The Case For The Establishment

Salon’s Bill Curry article on Sunday makes the argument that progressives need their own version of the Tea Party. He claims that progressives can currently be divided into four camps: Democrats that are “ready for Hillary”, people that work with the Democratic Party and view Hillary as somewhere between a “flawed candidate” and “spawn of Satan”, those who back third party candidates because they view the Democratic Party as hopelessly compromised, and those who have given up on politics all together. He goes on to state that Democrats have become too resistant to change and that the groups need to have a debate about the way forward and hopefully return to a time when “progressives made the policies that Democrats made into laws.”

There’s something to be said for his analysis. The dividing lines of the movement seem to be about where he has placed them, and there is some historical truth to the observation that policy ideas have tended to come from outside of the formal party structure, and that progressives have relied on the Democratic Party to do the working of transforming policy initiatives into legislation. He even states that “it offers the most direct path to progressive governance” (of course, that line is immediately preceded by describing the party as a “corrupt and empty husk of an institution”). Where I’m going to have to disagree with him is the viability or even the desirability of a bizarre world faction of the Tea Party.

What I think he gets wrong is the nature of the Tea Party and where they get their power from. First, the Tea Party owes its birth to the same powerful interests that it claims to stand against; it was (and in some respects remains) an AstroTurf organization. It is true that the organization has developed into a monster that threatens the life of its creators, but pretending that the organization sprung up organically hampers any analysis of the viability of replicating it on the left. Secondly, the great strength of the Tea Party and the accompanying reactionaries that share their politics (if not their branding) is in their ability to remain uncompromising, even in the face of potential disaster. This is illustrated by the inflexible stance they took regarding the debt limit negations. Mitch McConnell famously described the negotiations as a hostage taking, and in the face of potential economic catastrophe (and yes, defaulting on the nation’s debt would have been a legitimately unmitigated disaster), they held firm and managed to force massive cuts in spending that we are dealing with to this day. After the fact, comments by the Republican lawmakers leave little doubt that they were ready and willing to pull the trigger on a gambit that would have resulted in difficult to imagine suffering for millions of people. However, it is because they are reactionaries, looking to undue the success of the New Deal and Great Society programs (some would go so far as to say they are looking to repeal the entire 20th century), that they are able to remain so uncompromising. If your goal is to destroy, you have no need to negotiate because the disaster that would result in a failure to compromise serves your interests as well.

There is simply no effective way for progressives to credibly or responsibly maintain a similar posture. The debate on the left over the Affordable Care Act public option demonstrates this difficulty. It would have been ruinous to blow up the entire bill, and the real benefits that it has brought to millions of uninsured Americans, over an insistence that the public option be included in the final bill. That is the hard truth. It is much harder to create than to destroy, and a governing system that requires consensus building and deal making will always structurally disadvantage groups trying to build civil society. The emergence and rising prominence of the reactionary right-wing simply makes this problem more acute. 

It is true that as the Republican Party has careened ever further towards outright psychosis, the Democratic Party has been drug towards the center as a defender of the status quo. To those that are angry with the Party’s response, I would ask, what is your alternative? Remaining uncompromising, and furthering the non-function (as opposed to simple dysfunction) of government is no way to convert the people that have abandoned politics. Tacking further to the left and risking the fracture of the body politic would be an even worse outcome. To those that disagree, I ask, what is your theory of change? Is the collapse of the current order likely to bring about any of the progress that you seek? Keep in mind, that it is the opposition that is stockpiling firearms and food. As frustrating as the realization may be, it is quite likely that we are simply stuck playing defense in the intermediate term, attempting to limit the damage that the vandals that have taken over the Republican Party can accomplish (I know playing defense isn’t sexy, but no one ever said living in a democratic republic is always fun). That isn’t to say that there aren’t policy goals worth pursuing; improvements to the ACA, instituting maternity and sick leave, rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure, establishing a higher minimum wage and promoting unionization are all worthwhile goals. None of those polices are worth giving up what we already have; a country relatively free of political violence, with functioning (albeit crumbling) infrastructure. The far right is perfectly willing to abandon that, and if what we have dissolves, it will be elements of those factions that stand to benefit. So to those that say that progressives need their own version of the Tea Party, I emphatically respond—No, we really don’t.