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San Francisco is now nationally the most politically potent city in America, home to four of Democratic Partys most powerful elected leaders Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and California Governor Gavin Newsom.

All four are firmly liberal moderates, along with the citys prominent Mayor, London Breed, and longtime party godfather Willie Brown. All are lifelong Downtown/Establishment-friendly centrists within the left-leaning spectrum of California politics. None identify as progressive.

One might think then that their moderate viewpoint dominated San Francisco politics. But one would be wrong.

Beginning with the anti-war, environmental, and gay-rights movements of 50 years past that so strongly took deep roots in the Bay Area, and then merged with National agendas for civil rights, social justice and community empowerment, San Francisco evolved one of the strongest local progressive political forces in the US.

And since winning a signature victory in the 2000 elections to control the Board of Supervisors, even without winning the Mayors Office, progressives have set much of the political agenda of San Francisco for the last 20 years.

So this November, the Downtown Establishment tried to take progressives out conclusively to defeat enough progressive candidates to flip the Board of Supervisors to a moderate majority and defeat the three local business/property tax measures progressives had put on the ballot (Propositions I, F, and L). Downtown had the official or de facto support of the all of above party elite. They allied with the Yimby wannabes who have become national darlings of the neo-liberal cognoscenti. They poured $8 million into these campaigns, raised from a whos-who list of the citys Downtown/Tech powers, even including major GOP donors. They deployed these massive funds $17 per voter! for attack ads, hit pieces, and Cable TV scare ads against a fraction of that amount supporting the Progressives.

They lost:

Why did the elite San Francisco Democratic Party establishment support this fierce Downtown attack on their progressive fellow Democrats?

The national Democratic Party long ago became the co-opted protectors of that Establishment first and foremost, and protectors of the people only to the extent that will allow. They belong to it.

Which is why these days we see President-elect Joe Biden pledge to bi-partisan cooperation with the defeated neo-fascist Republican Party an utterly hopeless notion while at the same time we hear moderate Democrats and their Beltway/cable news media pundit pals warn against the extreme left proposals of the growing progressive movement within the party itself!

The Socialists are coming! they cry. As if, seriously.

This is an internal fight within the Democratic Party that the future of our nation cannot afford. Trump and his Republican White Peoples Party just got 48 percent of the vote 71 million Americans willing to accept a morally depraved neo-fascist state. They are not going to quit. The future of our nation is not secure.

To defeat this Great American Evil, the moderate elite of the Democratic Party need to stop attacking their progressive sisters and brothers and instead negotiate shared power and a common winning agenda both can live with and that enough of their Establishment can eventually accept.

That common winning agenda is for America to become a true Social Security Society. Our nation has more than enough wealth to achieve that. We are striving here in San Francisco to build as much of that society as it is possible for one city to do. But it is far from all that is needed. Only a full national commitment and just taxation of that wealth can really make it possible.

On November 3, 2020, progressives won the Battle of San Francisco.

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Progressives are winning the Battle of San Francisco | 48 hills - 48 Hills

In a year dominated by massive street protests over racial injustice and wrenching losses from the pandemic, Los Angeles voters upended the political status quo on Tuesday by backing a slate of progressive candidates and measures.

The question now is whether the leftward push is the beginning of a larger realignment of local politics or a unique moment brought about by extraordinary times.

Voters have the chance to dramatically reshape L.A. City Hall in 2022 when they cast ballots for mayor, eight City Council candidates, city attorney and city controller.

While L.A. has long been dominated by Democrats, the more establishment players are now being challenged from the left in a battle also playing out among Democrats at the national level.

Locally, voters on election day appeared to favor more progressive candidates and back stronger action on racial justice and a more humane approach to homelessness.

The large voter participation seen in L.A. County has been credited to the presidential race and a new election schedule that synchronizes local races with gubernatorial and presidential elections. At the same time, issues including police reform were at the forefront of voters minds.

It remains to be seen if progressives and reformers groups probably helped by a larger turnout of younger, poorer and non-white voters on Tuesday will also leave their stamp on the 2022 city election. The electorate in local L.A. races has historically skewed toward older homeowners and generally been pretty white.

Skeptics note that L.A.'s finances are already reeling from pandemic-fueled tax losses and that City Hall may not have the money to carry out ambitious plans.

But others believe this week is just the beginning.

I dont think that this is a one-off or some kind of fluke, said Isaac Bryan, who helped run the committee for Measure J, which voters backed Tuesday. The measure will divert more county money to social services and jail diversion programs.

All of these races demonstrated the values of L.A. County are now going to be reflected in our elected officials. We are tired of the corruption in City Hall, Bryan said. We are tired of speaking only in rhetoric and not in policy.

Former San Francisco Dist. Atty. George Gascon holds a lead over L.A. County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey.

(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)

Activists argued that Tuesdays results were the culmination of years of work, including regular protests held downtown in an effort to oust L.A. County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey, who appeared to be losing her race to challenger George Gascn, former San Francisco district attorney.

Political consultant Eric Hacopian expects many progressive candidates and even those further to the left will run for City Council in 2022, inspired by the apparent victory of newcomer Nithya Raman in a Hollywood, Silver Lake and Los Feliz City Council district race.

Theres going to be challengers galore next cycle, Hacopian said. Theres no question about it.

Ramans campaign relied on both grass-roots support and a big war chest to pull ahead of City Councilman David Ryu a formula that will be difficult to replicate, said Hacopian, who ran an outside committee supporting Ryu in the primary election.

Raman was one of three candidates who challenged establishment figures in Tuesdays election, a group that included Gascn and state Sen. Holly Mitchell.

Gascn, seen as a reformer on police issues, was ahead of Lacey, according to results updated Thursday.

The Times analysis that showed Gascn generally performed stronger on the Westside and in South Los Angeles than Lacey. Lacey pulled in more votes on the edges of Los Angeles County and the western San Fernando Valley, areas that have typically skewed more conservative, the data show.

Donna Bojarsky, a longtime Democratic political consultant and founder of a nonprofit dedicated to building civic engagement in L.A., said she would be cautious about calling the results a progressive wave.

You could also say there was an anti-incumbent vote, Bojarsky said, characterizing anti-incumbency as a major factor in several races.

That sentiment is a far cry from whats typically expected in L.A. politics, where incumbency has historically carried an enormous political advantage.

We have to know that progressive, in the context of a city like Los Angeles, has to mean more than just a title, Bojarsky said. We have to look beyond labels and take enough interest that we know who people are.

She cited the example of L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who ran as a progressive reformer in a long-shot bid to unseat then-incumbent Sheriff Jim McDonnell in 2018. Villanuevas tenure has been deeply controversial and brought rebukes from the groups that once endorsed him.

Raphael J. Sonenshein, a local government expert who runs the Edmund G. Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Cal State L.A., said Tuesdays election shows incumbents will probably have to recalibrate in coming elections.

Any [City Hall] incumbent is going to have some problems, partly because of the strength of the progressive movement that has its own issues that it really wants to see, Sonenshein said. Also, establishment candidates cant win just with endorsements from major players.

Still, progressives have fallen short in recent years in some districts.

In the northwest San Fernando Valley an area with a reputation as a relatively conservative part of L.A., despite having more Democrats than Republicans City Councilman John Lee has twice defeated a more progressive candidate in the last two years.

Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., challenged the notion that City Hall was suddenly going to enact sweeping changes sought by some activists after Tuesday.

There are candidates with bold ideas and then there are elected officials who have to be in touch with reality, Waldman said. You cant start giving away free rent, you cant start giving away free utilities. You have to be reasonable.

Mark Ryavec, president of the Venice Stakeholders Assn., said its his view that if Ryu and Lacey lose, its because neither is a particularly strong politician. He doesnt see those losses as a bellwether for how residents will vote in 2022.

In some sections of Venice, there is long-standing unhappiness with City Hall over the citys handling of homelessness and more recently, the increase in crime.

Ryavec predicted that the rise in crime will lead to law and order candidates on the ballot in two years.

Erick Huerta, an activist and host of the local issues podcast "rale Boyle Heights, sees Tuesdays results far differently.

He described the success of progressive candidates Raman as well as Sasha Rene Prez, a young community organizer wholl be the next mayor of Alhambra as part of the same momentum that drove New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs insurgent bid for Congress in 2018.

He characterized anger at the Trump presidency as a pivotal driver of political engagement at the local level.

Looking to the future, Huerta speculated that some of the ferocity of that energy might dim in L.A. if the country sees a Biden presidency, with some folks taking the back seat as the national situation registers as less of an emergency in liberal L.A.

Times staff writer Ben Welsh contributed to this report.

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Is this the start of a progressive wave in L.A. politics? - Los Angeles Times

In the wake of a tempestuous national election, it is very clear to most observers that the U.S. body politic is in a state of some disarray. Our politics seem more polarized than at any time in the past century or earlier, with many voters and political leaders (including Donald Trump and his supporters) refusing to even acknowledge the apparent election of Joe Biden to the presidency. Anger not only over the COVID-19 pandemic but over economic and racial inequality have led many thousands of protestors into the streets in recent months and to occasional clashes between activists of the left and the (sometimes armed) right. Though the widespread fear of civil unrest after the elections has so far proven unfounded, risks remain.

But has America been there before, and come through it fine? At other points of U.S. history, have the conflicts associated with inequality and polarization not only been resolved, but resulted in more cohesion and widely shared prosperity?

This is the thesis of a new book called The Upswing by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett. They present evidence that our current levels of economic and political polarization are not greatly different than they were in the 1890s, at the peak of the Gilded Age.

But the Gilded Age was soon followed by the beginning of the Progressive Era, which many historians associate with the ascendancy of Teddy Roosevelt to the presidency in 1901 (after President William McKinley was assassinated). This era of relatively egalitarian economic and political reform continued through the presidencies of William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson until the 1920s. And, with the coming of the Great Depression and the New Deal in the 1930s, as well as the civil rights legislation and War on Poverty in the 1960s, the egalitarian drift in American politics continued.

Will history repeat itself? In other words, is another Progressive Era coming now?

The argument put forward by Putnam and Garrett goes well beyond the historical observations above and builds on them in a number of important ways.

First, they argue that the Gilded Age and our current era are similar among several dimensions economic, political, social, and cultural. Putnam and Garrett present evidence that, like now, the U.S. of the Gilded Age was characterized by dramatic increases in economic inequality, political polarization, a low level of social and communitarian cohesion, and a culture that celebrated the nearly unfettered rights of the individual to whatever economic and political gains they could attain. Celebrations of the great wealth of the industrialists of the time and a growing acceptance of Social Darwinism as a governing philosophy were widespread.

But, second, Putnam and Garrett argue that much of this began to change with the beginning of the Progressive Era after 1900. For nearly 70 years, they show an increase in economic equality (often referred to by economic historians as The Great Compression), political reforms that increased democratic participation, a rise in public participation in social institutions (including civic associations and trade unions) and a culture that became more communitarian and less individualistic.

The mechanisms through which these changes occurred were varied. Rising economic equality was generated by the establishment of universal high school education, the rise of trade union membership, financial market reforms (including the creation of the Federal Reserve system), and progressive taxes and public spending. Political reforms included the direct elections of U.S. senators and expanding suffrage for women and later African Americans. They also show a rise in bipartisan activity in Congress and in political consensus in polling data. Social institutions in which participation rose included a range of civic organizations and trade unions. And cultural shifts reflecting a growing emphasis on family and community during that time are found in everything from polling data to text analyses of journalism and other publications. The growth of equal rights for both women and African Americans (as well as other minorities) are separately and similarly documented, with evidence that both groups made important strides over the entire 20th century before the more dramatic changes of the 1960s.

Third, Putnam and Garrett show that, starting in the 1970s, these trends began to reverse themselves. They document rising economic inequality, rising political partisanship and polarization, declining participation in civic institutions and a general rise in emphasis on individual rights rather than social responsibility. They note at best some flattening and even reversal of economic progress for minorities (especially African Americans), particularly associated with mass incarceration; such reversals are much less true for women, though their progress in labor force activity (and in obtaining crucial support for child care and paid family leave) have stalled.

Indeed, they show that the current era bears remarkable resemblance to the Gilded Age on all four dimensions. They characterize the pattern on all four dimensions of the past 120 years as reflecting an I-we-I cycle, and their evidence is compelling.

Of course, the most important implication of this analysis is that the U.S. might well be on the cusp of another upswing in egalitarian economic policy, political consensus, communitarian activity and emphasis on the collective good. Putnam and Garrett highlight the forces that they believe drove the beginning of the Progressive Era (besides the ascendancy of Teddy Roosevelt to the White House), including the work of muckraking journalists (like Ida Wells) and crusades by social reformers like Frances Perkins (who became Secretary of Labor in the New Deal era) and Jane Addams (of the settlement house movement for immigrants).

Putnam and Garrett argue that at least some of these reformist instincts are now becoming visible once again, especially among Millennials and the youth of Generation Z. Just as moderates of the Progressive era were goaded into action by the growing numbers of socialists and populists then, the activism of the Black Lives Matter and environmental movements (and even some sympathy of the young for socialism) might prod more moderate progressives today to find common cause with them and build a broader movement.

Putnam and Garrett have generated a very impressive analysis of broad trends in the U.S. over a period of 120 years. The fact that economic, political, social and cultural patterns are so similar over this time period is both new and very striking. Not every pattern looks exactly the same more rapid improvements in racial or gender equality, for instance, characterize some periods (like the 1940s and 1960s) while more economic compression is observed in the 1930s. All progress does not end in 1970, though many shifts begin to occur during that decade (especially in response to the turmoil of the 1960s) and accelerate under the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Putnam and Garrett are commendably cautious in attributing causality to any particular factor in generating the swings they observe. They point out, for instance, that more egalitarian economic and social changes seem to precede political reform and bipartisanship. They are also careful in analyzing exactly what led to the great upswing of progressive activity after 1900 and in drawing parallels to our current time.

There are, of course, limits to the commonality of the broad patterns we see. For instance, the Great Depression was the catalyst for the New Deal legislation that established the right of workers to bargain collectively, the first federal wage and hours regulation, and social insurance programs like Social Security.

World War II also generated a somewhat unique period of social cohesion and common purpose after the U.S. was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor and as the national interest in defeating the Axis nations was reinforced by the widely perceived moral necessity of doing so. It is unclear that anything similar to those unifying events will occur again nor do we want them to.

Interestingly, the social cohesion the U.S. experienced after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 didnt even last until the arrival of the election season in 2002, when President Bush and a number of Republicans attacked Democratic rivals as being weak on national defense and on securing the country against potential terrorist threats. The launching of the Iraq War in 2003, and the subsequent insurgency that American troops faced there, generated a strongly partisan counterattack by Democrats in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

Of course, the collapse of the housing and financial markets soon led to the Great Recession, and a number of other forces (like the bailouts of banks, a flood Chinese imports that eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs, rising immigration and even having an African-American president) created a right-wing populist backlash and the Trump presidency. And somewhat similar political developments in Europe and even Asia indicate that broad anger over trade, immigration, and rising diversity are not unique to the U.S.

Around the industrial world, it is hard to see much sign yet of an upswing in support of economic or political reforms that would be more egalitarian and communitarian in nature (notwithstanding the results of the 2020 election in the U.S., which produced few clear wins for Democrats and progressives outside of the presidency).

In addition, I find some other differences between the beginning of the Progressive Era and the one in which we currently live in the U.S. that lead me to be a bit more cautious in my optimism about an imminent rebound in economic egalitarianism and political bipartisanship right now.

In particular, these factors are:

The realignment of American politics since the 1960s has been quite dramatic. Large groups of Democrats especially the South, white ethnics and working-class whites left the party and its progressive politics to support Republicans, and most recently the nativism of Donald Trump. They were replaced as Democrats by highly-educated white progressives and growing minority populations, most of whom are concentrated geographically in large metro areas and especially the coasts of the U.S.

Indeed, the political chasm between these groups has grown wider in the Trump era. At the same time, the smaller towns and rural areas that constitute the backbone of Trump support have disproportionate political power, as lightly populated states have large numbers of U.S. senators and electoral votes. Within states, partisan gerrymandering since 2010 has reinforced this power.

I see little sign that the red states will have any interest in relinquishing the disproportionate power they wield, or in joining political or economic forces with those in blue states. A number of analyses in recent years indicate enormous gulfs in the outlooks of those in blue and red regions, with little sign of their abatement.[1]

And much (though surely not all) of this realignment can be attributed to one contentious issue: the role of race in American life. Indeed, Putnam and Garrett devote an important chapter of their book to the growing egalitarianism over race through the 1960s and the development of a growing white backlash in the late 1960s and beyond that fueled Republican and conservative political success. Today, nativist reactions to immigration reflect some of the same views.

Putnam and Garrett attribute the backlash to white resentments over the loss of their privilege and the weakening of their relative economic power and status. They correctly note white anger over the urban upheavals of the 1960s (which the authors consider to have been an understandable explosion of black anger and frustration after centuries of domination by whites), as well as policies like Affirmative Action (which they consider necessary to offset the legacies of white racism and ongoing systemic disadvantages facing African Americans and with which I agree). There is no doubt a good deal of truth in these characterizations.

But I also feel that Putnam and Garrett somewhat misunderstand and mischaracterize the white backlash that began in the late 1960s. Whether we agree or not, the white ethnic and working-class voters who abandoned the Democratic party in the 1970s and beyond had a range of motivations. They were angry over large increases in violent crime, what they perceived as reverse discrimination in Affirmative Action, and a set of income transfer policies (especially Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC) that reduced work among low-income women. To characterize these white and (often working and middle-class voters) only as sore losers of white privilege is not accurate in my view especially in light of the devastation of white working-class communities that has been documented by Case and Deaton (2019), among others.

In light of this view, can anyone rebuild a coalition of racial minorities, progressives, and at least some members of the white working and middle classes? Perhaps. One might argue that the wedge issues of crime and welfare are diminishing in salience with time. Thankfully, violent crime has declined greatly in the past 25 years (though there have been signs of recent increases); AFDC was eliminated and replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) in the 1990s, which reduced work disincentives (as well as cash support for the poor more generally). While spending on antipoverty programs has risen recently in the form of Medicaid, food stamps, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, these programs show little evidence of discouraging employment as did AFDC.

It is also possible that the U.S. Supreme Court, with its new conservative majority of six justices, will eliminate Affirmative Action in the coming years, at least as we have known it. As a supporter of Affirmative Action, I would not at all welcome this development; as Cornel West famously said, race matters. But a winding down of Affirmative Action might reduce white resentment along one more dimension. It could perhaps lead to admissions practices in universities that place more emphasis on shared economic disadvantage than racial disadvantage, which more working- and middle-class whites could support.

Indeed, the Biden campaign of 2020 tried to develop an agenda that appeals to working-class whites as well as racial minorities one that acknowledges ongoing and troubling racial disparities in all walks of life, while also trying to address the economic stagnation and deterioration suffered by working and middle-class Americans while the rich grow ever wealthier.

Whether they can successfully do so, and whether this is the beginning of a new period of progressive economics and politics, remain to be seen. But the likely hold on the U.S. Senate by Republicans (unless Democrats can win both Georgia senate races in the upcoming runoff elections), and the closeness of the results between Trump and Biden, suggest that conservatives will have little incentive to do things differently anytime soon.

And there is one more major hurdle that could also limit the development of a new progressive majority: the discouraging fiscal situation in which the federal government finds itself.

The ratio of public debt to GDP in the U.S. has risen dramatically in the past two decades as a result of both growing spending and regressive tax cuts. The fiscal stimulus in response to the Great Recession and the pandemic-driven economic shutdown in 2020 have contributed to the debt, as has the tax cut of 2017 and its earlier incarnations. (I am vastly more sympathetic to the former than the latter.)

And the ongoing gaps between projected expenditures, especially on retirement programs, and our projected revenues continue to grow. The no tax pledge that approximately 90 percent of Republican House members and Senators have signed (under pressure from anti-tax activist Grover Norquist) renders it impossible to address these imbalances in the near future in a bipartisan manner.

Of course, it is not impossible to fund progressive priorities while reducing our long-term debt; my Brookings colleague William Gale (2019), among other economists, has recently outlined how to do so. Given the damage created by both the current economic slowdown and the long-term trends hurting the U.S. working and middle classes, I fully share the view that our most immediate top priority must be improving equity and restoring widely shared economic growth (in an environmentally sound manner), rather than fiscal retrenchment.

But the inherent conflicts between trying to enact another (and greener) New Deal on the one hand and addressing our long-term debt on the other remain daunting, especially given the anti-tax straitjacket imposed on itself by one of our two major political parties. Indeed, it is impossible to generate newly progressive policies without major and lasting increases in tax revenues, hopefully achieved in a progressive manner. But, rightly or wrongly, the Republican party shows nearly zero interest right now in any such policy shifts.

Absent a major political upheaval, and a painful reckoning of the Republican party with both its Trumpian (and earlier) nativism and its economic regressivity, it is hard for me to fully share the optimism of Putnam and Garrett. Still, we should try; and their new book is highly enlightening and gives us at least some hope for the future as well.

[1] See, for instance, Frank (2004), Vance (2016), and Hochschild (2016).

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Is another Progressive Era coming? - Brookings Institution

As the incoming administration begins to take shape, progressive politicians and activists kicked off this week affirming their desire to see President-elect Joe Biden govern with consideration for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

Citing key Democratic victories spurred by progressive activists and liberal-leaning voting blocs in potential swing states like Arizona and Georgia, over the last few days a number of progressive leaders across the country have said Biden must lead with an eye toward the people largely responsible for helping him win the White House.

On Monday, for example, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doubled down on previous remarks she made in an interview advising the Biden administration against former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, an establishment Democrat who as mayor withheld video of the police shooting of Black teenager Laquan McDonald, as a potential Cabinet pick.

We must govern with integrity and accountability, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Monday. Laquan McDonalds life mattered.

In a New York Times interview published over the weekend, she said adding someone like Emanuel to a Biden administration would be a hostile approach to the grass-roots and the progressive wing of the party.

The call to govern with integrity was repeated byRep. Ilhan Omar (Minn.) in a tweet on Monday and is fast becoming a progressive slogan online.

Beginning on election night, as forecasters developed a clearer picture of Bidens likely victory, Democrats marginal retention of the House and the still-uncertain power balance in the Senate, politicos online and on television have floated their theories about who bears responsibility for the partys wins and perceived failures. That discussion has fueled subsequent talks about who holds power in the intra-party jostle among centrist and progressive Democrats.

In comments leaked from a conference call for House Democrats last week, multiple centrist candidates, including some who lost races this election cycle, blamed progressives for discussing issues they claim didnt play well in their districts.

We need to not ever use the word socialist or socialism ever again, Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) reportedly said. We lost good members because of that.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives later attributed some losses to a slew of campaigning missteps.

Biden rode waves of Latino, Black and Indigenous support in states like Arizona and Georgia, where high voter turnout put him ahead of President Donald Trump as of Monday evening.Since Biden was named the presumptive winner in the presidential election, activist groups who helped Democrats win these states have been undeterred by calls for them to temper their expectations.

In Arizona, for example, LUCHA, a grassroots organization focusing on social, economic and racial justice, has been credited for driving successful get-out-the-vote efforts that helped turn the state blue.

Voters decided and they showed up for immigrant youth and their families. They showed up for people with pre-existing conditions. They showed up for our planet and climate change. And they showed up for workers and womens rights, the organizations co-directors said in a statementSaturday, adding thatthey are ready to continue to push for bold, innovative and unapologetic agendas that center the needs of our communities.

The president of the National Congress of American Indians, the oldest, largest and most representative American Indian and Alaska Native organization, recently said in a co-written piece that the organization expects the Biden administration to pursue a bold agenda involving truth and reconciliation for the countrys 574 tribal nations.

And around the country, Black progressive organizations including Black Voters Matter, Fair Fight and others continue to stress the incomparable value Black voters bring to the Democratic Party, and the need for the party to respond with policies that tangibly improve Black lives.

For his part, Biden, who stressed moderation at times throughout his presidential campaign, celebrated the diversity of his coalition during his victory speech over the weekend. Biden thanked Americans of various identities gay, straight, transgender, white, Latino, Asian, Native American.

And especially for those moments when this campaign was at its lowest, the African American community stood up for me, Biden said.

Youve always had my back, and Ill have yours, he added.

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Progressives Are Not Preparing To Temper Their Expectations Under A Biden Presidency - HuffPost

Democrat Joe Biden appears to have ousted Donald Trump from the White House, yet for many Democrats and progressives the results of the election have produced mostly disillusionment, even despair.

The reason isnt hard to decipher. They expected the end of the Trump era to be marked by a blue wave, a surge of progressive political power that would sweep away not only Trump but right-wing obstructionism in the Senate and, in time, even the Supreme Court.

But the wave isnt visible in the results, so whats consumed the left is pessimism and gloom.

The model for this take comes from the liberal writer Eric Levitz of New York Magazine, who pronounced the election a nigh-catastrophic setback for progressive politics in the United States.

Levitz declared the Senate lost to Democrats for at least a decade to come and even cast doubt on the partys ability to hold on to the White House in 2024. All this before all the votes have been counted in 2020.

History has some advice for the despairing: Settle down and take a deep breath. Things arent nearly that bad.

You dont need a message that will only appeal to the Rust Belt or only appeal to the Sun Belt. You can run on a broad message that has appeal ... to those voters in Southern states, to younger voters, to non-whites all over the country.

Progressive political analyst Ruy Teixeira

A couple of fundamental points need to be made at the outset. One is that a progressive trend in American politics has been building for years; evidence of it was visible in many down-ballot contests on election day and obscured by exotic conditions in others. More on that in a moment.

Another is that its foolish to be defeated by ones own exaggerated expectations. Political waves dont happen all that frequently, and when they do, theyre often evanescent, in part because they can provoke equal and opposite reaction.

It may be better for progressivism to continue to infuse itself into the body politic in stages, rather than all at once.

The notion that American politics moves in waves is an artifact of analytical hindsight. Jack Balkin, a constitutional law scholar at Yale, recently cited his colleague Stephen Skowroneks categorization of political cycles for a Washington Post op-ed.

These eras are the Federalist (1789-1800), Jeffersonian (1800-1828), Jacksonian (1828-1860), Republican (1860-1932), New Deal-Civil Rights (1932-1980) and Reagan (1980-the present).

In each political era, Balkin observes, a new dominant party arises, forms a winning coalition, promotes its interests and ideology, and eventually decays and collapses, often the victim of its own past success.

Reagan Republicanism has run out its string, Balkin writes, setting the stage for a new regime with a new dominant coalition and a new dominant party, most likely the Democrats.

Yet its important to note that changes of political eras usually dont occur so abruptly or at least that such changes are often visible only in a rearview mirror.

One might be inclined to think of the New Deal-Civil Rights era, for instance, as nearly a half-century of unbroken progressivism, but it didnt appear full-blown with the 1932 election and took decades to fully play out. As Ive written, the New Deal itself was a mlange of liberal and conservative policies under Franklin Roosevelts leadership.

The second item on FDRs legislative list during his vaunted first Hundred Days, after closing the banks and arranging for their reopening under sturdier financial circumstances, was the Economy Act, which slashed the pay of federal employees and cut veterans benefits, all in the name of balancing the federal budget.

During the 1932 presidential campaign, Marriner Eccles, the Utah banker who would help FDR remake the Federal Reserve System, was perplexed by the spectacle of the conservative Herbert Hoover touting the dynamism of his public works spending while the ostensibly progressive Roosevelt castigated him for his spendthrift ways.

The campaign speeches, Eccles reflected, often read like a giant misprint, in which Roosevelt and Hoover speak each others lines.

The New Deal often institutionalized the racism in federal programs, and FDR resisted to the last Black activists pleas for an anti-lynching law. Roosevelt almost torpedoed Social Securitys old-age program on the very eve of its enactment in 1935 (his priority for the law was an unemployment relief program).

The progressive rethinking of the federal governments relationship with the people that began with Social Security didnt reach its full flowering until three decades later, with Lyndon Johnsons creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. In other words, these things take time.

Another problem with shoehorning political history into discrete eras is that political parties are rarely monoliths.

The Republicans of Skowroneks 1860-1932 period encompassed the stolid pro-business politics of William McKinley and the progressivism of McKinleys vice president and successor, Theodore Roosevelt who would eventually splinter from the GOP by forming the Progressive or Bull Moose Party to run for President in 1912. The progressive cause was carried on by President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, in 1913-1921.

After the 1932 election, FDR wavered between liberal and conservative policies in part because some of his strongest progressive supporters were Republicans and some of his most powerful critics were Southern Democrats, whom he could not afford to alienate with civil rights initiatives.

This years election reminds us that not all states or regions are as ideologically monochromatic as they appear on the surface. Florida voters went for Trump, but also passed a $15 minimum wage law. Only two years ago, moreover, Floridians opted to restore voting rights to felons who had completed their sentences.

That would have added as many as 800,000 voters to the rolls had not Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled legislature not worked hard to undermine the law by imposing fees and conditions to the restoration.

Other apparent retrenchments from progressive trends may have other explanations than ideology.

Take Californias Proposition 22, which seemed to reverse the progressive trend toward better workplace benefits and protections by allowing ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft to continue treating their drivers as independent contractors with substandard rights.

A key to the initiatives passage was plainly the more than $205 million spent by those companies and other gig employers to draft and promote the measure.

California Democrats may have given back a couple of the congressional seats they wrested from the GOP in 2018 (as we write, the outcome is still unclear), but they may also have solidified their control of the state Senate by adding some seats to their preexisting supermajority.

Voters also approved a progressive proposal to restore voting rights to parolees, while rejecting a measure that would have increased penalties for minor offenses.

The trend toward a more progressive American electorate has been developing over the long term. Democratic presidential candidates have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections, from Bill Clintons first victory in 1992 through Bidens win.

In two of those elections, however, the popular vote loser became president George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 due to the peculiarities of the electoral college (and in Bushs case, the meddling of the Supreme Court).

Many progressives have been wringing their hands over the thought that some 69 million Americans could have cast their votes for a candidate as manifestly unfit for reelection as Donald Trump. Here its also worth examining the record. Over the last 200 years of American history, the presidential vote has almost never broken down by more than about 60-40.

Thats true even in elections viewed as landslides. The largest percentage of the popular vote secured by a winning candidate since 1820 belonged to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, when he trounced Barry Goldwater by winning 44 states; even then, his share of the popular vote was only 61.05%

A similar story unfolded when Richard Nixon lost only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia to George McGovern in 1972 but collected only 60.67% of the popular vote and in FDRs commanding victories over Herbert Hoover in 1932 (FDR won 42 out of 48 states, and 57.41% of the popular vote) and over Alf Landon in 1936 (losing only Maine and Vermont to Landon yet 60.8% of the popular vote).

In other words, with few exceptions presidential elections have been fought for voters in the no-mans-land of the middle 20 percentage points, no matter how plausible or implausible any candidate has been.

The 2020 contest, judging from the current numbers, was no exception: Bidens record-setting popular vote, which is approaching 72.5 million, still amounts to only about 50.4% of the total votes cast.

Over the last couple of decades progressive projects have materially advanced in American politics. The nation has embraced gay rights including same-sex marriage, the legalization of marijuana and moved toward universal health coverage. Immigration policies were becoming more liberal.

None of this happened without significant pushback from reactionary elements in all three branches of government and at all governmental levels. As has been often observed, the path to justice is not a straight one.

If theres a silver lining in the blue wave that never came, it may be that the outcome will prompt Democrats to take stock of their approach to building a lasting political edifice. Thats the view of Ruy Teixeira, whose 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, co-written with John Judis, examined the demographic trends underlying Democratic power.

Teixeiras thesis, as he told Greg Sargent of the Washington Post before election day, was that a Democratic coalition uniting non-whites, professionals and people who live in cities and suburbs could only be dominant and stable if it managed to retain a substantial share of the white working class.

These are people who havent been doing well for decades, Teixeira says. Their communities have suffered declines, jobs problems, healthcare problems. Democrats have to speak to these people.... You dont need a message that will only appeal to the Rust Belt or only appeal to the Sun Belt. You can run on a broad message that has appeal not only to persuadable members of the white working class in the Northern-tier swing states, but also has appeal to those voters in Southern states, to younger voters, to non-whites all over the country.

For Democrats, this is still a work in progress. There has been progress; what the election tells us is that the destination hasnt been reached, just yet.

Link:
Hiltzik: The end of Trump and a new progressive era - Los Angeles Times