The left's fantasy of remaking the country is not going to happen. It was never going to

The below article is on the state of the left-wing of the Democratic Party. They are despondent and have had their dreams shattered, the article says. Grand plans to remake America have gone by the wayside. The reality of a narrow majority in Congress has made their ideas all but dead.

I don’t really disagree with that, but it is amazing just how much delusion there was in the Democratic presidential primary. Throughout 2019, one Democrat after another fell over themselves to show who was the most far out in left field. I watched with dismay and alarm as one candidate after another did everything possible to make Trump look reasonable by comparison. Sometimes it seemed like some of the candidates running were part of a secret committee to reelect Trump. It is not 20-20 hindsight to say that the huge lurch leftward was a bad move. It was obvious at the time.

If someone had told me in 2019 that Democrats would win the White House and have 50 Senators, I would not have been surprised at all and would have been quite happy. Simply looking at the Senate map in 2020 made it clear that even on a great night Democrats would wind up with maybe 52 Senators. Whether they had 50 Senators or 52 or even 55 on a perfect night, the grand ambitions of the left were never going to happen.

It was as if many of the Democrats running for president inhabited a completely different world from the one everyone else is living in. To be fair, the problem of going way too far out ideologically is not unique to Democrats. In fact, Republicans did the exact same thing in 2012. While Mitt Romney was the least right-wing candidate, he ran well to the right of John McCain, George W Bush and himself in 2008. His running mate was none other than Paul Ryan.

What was all the more dismaying about the huge lurch leftward was that there was virtually no popular demand for it. During 2019, the economy was solid and most people were happy about it. Trump should have been coasting to re-election. What got him in trouble was his behavior. People wanted to see him gone. They were not clamoring for ripping everything apart.

As the article notes, it is natural for the party out of the White House to start thinking big on policy issues. There is nothing wrong that per se and it can be desirable. It is good to be dynamic and adapt to new realities and problems. Republicans have largely not done that and still preach the same things about economic policy that they did 40 years ago. More than anything else, that is what allowed Trump to sweep in and take the nomination in 2016. He offered a new path while the other Republican candidates kept preaching spending and tax cuts as if it was still 1980. The problem Democrats had was not that they were looking at new policy ideas, it was that they were pushing ideas that were far out of the mainstream and that nobody other than the far left was demanding.

There is no popular demand for eliminating private health insurance, for example. The amount of disruption that would cause would be unfathomable, which is why it was never going to happen. Even if Democrats had super majorities in Congress, no such thing would ever pass. It is not just Republicans who oppose that, but Democrats, too. Rank-and-file Democratic voters are among the many beneficiaries of private health insurance and would be up in arms if they were forced off of it. It was the worst of both worlds for Democrats who advocated for that because they made themselves toxic and did it over something with no chance of passing.

What was so foolhardy is that many of the Democrats who ran thought they could run to the left of Bernie Sanders. That is not possible. Bernie Sanders is way out in left field and always has been. Although he is often pragmatic as a Senator, his own views are completely detached from reality. He genuinely believes that we can spend tens of trillions of dollars without having to worry about any tradeoffs. None of the other Democrats could claim to believe that without being laughed out of the room.

Someone like Elizabeth Warren could have been a serious contender had she emphasized and stuck to discussing her main causes of consumer protection and fighting corruption. There was no need for her to try to check every single left-wing box. Instead, she endorsed abolishing private health insurance, decriminalizing border crossings and banning fracking, among many other toxic positions. Kamala Harris, too, could have been a serious contender had she emphasized her career as a prosecutor. Instead, she waffled from one far-left position to another, only to have to walk it back and come off as phony and calculating. In contrast, Biden largely avoided going way out into left field. He proposed much more modest changes such as improving on the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

How can we be so sure Democratic voters were not demanding all those radical things? It’s very simple. If they were, Bernie Sanders or some other candidate who went way out into left-field would have been nominated. Instead, Joe Biden, one of the few candidates who did not do that, won the nomination handily.

A huge misread of 2016

One part of the article mentions how the left was very optimistic in 2019 and 2020, which is unusual for them. I can certainly speak to that from plenty of personal experience interacting with that crowd. They really saw it as an opportunity to remake the country. The problem was not just that they wanted to do unpopular and unrealistic things, but also that they had completely misinterpreted the meaning of Trump getting elected.

Trump was a candidate like no other in US history. On that part, the left is correct. But the reason for that is crucial and the left completely misunderstood it. What made Trump different was not that he was proposing radical, new policy ideas. It was his behavior and defiance of the Republican establishment and almost all norms previously considered sacrosanct. He shattered the belief among many that rank-and-file Republican voters were government-hating ideologues clamoring for a return to laissez-faire economics.

To the extent that Trump discussed policy, it was often moving leftward. He put an end to the Republican obsession with Medicare and Social Security (entitlement) cuts. His opposition to free trade is almost as strong as Bernie Sanders’. The Republican establishment position, best exemplified by Jeb Bush, was for fewer entitlements, more trade and more immigration. Trump turned that on its head and won the primary with ease while Jeb Bush went nowhere.

What I am getting at is that while the left wanted a policy revolution, Trump was the opposite of a policy revolution. His election to the presidency was not an endorsement of radically altering the role of the federal government. It was basically keeping it as it was. Trump’s appeal was largely emotional and cultural. His moving leftward on entitlements disarmed Democrats of some very effective weapons they had used against previous Republican candidates. The left misread all of that and assumed that because Trump had ascended to the presidency, that meant the country was craving for radical changes. In their eyes, Trump pushed for far-right ideas. Since people rejected his far-right ideas, that meant they wanted far-left ideas.

As strange as it sounds, Trump was a comparatively moderate Republican on many policy issues. He not only ran to the left of Mitt Romney on entitlements, but to the left of Obama, too. He is radical, but not on policy. His radicalism is his shameless corruption and dishonesty, including lying about the 2020 election. That is what makes him stand out. Most of the actions he took as president, i.e., judges, tax cuts, were no different from what any other Republican would have done.

Trump is not a good candidate overall. For all the talk about how lucky he was to run against Hillary Clinton, she was lucky to run against him. Because Trump had so many conflicts of interest and ethical challenges, he was unable to take advantage of many of her weaknesses. In 2020, he should have been re-elected given how close things were in the electoral college and that had got good marks on the economy. Had he not shot himself in the foot at every turn, he would still be president. That said, he has much better political instincts than most other Republicans. He saw that cutting entitlements was a political dead end and that Republican voters have very different priorities than donors. Virtually all other 2016 Republican candidates were still advocating for the same old policies that benefitted donors while doing little for voters.

Another big misread that the left made of 2016 was misunderstanding the reason Bernie Sanders did as well as he did in the primary. The assumption from the left and many Democratic candidates was that his 2016 performance was indicative of where the party was headed. He did well because Democratic voters wanted a revolution. They believed the system was rigged and needed to be burned down. That is why eliminating private health insurance, cancelling student debt, free college for all, abolishing ICE and the Green New Deal were the ways to go.

In reality, his 2016 performance had almost nothing to do with what he was selling. The reason he did as well as he did was simply because he was not Hillary Clinton. For Democrats who were tired of Hillary Clinton and the endless drama that followed her, he was the only show in town. In other words, he did well not because he was strong but because she was weak. How can we be so sure of this? Look at what happened when he was head-to-head against someone not named Hillary Clinton. Biden crushed him and he dropped out of the primary and endorsed him in April 2020.

There are plenty of things that Democrats and the left can learn from Trump, which I have written about before. Trump understood Republican voters much better than the other Republican candidates who ran in 2016. He saw that they were interested in fighting, but not to reduce the size of government. He saw that they were angry at the Republican establishment that had ignored them and prioritized the interests of donors. He saw that there was an opening for a candidate who was openly antagonistic towards them and he took advantage of it.

If there is any policy takeaway that Democrats and the left could learn from Trump, it is that a Democratic candidate who is moderate is really what Democratic voters are looking for. Just as Trump showed that most Republican voters are not ideologues, most Democratic voters are not ideologues either. A future Democratic presidential candidate (or candidate for most offices) who advocates for more modest ideas is in fact at a big advantage compared to one who advocates for tearing things down. Democratic voters have sent plenty of signals for the last 2 years about which direction they prefer. While acting like Trump would not be helpful in a Democratic primary, adopting a centrist or center-left version of where he stood on policy is likely a big asset.

Governing is hard

The American political system is heavily biased against enacting things. Unlike many democracies, we have a presidential system and not a parliamentary system. The biggest difference between the two is veto points, which the former has many more of. Enacting legislation is a Herculean task in our system and requires painstaking work. Getting the ACA enacted was decades in the making and it was a very modest bill compared with what the left wanted.

That Democrats are struggling to pass things now is no surprise. They have the narrowest majority possible. When you cannot afford to lose a single vote, you have to satisfy everyone and that is never a small task. Still, plenty can be done if Biden can finally muster the will to tell interest groups and activists that they are not going to get what they want. The opportunity is there, but Biden needs to take the lead on it because he is the president. Only he can deliver the bad news to those who are going to have to take an L. The good news is that because those groups and activists do not represent any actual voters, their protests will not affect the bill’s passage and will be noticed by nobody outside of DC.

The struggle Democrats are having now, as one person quoted in the article notes, is in fact quite normal. It is rare for a party to have the White House and Congress at the same time. In fact, it can often happen unexpectedly, which is the case now. The only reason Democrats have the Senate is because of the runoffs in Georgia, which they were not supposed to win. Trump was not supposed to win in 2016 and Republicans were caught off guard by that. Both had to scramble to make plans.

Similar to where Biden is, Trump only had 52 Republican Senators in 2017. His efforts to repeal the ACA failed on a 51-49 vote. Had his majority been any bigger it may well have passed. If Democrats had 51 or 52 Senators, Build Back Better probably would have already passed. That is the reality of our political system. It seldom delivers majorities in Congress and the White House at the same time and when it does, they tend to have a very short shelf life. Democrats lost the House in 2010 and Republicans lost it in 2018 right after they had majorities. That is just how midterms work.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/01/17/liberal-promises-biden-midterm/