Strange Multitude

Meanwhile, as American politics has seemed more and more polarized as a whole, it’s become a matter of consensus among Republican partisans—and plausible enough to others—that the Democratic Party is now at least as “far-left” as the Republican Party is “far-right.” After all, from the early days of the anti-Trump “Resistance,” Senator Bernie Sanders, a key figure of the Democrats’ old left, became more popular than ever; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a generation of young leaders from its new left became more prominent than most American politicians; and progressives started driving the Democratic agenda on a range of high-profile issues from immigration to sex and gender.

Yet Biden himself is hardly an avatar of the progressive left. In fact, very few senior Democratic leaders have anything to do with the progressive left at all. And the platforms critics on the right most associate with it—from defunding police to distributing monetary compensation for slavery and its long aftereffects—struggle for traction within the party almost as much as they do among Americans generally. So if progressives don’t really dominate their party, who, if anyone, does?

David A. Hopkins is an associate professor of Political Science at Boston College. As Hopkins explains, the Democratic Party is constitutionally unlike its counterpart: While Trump has reshaped the Republican Party, its politics remains a fusion of conservative social ideas and pro-business economics. The Democrats, by contrast, are a broad coalition of rivaling groups. Those who supported the neoliberal Hillary Clinton for the party’s presidential nomination in 2016, for example, had very little in common ideologically with those who supported the socialist Bernie Sanders. Which means the party’s leadership always ends up having to balance these kinds of factions against each other—and small groups can wield more power than mere numbers might suggest they would.

Still, Hopkins says, the Democratic coalition is changing. It’s becoming more ideologically uniform; its voters’ ongoing reaction to Trump is accelerating this change. And the whole dynamic is altering the American political landscape …

“Over time, the number of people who are Democrats solely on the basis of group loyalty has declined. Which has made the party a lot more unified than it used to be. On the one hand, that’s been good news for the Democratic Party, because it’s made it considerably easier for them to agree on policy. On the other, it’s made it considerably easier for them to lose electoral support. The Democrats used to be the clear majority party. That’s not the case anymore.”

“Because Trump is prone to making controversial statements about racial minorities, because of his treatment of women in the past, because of his blunt style of politics—for all these reasons, he’s effectively encouraged the Democrats to define themselves as the antithesis of all of that: the party of the educated and erudite, the party of the socially sensitive, the party of the internationally tolerant.”

“[Biden has] invested a lot in reviving the old labor left. He hasn’t had so much success yet in winning voters back, but the labor movement really hasn’t had a better friend in the White House since Presidents Lyndon Johnson or Harry Truman. If instead, Vice-President Kamala Harris or Senator Amy Klobuchar or Pete Buttigieg were the president, I’m not sure the revival of labor politics would have been a priority for the Democrats at all. I think Biden himself has made it a priority.”

Trade War II

In May, Alice Han explored the apparent trade war emerging behind these events between China and the West. Han says China is significantly expanding its industrial capacity in part to revive its flagging economy—but also to pursue its goal of dominating high-tech manufacturing globally. Brussels and Washington are responding with tariffs and investigations into subsidies that might violate World Trade Organization rules, while the political mood in both capitals has turned in favor of more aggressiveness toward Beijing. At the same time, Han says, individual European member states still hold different positions on trade with China—which is why the EU’s whole approach remains so much a work in progress.

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