As the shape of a Joe Biden White House comes into focus, progressives and left-leaning Democrats in Washington and around the country are asking themselves what kind of a role they can expect to have in the new coalition.
For some progressives, a junior partner position in a Biden-led Democratic Party is worth supporting an administration well to the right of their ideological outlook. The prospect of affecting policy for left goals makes going along a good trade.
“Most young people who voted, voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” March for Our Lives Organizing Director Maxwell Frost told NPR in November. “So we expect him to use that bully pulpit and use his presidency... to educate millions of people on our issues and set an agenda that will set the foundation for change.”
Other progressives, however, are less optimistic about that expectation and don’t have faith that success is on the horizon. They specifically cite the Biden transition’s picks of moderate nominees for the incoming administration as proof that the left isn’t being taken seriously by the president-elect.
“We helped win Democratic seats around the nation,” New York State Rep. Yuh-Line Niou, a rising progressive leader in the state, told Blue Tent. “Like it or not, we are a large group of voters.”
The competing impulses to cooperate with the party and make demands are leaving progressive leaders in a bind as they balance their desire to influence policy making with the need to push the incoming administration to the left. Blue Tent spoke with a number of leaders in the progressive world on what they see as the role of left politics in a Biden-dominated Democratic Party and what cooperation between the two sides of the coalition might look like—as well as points of contention that are already surfacing.
Part of a governing coalition
The Center for Popular Democracy, which works with grassroots groups around the U.S.—including in key states that flipped blue—is one of the powerful progressive groups expecting to be heard by the incoming administration. CPD’s executive director, Jennifer Epps-Addison, told Blue Tent that her organization’s mission is to help people, not parties, and so its work regularly runs up against the interests of the Democratic establishment.
“We understand that we are not the Democratic Party—that we’re organizing core constituencies within the party,” said Epps-Addison. “The relationship is one of push and pull.”
Epps-Addison added that there were some cases in which CPD and other leading activist groups would be acting in opposition to the party, citing backing progressive challengers to sitting members, fighting cabinet picks like Rahm Emanuel, and other breaks between the party’s left and centrist wings.
“Our true issues and needs have been ignored by the system for far too long,” said Epps-Addison. “People need to come together to recognize that their struggles are not isolated and they’re not individual problems, that they’re a collective struggle and the result of an economic and a political system, an education system that was rigged against them.”
Such a politics of solidarity requires addressing the root causes of problems, and is one where action and activism cannot be reduced to voting or working within the confines of the system as set up by the major players. Epps-Addison said that her hope is that the Democrats realize CPD and other progressive groups are part of their governing coalition. In practice, that means that they work with the party in a limited fashion, but at the end of the day, “we don’t see our role as having blind fidelity to a political party,” Epps-Addison said. “Our role is about helping people who are struggling to build and exercise their power. And in some cases, that means that we’ll be working in alignment with Democrats.”
In an interview with Politico, Justice Democrats co-founder and New Consensus President Saikat Chakrabarti echoed that take on the role of outside groups.
“My approach—speaking just as myself—has always been: We’re going to present a solution. We’re going to show there’s no reason not to do the solution,” said Chakrabati. “And then, if leaders don’t do it—with no excuse —we have to pressure them. Then, of course, you have to do sit-ins; you have to show that they’re not doing it, because then they’ll at least get embarrassed into doing it. I hope they don’t have to be embarrassed into doing it; I hope they will lead.”
Social Security Works, the advocacy group led by Alex Lawson, has a simpler relationship with the party establishment. SSW focuses on protecting and expanding Medicare, Social Security and other social programs, including Medicaid. For Lawson, a long-time veteran of the intra-progressive disputes of the Obama era, the lessons learned from the past inform today’s fights.
“We have a mission and we don’t deviate from it,” said Lawson.
Lessons learned—and not
In Lawson’s view, one of the biggest mistakes Biden could make is to pursue a strategy of turning over a new leaf with the GOP. Given the Senate’s makeup and the behavior of current Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, that’s an approach that’s already failed.
“To expect that he’s not going to actually immediately start fighting everything that Biden wants to do, that the Democrats want to do—it’s naive,” said Lawson.
Rather, progressives need to form a bloc both inside and outside of the Democratic Party to oppose GOP intransigence, Lawson said.
But selling the progressive movement on that approach might be difficult. Epps-Addison cited her experience with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during negotiations over the coronavirus stimulus bill as an example of the limits of the Democratic Party’s political strategy.
“She would really focus the conversation on how unreasonable Republicans were,” said Epps-Addison. “And we would say to her, if Republicans won’t even offer you a dollar to feed a hungry child, then why are you limiting your response to just, like, what you think they will agree to, if they won’t agree to anything?”
The Democrats are limiting themselves by only putting forward moderate bills that the GOP will nonetheless reject, Epps-Addison continued. She noted the fact that people around the country don’t care about the intricacies of aid bills that will or will not provide state and local aid.
She said there’s “a lot of risk that if we don’t make some real material gains for people who are struggling, we could be in a situation to see a red tide in 2022 and a resurgence of a more competent authoritarian in 2024.”
That’s a view shared by Working Families Party National Director Maurice Mitchell. Mitchell told Blue Tent that he hopes the president-elect makes ambitious policy proposals a keystone of his administration.
“Voters elected Biden because this country is in crisis, and Trump was ignoring those crises or making them worse,” said Mitchell. “For Biden to honor the will of the voters and address our crises at scale, he must embrace an agenda of transformational change and use every single tool in his toolbox to make it a reality.”
Mitchell recognizes that for Biden, that kind of approach “may go against his middle-of-the-road instincts, but it’s what the moment requires.”
The incoming president also needs to dispense with the idea that the Republicans are going to come to the table with honest intentions and an open ear, said Mitchell, echoing Lawson.
“Our hope is that, given McConnell’s intransigence and obstruction on something as vital and popular as COVID-19 relief, Biden will recognize Republicans aren’t operating in good faith,” Mitchell said. “Biden will inevitably need to use executive authority and the bully pulpit to win relief for the millions who need it and to enact a transformational progressive agenda.”
David Segal, co-founder and executive director of the group Demand Progress, said that the Obama transition’s experience may have some lessons for Biden. The desire not to fall into the trap of half measures—with attendant electoral disaster in the midterms—has combined with a rising left in the Democratic Party to affect the direction of the transition.
Segal pointed to Biden’s top personnel picks so far. “In general, we’ve been able to avoid the worst of the worst getting these prominent positions, especially the Senate confirmation positions,” he said. “And some of that’s likely a function of pressure from the left; some of it’s a function of the left being much bigger than it was 12 years ago.”
Demand Progress fits into that ecosystem by pushing progressive positions on issues like war and surveillance, said Segal. And sometimes that means taking a stand against the party—something he said the group is not afraid to do, especially as the incoming president staffs up his administration.
“I think that the role that we’ve been playing in the transition has exemplified that already,” said Segal, adding, “I’d like to think that we and some of the coalitions we are a part of played a role in undercutting some of the more reprehensible people being cited for some of these positions, and in some cases, perhaps also helping elevate some people who were more acceptable from a progressive vantage.”
Limited possibility
The Biden transition appears to have learned from the mistakes of the Obama team, which, in a similar moment of crisis, turned to Wall Street insiders to fill key jobs. Things aren’t perfect—Segal acknowledged that the appointments are far from where he would like them to be. “I wish we were operating on a playing field where the breadth of some of the spectrum of possibilities was a little bit broader,” he said.
Mitchell, of the Working Families Party, agreed.
“So far, Biden hasn’t named progressive champions or anyone we’d consider our first choice, but he has also so far steered clear of the most polarizing figures like Rahm Emmanuel,” said Mitchell. “In many cases, his nominees seem more open to progressive points of view than Obama’s first-term nominees.”
However, Mitchell did single out Tom Vilsack, Biden’s pick for agriculture secretary, as a bad choice. Vilsack’s record on race and his firing of Shirley Sherrod after Andrew Breitbart manipulated video of her remarks at an NAACP event “continue to stain his record,” said Mitchell. (See Blue Tent’s coverage of that appointment.)
The elections of more progressives to the House and the success of the Bernie Sanders campaign show there’s an appetite for progressive change, said Lawson. Keeping up the motivation in the midterms, when Democratic voters historically lose interest, is going to be the key, he said, calling the current progressive moment a “new epoch” for the left in the U.S.
Lawson of Social Security Works said that Biden’s appointments so far were bringing the dynamics of “Bidenland” into clearer focus. He defined Bidenland as the incoming administration’s balancing of the president-elect’s moderate impulses and the demands of the progressive wing, which the transition team appears to be listening to. Rahm Emmanuel has yet to receive an appointment—and well may not—but such a move would be a major upset to the process, he said.
“You’ve seen sort of flare-ups from various sections of the grassroots over different things, but not a ton of institutional breakdown yet,” said Lawson.
But Biden’s nomination of Neera Tanden, the president and CEO of powerful Democratic-allied group the Center for American Progress, for director of the Office of Management and Budget, may test that.
CAP and the Democrats
Both Tanden and CAP provoke mixed reactions among progressives.
Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, has been called “the thorn in the Biden transition’s side” for his advocacy of transparency from the incoming administration on appointments and conflicts of interest. Hauser told Blue Tent that there is some nuance on the groups with ties to Biden, citing the Center for American Progress as an example of a group with a connection to the incoming administration and the Democratic Party that does more good than ill.
With the GOP-led reduction of congressional staffers and congressional office budgets over the past 25 years, Hauser explained, the pool of people with influence over policy has tilted to the corporate side. CAP therefore plays an important role in offering independent counter-analysis to Democrats on the Hill.
The group is also a better place for Democrats to cool their heels in between administrations than the private sector, Hauser said.
But not everyone shares that view of the group. One progressive leader Blue Tent spoke to said on background that they saw CAP as functioning as a foil to more left-leaning groups hoping to influence policy. Because CAP is part of the Democratic establishment ecosystem, it stakes out positions just to the left of party leadership and no further as a way of controlling opposition.
Epps-Addison also sounded a note of skepticism and noted that Tanden’s selection indicates that the transition team is somewhat out of touch. She told Blue Tent that she had been in contact with the transition and was pressuring them to select a “real movement leader.” When the team chose Tanden, they reached out to Epps-Addison, she said, and told the CPD head that they had listened to her.
“When that came out, I got a text saying, ‘Aren’t you happy we brought a movement leader into the administration?’ And I said, no comment,” Epps-Addison said.
“I really don’t think that mainstream people understand that CAP is not a leftist organization,” she added. “But they literally were like, ‘you should be happy.’ Like a big movement leader is like one of the most important positions, be happy.”
Future prospects
The transition is swiftly becoming the litmus test by which progressives are reading the tea leaves on their place in the coming coalition.
“The Biden transition has been a battleground between two contradictory goals: to return to business as usual [...] and to move the party in a more progressive direction,” wrote The Nation’s Jeet Heer. “So far, the record has been mixed.”
Writer and analyst Carl Beijer has tracked the success rate of progressive influence over Biden’s transition team and has been unimpressed. Rather than focus on what could be worse and accept that as victory, Beijer told Blue Tent, the left should look outside of traditional cooperation with the Democrats and immediately put up a united front against the incoming administration.
“I just don’t see what leverage the left has at this point to influence Biden and his transition,” said Beijer. “And I’m wary of media figures and organizations that are being unrealistic about this as a way of projecting relevance to the public. A left that has any impact on the administration is going to have to be combative with Democrats in a way that I haven’t seen in my lifetime.”
Niou, of the New York State Assembly, told Blue Tent that Democratic leadership has been preaching the need for outreach to communities for years. To tell them now that they can only engage with the party in a limited fashion is a nonstarter, she said.
“Unfortunately, that’s not how to advocate for our communities. We aren’t puppets and we aren’t going to be disposable,” said Niou. “How this administration transitions and how people are included will be telling of where the country will be headed.”
Setbacks for the progressive movement aside, said Lawson, there are reasons to feel optimistic going forward.
“I am reflexively anti-doom, anti-despair—even in the midst of all this terrible mess,” said Lawson. “If you actually look at the development in the progressive sphere, it’s really quite powerful.”