the context of the American political system, the last major piece of the American liberal project. Healthcare reform.
Note the word, "major." There is still plenty that New Deal/Great Society liberals would seek to do. Right now, top of that list would be environmental regulation to address climate change. There are places that liberals would like to shore up the welfare state. Civil rights? As far as race and sex/gender go, laws are on the books, but enforcement is a never-ending battle. There are agenda items within the scope of Great Society liberalism, especially, given its expansion into civil rights, but the basic observation I am making is that once Obama signed the ACA into law, liberalism didn't exactly win, but it won its last major victory, making most other things about enforcement.
So what do you do?
And here is where I missed the boat on the direction of the Democratic Party four years ago. I was giving a talk to a group of campus visitors during the 2016 election, and the question arose-- if Clinton lost, who would the Democrats nominate in 2020? Consensus in the room, including from me, was Warren. It just seemed like their obvious choice. And at the time, Warren was acting like an Obama-style Democrat. And in fact, in 2012, Obama was borrowing heavily from Warren. The whole, "you didn't build that" schtick that Romney tried to turn into a massive scandal was Obama clumsily borrowing Warren's schtick. In 2012, Warren wasn't trying to out-left Lefty McLefterson. She was just a high-visibility popular Democrat within the mainstream of her party. Like I said, an obvious choice, and an obvious heir to Obama.
So, I thought Warren would have an easy walk to the nomination with the party throwing rose petals at her feet. (Assuming Clinton lost, which I didn't think would happen, so obviously I suck anyway.)
But.
Clinton lost, Trump threw everything in the country into chaos, and with the liberal project not complete, exactly, but with its major structures in place, here's the problem. One of the things that I try to explain is that a nomination process is how a party defines itself. Hey, everyone! We won! Now, let's work on enforcement and fill in the gaps! Does that work while Trump is in office?
Structurally, what Trump is doing is tearing down the checks-and-balances of democracy, but he hasn't actually torn down the welfare state! He wants to, and he's suing to have the ACA struck down (again), but he hasn't torn down the welfare state! Civil rights? We're back to enforcement rather than legislation. See my point? The statutory structures of New Deal/Great Society liberalism are still there.
Combine the statutory completion of New Deal/Great Society liberalism with the core attacks on democracy being made by Trump, and you have a push for someone who is not running as a New Deal/Great Society liberal.
The result? Something I didn't see coming.
There are a lot of ways this could have gone, but what is happening now in the Democratic Party is that the party is moving away from New Deal/Great Society liberalism as voters and politicians cast about looking for something that might work. There are the true socialists, those who just use the name not knowing what it means, there is the all-identity-politics-all-the-time faction... the party is unsettled. And in this environment, an electorate that doesn't just want a candidate who will shore up the New Deal/Great Society project will look at a type of candidate who would otherwise be anathema and say, sure. That.
Warren saw this coming. That's why she chased Sanders's left flank. Why didn't that work? There are a lot of reasons. Too many to list in this post, but when you combine Warren's fall with the Democratic Party moving away from New Deal/Great Society liberalism after the essential completion of the project, someone like Sanders-- even though he isn't even a Democrat!-- winds up with a shot at the nomination.
I wasn't thinking in terms of either Skowronek's model directly, or extensions of it. What I am proposing here isn't precisely Skowronek, but it follows from the spirit of his model, and I think it works. Warren's fall? That's more complicated, but once she started really stumbling, that gave Sanders the opening.
Has he already won? No. Miles to go, and all that. At this point, I'm no longer even discounting Bloomberg. I wrote him off entirely, on the sole basis of the fact that he's a self-funder, applying Jennifer Steen's research, but at this point, establishment Democrats might get so nervous about Sanders that, without another plausible alternative (sorry, Buttigieg), they may rally behind Bloomberg.
And that brings me to the general election. Sanders would be toast.
You will, at various points in time, encounter head-to-head general election match-up polls which purport to show who is and is not "electable." Those polls do nothing, and here's what everyone needs to remember about Bernie Sanders. Nobody has ever run a serious, hard campaign against him. In 2016, Clinton coddled him because she knew, with absolute certainty, that (a) she would defeat him, and that (b) anything negative that she said about him would be held against her by the Sanders faction. So, she had to absorb everything that Sanders and the Bernie-bros said about her, without ever responding in kind. Democrats can't respond in kind now because even if Buttigieg, or Bloomberg, or even Biden beat him, they still need Sanders's voters.
Democrats have always pulled every punch when it comes to Sanders.
Republicans won't. Trump won't. You cannot look at existing polls on a person who has never been punched before. When Hillary Clinton was defeated for the Democratic nomination by Barack Obama, Republicans played nice with her to try to stoke intra-party divisions within Democrats. Then, they played nice with her while she was Secretary of State, right up until they needed to turn on her as preparation for her up-coming presidential run. That was why they made such a teapot-tempest out of hash-tag-Benghazi. Yeah, I'm just typing out "hash-tag." When Republicans played nice with Clinton, her approval ratings were sky-high! The numbers tell you nothing until after the other party starts campaigning.
They haven't started with Sanders. Nobody has. Even the Democrats pull their punches with him.
If he gets the nomination, though, his jaw isn't even glass. It's breakaway glass. He calls himself a socialist. He has cozied up to vile, oppressive communist regimes. You want to nominate this guy when the economy is booming?
Really?!
Look, there's political science on this. Extremism really does hurt in an election, and Sanders is out there. And the thing is, it's hard to measure just how out-there he is. We can measure his voting record in the Senate, but that is constrained by the Senate legislative agenda. In other words, it doesn't capture just how out of the American mainstream he is because his proposals don't even get onto the agenda.
Sanders is way out of the mainstream. And he is out of the mainstream in such a way that is completely incompatible with what is happening. The economy is booming. And he is responding with cries for socialism. Technically, he is always calling for socialism, but calling for it amid an economic boom is just politically stupid for the party. FDR redefined liberalism around the welfare state as a response to the Great Depression, and Sanders is calling for socialism as a response to one of the great economic expansions in history?!
What is wrong with you people?!
OK, this is happening in the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party got "within epsilon"* of completion of the New Deal/Great Society liberal project when Obama signed the ACA into law. So, lefties are looking for a new way to define lefty-ism that is more exciting than shoring up the gaps in the welfare state and working on enforcement of civil rights laws that are already on the books.
Let's be clear. That's all hard stuff. These aren't easy tasks.
To say nothing of climate change.
But the party is redefining itself, and rethinking what liberalism means. That happens. After all, liberalism in America doesn't mean what it means in the UK! Remember my mini-lecture from above? Definitions change over time, and it's changing again. That happens.
It's just that usually, parties change in ways that involve looking for ways to win a general election, rather than finding the most effective way to lose.
Then again, keep in mind my observations about the state of democracy in this country. The debates within the Democratic Party right now about how to define the party, and how to define liberalism, rather miss the point. The candidates are acting as though the number 270 still has meaning.
Bernie Sanders will not be President next year, and this is all moot. The Democratic Party needs to understand that this is not an election being played under normal rules with the potential to be followed by a normal, peaceful transition of power.
*Mathematical jargon for a number arbitrarily close to but not precisely equal to zero.
I am not, generally speaking, a big fan of Stephen Skowronek's work. He is best known in political science for his model of presidents and how they fit into a sort of cycle of political time. Some presidents are transformational. Some carry on legacies of existing presidents, and so on. Oh, and there's a two-by-two table, 'cuz we political scientists love two-by-two tables. It is based on thorough historical analysis, but I just don't dig it. However, I find myself thinking about modern liberalism.
A reminder about definitions, which alas, I need to do these days because not everyone gets this. The word, "liberal," has a meaning in American politics that is different from its meaning in British and European politics. The etymology of the term is rooted in "liberty," and as originally conceived, it meant freedom and small government. However, in American politics, that's not what liberalism means anymore. Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay long ago conceiving of two kinds of liberty: positive and negative liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from government intervention. I am free to write this blog because the government doesn't stop me from doing it. Positive liberty, though, requires the resources to take advantage of the negative liberty. So, consider another example. Both a poor person and a rich person have the negative liberty to sleep under a bridge. But, only the rich person has the positive liberty to sleep in a posh hotel. That positive liberty becomes more critical when it comes to things like, well... healthcare.
When the Great Depression struck, Franklin Delano Roosevelt reoriented the Democratic Party around an ideology of positive liberty, and that became the ideology that Americans call, "liberalism." Liberty, liberalism... See? You need to understand the history to get how it happened. Not so complicated, is it? Anyway, that became American liberalism.
American liberalism became an ideology of capitalism with a welfare state to support positive liberty. A social safety net, but still fundamentally capitalist. Built into that ideology was a set of goals for what the safety net should cover. You get New Deal liberalism, and its extrapolation into Great Society liberalism, which was not conceptually all that different. It expanded the safety net, and added civil rights, which was the bigger conceptual change, although Martin Luther King didn't see that as fundamentally different, conceptually.
In terms of the structure of the welfare state, though, the big piece that went missing for so long was healthcare. Generation after generation of liberal politician tried and tried and tried, but... they never got there. Johnson got Medicare, but that's just for the oldsters.
Then came Nancy Pelosi. Yes. She could. (Oh, was there another guy?) So, I'm being a little snarky with the credit here, and there was a chapter in my last book-- Incremental Polarization-- arguing that Pelosi deserved the lion's share of the credit for passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but in 2010 (after a hard slog in 2009), Congress passed and the President signed legislation expanding Medicaid and providing subsidies for health insurance to those who couldn't afford it, while prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.
This was not single-payer, but despite the delusions of clueless people like Bernie Sanders, single-payer has zero chance of passing. Like... ever. While discussing the issue, President Obama said that he believed a country starting from scratch should start with something like single-payer, but the US was not starting from scratch. He was being pragmatic.
Whether you agree or disagree with expanding the welfare state, Obama's pragmatism was far more intelligent, strategically, than any words that have ever escaped Sanders's mouth. And the result was, given the context of the American political system, the last major piece of the American liberal project. Healthcare reform.
Note the word, "major." There is still plenty that New Deal/Great Society liberals would seek to do. Right now, top of that list would be environmental regulation to address climate change. There are places that liberals would like to shore up the welfare state. Civil rights? As far as race and sex/gender go, laws are on the books, but enforcement is a never-ending battle. There are agenda items within the scope of Great Society liberalism, especially, given its expansion into civil rights, but the basic observation I am making is that once Obama signed the ACA into law, liberalism didn't exactly win, but it won its last major victory, making most other things about enforcement.
So what do you do?
And here is where I missed the boat on the direction of the Democratic Party four years ago. I was giving a talk to a group of campus visitors during the 2016 election, and the question arose-- if Clinton lost, who would the Democrats nominate in 2020? Consensus in the room, including from me, was Warren. It just seemed like their obvious choice. And at the time, Warren was acting like an Obama-style Democrat. And in fact, in 2012, Obama was borrowing heavily from Warren. The whole, "you didn't build that" schtick that Romney tried to turn into a massive scandal was Obama clumsily borrowing Warren's schtick. In 2012, Warren wasn't trying to out-left Lefty McLefterson. She was just a high-visibility popular Democrat within the mainstream of her party. Like I said, an obvious choice, and an obvious heir to Obama.
So, I thought Warren would have an easy walk to the nomination with the party throwing rose petals at her feet. (Assuming Clinton lost, which I didn't think would happen, so obviously I suck anyway.)
But.
Clinton lost, Trump threw everything in the country into chaos, and with the liberal project not complete, exactly, but with its major structures in place, here's the problem. One of the things that I try to explain is that a nomination process is how a party defines itself. Hey, everyone! We won! Now, let's work on enforcement and fill in the gaps! Does that work while Trump is in office?
Structurally, what Trump is doing is tearing down the checks-and-balances of democracy, but he hasn't actually torn down the welfare state! He wants to, and he's suing to have the ACA struck down (again), but he hasn't torn down the welfare state! Civil rights? We're back to enforcement rather than legislation. See my point? The statutory structures of New Deal/Great Society liberalism are still there.
Combine the statutory completion of New Deal/Great Society liberalism with the core attacks on democracy being made by Trump, and you have a push for someone who is not running as a New Deal/Great Society liberal.
The result? Something I didn't see coming.
There are a lot of ways this could have gone, but what is happening now in the Democratic Party is that the party is moving away from New Deal/Great Society liberalism as voters and politicians cast about looking for something that might work. There are the true socialists, those who just use the name not knowing what it means, there is the all-identity-politics-all-the-time faction... the party is unsettled. And in this environment, an electorate that doesn't just want a candidate who will shore up the New Deal/Great Society project will look at a type of candidate who would otherwise be anathema and say, sure. That.
Warren saw this coming. That's why she chased Sanders's left flank. Why didn't that work? There are a lot of reasons. Too many to list in this post, but when you combine Warren's fall with the Democratic Party moving away from New Deal/Great Society liberalism after the essential completion of the project, someone like Sanders-- even though he isn't even a Democrat!-- winds up with a shot at the nomination.
I wasn't thinking in terms of either Skowronek's model directly, or extensions of it. What I am proposing here isn't precisely Skowronek, but it follows from the spirit of his model, and I think it works. Warren's fall? That's more complicated, but once she started really stumbling, that gave Sanders the opening.
Has he already won? No. Miles to go, and all that. At this point, I'm no longer even discounting Bloomberg. I wrote him off entirely, on the sole basis of the fact that he's a self-funder, applying Jennifer Steen's research, but at this point, establishment Democrats might get so nervous about Sanders that, without another plausible alternative (sorry, Buttigieg), they may rally behind Bloomberg.
And that brings me to the general election. Sanders would be toast.
You will, at various points in time, encounter head-to-head general election match-up polls which purport to show who is and is not "electable." Those polls do nothing, and here's what everyone needs to remember about Bernie Sanders. Nobody has ever run a serious, hard campaign against him. In 2016, Clinton coddled him because she knew, with absolute certainty, that (a) she would defeat him, and that (b) anything negative that she said about him would be held against her by the Sanders faction. So, she had to absorb everything that Sanders and the Bernie-bros said about her, without ever responding in kind. Democrats can't respond in kind now because even if Buttigieg, or Bloomberg, or even Biden beat him, they still need Sanders's voters.
Democrats have always pulled every punch when it comes to Sanders.
Republicans won't. Trump won't. You cannot look at existing polls on a person who has never been punched before. When Hillary Clinton was defeated for the Democratic nomination by Barack Obama, Republicans played nice with her to try to stoke intra-party divisions within Democrats. Then, they played nice with her while she was Secretary of State, right up until they needed to turn on her as preparation for her up-coming presidential run. That was why they made such a teapot-tempest out of hash-tag-Benghazi. Yeah, I'm just typing out "hash-tag." When Republicans played nice with Clinton, her approval ratings were sky-high! The numbers tell you nothing until after the other party starts campaigning.
They haven't started with Sanders. Nobody has. Even the Democrats pull their punches with him.
If he gets the nomination, though, his jaw isn't even glass. It's breakaway glass. He calls himself a socialist. He has cozied up to vile, oppressive communist regimes. You want to nominate this guy when the economy is booming?
Really?!
Look, there's political science on this. Extremism really does hurt in an election, and Sanders is out there. And the thing is, it's hard to measure just how out-there he is. We can measure his voting record in the Senate, but that is constrained by the Senate legislative agenda. In other words, it doesn't capture just how out of the American mainstream he is because his proposals don't even get onto the agenda.
Sanders is way out of the mainstream. And he is out of the mainstream in such a way that is completely incompatible with what is happening. The economy is booming. And he is responding with cries for socialism. Technically, he is always calling for socialism, but calling for it amid an economic boom is just politically stupid for the party. FDR redefined liberalism around the welfare state as a response to the Great Depression, and Sanders is calling for socialism as a response to one of the great economic expansions in history?!
What is wrong with you people?!
OK, this is happening in the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party got "within epsilon"* of completion of the New Deal/Great Society liberal project when Obama signed the ACA into law. So, lefties are looking for a new way to define lefty-ism that is more exciting than shoring up the gaps in the welfare state and working on enforcement of civil rights laws that are already on the books.
Let's be clear. That's all hard stuff. These aren't easy tasks.
To say nothing of climate change.
But the party is redefining itself, and rethinking what liberalism means. That happens. After all, liberalism in America doesn't mean what it means in the UK! Remember my mini-lecture from above? Definitions change over time, and it's changing again. That happens.
It's just that usually, parties change in ways that involve looking for ways to win a general election, rather than finding the most effective way to lose.
Then again, keep in mind my observations about the state of democracy in this country. The debates within the Democratic Party right now about how to define the party, and how to define liberalism, rather miss the point. The candidates are acting as though the number 270 still has meaning.
Bernie Sanders will not be President next year, and this is all moot. The Democratic Party needs to understand that this is not an election being played under normal rules with the potential to be followed by a normal, peaceful transition of power.
*Mathematical jargon for a number arbitrarily close to but not precisely equal to zero.
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