Best political writer out there.
In our system as configured today, particularly within coalitions, real, shut-it-all-down style leverage is a rare commodity. Make or break threats, implicit or explicit, to throw elections to the opposition can’t be a source of leverage in a coherent movement where everyone understands the other party to be worse across all major issue areas. It’s only leverage for those who reject that analysis, or for political hobbyists who treat elections like consumerism, and are happy to say “neither” whenever their preferences aren’t sufficiently met.
In the current era—particularly in the
Trump era—we need a new, if somewhat unsatisfying, conception of what it means to be a stakeholder in progressive politics, or the movement will kill itself, and perhaps millions of others, in a murder/mass-suicide.
DEVILS, BARGAIN
The term “leverage” doesn’t
have to connote a negotiation between adversarial parties, but that’s often the idea it conjures: a unionized labor force demanding higher wages under threat of a work stoppage; a reluctant buyer who makes a best-and-final offer at a fire-sale price, knowing the seller is distressed. Take it or leave it.
If that’s how factions within a political coalition conceive of and wield leverage internally, it’s only a matter of time before one of them miscalculates and everyone in the alliance loses. Striking workers can threaten the viability of a business, greedy counterparties can sabotage a mutually-desired acquisition. But failure isn’t typically the goal, and in the event of failure, everyone can pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again. They would understand their bargaining power much differently if failure resulted in death or imprisonment. But that, in an only slightly hyperbolic sense, is the proposition on the table when factions within the progressive coalition try to “leverage” a Democratic president in this way, as fascism looms in the near distance.
People on the broad left understand the distinction between leverage and sabotage quite clearly when they’re on the receiving end or witnessing their opponents descend into self-destructive recriminations.
When Republicans threaten to plunge the economy into a credit-default depression, as they do every couple years, all liberals and progressive activists understand it as both faithless opposition and illusory leverage: faithless in that it’s immoral to extort concessions from anyone of any kind under threat of mass harm; illusory because Republicans presumably don’t want to wreck their own communities or personal wealth. Democrats
have not always been steel-spined about calling the bluff, but they have adamantly rejected the tactic.
Likewise, when MAGA activists take aim at popular Republican politicians in competitive states and districts over their insufficient fealty to Donald Trump, most progressives understand it as a form of self-sabotage. Occasionally the far-right Republicans who replace popular incumbents on those ballots win, but more often than not they lose. When a group of Trump loyalists in the House forced a vote on ending Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, the overwhelming consensus on the left was to not interrupt the enemy in the midst of a mistake.
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The broad left is susceptible to similar errors, though they tend to manifest in different corners of the political system. Democrats did trigger one (extremely brief) government shutdown during Trump’s single term, but they don’t generally make leverage errors in legislative negotiations with the GOP. If anything, they under-exploit the leverage they do have. Democrats are also much
less prone to bouncing popular incumbents in swing seats.
When Democrats are negotiating among themselves, as they did many times in 2009 and 2010, and 2021 and 2022, progressives have
some leverage, but no more than their peers in the party’s centrist wing, and in many cases less. President Obama needed every Senate Democrat to support the Affordable Care Act; President Biden needed almost every Democrat in all of Congress to support the Inflation Reduction Act. Under those circumstances, everyone in the party had leverage, and everyone had a claim to be treated respectfully and dealt with in good faith. But conservative Democrats won most of the internal fights over provisions in both bills because progressives are more invested in policy reform than centrists.
Progressives would (for instance) claim they’d rather have no health-care reform than lose the public option. But it was just a bargaining tactic. Everyone saw through the bluff. They’d already identified themselves as the eager buyer. Joe Manchin, by contrast, could claim he’d be happy spending $0.00 on Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, and it was at least plausible that he was telling the truth.
In American elections, progressives threatening to withhold their votes for Biden are playing the spoiler just like Manchin—except instead of coming up empty on an infrastructure bill, we’ll get Donald Trump. Some leftists will claim to prefer that outcome and were just waiting for a pretext to oppose Biden. They imagine, wrongly, that they’ll have more clout in the political system if he loses. Others are happy to let Trump burn the whole place down, “after Hitler, our turn”-style. This essay is obviously not for them.
But in unguarded moments, most people on the left will acknowledge that another Trump presidency would be an existential threat to democracy and progressive politics long term. “Leveraging” Biden despite this understanding will sometimes move White House policy, and may thus be a worthwhile, calculated, high-stakes risk in rare circumstances. But it can’t be a permanent condition of coalition-wide politics. If you’ve ever worried that, through serial hostage taking, Republicans will one day blunder the country into default, then you see the problem: Eventually, perhaps just five months from now, the leverage-wielders will hit the brakes too late and drive us off the cliff.
NUCLEAR SPLINTER
In fairness to the progressives who think this analysis sucks: I agree. Or rather, I agree that the state of affairs sucks.
More representative democratic systems create many more opportunities for factions within coalitions to make demands. In a parliamentary system, progressives could rally to increase the size of progressive parties, and then demand more concessions in power-sharing arrangements when attempting to establish a governing coalition.
In the U.S. system, there is no power-sharing arrangement
per se, and the party agenda gets sorted out in the primary. Factions thus have credible leverage during and immediately after primaries. Progressives made solid use of this leverage after Biden beat Bernie Sanders in 2020, as my friends
Luppe B. Luppen and
Hunter Walker detailed thoroughly in their book
The Truce. This year, there was no competitive primary. One of the only viable opportunities progressives ever have to exert leverage thus wasn’t available.
And so they’re left with the nuclear option: The threat to boycott the election and let Trump win. Or, alternatively, the dismaying sense of running out of moves.
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