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The conservative movement infiltrated the Republican Party, then took it over completely, to establish a beachhead from which to attack (and ideally dismantle) liberal government in the United States.
But for most of its existence the constituent elements of that movement didn’t agree with one another about what made liberal government so intolerable, and, thus, where to focus their energies.
The money behind the movement was largely obsessed with money. Wealthy reactionaries both believed in and financed the production of an ideology that abhorred government regulation and redistribution of income. They hated the income tax and the New Deal. All that money rightfully belonged to them, and they should be able to do what they want with it.
But the popular fixations were traditionalist, xenophobic, and bigoted. America should be a Christian nation, and really a white Christian nation.
These elements fused. But to gain power nationally, their motive commitments had to be euphemized. The New Deal was popular nationally. Civil inequality (eventually) was not. So they campaigned for “small government,” and “liberty”—often the liberty to discriminate—rather than wholesale rejection of the welfare state and civil rights.
The plan basically worked! Except that by the time conservatives became a dominant faction within the GOP, they were overrepresented by the money people—the faction with the least organic public support. Indeed, the conservative movement’s money agenda inhibited its growth, insofar as many Americans with traditionalist or nativist beliefs were reluctant to join a movement committed to running Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and food stamps dry.
Donald Trump brought the movement to full fruition with con-artistry. He emphasized and recommitted to the movement’s identitarian commitments, while adopting a populist pose. Republicans still funnel money up to the money people, and they still gut welfare programs. But they found an optimal political balance by switching out euphemisms in favor of outright lies.
The progressive movement is younger, and modeled openly on the conservative movement.
Its goals are obverse: pluralist, rather than nativist; distributionist rather than regressive; secular rather than denominational.
But its approach is familiar: create a fusion of activists with different priorities along with a baseline view that the American government should be radically changed; back candidates committed to that vision, with the goal of claiming control of the Democratic Party entirely.
It is unclear to me whether that objective is attainable. For a long time I would have bet not. We used to refer to the three-legged stool of old-school Republicanism, because it had three constituent elements (traditionalism, libertarianism, national security) but also because this seemed like a stable arrangement. The agenda was uncomplicated, and it had a lot of popular support.
The progressive firmament couldn’t be described in the same terms, at least in its early waves, because stools don’t come with dozens of legs, and the constituencies were often at odds over their priorities: environmentalism or labor revival? Racial equality, or gender equality, or sexual equality, or religious equality? Health care or climate change or immigration reform or… you get the idea. You could ask “why not everything in one fell swoop?” but some of these objectives come into conflict, and in any case there aren’t too many doctrinaire progressives in the electorate who support the whole suite of ideas.
As a left-populist reaction to the second Trump term, though, the picture looks different. Whatever commitments they carry around in their hearts, the new wave of the progressive insurgency has boiled its appeal down to a more manageable range of promises: fight oligarchy, Medicare for All, no aid to Israel. Most of the baggage from the last decade is gone.
“No serious person that I know who is running for office, believes in quote unquote defunding the police [or] doing away with prisons,” Bernie Sanders told the liberal podcast host Jon Favreau, “Open borders? No. Most of us believe in comprehensive immigration reform, not opening up all the borders.”
And, when progressives recruit charismatic candidates and rally around them, those candidates can reliably count on garnering between (say) 35 and 50 percent of the vote in competitive primaries. Not always enough to defeat establishment candidates head-to-head, but usually enough to beat a divided field. Not enough to win general elections everywhere Democrats are competitive, but enough to win in blue territory; possibly purple, too, as Republicans and Trump circle the drain together.
Can this movement displace the Democratic establishment just as the conservative movement displaced the old Republican guard? Maybe. If in victory progressives govern well, they can make converts. If they make converts, they might become viable in larger swaths of the country. But they are also, to some extent, free-riding on widespread discontent with the establishment. Democratic voters did not lurch to the left all of a sudden; but they are furious at their party for adopting an approach to politics that lost two of three elections to Donald Trump. That outrage will likely subside if a charismatic but mainstream Democrat coasts to power in 2028 and manages not to repeat the mistakes of the Trump-Biden era leadership. The new energy on the left would dissipate, and the movement would recede somewhat.
It is also possible that calamity could strike. Abdul el-Sayed, the progressive Senate nominee in Michigan, has both upside and downside potential, but the party quickly united behind him. If everyone else on the Democratic ticket wins in November, but he loses, Democratic voters will be snakebit. Good luck convincing them to take a flyer on another left-wing candidate in swing territory for the foreseeable future.
But either way—between radicalization and cohort replacement—the progressive faction has grown too big for the party to relegate to the fringes. It’s not the aughts, anymore, when the left served up Dennis Kucinich to win one percent of the vote in presidential primaries. Democratic leaders thus face a choice: They can tap out—cede control of the party, making an indirect bet that the left will discredit itself; they can try to find equilibrium with progressives on the basis of non-negotiable shared commitments (to democracy, civil equality, and the rule of law); or they can recommit to crushing the insurgency and re-marginalizing the left.
The second option—the big tent option—is the only palatable one at this point. Moderate and centrist and establishment Democrats seem to be in denial about it.