In a recent column, Perry Bacon, Jr. writes that President Biden and the Democrats “are running a markedly more progressive and partisan campaign than they did in 2018 and 2020.” His piece is a great elaboration of a point I made last week about Biden’s Independence Hall speech, in which the president not only escalated his rhetoric against Republican authoritarianism but crossed a threshold by identifying it as a clear and present danger to American democracy. As Bacon describes it, not only are fellow Democratic politicians more willing to call out the MAGA Republican threat, but are also more broadly foregrounding “liberal,” partisan issues like gun control, abortion rights, and filibuster reform.
As I tried to make clear in my post about President Biden’s Independence Hall speech, it’s 100% advisable for Democrats to draw a clear line in the sand and call out the MAGA-dominated GOP for the threat that it is to American democracy and freedom, simply for the sake of the country’s good. But I think Bacon makes an illuminating point about the sort of synergy that occurs between the Democrats standing up for democracy and also standing up for progressive positions that have broad public support. He sees that the Democrats are moving forward on both fronts, in particular collectively leaning more into progressive positions than in 2018 and 2020, when the campaign theme was more pronouncedly one of moderation alongside defense of democracy and opposition to Donald Trump.
But I don’t think it’s simply a coincidence that Democrats are getting more progressive as they’re also choosing to confront Republicans more aggressively on their anti-democratic turn. After all, the Republicans’ authoritarianism isn’t just for its own sake, but is a method of imposing substantive policies and ideas on the American majority: from abortion restrictions to unbending opposition to gun control, authoritarianism is a means to an end — a way of overcoming majority beliefs and imposing minority policies on the rest of us. The Republicans’ anti-democratic push has ever been accompanied by a push to impose a raft of unpopular policies.
The clincher here is that those policies have exposed, or even to some extent have provoked, strongly held contrary opinions among the American majority, so that positions like support for gun control and abortion rights have now become not simply progressive positions but widely-held, majority ones. If the MAGA movement represents a backlash against a diverse, egalitarian modern America, then I think we are also simultaneously witnessing the development of a backlash against the backlash — one that is clarifying the values and ideals of the American majority in ways that were not so clear before.
Another way of thinking about the dynamic going on is that, once the Democrats start really foregrounding the idea of democracy, then there is a certain logic and momentum in them also foregrounding substantive policies that have majority backing. And this dynamic, again, is strengthened by the fact that the Republicans are making so clear the connection between the unpopular ideas they hold and their obsessive need to subvert majority rule. Short version: by clearly defining their opposition to MAGA Republicanism, Democrats are also clarifying their own fundamental values and what they stand for.
But putting aside my speculation on the dialectic between MAGA craziness and the development of the majority’s self-awareness, I think Bacon correctly points out the benefits of a more coherent Democratic agenda now in comparison to 2018 and 2020. As he writes, if the Democrats manage to hold Congress, there will be much more clarity about the need for them to protect abortion and pass democracy-protection legislation. He also notes that, “The party has now clearly described Trumpism, not just Trump, as an existential threat, so it will be hard for centrist members to continue to bash the left and triangulate between left-wing members like [Representative Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez and Trump-aligned Republicans.” This would indeed be a welcome development, and I’d note a further benefit for those who support progressive causes: if the party can indeed neutralize or at least soften the conflict between its progressive and centrist wings, it’s hard not to think that this won’t ultimately benefit the progressives, as their advocacy of burning issues like abortion rights and environmental protections, not to mention defense of democracy, align closely with the current public energy.