Incrementalism For All Who Can Survive It
Photo credit: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
As massive catastrophes unfold, politicians, pundits, and voters are responding with demands for compromise and incrementalism.
by DAVID SIROTA
Two things are happening in America that should not occur at the same time. Real, verifiable evidence from the terrestrial world is screaming warnings about existential environmental, health, economic, and political emergencies that require radical responses. And yet, politicians, media elites, and many voters inside the wonderland of politics have decided that now is the time we most need compromise, moderation, and incrementalism.
What explains this dissonance?
Scientists are warning of an accelerating climate cataclysm with mind-bogglingly disastrous consequences, and yet Democrats are responding by slashing climate spending, boosting fossil fuel subsidies and offering weak pollution standards — all in the name of moderate bipartisanship.
The pandemic is resurging as our dysfunctional corporate health care system has become a deterrent to vaccination, and yet Medicare for All is fully gone from the political conversation.
Millions could be thrown out of their homes during the pandemic, and yet Democrats missed the deadline for trying to extend the federal eviction moratorium, allowing it to expire right after the House went on vacation — and the Biden administration only belatedly extended it after a public shaming campaign.
Voting rights are under assault in states across the country, and Democratic lawmakers are on the verge of missing an imminent deadline next week to block Republican gerrymandering plans — a deadline the Biden administration just moved up by four days, after his Census Bureau finished crunching numbers a little early.
In effect, we are living inside of an asteroid disaster movie, and yet the response is a collective sigh and pious odes to caution — and it’s the same discordance outside the Beltway, as evidenced in this week’s Ohio’s special congressional election.
There, super PACs, Republican donors, and corporate lobbyists bankrolled Shontel Brown’s campaign to defeat former Democratic state Senator Nina Turner, who ran on a promise to push the Democratic Party to embrace Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and other policies that would at least give the country a fighting chance to halt this epoch’s existential crises. For the crime of pushing too stridently, Turner was voted down at the polls in favor of a candidate whose major promise to voters was a pledge of lockstep fealty to Democratic leaders in Washington.
One obvious takeaway from all this is that cash is still king. In Washington, donors and lobbyists use a system of legalized bribery to convince their patron politicians to prioritize short-term private profits over public-minded policy. In the electoral arena, big money coordinated by D.C. operatives can still flood congressional districts with ads that influence elections, especially low-turnout affairs in which more than 80 percent of voters don’t even bother to cast a ballot.
But the other takeaway is that even in the face of the crises, corporate-friendly incrementalist government is what many Democratic politicians and their voters actually want, or are at least willing to tolerate. Indeed, while there is now a cottage industry in Washington producing polls purporting to show majority support for progressive policies, Biden’s approval ratings among Democratic voters remains sky high, despite his capitulations and betrayals on many of those same policies.
Likewise, the Ohio election — and other similar progressive losses up and down the ballot — show that more Democratic voters than not have been voting for candidates who do not support a robust progressive agenda.
The question is: why?
Party Is Now Identity, And Democratic Voters Are Getting What They Want
One part of the answer has to do with segments of the Democratic primary electorate that are inherently more hostile to the idea of structural change.
Older voters, for instance, tend to be more change-averse. Affluent voters tend to be more conservative on economic initiatives that might ask them to forego a tiny shred of their wealth to help solve big, systemic problems. And the party’s legions of cable TV addicts are conditioned by a 24-7 multiplatform smorgasbord of corporate agitprop to oppose anything that millionaire pundits deem too lefty to be politically viable.
Taken together, it’s a simple truth even if it’s painful for many progressives (including me!) to acknowledge: A sizable portion of the Democratic primary electorate willingly and enthusiastically votes for incrementalism, regardless of how insufficient incrementalism may be in meeting the moment’s challenges.
That reality played out in microcosm in the Ohio special election, as Jacobin’s Matt Karp noted: “Turner won five of Cleveland’s nine black-majority wards and lost four (all of them narrowly, by less than two points). She won the city of Cleveland overall, as well as the black-majority city of Akron (but) the key difference came in the more affluent suburbs.”
Demographics, though, are only one factor — the other was spotlighted in a recent Washington Post column by the paper’s national reporter James Hohmann. Epitomizing Beltway elites’ excitement about the triumph of Democratic incrementalism and corporatism, he writes:
Brown prevailed by embracing President Biden — and celebrating his brand of incrementalism. “This is about making progress, and sometimes that takes compromise,” she said during her victory speech in a Cleveland suburb. “Because when you demand all or nothing, usually you end up with nothing.”
The fealty to Biden, the “celebrating his brand of incrementalism,” the vapid Veep-esque reference to “making progress” without mention of what that even means, the fetishization of compromise as an end unto itself, the idea that Biden shouldn’t have to “placate” those who don’t want to see millions of people thrown out into the street — all of this reflects how partisanship has become a powerful identity in the era of identity politics. How loyal one is to the party — how many party-signaling bumper stickers, yard signs, and social media avatars one can flaunt — is now for many the purest form of self-expression and self-identification.
In the context of primary campaigns, that means candidates’ perceived loyalty to Democratic leaders and the blue brand can be a more animating issue for voters than even fundamental differences on core issues.
“American politics, it has become plain, is driven less by ideological commitments than by partisan identities — less by what we think than by what we are,” wrote New York University professor Kwame Anthony Appiah in 2018. “Identity precedes ideology.”
In an alternate universe where party sycophancy wasn’t deemed so important, more primary voters may have seen Turner’s constructive critique of Democratic incrementalism as laudably prophetic, and they may have forgiven her occasionally colorful language — especially at a moment when incrementalism so obviously threatens to leave America unprepared for various apocalypses.
But that’s not the world we live in.