How Boring Centrists Beat Back the Socialist Revolt
The most popular and powerful ideology in America is the one that is least often discussed.
Welcome back to What Went Wrong?, a newsletter about the failures, inefficiencies, and screw-ups that define 21st-century American life, written by Harry Cheadle. Image via Flazingo Photos.
For the last four years, the United States has been seized by a powerful surge of political energy. Among millions of Americans, fear of a Trump administration gave way to anger and then a sense of purpose. Dozens of organizations devoted to opposing Donald Trump and the Republican Party sprouted up and gave these freshly motivated activists a conduit for their rage. They phone-banked and wrote postcards to strangers urging them to vote; before the pandemic made in-person contact risky they went door-to-door trying to change hearts and minds. Even if you weren’t part of this movement you couldn’t avoid it—social media feeds were suddenly politically charged as left-of-center America fixated on children in cages, executive branch corruption, the rightward shift of the Supreme Court, the repeated and deadly failures on Covid.
This outpouring led to a reversal of fortunes in DC, with Democrats now controlling both chambers of Congress as well as the White House. In particular, one faction of the Democrats now controls the federal government, and it’s the faction that is usually not associated with energy or dynamism. Centrism reigns supreme; middle-of-the-road types now control the White House, much of the Democratic Party leadership structure, and key levers of power in Congress. Yet centrism gets far less discussed than more exciting, more polarizing points on the ideological spectrum. The rise of the centrists was the most important story of the Trump era, and a bunch of people, including me, ignored it.
The socialist revolution that wasn’t
At the beginning of the Trump era I was the politics editor for Vice, and I commissioned lots of stories about what I saw as an exciting time for left-wing politics. It seemed that in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, the Democratic establishment and its drab rhetoric of “electability” had utterly failed. The bowling bumpers that had confined American politics to a narrow ideological lane had been removed; the country now had the potential to roll in extreme directions. If Trump could be president, Bernie Sanders surely had a shot.
The left—the actual socialist left, not just “liberals”—seemed to have momentum. The Democratic Socialists of America, a once-obscure lefty group, recruited tens of thousands of members in the span of months. DSA support led to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseating a powerful Democratic incumbent in New York and she became one of the most famous politicians in America overnight. Other progressives in different parts of the country ran campaigns centered on Medicare for All and the type of bold policies that Clintonian Democrats had shied away from. Randy Bryce, a.k.a. “Iron Stache,” the union worker running to replace Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in Wisconsin, may have been the most famous of these, but there were others. I commissioned some largely positive profiles of these figures, and so did other editors at other left-leaning websites. Stories about how Medicare for All polled well even among Republican voters gave credence to claims that progressive policies weren’t just right, they were popular. What if championing bold ideas some would call “socialist” was the path back to power, if only Democrats were brave enough to walk it?
This did not happen. A few left-wing politicians won in places where nearly all the voters were Democrats, but the vast majority of the candidates who defeated Republican incumbents, in other words the driving force behind the Democrats flipping the House, were moderates. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics ran an analysis on candidates who supported Medicare for All and found that the allegedly popular policy tended to lose votes in swing districts. Most of the Democrats who beat Republican incumbents didn’t support Medicare for All, and many spent a good deal of time clarifying that while they wanted to reduce the price of healthcare, they weren’t from the Bernie wing of the Democratic Party. Voters really seemed to dislike the Republican effort to scrap Obamacare and cause millions to lose their health insurance; they also seemed wary of a plan to totally reinvent the health insurance system. American public opinion was somewhere between those two poles, and so was much of the Democratic establishment.
That was the story of the 2018 midterms, and it was pretty boring. The Democratic Party had a bunch of bland policies and the older people who tend to actually vote (the median voter age in 2018 was 53) liked those bland policies. It’s a story of Cream of Wheat being sold to people who already liked Cream of Wheat. An enormous amount of effort and money went into electing these Cream of Wheat Democrats, but they won not because they promised transformative changes, but because they promised not to be as deranged as the Republicans who then controlled the federal government.
But after the election these boring Democrats barely got any media attention compared to“the Squad”—four left-wing congresswomen who made up less than 1 percent of the seats in the House. They all had substantial social media followings (especially Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and all were abnormally good fundraisers partly because of that (again, especially AOC), but they and other left-wing members of Congress didn’t actually have much power and didn’t necessarily represent the future of the Democratic Party. After all, lots of those Cream-of-Wheat moderates were young too, and many of them had won in districts that Democrats would need to keep winning in in order to maintain power. Why weren’t we all talking about Conor Lamb or Antonio Delgado? Who? Exactly.
Political journalism: a terrible way to understand politics
It’s worth unpacking the incentives that turned AOC into one of the biggest political celebrities in the country, because these incentives warp how we understand what’s happening in our politics.
Socialists naturally love talking about AOC and the Squad. Ocasio-Cortez and her Squadmate Rashida Tlaib are the two most famous DSA members in the country; of course lefties will celebrate them.
Conservatives love talking about AOC and the Squad because they realize that the Squad’s policies are not all that popular outside of left-leaning areas. Republicans running against moderate Democrats can’t attack those moderate, popular Cream-of-Wheat positions, so instead try to link the moderates to radical Squad members—and often throw in a dash of racism by insinuating, for example, that Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is extra scary because she’s a hijab-wearing Muslim.
The media’s constant AOC coverage is a little trickier to unpack. A lot of journalists at left-leaning publications may really love Ocasio-Cortez and want to write about her. A publication’s target audience may be young city-dwellers who overlap with the demographic that loves AOC. Ocasio-Cortez also inspires such strong opinions from both her fans and her detractors that content about her is more likely to be viewed and shared; a photo of her, unlike the photos of nearly any other political figure, is likely to inspire some clicks. At a certain point, her fame turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy: She had such a huge following that anything she did was newsworthy and therefore worth reporting on, and that only makes her more well-known.
Ocasio-Cortez isn’t to blame for this dynamic (though she does court a certain amount of publicity by hosting Twitch streams or giving interviews where she openly criticizes other Democrats). The media and the general public are drawn to political figures who stir up emotions, make bold proposals, and inspire debate. You can tell all sorts of stories with AOC at the center of them—about feminism, about race, about the emergence of a new version of left-wing politics, about social media and celebrity. But the focus on AOC and the Squad takes attention away from who is actually wielding power in the Democratic Party right now.
The centrist ascendency
If you still thought the Democratic Party was trending toward Full Leftist in 2020, the presidential primary should have freed you of that illusion. Many of the candidates endorsed a smorgasbord of radical positions: During one debate nearly everyone onstage raised their hand to endorse ending private health insurance (though Kamala Harris had to embarrassingly backtrack on that); during another debate Julian Castro, who adopted some of the most left-wing views of any candidate, said he wanted to decriminalize illegal border crossings. But Castro never got traction among the Democratic electorate, and in the end Joe Biden, who pointedly rejected all those policies, came out on top.
There was plenty of grousing in the aftermath from Bernie Sanders supporters in particular who complained that the media was biased against him and that voters only went for Biden because they were spooked that Sanders would be unelectable. This is an extremely confusing line of critique—if Sanders was in fact electable, wouldn’t he be able to persuade sympathetic Democratic voters of his electability? Didn’t his failure to do so demonstrate a pretty big shortcoming on his part? Biden’s ability to be seen as the safe choice, by contrast, seems in hindsight like an extremely savvy bit of maneuvering. As a strategy it was dull as dishwater, attracting hardly any social media passion or celebrity endorsement heat. No model-actresses wore Biden T-shirts, as far as I know; if they were, Vogue wasn’t covering them. Biden’s base was almost entirely silent online, and young Biden fans were rare enough that when I interviewed some in March 2020 they seemed like a novelty. But while Bernie’s youth revolution failed to materialize in voting booths, Biden’s supporters cast ballots in droves, and ultimately won him the presidency.
As a result of Biden’s victory, Democrats control Congress and the White House for the first time since 2009. Sanders himself has a key position as the chair of the Senate Budget Committee. But the faction that holds the most power is centrist Democrats.
It was a centrist Democrat, Kathleen Rice, who recently beat out AOC for a spot on the key Energy and Commerce Committee after Congressman Henry Cuellar, another moderate, criticized Ocasio-Cortez’s efforts to challenge centrist Democrats in primaries. West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, has an immense amount of influence stemming both from his chairship of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and his status as the swing vote Democrats need to pass anything. It’s a centrist Democrat who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. A few more socialism-friendly Democrats won congressional seats in 2020, but the largest caucus in the House is still the centrist New Democrat Coalition. And the most powerful caucus may be the Problem Solvers, a group of moderate Democrats and Republicans who were instrumental in passing December’s Covid relief package and will probably be involved in any bipartisan legislation going forward.
If you want to look on the bright side, today’s centrists lean more to the left than previous generations of centrists. But this feels like spin, a way to occlude the setbacks progressives have been hit with lately. On Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez claimed that all the Democrats who were in swing districts and endorsed Medicare for All won reelection, which is true, but largely because there were very few of these incumbents—most Democrats who won in swing districts rejected Medicare for All in the first place. Meanwhile Kara Eastman, a highly touted Medicare for All–supporting progressive, lost in a Nebraska district that Biden won. Katie Porter, a M4A supporter who won a House seat in California’s traditionally conservative Orange County and has gone viral repeatedly for humiliating bankers in public hearings, was taken off of the Financial Services Committee, probably because her tactics during those hearings were too aggressive for chair Maxine Waters.
This is not to say progressives are fighting a pointless fight—far from it. Without all that left-wing agitation, I doubt Biden would have signed a wave of climate-related executive orders immediately upon taking office, for example. But centrists have a way of co-opting the most popular elements of the progressive agenda, watering them down, repackaging them, and using them to win campaigns. Their success at doing so is why centrism now dominates DC.
And yet the media and the sort of people who hang out on Twitter all day rarely discuss centrism or centrists. They seem boring—not toxic enough to drag on Twitter, not inspirational enough to celebrate with a poster or T-shirt. They are deliberately unfashionable, and they have conquered the country. If we want to understand our politics, we need to start with centrism.
Next time I’ll write about what centrists actually believe. And in the next few months I’ll probably write mostly about politics as I experiment a bit with the subject matter of this newsletter—I may even change the name, who knows?
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