Social progress–like science–progresses one funeral at a time.
Assuming Biden wins, this election should be seen as a return to normal politics. Which is still a victory considering the highly abnormal situation we’ve endured for the last four years.
But I can understand that some people might not see this as a great thing. If you feel that politics as normal has been a problem, you don’t want to stop there.
But progressives need to give up the illusion that they’re one step away from victory. They have to abandon the belief that their platform already has the support of the American people and all they need to do is push aside the politicians who are blocking that consensus.
As the OP noted, a lot of Americans voted for Trump even after seeing him in office for the last four years. These people are not silent supporters of progressivism.
Progressives need to acknowledge that if they want to enact a progressive agenda, they need to work on building up a progressive movement. They need to build to sell their ideas to the people and then work on converting popular support into political change.
Octopus is right (and that’s not something I say very often). Big social changes take a lot of time and effort. But they are possible and they do occur.
Some progressive ideas, such as single-payer healthcare, could get very broad support if they were just sold differently. Sell them on the basis that the USA spends an abhorrent sum of money on healthcare (17 percent of GDP) and gets abhorrently-bad outcomes (a broken leg can still cost you $50,000 at the emergency room.) Sell it on efficiency - if we adopt single payer healthcare, then within a decade, we could trim our healthcare spending in half while getting better returns, which then boosts our economy that much more. Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. That can tickle moderate and conservative ears.
Stop selling it on the basis of compassion, or illegal-immigrants-deserve-it, or “Jesus gave people free healthcare” (a bumper sticker I’ve actually seen.) Those arguments backfire rather than help.
Yup.
The way these things work:
There’s a great big brick wall. Somebody comes along, says ‘this wall shouldn’t be here’, and starts beating their head against it.
People walking by think the headbeater’s being a fool. That wall’s always been there, it’s got to be there, it’s too strong to knock down, it’s certainly stronger than that person’s head. Eventually the headbeater either winds up with a bashed-in head, or gets exhausted and goes home.
Somebody else comes along, says ‘this wall shouldn’t be there’ and beats their head against it; with what looks like exactly the same results.
This keeps on happening for years. Often for lifetimes, multiples of. Sometimes there’s a batch of people beating their heads on that wall. Sometimes there’s one lonely person. Sometimes there’s nobody at all. Doesn’t look like anything’s being accomplished but exhaustion and some blood on the ground.
Then one day somebody walks up to that wall, says ‘this wall shouldn’t be here’, and pushes at it. And the wall disintegrates into a heap of rubble all fallen down on the ground.
From that one push? No. From the accumulated impact of all those people who thought they hadn’t accomplished anything at all.
\
(And, not very much later, some people will start saying ‘Wall? What are you talking about? There was never a wall here!’ Sometimes while they’re still tripping over the rubble.)
If you’re too tired to keep headbeating, now or maybe forever: that happens. Somebody else will be along. Maybe they’ll get to be the one who gives that last push.
And this is why I keep banging my head against the wall and the glass ceiling. Thank you for the reminder.
Great article. Thanks!
The world - most of it - has become more progressive and left wing over the last 200 years, including North America and Western Europe.
The right always say they are thwarting the left, but gradually, little by little, progressive and left wing ideas are coming to reality.
In the UK, 40 years ago the right did not accept gay rights, 15 years ago they laughed at gay marriage.
The right campaigned against minimum wage but now promote it.
The rightwing parties were far more racist than now.
I could list many more.
The reason why the right think we are not moving left is that progression follows this pattern:
- Big movement to the left
- The right mock and push back
- The movement is slightly to the left
- The right say they won the issue.
Eg: BLM:
Big movement, toppling of statues, protests, etc.
The rightpuch back
Statue topplibg is stopped
The right say they stopped staue toppling, but actually, BLM is never going away.
There has been a steady growth in the number of women in Congress and governors of states over the past one hundred years (and there were none before then):
I’m tired of looking thing up (and I’ve got to go somewhere), but you can do the same thing for the number of non-white officeholders, non-heterosexual office holders, non-binary office holders. Some of those categories have taken off decades later than others. Everything takes time.
It sounds like you are saying that the middle is to the right? I think it might be more accurate to say that the middle is to the right of YOU.
It sounds like he will continue voting but he realizes that many of his progressive policies are lost causes.
You’re in the wrong country for that. The left wants to feel good about themselves; the right wants everyone to be more miserable than them and the middle just want their country back,
Don’t give up. Instead, knuckle down and work harder on a way to SELL the American people on progressive policies. PEOPLE WILL BUY ANYTHING if it’s marketed with sufficient salesmanship. They’ll buy fucking fidget spinners and pet rocks. People will run their bank accounts into the red keeping up with trends for no other reason than that they were effectively sold on them by good marketing. There is no reason and I mean NO reason why this same concept does not apply to political goals.
My advice? Get rid of the label “socialism”, throw it right out into the garbage with “negro”. That word has bad juju. Words have power. Get rid of that goddamn word. Rebrand the ideas as ANYTHING else. And try to keep "intersectionality’ away from progressive movements. Keep the message on economic justice. Everything else radiates from economic justice anyway.
This can be done. It just takes, you know, work.
Except that, in a way, everything you listed above benefits ME (not ‘them’). Most of the policies that Progressives favor have a greater propensity to benefit THEM or US.
When we think of that ‘continuum of care’ concept, you’re dealing with wildly divergent interests.
If you even implied that getting clean drinking water for the people of Flint, Michigan meant you couldn’t buy your fidget spinner, they’d almost surely tell you to go pound sand.
That’s also the reason the left thinks we are not moving left. They look at current injustices but either cannot contextualize how much worse it was previously, or think that saying that moderate liberals are basically the same as the worst conservatives of the previous eras will somehow advance their goals even if they know it’s false.
Umair Haque is over the top and yet it is hard to refute his main conclusions. The majority of whites–not an overwhelming majority to be sure–is willing to forego a social democracy because it would rather screw itself than see anything going to those people. And I have seen that clearly my whole life.
But I am still not ready to throw in the towel. If only all those “progressive” 18-30 year olds would just get out and vote.
the issue is that our movement to the left is uneven, we’re moving to the right on other areas.
moving to the left:
feminism
Non whites obtaining wealth, Power and acceptance
breaking the hold of Christian dominionism
drug laws
LGBT rights
moving to the right:
gun control
blatant racism
redistribution of wealth
social safety nets
abortion rights
FDRs New deal and LBJs great society would never happen today. that includes LBJs efforts at racial equality, since there’d never be bipartisan cooperation to promote justice for minorities on that level.
Reagan and Nixon are fairly moderate by modern republican standards.
Systems set up have unintended consequences. I don’t know anybody who is unwilling to support programs that assist others if the programs do not have a set of pernicious incentives.
^ So much this.
The blinkered view some progressives take of ‘what the American people want’ is frequently irritating, even to people who generally support progressive goals ( 
)
If only more progressive activists would embrace science–in the form of reputable polling and research–then their messages might find more approval.
Instead, the progressive-activist message often seems inspired by self-righteousness and an eagerness to be seen as ‘as woke as possible.’ This is, to say the least, counter-productive.
Progressives will never find a way to appeal to the racists and deplorables. But there is likely to be a way to appeal to the ‘voted for Trump because of taxes’ millions, among other self-absorbed groups. Just show how progressive policies will benefit them.
a far left person will not be elected president unless the GOP candidate is terrible or we go into a long deep depression or both. Last far left guy who ran was McGovern and we saw what happened there . Could not even win his home state SD
I am absolutely confidant Bernie would have won against Trump as well, and most likely with a higher margin. And the terrible GOP candidate would have helped him just like he did Biden, because let’s be honest, Biden would have never won if there was a more standard Republican to run against.
The reason the Democrats did so poorly is because they ran on nothing substantial, instead relying on fond memories of the “good old days” under Obama. And they ran away from issues that could have helped the moderates succeed like the left did with Green New Deal and Medicare For All. At least Biden isn’t promising “Hope and Change” that he never intends to deliver. I am already aware that we on the left will have to fight for every inch with him.
Well, I am absolutely confident that Bernie would have lost resoundingly to Trump. There are a great many Americans who are terrified of socialism, and a self-proclaimed democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders has a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected in a national election in my lifetime.
Even Biden had to overcome charges of socialism in this past election, and Biden is the ultimate centrist Democrat.
Yep. Exactly. Sanders would have been absolutely and definitively murdered in the election. Leftism will not get us more votes. If anything this election proves that there are a lot more authoritarian right wingers than we thought there were. The lumpenproletariat do not want a candidate from the left.