March 26, 2020 61
campaign would rest on the idea of
“the people versus the powerful.” But
over the next few weeks, the powerful
must have started calling. Gore toned
that rhetoric down. We never got to see
him govern, of course, as he won the
election by 500,000 votes but lost it by
one at the Supreme Court. John Kerry
continued in a similar style in 2004.
He proposed new health care and jobs
spending, to be paid for by rescinding
the Bush tax cuts. He also pledged to
cut the defi cit in half in four years. But
the 2004 election turned more on na-
tional security—Iraq and the Septem-
ber 11 attacks—than the economy, and
he narrowly lost.
None of these candidates really had
to worry about “the left.” It certainly
existed. There was a fairly robust
movement against free trade, backed
by the labor unions, though it never
succeeded in nominating a president.
And there were numerous
columnists and policy intel-
lectuals who protested every
time a Democratic president
or congressional leader em-
phasized the importance of
defi cit reduction, or other-
wise embraced austerity. But
electorally, Democrats could
get by just paying occasional
lip service to the economic
left.
Then came the meltdown of
2008 and the Great Reces-
sion. As thrilled as millions
were by Barack Obama’s
election victory, the activists
and intellectuals who cared
most about breaking the neo-
liberal grip on the party were appalled
by his appointments of Tim Geithner,
Larry Summers, and Rahm Emanuel
(not an economic adviser per se but a
brutish enforcer of centrist orthodoxy),
among others. To be fair, Obama had
never done anything to indicate, on the
campaign trail or in his short career,
that he would govern as a left populist.
Adam Tooze, in Crashed, his authori-
tative book on the fi nancial crisis, notes
that in April 2006, Senator Obama was
selected for the rare privilege of speak-
ing at the founding meeting of the
Hamilton Project, a group of centrist
economists brought together by Rob-
ert Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury secretary
and the bête noire of the left populists.
Presidential ambitions no doubt on his
mind during this important audition, he
carefully walked the Keynes- neoliberal
line: he reminded his audience of the
people the global economy had left be-
hind in Illinois towns like Decatur and
Galesburg, yet he also nodded toward
two Hamilton Project priorities when
he spoke of “keep[ing] the defi cit low”
and keeping US debt low and “out of
the hands of foreign nations.”^3
In the early years of Obama’s presi-
dency, the only anger most of the media
noticed emanated from the right, in
the form of the Tea Party movement,
supported fi nancially by fi gures like
the Koch brothers and promoted by
the Fox News Channel. The angry left,
lacking such resources, was less vis-
ible, but it was always there. It found
its avatar in Elizabeth Warren, named
by then Senate majority leader Harry
Reid to chair a congressional over-
sight panel on emergency economic
relief. It was from this perch that she
became such a thorn in Geithner’s, and
Obama’s, side—and such a star of the
progressive left.
Outside of offi cial Washington
circles, the impatience, and the insur-
gency, were building, especially among
young people born since about the early
1990s. They had grown up under a capi-
talism very different from the one Baby
Boomers experienced; they’d seen a
rigged game all their adult lives—a
weak job market and heavy college
debt for them, more and more riches
for the one percent, and no one seem-
ing to do anything about it. In 2010 a
young leftist named Bhaskar Sunkara
started Jacobin, a socialist journal that
became an immediate surprise suc-
cess. The next year, the Occupy Wall
Street demonstrations began, makingit clear that anger was real and wide-
spread, and eventually having a strong
infl uence on debate within the Demo-
cratic Party. The Democratic Socialists
of America, founded in 1982, saw its
membership rise from 6,000 in 2016 to
40,000 in 2018. Two other movements
of the left, while not mainly concerned
with economics, became potent po-
litical forces—the Black Lives Matter
movement, founded in 2013, and the
movement seeking permanent legal
status for the so-called Dreamers, un-
documented immigrants who came to
the United States as children.
All this activity might have remained
inchoate had Sanders not decided to
run for president against Hillary Clin-
ton in 2016 (he deferred at fi rst to War-
ren, who declined to run). Sanders had
been inveighing against the banks and
rigged political system in exactly the
same language for years, but his gen-
eral ineffectiveness on Capitol Hill,
and his comprehensive lack of interest
in schmoozing, reduced him to back-
ground noise as far as most of Wash-
ington was concerned. Now, however,
people were coming out by the tens of
thousands to hear him speak bluntly
about the banks and the billionaires in
a way Clinton never would have. And
he gave this movement a fi gurehead,
a cynosure around which to rally; his
conveniently uncommon fi rst name
seemed to dance joyfully out of his sup-
porters’ mouths.
There is no harsher spotlight in the
world than the one shone on major-
party candidates for president of the
United States, and he handled it with a
skill that not everyone thrust into that
position could. His critics—and I have
been one, especially when I felt in 2016that he attacked Clinton too viciously
for too long, well after he was math-
ematically eliminated^4 —cannot deny
him that. Whatever happens with this
nominating process and election, he
has gone from being an afterthought
backbencher to a historical fi gure.To what extent was all this left-wing
anger at mainstream Democrats justi-
fi ed? It’s a complicated question. The
left was correct that Obama could have
been far more aggressive on mortgage
rescues and penalties imposed on the
banks that brought on the fi nancial
crisis, as well as in its criticisms (which
I joined) of Obama’s lamentable em-
brace of defi cit reduction. It is also
correct that Democrats have, since the
1990s, gotten themselves far too in-
debted to certain donor groups, nota-
bly Wall Street and the tech industry.
Yet the left, in its critiques,
sometimes acts as if Repub-
licans don’t exist and have
no say in political outcomes.
Leftists tend to interpret the
policy failures of the Obama
era as a function of his own
lack of will, or his reliance
on corporate interests, rather
than what they more often
were, in my view—a refl ec-
tion of the facts that in the
Senate, a unifi ed and dug-in
minority can thwart a ma-
jority, and even a majority
can pass legislation only as
progressive as the sixtieth
senator will allow because
of the super-majority voting
rules. I recall several con-
versations with administra-
tion offi cials who had worked for
months on certain policy matters but
who knew that the ideas would never
get through the Senate. And presi-
dents just don’t have endless political
capital.
I’ve always found this a useful heu-
ristic: imagine Obama in his fi rst term
with LBJ-like majorities in Congress,
sixty-eight senators and nearly three
hundred House members. What would
he have passed? It’s useful because
our answers defi ne the limits of main-
stream liberalism—what it would be
willing to push for, and the interests it
would be hesitant to take on.
First, I think a larger stimulus would
have passed, with fewer tax cuts and
more spending, like the green school
construction proposal that was killed
by Republican Susan Collins. Quite
possibly there would have been a sec-
ond stimulus the next year (a good and
needed dose of Keynesian counter-
cyclical spending). A more progressive
health care bill with a public option
might well have passed. Certainly a
minimum wage increase. A big infra-
structure bill. The Democrats would
have done something on climate
change—nothing on the scale of to-
day’s Green New Deal ambitions, butsomething. Immigration reform. Prob-
ably a student-loan reform bill. And,
I believe, a paid family leave bill of
some kind (some of this would have
depended on where those extra eight
Democratic senators were from and
what they were willing to support).
Some things that still would not have
passed: Medicare for All; free college;
card-check legislation to ease union or-
ganizing, which was opposed by south-
ern Democrats; aggressive antitrust
legislation; any efforts to take on or
break up the big tech companies; any
bill that would have seriously weak-
ened the power of Big Pharma. It’s also
quite unlikely there would have been
any effort to break up or punish the big
banks—on that issue, Obama was defi -
nitely not a populist crusader.
The broader American public would
likely have been delighted with this
balance sheet (which Republicans
knew well and took care to thwart). But
the left would not have been, because
Obama would still have failed to take
on some powerful special interests and
because he would have refrained from
adopting the broad Sanders-esque ef-
forts to combat wealth concentration
and corporate power. Also, people on
the left would have judged the accom-
plishments inadequate, as surely many
of them would have been—student
debt forgiveness not generous enough,
the climate measure not ambitious
enough, and so on. So their assessment
of Obama as a neoliberal would still
have stood.
That’s the heart of the division
today—the left sees liberal cowardice
as the main impediment to change,
while liberals blame a system that
abets and indeed rewards Republican
minority obstruction (or, sometimes,
helps them win elections they’ve lost).
It’s not an accident that one of the left’s
favored insults for mainstream liber-
als is “corporate Democrats.” Mean-
while, when liberals speak of reforms
that would permit sweeping change,
the ideas tend to focus on procedural
matters of governance: eliminating the
Senate fi libuster, doing away with the
Electoral College, perhaps expanding
the Supreme Court.
Incidentally, where Warren sits on
this grid is an interesting question. She
persuasively criticizes both corporate
power and structural impediments to
change. The media grouped her with
Sanders, a pairing she encouraged but
may regret today, because the intoler-
ant and besotted Sanders Twitter army
ended up savaging her anyway, as she
should have known it someday would.
I always felt that she should have tried
from the start to create a third “lane”
for herself, between Sanders on her
left and the others on her right—by
stopping just short of embracing Medi-
care for All, for example, which was
the issue that bedeviled her after she
downplayed initial support for the pol-
icy. This would have positioned her as
an acceptable compromise candidate
in a fractured party, which in theory
she still could be at a deadlocked
convention.The Democrats have no unifying can-
didate. None of the mainstream candi-
dates has made overtures to the Sanders
lef t ; i n debates, they have mostly soug ht
to assure the non- Sanders electorate
that they think his brand of politics will
reelect Trump. Sanders has likewise(^3) Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade
of Financial Crises Changed the World
(Viking, 2018), p. 27.
(^4) I made precisely the same criticisms of
Clinton herself in 2008, when she con-
tinued to run a negative race against
Obama long after she had no math-
ematical chance. When that point is
reached, I think candidates should
continue to run to give their support-
ers in late-voting states a chance to vote
for them, but they should refrain from
harsh attacks on the person who is ob-
viously going to be the nominee.
Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden