To Win More, Seek Less
Better a broad coalition pursuing a few major goals than a narrow one failing to achieve anything.
It’s striking that Election Day and Thanksgiving are always so close together. A celebration of abundance comes mere weeks after the end of a long season of bitter combat (unless the two overlap thanks to election denial and recounts). Add to that the trope of family arguments over Thanksgiving dinner, although that may be a lot less common than we often assume.
Given that Democrats, despite outperforming expectations, have lost control of the House of Representatives, this contrast of political conflict with feasting should lead those of us within the party to consider limits even as we seek greater abundance. We should be thankful for what we have, and can be heartened that things were not far worse. But if we want to achieve our policy goals - if we want to dedicate more of America’s wealth to public goods rather than private indulgence - we will have to keep our expectations modest. We will have to accept the limits of what our politicians can realistically achieve, and of what most Americans will accept.
That includes coming to terms with the limits of what even solid Democratic majorities can pass. It is not only under Republican control that passing sweeping economic and social legislation becomes difficult. One of the most successful Democratic presidents in American history understood that all too well.
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The 1964 election brought an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress to power on the coattails of Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater. Many of Johnson’s staff were excited by the prospect of passing mountains of liberal legislation on civil rights, health care, poverty reduction, and more. They thought their boss could more or less do whatever he wanted for four years.
Johnson, however, quickly disabused them of that notion. At the beginning of the term, he told them they would likely have only six months in which to get their favored bills passed. This was not only because the heavily Southern conservative wing of the Democratic Party was still large and powerful in 1965. Johnson knew that even liberals would eventually balk at taking stances that, while they would improve the lives of many vulnerable Americans, would be unpopular with swing voters in their districts and states.
Sure enough, when you look at the major laws, programs, and institutions of the Great Society - the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, the Higher Education Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development - most of them were passed either in 1964 (when the shock of John F. Kennedy’s murder gave Johnson the rhetorical power of appealing to JFK’s legacy) or in 1965.
Speaking to NPR in 2013, historian Michael Beschloss described the difficulties Johnson wisely foresaw. That same year, journalist Jeff Greenfield published If Kennedy Lived, a remarkable alternate history describing what likely would have happened during a second Kennedy term. Discussing the book, Greenfield and Beschloss agreed that Kennedy would also have faced significant hurdles passing major legislation after a brief honeymoon period, had he not been killed. They both rightly cited Goldwater’s bellicose rhetoric, his talk about turning the Cold War into World War III, as a major factor in Democratic victory in 1964. But that did not mean all political trends at the time were working in liberals’ favor.
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Bayard Rustin, the great civil rights and labor activist, presciently saw it was necessary to convince working class whites that their needs and those of poor blacks were not mutually exclusive. Activists who entered politics to achieve racial equality under the law, and to push for greater public investment in black communities, would have to take great care not to alienate whites who had different reasons for voting Democratic (like Goldwater’s talk of making Social Security voluntary, which would undermine it), even if they were racially resentful. He warned the left not to expect to achieve everything they wanted quickly. As he wrote in Commentary in 1965:
“I do not believe that the Johnson landslide proved the ‘white backlash’ to be a myth. It proved, rather, that economic interests are more fundamental than prejudice: the backlashers decided that loss of social security was, after all, too high a price to pay for a slap at the Negro. This lesson was a valuable first step in re-educating such people, and it must be kept alive, for the civil rights movement will be advanced only to the degree that social and economic welfare gets to be inextricably entangled with civil rights.”
Rustin knew that process, of achieving major left-of-center goals while Johnson’s coalition still held together, would require hard work, respect for others’ interests, and willingness to compromise. He had no patience for those on the left he called the “moralists” of the civil rights movement, those who “seek to change white hearts—by traumatizing them” (like some on today’s left do).
If those are the limits the center-left faced at a time when Democrats dominated the federal government, the need for humility is much stronger now.
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We will have a divided Congress in 2023. Most Republicans on Capitol Hill will oppose President Biden on anything and everything. With control of the House, they will attack him and his lieutenants with every weapon in their arsenal - possibly including impeachment. Congressional Democrats will rightly push back against such petty, reckless, narrow-minded behavior by the right. But resistance is not enough.
Democrats can use the next two years to narrow their goals and expectations, and to build a broader coalition around a few major priorities. Win back the working class voters who have abandoned the party in droves in recent elections, not only whites whom too many progressives wrongly dismiss, but also Hispanics whom they have wrongly taken for granted. Pursue broad-based economic growth, something that sometimes requires greater spending, but sometimes doesn’t. By all means call for taxing the rich more heavily, but seek to use the revenue for basic economic security for everyone, not a Build Back Better-style sweeping change. And on social issues, rediscover the appeal of freedom to American voters - when defending abortion rights, for example, it’s probably wiser to say “reproductive freedom,” not “reproductive justice.”
An agenda rooted in economic security and personal freedom, not grand notions of progress and transformation, is the surest path to Democratic victory in 2024. If we win elections this way, implementing our policies will still be difficult and frustrating, and our success may only be partial. But that is surely better than aiming too high and missing entirely, the likeliest result of sticking to the left and alienating many persuadable voters. The choice is ours.
Happy Thanksgiving!