Democracy's Big Tent Revival

PRESENTED BY THE SQUIDWORMS AND SANDELISTAS

On Tuesday, I attended, in the words of Politico’s Elena Schneider, a “private confab” of “progressive politicians and strategists” seeking “a more leftward path out of the political wilderness.” That’s as good a description as any for the event, organized by Jen Ancona’s group Way to Win and James Slezak’s marketing firm Swayable. To be honest, I didn’t expect too much for an afternoon conference about political persuasion techniques, focus groups, and polling data, though I was looking forward to catching up with folks I’ve known in my twenty-odd years in lefty-techie politics.

But Ancona and Slezak put together a tight line-up, from Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Reps. Lateefah Simon (D-Calif.) and Greg Casar (D-Texas) to the charismatic candidates Kat Abughazaleh, running for Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s seat, and Graham Platner, looking to unseat Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), as well as influential political strategists such as Way to Win president Tory Gavito, Anat Shenker-Osorio, and LaTosha Brown. From politicians to marketers, nearly all the participants wanted Democrats to stand for a coherent policy vision that lifts up working families, taxes the billionaires, and addresses the big challenges of our time, like the New Deal. I almost laughed in my seat at how close the speakers were to rediscovering the blazing popularity of the Green New Deal in 2018.

The confab (thanks, Elena) made it clear we are living in the shadow of Michael Sandel, the political philosopher who wrote the prescient Democracy’s Discontent in 1996. Coming on thirty years ago, Sandel argued that the fabric of American democracy was threatened by the rise of neoliberal free-market ideology. Specifically, he believed that as political leaders treated Americans more as consumers than as citizens amid accelerating inequality, they would lose faith in democratic government. And he has been proven right.

What’s needed now, he wrote in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election, is a “political vision that combines populism and patriotism – a radical critique of inequality and unaccountable, concentrated economic power (that’s the populism) and a greater emphasis on community, solidarity, and our mutual obligations as citizens (that’s the patriotism).”

Looking at the Biden administration in the rearview mirror, I keep coming back to how we instead had a Democratic Party that trashed the Green New Deal rhetorically while working sincerely and effectively to pass as much of the Green New Deal agenda as possible. We achieved a self-defeating divorce of politics and policy, which Biden telegraphed would be his approach during the 2020 campaign.
 
Some of that was simply the typical preference of most White House denizens for negotiating with Congress and Beltway lobbyists instead of engaging the public. Democrats in Washington also quickly conceded the agenda-setting rhetorical power of Fox News. But a lot of the antagonism to the Green New Deal was as petty as then Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) personal animus for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) distaste for anyone under the age of 85. But I believe it all comes back to a Democratic Party trying to maintain a political coalition that includes Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires.

I think we can and must expect a different Democratic Party now. But it’s going to take a lot of courage and outcampaigning corporatist milquetoast in primaries, in an even harsher political landscape. 

In a panel with Mehdi Hasan, Abughazaleh and former Harris-Waltz digital battleground campaigner Bhavik Lathia showed how to cut through the Trumpian slop: moral clarity. In their case, they talked from the heart about the U.S. complicity in the genocide in Gaza. “There’s no polling [based stance to take] on genocide,” Lathia explained. “Either you’re against it, or you’re one of the bad guys.”

Voters in battleground states repeatedly told Lathia’s team they were upset about Gaza and the Harris campaign’s equivocal stance. “We raised it over and over again with the campaign leadership,” Lathia said. “Eventually, we were told to shut the fuck up.”

“Why is it so hard to acknowledge clear atrocities?” Abughazaleh asked. “AIPAC should have the same connotation as the NRA in Democratic politics.”

“I think this is the very purposeful ignoring of humanity,” she continued. “But when you have money coming in, you don’t want to jeopardize that.”

Van Hollen, Casar, Platner, Shenker-Osorio, Patriotic Millionaires founder Erica Payne, and Democratic New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani advisor Morris Katz struck a common theme of the importance of Sandelian politics, of naming the rich as the villains of economic inequality while defending core moral principles.

“The Democrats’ big tent can only be so big to include only the people who want to solve the money problem,” Payne said, presenting the Equal Tax Act. “We have created a political economy that guarantees more inequality. Inequality leads to authoritarianism.”

“A consultant told us to say ‘Defend Social Security.’” Casar related. “We said, how about, ‘Fire Elon Musk’? And some members worried, ‘Won’t people think we want to punish wealth?’ So we didn’t ask for permission.”

Similarly, Van Hollen discussed with Perry Bacon why he was driven to fight for Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s freedom despite pollsters advising Democrats that defending immigrants’ rights was a losing issue:

“We have a tax code that rewards people with money with more money and punishes people for working,” Van Hollen said.

“We are relentless about economic issues. We are relentless about health care. We are relentless about affordability,” Platner told Gavino, striking a similar tone. “This doesn’t mean we have to sell out our values.”

“We need to go back to being a party that tells the truth,” Platner argued, sketching out a clearly Sandelian vision of civic engagement tied with economic populism. “It’s the only way to rebuild the Democratic Party as the party of working people. In this race, the ground is fertile to build power locally and then build that into structural power.”

“Voters were struggling with an affordability crisis but had given up hope a mayor could do anything about it,” Katz explained when asked about Mamdani’s meteoric success. “Zohran wasn’t scared of naming villains”—like greedy landlords and private equity billionaires—”and proposing solutions.”

Both Katz and Slezak separately emphasized the importance of candidates and campaigns using marketing techniques like polling, focus groups, and message testing only after deciding what you stand for. That’s what requires political leadership; the pollsters and consultants can help you hone that message and help it reach people, but that should come at the end of the decision-making process, not the start.

I have to file a correction—in my previous post about the shutdown fight, I implied that only “isolated bloggers like yours truly” were looking to prevent Democrats from rubber-stamping Trump’s lawless regime in return for promises to extend healthcare tax credits. Not so! The politicians and high-level operatives at Tuesday’s gathering similarly agreed.

In particular, Shenker-Osorio ripped Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries for the incoherence of their shutdown strategy. “When you say ‘fire fire fire! There’s a fascist threat!’ and then don’t run into the building to fight it, people say ‘wait a minute.’” Shenker-Osorio argued. “Say: No funding for fascism. No payouts for pedophiles. Say: I cannot fund your war against Americans.”

She concluded: “Either you’re fighting fascism or you’re negotiating with a standard right-wing administration. It’s cannot be both.”

And we very much do not have a standard right-wing administration. So yes, again: no funding for fascism.

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