Update: Jacob Grier has an amazing substack post in which he lays out an evolution from “libertarian” to “liberal” that I strongly identity with. And he has his own thoughts on the democracy axis (emphasis mine below). Let’s make the democracy axis happen!
Something important has changed, however. It’s just not about specific policies or suites of policy preferences, so it doesn’t show up in charts or quizzes built around the things government should or shouldn’t do. It’s more about the need to support the basic political institutions that make democracy possible. This is basic stuff like voting rights, respecting the outcome of elections, preserving the rule of law, and the peaceful transition of power. We might imagine this as a third dimension on the chart mapping a democratic versus autocratic axis, though that gets hard to visualize. This is all tremendously important, but since we live in a mature democracy in which we’re all expected to agree on these things, it typically stays invisibly in the background of our political debates.
I often get accused in my very liberal circle in San Francisco of being quick to “both sides-ism.” In my mind, there’s a lot of radicalism out there on both sides, but I actually support none of it. So you might say that I am actually quick to “neither side-ism.” How this manifests itself in conversation is just a function of the people I’m speaking with. The left never gets criticized inside my bubble and there are more than enough people to criticize the right. Why would I want to pile on to that? I am just doing my part to even out the dunking by pointing out the radical left also sucks.
Here’s my working hypothesis of the American political spectrum.
You often see the left/right divide illustrated as a horizontal line. I see it more like this, with an axis that honors or at least pays deference to small-d-democratic values. In this framework, partisans are ideologically symmetrical at any point on the line, and the more centrist you are, the more you’re likely to just want to do things that are popular with most people (aka, you’re closer to the center in this very literal diagram).
What makes the parties different is a function more of where the median voter in the coalition lies. It just seems to me that more people in the American left are close to the center than on the right. So you get a left that has a lot of people who are interested in more centrist policies that have broad democratic appeal but check off less of the lefty wish list. Some people call this settling. It makes people further to the left very angry, which is how you get this narrative that the Democratic Party (which represents the broad left in America) constantly caves while the Republicans are willing to fight tooth and nail.
I wanted to lay this out anyway but then this great set of tweets from David Roberts, who is a very left leaning person, helped lay out the tension perfectly.
A centrist minded person would note that we did get Obamacare and Republicans had to abandon overturning it. They failed to privatize social security as well. Biden passed a massive recovery bill with no Republican support. Very Serious People who make up the “D establishment” seemed to get some things done that were pretty popular.
The further left people will retort that none of these “wins” went far enough. We don’t have single payer, the welfare state is too stingy and we should have given bigger checks. And so it goes…
In fairness to the left critics, there is polling that Medicare for All is popular (at least in some abstract form where you don’t tell people their taxes are going up) and Bernie almost was the Democratic nominee (sort of). You could almost imagine a world where we would have a very left leaning administration that people democratically awarded the presidency. We will never know, but it isn’t out of the question. Whether the platform would have been implemented, even if our Senate had less partisan skew, is another matter. In the meantime, it doesn’t seem like most Americans are unsatisfied with the centrism they are being served by the Biden administration and the Democrat-led congress.
We have two parties that straddle the entirety of their respective ideological spectrums. Based on the ideological contours of this country, that means you’re going to keep getting neoliberal sellout politics (aka popular centrist solutions) on the left. The right might have some victories here and there but they are going to broadly push less popular and more radical ideas and hope they can implement them through undemocratic means. The sad thing is that because of our political system and the way voters are distributed, the Republican strategy has a shot at working here where in many other places it wouldn’t.
That’s how I see the world, anyway.
- Cameron Parker