Today is Joe Biden day at the Democratic convention in Chicago. Thanks, Joe, will be the spirit: thanks for winning in 2020 and thanks for finally getting out of the way. But as Biden departs and the party swings into its next phase, the most surprising effect of the Biden period might be the sidelining and cooptation of what, in the last few election cycles, has been an ascendent "progressive" or "democratic socialist" or "squad" faction within the party.
Starting with Bernie Sanders' shockingly effective primary challenge to Hillary Clinton in 2016, one of the notable developments in American politics (along with the rise of the populist right) is the rise of an anti-Wall-Street, anti-war left, advocating a much more aggressive safety net and other measures to ameliorate economic inequality. With Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as senior leaders, younger figures such as Ayanna Presley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman entered Congress and the spotlight over the next couple of cycles.
American leftists had, for decades, endured the Democratic Party's extremely close relations to Wall Street donors, and their support of mass incarceration, the Iraq war, the Patriot Act, trade deals that moved jobs overseas, for example. It’s not too much to say that at the moment of Sanders' national ascent, there was effectively no left wing of American politics. Obama and Pelosi were as far left it gets. Very not very, in other words.
After Sanders nearly toppled Clinton and his young energetic avatars started arriving, it was possible to think that a new progressive era was coming. By 2020, for younger people, "socialism" was no longer a dirty word. Squad-style politics was ascendent on college campuses all over the country. Black Lives Matter and movements for LGBTQ+ equality quickly gained momentum. Protests exploded.
However, perhaps the Democratic Party freaked out a little right at that moment (spring 2020), and didn’t believe that Sanders or Warren (to say nothing of Beto O'Rourke) could beat Trump. The sudden turn of the party back to Biden, apparently accomplished almost overnight by Jim Clyburn as the South Carolina primary loomed, signaled that the progressive wing was going to have to wait at least one more cycle, that Clintonian compromise would proceed as usual.
But waiting another cycle hasn’t helped the Squad. People may want to believe that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz represent that wing of the party, but they obviously don't. In 2020, Kamala tacked left hard, but that had little to do with her history, persona, or belief system. It was pure strategy, and she has long since repudiated those positions (single-payer health-insurance, for example). She's Joe Biden's Vice President, and has shown no tendency at any time to distance herself from his positions.
Harris and Walz, meanwhile, are tacking right and annexing JD Vance's positions on a variety of matters, such as a tax break for babies.
The end of the Squad has been shocking and I'm sure difficult for a group of gifted young politicians who must’ve felt like The Beatles five years ago. Bowman and Bush lost their primaries. And it appears to me that AOC and Omar, and even Bernie Sanders, have been thoroughly co-opted by Clinton/Biden/Obama mainstream.
For reasons I find difficult to follow, Sanders, AOC, Omar, and Pressley were among those most vociferously urging Biden to stay in the race. Pressley, for example, said that those calling on Biden to withdraw had "lost the thread." "I have not seen an alternative scenario that, I feel, does not set us up for enormous peril," said AOC in mid-July. I guess I hadn't pegged her as that sort of "safety-first" politician. Well, she's turned out to be wrong, and Harris has a better chance of beating Trump than did Biden.
The fact that the progressive wing, and Sanders most vociferously, urged Biden to stay in and the party to stick with him, contributed to the delay in changing nominees. But more to the point, it signaled the end of the "elected-progressive" moment. First, Sanders directly endorsed the moderate Clintonism to which he’d provided an alternative. And second, he (and AOC, and Omar, etc.) ended up on the losing side.
If Biden had stayed in and beaten Trump, I suppose, the progressives would’ve gotten credit for their loyalty, and been more ascendent in a second Biden administration. As it is, they’re over. They've got no remaining leverage on anyone.
One reason that progressive support for Biden was puzzling is Gaza. Omar, for example, has been brutally critical of Israel's conduct of the war, and her daughter was arrested at Columbia for protesting it. And yet she stuck with Biden and his policy of shipping billions of dollars of arms to Israel to allow the bombardment to continue. I don't see any reason to think that Harris disagrees with Biden on Gaza/Israel policy. But one thing's for sure: the progressive wing of the party is not in a position to put any pressure on a Harris administration on Gaza or anything else.
So it’s likely that we're going to end up sticking with Netanyahu no matter who’s elected. That may end up causing thousands more deaths. The end of the progressive wing has real consequences.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
