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A couple newsletters ago, I pointed out how dysfunctional the Republican Party had become on policy—how it has functionally no interest in governing and instead engages in stunts designed to get media coverage. It’s a savvy strategy if you aren’t thinking more than five seconds ahead, as media outlets on both the right and the left get pulled into covering the latest GOP idiocy/masterstroke and oxygen gets sucked away from whatever the Democrats want to talk about, which is probably something boring like healthcare or people dying of Covid. Republicans get attention, they get votes, and who cares if they don’t have an agenda?
By contrast, the Democrats have an agenda. Boy howdy do they ever! From centrists to libs to socialists, everyone on the left side of the spectrum has reams of policy proposals ready to pull out the second they get into power. In 2016, while Donald Trump fired up the right-wing base with nonsensical and racist rhetoric, Bernie Sanders fired up the left-wing base with his call for Medicare for All, not only a policy idea but an actual bill. Largely as a consequence of Sanders’s popularity, the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries were for a time centered around Medicare for All and competing healthcare policy proposals. Though that’s no longer the hottest of topics, arguments among different elements of the Democratic coalition usually concern policy, i.e. how to govern. Is defunding the police a good idea? (Also, what does “defund” mean?) Should the U.S. reconsider its posture toward Israel and/or Saudi Arabia? Should you allow real estate developers to build housing even if area homeowners object to more density? Sometimes these debates turn needlessly petty or personal or vicious, but there’s a sense that these discussions matter, that they have real-world stakes.
There’s a way of framing this contrast between Democrats and Republicans that paints the former as intellectuals who care about the world and the latter as a pack of frothing morons whose main concern is electing the craziest, most racist politicians to the highest office possible. Democrats are the party that cares about governing! Where Republicans avoid detailing their plans because they know their supporters largely don’t care, Democrats love to share their plans. They are thrilled that someone is finally asking them about their plans so here they are, with charts! And bullet points! Here’s the Medicare for All bill, the Green New Deal bill, how you could add new seats to the Supreme Court, how you could end gerrymandering, how you could turn Washington D.C. into a state and bring Puerto Rico in as a 52nd state to address the partisan imbalance in the Senate, then you just need to end the filibuster and then…
Unfortunately, this sort of discourse is the political equivalent of going onto a real estate website and browsing homes you will never be able to afford. Progressives have policies, but they don’t usually have a path to enacting those policies. Even if Sanders had been elected president, Medicare for All would have had no chance of passing, since it has never had the support of enough Democrats in the House or Senate. You can make similar critiques of the Green New Deal framework introduced in Congress by left-wing Democrats in 2019—while not quite the same thing as a bill, the framework included a grab bag of progressive policies, including a jobs guarantee and universal healthcare, that only have a chance of becoming law in some sort of alternate reality.
It’s nice to talk about nice things . But in our current drab reality, you can only pass legislation when there is a genuine bipartisan coalition behind it, or when you can convince the most skeptical member of your party that the legislation is worthwhile. That’s what happened with 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, which centrist West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin agreed to after a long Hamlet routine. The IRA will reduce emissions and is a bona fide achievement, even if it didn’t do all the things the Green New Deal would do—but of course Manchin (and a bunch of other Democratic senators) aren’t ever going to sign up for the GND.
Why do progressives float proposals that are dead on arrival in Congress? I can think of three reasons. In order of least to most cynical:
Proposing big left-wing ideas gets people to talk about them, and maybe that will make them more popular. Of course, the downside is that elements of the media inevitably seize on the silliest, least thought-through parts of your ideas—as GND advocates learned when they mistakenly posted a draft of their framework that included a line about how they wanted to “fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes” and had to endure a couple right-wing news cycles about how Democrats were coming for your meat and planes.
If you’re a progressive in Congress you gotta do something with your time. Individual members of Congress have barely any power, as their job is basically to vote the right way on the tiny fraction of bills that could pass the House and Senate. So why not come up with some ideas and issue some press releases?
Most cynically, being an outspoken lefty is a fantastic way to raise money. The Green New Deal isn’t happening, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office made some really cool GND posters and she gave interviews all over the place when the framework was announced. Among other things, Ocasio-Cortez is a savvy fundraiser—she’s raised $11 million in the past two years, more than all but four other House Democrats. (And one of those Democrats, David Trone, didn’t really “fundraise” so much as “give his own campaign $12.5 million.”) If embracing big, ambitious policies gets you noticed by progressives, it’s also a great way to raise money from progressives.
If we wanted to, we could have a whole big long conversation about the strategic wisdom of progressives making noise about their biggest ideas as opposed to having “message discipline,” a.k.a. not talking about those ideas and instead saying “I want to go to Washington to solve problems and cut taxes for the middle class” over and over again. But let’s skip that conversation—my point is merely that grandstanding about Medicare for All or the Green New Deal or whatever is mostly performative. Personally, it appeals to me more than the Republican version of political performance, which is to take horse medications and demand that we break open the voting machines to expose the tiny goblins inside who are rigging elections, but it’s performance nonetheless.
There’s always an element of performance in politics, but the current rhetorical style of both parties has become increasingly apocalyptic, and increasingly untethered from the realities of how Congress actually works. The audience (we’re really more audience members than we are voters) is being told that defeat of the other side is not just possible but essential in order to preserve the rule of law, democracy, etc. etc. Our side’s inevitable victory will result in a golden age of prosperity and freedom blah blah blah.
You can fundraise on this message, you can win on this message, but you’ll never be able to govern on this message, because total victory over the other side is an impossible dream. The system of government in the U.S. is (maddeningly) built on compromise and consensus. Whatever happens this upcoming Election Day, Congress will be closely divided between Republicans and Democrats, as it will be for the foreseeable future1.
Boringly, passing legislation requires working with the other side and making concessions in order to get at least some of what you want. And this sucks! Imagine we had a system where if a party got a majority of votes, it could pass bills into laws and thereby govern the country according to the wishes of voters! But in defense of the current system, it sorta works sometimes—a divided Congress managed to pass a Covid 19 relief package in 2020, and has passed a fair number of relatively important and useful bills in the last few years on a bipartisan basis. (These bills pass in spite of, or maybe because of, the lack of media coverage around them.)
Proposing big, bold ideas is good if you’re a blogger of if you work at a think tank, which is like being a blogger who wears a suit. But when you are a legislator whose job should involve some dialogue and compromise with the other party, what you should focus on aren’t bold ideas but ideas that can become reality. It’s fine to dream big, but then you need to wake up and go to work.
Well, unless Republicans wind up controlling the Senate with a huge majority.