How Progressives Blew It

This article is reprinted from the Substack newsletter “The Liberal Patriot.”

It wasn’t so long ago progressives were riding high. They had a moment; they really did. Their radical views set the agenda and tone for the Democratic Party and, especially in cultural areas, were hegemonic in the nation’s discourse. Building in the teens and cresting in the early ’20s with the Black Lives Matter protests and the heady early days of the Biden administration, very few of their ideas seemed off the table. Defund the police and empty the jails? Sure! Abolish ICE and decriminalize the border? Absolutely! Get rid of fossil fuels and have a “Green New Deal”? Definitely! Demand trillions of dollars for a “transformational” Build Back Better bill? We’re just getting started! Promote DEI and the struggle for “equity” (not equal opportunity) everywhere? It’s the only way to fight privilege! Insist that a new ideology around race and gender should be accepted by everyone? Only a bigot would resist!

Progressives thought they had ripped the Overton window wide open and it remained only to push the voters through it. In their view, that wouldn’t be too hard since these were great ideas, and voters, at least the non-deplorable ones, were thirsty for a bold new approach to America’s problems.

In reality, a lot of these ideas were pretty terrible and most voters, outside the precincts of the progressive left itself, were never very interested in them. That was true from the get-go, but now the backlash against these ideas is strong enough that it can’t be ignored. As a result, politics is adjusting and the progressive moment is well and truly over.

Astute observers on the left acknowledge this, albeit with an undertone of sadness. Progressive Substacker Noah Smith plaintively notes:

I spent pretty much all of the 2010s—my first decade as a writer and pundit—advocating for various progressive causes. . . . In the late 2010s, it felt like a long wave of progressive sentiment. . . had finally reached a critical level of intensity. . . . 

A few years later, I’m not so sure. My values haven’t become more conservative. . . . But I have to say that I now doubt the practical effectiveness of some of the policies I embraced in previous years.

Andrew Prokop of Vox, laments:

Ambitious progressive rallying cries of just a few years ago, such as defunding the police and Medicare for All, are now absent from the discourse. Politicians who assiduously cultivated left activists are now increasingly tacking to the center—most notably Vice President Kamala Harris, who has abandoned many of the positions she took while running in the Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary.

Finally, David Weigel of Semafor observes in his recent article, “No Matter Who Wins, the U.S. Is Moving to the Right”:

The Democratic Party, after two decades of leftward post-Clinton drift, has jerked abruptly right. . . . They’ve adjusted to an electorate that’s shifted to the right, toward the Trump-led GOP, on issues that progressives once hoped were non-negotiable—immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, climate change policies, and criminal justice reform. . . . 

Both parties now face voters, white and non-white, who were open to some left-wing ideas about race, crime, and gender in 2020 but are far more skeptical now.

So how did the progressive moment fall apart? It is not hard to think of some reasons.