The kind of progressivism that people expect from the Democratic Party has been subsumed by another
October 23, 2024
Source: Responsible Statecraft
Photo by Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“What’s happened to the Democrats? They used to be antiwar!” Such is one of the many questions being bandied about by an online commentariat seeking to make sense of a litany of Republican endorsements of Kamala Harris, many of them made by party elites known for their hawkish foreign policy like former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney.
One could find similar consternation with American liberals’ support for U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. The confusion is based primarily on nostalgia, a selective view of history that obscures the Democratic Party’s longer, more complicated relationship with interventionism.
The reality is quite different: what we are witnessing is the latest iteration of an ongoing intraparty struggle where the dominant liberal interventionist core asserts itself over a smaller progressive noninterventionist periphery. While the latter often dominates popular conceptions of the Democratic Party and its vision for American foreign affairs, the former drives the reality of party politics.
This has been happening since the First World War, best encapsulated by the public debate between Columbia professor John Dewey and one of his students, writer Randolph Bourne. While both were considered liberals of a progressive stripe, they maintained opposing views on American entry into Europe’s conflagration.
Known for his adherence to philosophical pragmatism, Dewey asserted that the war could save the world from German militarism and be used to shepherd the American political economy toward a fairer, managed state. Bourne rejected this notion and argued that American entry into the war would undermine the egalitarianism of the larger progressive project and create a labyrinth of bureaucracies that would undermine democracy.
While Dewey’s arguments held sway as the United States entered the war, American involvement in Europe’s quarrel, compounded by civil rights abuses at home, proved Bourne posthumously correct.
Despite succumbing to the Spanish Flu in 1918, Bourne’s views of the war, bolstered by the posthumous publication of a collection of essays entitled Untimely Papers, found fertile soil in an American society horrified by the conflict. Chastened by the realities of the Western Front, interwar progressivism took on a solid strain of pacifism and opposition to centralized authority.
While Bourne’s sentiments survived the Great War and inspired a postwar mood of non-interventionism, they would not survive America’s subsequent entry into World War II, which set the tone for the foreign policy of American liberalism and, by extension, the Democratic Party for the next 30 years.
Liberal interventionism won out in the face of a threat posed by the distinctly right-wing geopolitical threat in the form of the Axis powers. Except for a few strident leftwing pacifists and a few dissident liberals who took refuge with the Republican Right, the bulk of the formerly pacifist left took up the cause of intervention in the name of antifascism.
The tone set by the Second World War carried through into American liberalism’s conduct of the Cold War. Beneath the din of anti-communism, one often amplified by conservatives, American foreign policy was shaped by a liberal understanding of recent history and the origins of communism. President Harry Truman’s eponymously titled doctrine entangled the United States in Europe’s security architecture.
After the Eisenhower administration, which solidified the Truman doctrine and expanded it to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Cold War framework was thickened further still by a liberal cold warrior, President John F. Kennedy.
Empowered by a materialist and universalistic view of human advancement and the belief that the U.S. had fallen behind the Soviets, JFK pursued a policy known as “flexible response” that expanded American military spending beyond the bounds of nuclear deterrence. These policy changes, maintained under his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, and coupled with a dramatic increase in foreign aid spending, expanded U.S. commitments throughout the postcolonial world.
This combination of asymmetric warfare and economic development drastically raised the stakes of the Cold War and led directly to U.S. entry into the quagmire of the Vietnam War.
Contrary to nostalgia present the Kennedy era as a missed path towards peace, in reality, JFK continued America on a path of war-making and militarization laid out by his predecessors and stretched well beyond the deaths of the slain Kennedy brothers.
While the Vietnam War was the product of Cold War liberalism, it was also its undoing. The horrors of the war, coupled with the inequities of the draft and government secrecy revealed, inspired a mass antiwar movement among the heretofore latent progressive left that found a resonant audience on Capitol Hill.
Earlier antiwar works from the left, including that of Randolph Bourne, were revived for a youth movement radicalized against the war. This movement similarly inspired subsequent debates during the late Cold War, particularly on the issue of the Reagan administration’s arming of the Contras in Nicaragua and intervention in the Angolan Civil War. The future seemed bright for a left-wing anti-war sensibility and its access to a Democratic Party that was amenable to its views.
However, the collapse of the Soviet Union, internal changes within the Democratic Party, and the subsequent birth of a new logic for humanitarian interventionism subsumed the ruptures caused by the Vietnam War. While the Democrats indeed offered notable resistance to Operation Desert Storm, often invoking the specter of Vietnam, congressional Democrats provided significant support to U.S. operations in Somalia and interventions in the former Yugoslavia.
During the Clinton administration, inspired by retrospectives on the Holocaust compounded by the Rwandan genocide, the notion of a “responsibility to protect,” the concept that the U.S. had the moral obligation to use force to prevent mass atrocity, took hold within elite liberal circles.
Due to these competing impulses, Democratic opposition to the Global War on Terror was checkered and paired by a left-wing anti-war movement that, in retrospect, was a shadow of its Vietnam-era self. While, as with Iraq War I, Democrats posted noticeable opposition to Iraq War II, such opposition was overshadowed by the fact that Democratic leadership, especially in the Senate, acquiesced to a war spearheaded by a Republican administration.
Three of the last five Democratic presidential nominees — then Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden — voted in support of using military action against Iraq. President Obama won in 2008 in part because he publicly opposed war in Iraq before it began and campaigned on ending that war. While he advanced that sentiment by pursuing diplomacy with Iran and opening up to Cuba, he also launched interventions into Libya, Syria, and Yemen, often sold on the grounds of a “responsibility to protect.”
Much like the liberal rationale of interventions past, American involvement was justified on humanitarian grounds and met largely with Democratic acquiescence in Congress and voter apathy.
Liberalism has entered a new wave of internal strife regarding America’s role in the world. In a new era of great power competition, the progressive base of the Democratic Party has come out hard against unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon. It has also shown varying degrees of opposition to U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. Yet, unlike the Vietnam era, this grassroots opposition has been unable to substantively influence Democratic politics, where a party elite clings to old views about upholding international norms and alliances, no matter how inconsistent or counterproductive those views in practice may be.
Given this intraparty divide, it should not be surprising that the Harris campaign has courted the endorsement of hawkish Republicans.
This history, however, should not be viewed as determinative of an inevitable path forward. The past has shown that these impulses are not static but held by individuals determined to shape the future.
Brandan P. Buck
Dr. Brandan P. Buck is a foreign policy research fellow at the Cato Institute and holds a Ph.D. in history from George Mason University. Brandan is a former intelligence professional who served in the United States Army and Virginia Army National Guard, completing multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Photo by Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“What’s happened to the Democrats? They used to be antiwar!” Such is one of the many questions being bandied about by an online commentariat seeking to make sense of a litany of Republican endorsements of Kamala Harris, many of them made by party elites known for their hawkish foreign policy like former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney.
One could find similar consternation with American liberals’ support for U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. The confusion is based primarily on nostalgia, a selective view of history that obscures the Democratic Party’s longer, more complicated relationship with interventionism.
The reality is quite different: what we are witnessing is the latest iteration of an ongoing intraparty struggle where the dominant liberal interventionist core asserts itself over a smaller progressive noninterventionist periphery. While the latter often dominates popular conceptions of the Democratic Party and its vision for American foreign affairs, the former drives the reality of party politics.
This has been happening since the First World War, best encapsulated by the public debate between Columbia professor John Dewey and one of his students, writer Randolph Bourne. While both were considered liberals of a progressive stripe, they maintained opposing views on American entry into Europe’s conflagration.
Known for his adherence to philosophical pragmatism, Dewey asserted that the war could save the world from German militarism and be used to shepherd the American political economy toward a fairer, managed state. Bourne rejected this notion and argued that American entry into the war would undermine the egalitarianism of the larger progressive project and create a labyrinth of bureaucracies that would undermine democracy.
While Dewey’s arguments held sway as the United States entered the war, American involvement in Europe’s quarrel, compounded by civil rights abuses at home, proved Bourne posthumously correct.
Despite succumbing to the Spanish Flu in 1918, Bourne’s views of the war, bolstered by the posthumous publication of a collection of essays entitled Untimely Papers, found fertile soil in an American society horrified by the conflict. Chastened by the realities of the Western Front, interwar progressivism took on a solid strain of pacifism and opposition to centralized authority.
While Bourne’s sentiments survived the Great War and inspired a postwar mood of non-interventionism, they would not survive America’s subsequent entry into World War II, which set the tone for the foreign policy of American liberalism and, by extension, the Democratic Party for the next 30 years.
Liberal interventionism won out in the face of a threat posed by the distinctly right-wing geopolitical threat in the form of the Axis powers. Except for a few strident leftwing pacifists and a few dissident liberals who took refuge with the Republican Right, the bulk of the formerly pacifist left took up the cause of intervention in the name of antifascism.
The tone set by the Second World War carried through into American liberalism’s conduct of the Cold War. Beneath the din of anti-communism, one often amplified by conservatives, American foreign policy was shaped by a liberal understanding of recent history and the origins of communism. President Harry Truman’s eponymously titled doctrine entangled the United States in Europe’s security architecture.
After the Eisenhower administration, which solidified the Truman doctrine and expanded it to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Cold War framework was thickened further still by a liberal cold warrior, President John F. Kennedy.
Empowered by a materialist and universalistic view of human advancement and the belief that the U.S. had fallen behind the Soviets, JFK pursued a policy known as “flexible response” that expanded American military spending beyond the bounds of nuclear deterrence. These policy changes, maintained under his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, and coupled with a dramatic increase in foreign aid spending, expanded U.S. commitments throughout the postcolonial world.
This combination of asymmetric warfare and economic development drastically raised the stakes of the Cold War and led directly to U.S. entry into the quagmire of the Vietnam War.
Contrary to nostalgia present the Kennedy era as a missed path towards peace, in reality, JFK continued America on a path of war-making and militarization laid out by his predecessors and stretched well beyond the deaths of the slain Kennedy brothers.
While the Vietnam War was the product of Cold War liberalism, it was also its undoing. The horrors of the war, coupled with the inequities of the draft and government secrecy revealed, inspired a mass antiwar movement among the heretofore latent progressive left that found a resonant audience on Capitol Hill.
Earlier antiwar works from the left, including that of Randolph Bourne, were revived for a youth movement radicalized against the war. This movement similarly inspired subsequent debates during the late Cold War, particularly on the issue of the Reagan administration’s arming of the Contras in Nicaragua and intervention in the Angolan Civil War. The future seemed bright for a left-wing anti-war sensibility and its access to a Democratic Party that was amenable to its views.
However, the collapse of the Soviet Union, internal changes within the Democratic Party, and the subsequent birth of a new logic for humanitarian interventionism subsumed the ruptures caused by the Vietnam War. While the Democrats indeed offered notable resistance to Operation Desert Storm, often invoking the specter of Vietnam, congressional Democrats provided significant support to U.S. operations in Somalia and interventions in the former Yugoslavia.
During the Clinton administration, inspired by retrospectives on the Holocaust compounded by the Rwandan genocide, the notion of a “responsibility to protect,” the concept that the U.S. had the moral obligation to use force to prevent mass atrocity, took hold within elite liberal circles.
Due to these competing impulses, Democratic opposition to the Global War on Terror was checkered and paired by a left-wing anti-war movement that, in retrospect, was a shadow of its Vietnam-era self. While, as with Iraq War I, Democrats posted noticeable opposition to Iraq War II, such opposition was overshadowed by the fact that Democratic leadership, especially in the Senate, acquiesced to a war spearheaded by a Republican administration.
Three of the last five Democratic presidential nominees — then Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden — voted in support of using military action against Iraq. President Obama won in 2008 in part because he publicly opposed war in Iraq before it began and campaigned on ending that war. While he advanced that sentiment by pursuing diplomacy with Iran and opening up to Cuba, he also launched interventions into Libya, Syria, and Yemen, often sold on the grounds of a “responsibility to protect.”
Much like the liberal rationale of interventions past, American involvement was justified on humanitarian grounds and met largely with Democratic acquiescence in Congress and voter apathy.
Liberalism has entered a new wave of internal strife regarding America’s role in the world. In a new era of great power competition, the progressive base of the Democratic Party has come out hard against unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon. It has also shown varying degrees of opposition to U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. Yet, unlike the Vietnam era, this grassroots opposition has been unable to substantively influence Democratic politics, where a party elite clings to old views about upholding international norms and alliances, no matter how inconsistent or counterproductive those views in practice may be.
Given this intraparty divide, it should not be surprising that the Harris campaign has courted the endorsement of hawkish Republicans.
This history, however, should not be viewed as determinative of an inevitable path forward. The past has shown that these impulses are not static but held by individuals determined to shape the future.
Brandan P. Buck
Dr. Brandan P. Buck is a foreign policy research fellow at the Cato Institute and holds a Ph.D. in history from George Mason University. Brandan is a former intelligence professional who served in the United States Army and Virginia Army National Guard, completing multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Thesis on The Kosovo Crisis and the Crisis of Global Capitalism
(originally written May 1999, Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. to invade Afghanistan and Iraq for humanitarian purposes.)
http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2005/01/war-whats-it-good-for-profit.html
The US Isn’t Moving Right — the Democrats Are
As the Kamala Harris campaign lurches rightward, pundits want us to believe she’s just following the will of the voters. The facts don’t bear that out.
As the Kamala Harris campaign lurches rightward, pundits want us to believe she’s just following the will of the voters. The facts don’t bear that out.
October 23, 2024
Source: Jacobin
Some alarming news is brewing for the Left. It turns out that after a brief flirtation with progressive and socialist politics, the United States is now turning back to the right.
“Five years ago, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Harris catered to the social justice Left. Now she tells Oprah she’ll shoot intruders with her Glock. That’s what I call progress,” the American Enterprise Institute recently celebrated, pointing to Harris’s moves to “catch up” with a more conservative voting public. “Kamala Harris is running to the center-right because America is center-right,” National Review blared last month. Dave Weigel argues that Democrats have “adjusted to an electorate that’s shifted to the right” by making several major policy concessions “that they didn’t want to, or think they needed to, in 2016 and 2020.”
Don’t be so sure.
It’s not that there’s nothing to this. Immigration has become a more important issue to voters across the board, and far-right ideas like mass deportation, gutting the right to asylum, or simply curbing immigration now have support from majorities or pluralities of Americans, even leaping in popularity among Democrats. And polling shows that the public has lagged or moved the other way on topics related to transgender Americans, who the Right has been somewhat successful at turning into a wedge issue.
But it’s a mistake to treat the Democratic Party’s rightward lurch under Kamala Harris as an accurate measure of the country’s politics as a whole, or even to treat support for Donald Trump or Joe Biden and Harris as a proxy for ideology. (To be fair to Weigel, he takes care to take note this and other nuances.)
Take the issue of raising the federal minimum wage. Harris never talks about it: not at the debate with Trump, not in her first sit-down interview in August, not in the Univision town hall she just did. Though it might be part of the Democratic platform, for all intents and purposes, it has been dropped from her campaign and presidential agenda.
Does this mean the country has turned against a $15 or higher minimum wage, a major left-wing priority that was one of the Bernie Sanders campaign’s (and, later, Biden’s) flagship policies? Obviously not, as we can see not only from robust recent polling that shows the measure is wildly popular across party lines, but from the results of state and municipal ballot measures that have routinely seen Americans directly vote to hike the wage — including in deep red Florida, 60 percent of whose voting residents backed raising the wage to $15 four years ago, at the same time they elected Trump and a spree of Republicans downballot.
This isn’t the only such example. There are a host of progressive policies that poll well across the board that Harris either refuses to take up, like adding dental coverage to Medicare and lowering the program’s eligibility age, or doesn’t ever talk about, like a national rent cap. In a political system where both parties beg for money from corporations and the ultrarich, treating what policies those parties do and don’t support as a reflection of the will of the voters doesn’t make much sense.
Harris’s rightward lurch on foreign policy isn’t justified by meeting the electorate where it is either: polling consistently shows that voters, especially in swing states, are worried about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East escalating, see preventing that escalation as a higher priority than total military victory, oppose Israel’s war and favor an arms embargo on it, and prefer the United States generally shrink its global footprint to focus on domestic problems.
These are all positions traditionally espoused by left-wing voices, and they’re also positions that Harris is on the opposite side on. Several of them are actually much closer to what the public has been (wrongly) told are the positions held by Trump, who is consistently trusted on foreign policy more than Harris.
In fact, the clearest and most consistent takeaways from election-related polling are not that voters think Harris is too far left and that Trump’s policy platform is what Americans want. It’s that voters are most concerned with the cost-of-living crisis that we’ve all taken to calling “inflation” as shorthand, that voters are drawn to Trump largely for this reason, that they want to hear more from Harris about what she would actually do as president to solve this, and that they don’t think she would break from President Joe Biden, whose years in power they associate (not unfairly) with feeling poorer.
At the same time, we’re only two years out from a midterm election in which Republicans, convinced that voters had turned against socially liberal views on abortion and LGBTQ rights, failed miserably to capitalize on an unpopular incumbent president by making what turned out to be an alienating conservative assault on both issues central to their identity. Even now, a left-populist candidate is within striking distance of beating a Republican for a Senate seat in Nebraska, a state that hasn’t voted blue since 1964 (yes, by taking a more conservative position on immigration, but also by running on a more liberal position on abortion).
Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign organization are not exactly acting like he’s running for president in a country that’s lurched rightward.
Trump has spent the bulk of this year running away from Project 2025, the deeply unpopular policy blueprint of radical right-wing ideas that members of his first administration devised in partnership with the Heritage Foundation, and which the campaign once proudly touted and has many overlaps with his official campaign documents. He’s renounced the GOP’s politically toxic stance on abortion, to the point of wrenching control of the platform-writing process and angering the party base with a more centrist position. The biggest takeaway from the vice-presidential debate was how Trump running mate J. D. Vance pretended to be someone else with a whole different set of beliefs.
That’s all before we get to the fact that, despite Trump’s resilience in the polls, his campaign has gone from consistently leading to being neck and neck in the popular vote, even trailing — and that Harris, in spite of running a far more conservative campaign, is not exactly running away with it either.
In fact, Trump’s resilience in the polls is in large part explained by the time he departed from right-wing economics.
Commentators have scratched their heads over why voters seem to have a nostalgia for Trump’s final, chaotic year as president in 2020. One obvious reason is that a Democratic-led Congress passed, and Trump signed into law, a hugely expensive welfare state expansion that, despite the hardship of the pandemic, was transformative for many people: income inequality narrowed on a historic scale, debts were paid off, money was saved, and many had the newfound financial security to find new, more rewarding, and lucrative careers.
Almost all of that expanded welfare state gradually disappeared under Biden.
Even on immigration, the issue voters have most dramatically moved rightward on, things aren’t as clear-cut as they might seem. Current public opinion on this hasn’t come out of a vacuum. Part of it has been a migrant crisis that is more and more visible to the average voter on their streets, and record arrivals at the border earlier in the year. But part of it is also a high-profile Democratic retreat on the issue, which has seen the party adopt a defensive crouch, abandon its Trump-era positive case for the benefits of immigration, and inadvertently elevate the issue by picking a high-profile fight over it instead of one over Trump and the GOP’s weaknesses (raising Social Security benefits, for instance). We can’t know how differently things would have looked after this path not taken. But it’s absurd and ahistorical to argue it would have had no effect.
So no, it is not really true that the country has lurched right, and certainly not that the rightward shifts we’ve seen are simply part of some organic process of the electorate coming to its senses. But we can say one thing for sure: the Democratic establishment is turning rightward, and it is determined to do so after a short-lived experimentation with mildly progressive governance under Biden. Whether Harris wins or loses in November, the result will be spun to argue there is no alternative.
Branko Marcetic is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a 2019-2020 Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting fellow. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
Some alarming news is brewing for the Left. It turns out that after a brief flirtation with progressive and socialist politics, the United States is now turning back to the right.
“Five years ago, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Harris catered to the social justice Left. Now she tells Oprah she’ll shoot intruders with her Glock. That’s what I call progress,” the American Enterprise Institute recently celebrated, pointing to Harris’s moves to “catch up” with a more conservative voting public. “Kamala Harris is running to the center-right because America is center-right,” National Review blared last month. Dave Weigel argues that Democrats have “adjusted to an electorate that’s shifted to the right” by making several major policy concessions “that they didn’t want to, or think they needed to, in 2016 and 2020.”
Don’t be so sure.
It’s not that there’s nothing to this. Immigration has become a more important issue to voters across the board, and far-right ideas like mass deportation, gutting the right to asylum, or simply curbing immigration now have support from majorities or pluralities of Americans, even leaping in popularity among Democrats. And polling shows that the public has lagged or moved the other way on topics related to transgender Americans, who the Right has been somewhat successful at turning into a wedge issue.
But it’s a mistake to treat the Democratic Party’s rightward lurch under Kamala Harris as an accurate measure of the country’s politics as a whole, or even to treat support for Donald Trump or Joe Biden and Harris as a proxy for ideology. (To be fair to Weigel, he takes care to take note this and other nuances.)
Take the issue of raising the federal minimum wage. Harris never talks about it: not at the debate with Trump, not in her first sit-down interview in August, not in the Univision town hall she just did. Though it might be part of the Democratic platform, for all intents and purposes, it has been dropped from her campaign and presidential agenda.
Does this mean the country has turned against a $15 or higher minimum wage, a major left-wing priority that was one of the Bernie Sanders campaign’s (and, later, Biden’s) flagship policies? Obviously not, as we can see not only from robust recent polling that shows the measure is wildly popular across party lines, but from the results of state and municipal ballot measures that have routinely seen Americans directly vote to hike the wage — including in deep red Florida, 60 percent of whose voting residents backed raising the wage to $15 four years ago, at the same time they elected Trump and a spree of Republicans downballot.
This isn’t the only such example. There are a host of progressive policies that poll well across the board that Harris either refuses to take up, like adding dental coverage to Medicare and lowering the program’s eligibility age, or doesn’t ever talk about, like a national rent cap. In a political system where both parties beg for money from corporations and the ultrarich, treating what policies those parties do and don’t support as a reflection of the will of the voters doesn’t make much sense.
Harris’s rightward lurch on foreign policy isn’t justified by meeting the electorate where it is either: polling consistently shows that voters, especially in swing states, are worried about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East escalating, see preventing that escalation as a higher priority than total military victory, oppose Israel’s war and favor an arms embargo on it, and prefer the United States generally shrink its global footprint to focus on domestic problems.
These are all positions traditionally espoused by left-wing voices, and they’re also positions that Harris is on the opposite side on. Several of them are actually much closer to what the public has been (wrongly) told are the positions held by Trump, who is consistently trusted on foreign policy more than Harris.
In fact, the clearest and most consistent takeaways from election-related polling are not that voters think Harris is too far left and that Trump’s policy platform is what Americans want. It’s that voters are most concerned with the cost-of-living crisis that we’ve all taken to calling “inflation” as shorthand, that voters are drawn to Trump largely for this reason, that they want to hear more from Harris about what she would actually do as president to solve this, and that they don’t think she would break from President Joe Biden, whose years in power they associate (not unfairly) with feeling poorer.
At the same time, we’re only two years out from a midterm election in which Republicans, convinced that voters had turned against socially liberal views on abortion and LGBTQ rights, failed miserably to capitalize on an unpopular incumbent president by making what turned out to be an alienating conservative assault on both issues central to their identity. Even now, a left-populist candidate is within striking distance of beating a Republican for a Senate seat in Nebraska, a state that hasn’t voted blue since 1964 (yes, by taking a more conservative position on immigration, but also by running on a more liberal position on abortion).
Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign organization are not exactly acting like he’s running for president in a country that’s lurched rightward.
Trump has spent the bulk of this year running away from Project 2025, the deeply unpopular policy blueprint of radical right-wing ideas that members of his first administration devised in partnership with the Heritage Foundation, and which the campaign once proudly touted and has many overlaps with his official campaign documents. He’s renounced the GOP’s politically toxic stance on abortion, to the point of wrenching control of the platform-writing process and angering the party base with a more centrist position. The biggest takeaway from the vice-presidential debate was how Trump running mate J. D. Vance pretended to be someone else with a whole different set of beliefs.
That’s all before we get to the fact that, despite Trump’s resilience in the polls, his campaign has gone from consistently leading to being neck and neck in the popular vote, even trailing — and that Harris, in spite of running a far more conservative campaign, is not exactly running away with it either.
In fact, Trump’s resilience in the polls is in large part explained by the time he departed from right-wing economics.
Commentators have scratched their heads over why voters seem to have a nostalgia for Trump’s final, chaotic year as president in 2020. One obvious reason is that a Democratic-led Congress passed, and Trump signed into law, a hugely expensive welfare state expansion that, despite the hardship of the pandemic, was transformative for many people: income inequality narrowed on a historic scale, debts were paid off, money was saved, and many had the newfound financial security to find new, more rewarding, and lucrative careers.
Almost all of that expanded welfare state gradually disappeared under Biden.
Even on immigration, the issue voters have most dramatically moved rightward on, things aren’t as clear-cut as they might seem. Current public opinion on this hasn’t come out of a vacuum. Part of it has been a migrant crisis that is more and more visible to the average voter on their streets, and record arrivals at the border earlier in the year. But part of it is also a high-profile Democratic retreat on the issue, which has seen the party adopt a defensive crouch, abandon its Trump-era positive case for the benefits of immigration, and inadvertently elevate the issue by picking a high-profile fight over it instead of one over Trump and the GOP’s weaknesses (raising Social Security benefits, for instance). We can’t know how differently things would have looked after this path not taken. But it’s absurd and ahistorical to argue it would have had no effect.
So no, it is not really true that the country has lurched right, and certainly not that the rightward shifts we’ve seen are simply part of some organic process of the electorate coming to its senses. But we can say one thing for sure: the Democratic establishment is turning rightward, and it is determined to do so after a short-lived experimentation with mildly progressive governance under Biden. Whether Harris wins or loses in November, the result will be spun to argue there is no alternative.
Branko Marcetic is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a 2019-2020 Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting fellow. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.
