In 1996, Bill Clinton succeeded in enacting a key Republican priority, fulfilling a campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it". In the boom times of the late 1990s this seemed like a winner, though those of us who didn't believe the hype about the "long boom" had no trouble predicting the consequences of placing a lifetime limit of five years on benefits paid by federal funds.
As the New York Times reports, the consequences have come due:
About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income, according to an analysis of state data collected by The New York Times.
When a Democrat, seeking political advantage, enacts a Republican priority, the result is that the American landscape has been permanently altered. And welfare reform is only one example; my purpose isn't to pick on Bill Clinton in particular.
This dynamic once worked in reverse: in the 1970s, the Republicans were the me-too-only-more-moderate party, and Richard Nixon signed a number of Democratic priorities into law (the EPA; a series of arms limitation treaties with the USSR; Medicare expansion). And, of course, Nixon went to China. But Reagan and the Bushes never played this game, while we've had three straight moderate Democratic administrations (Carter, Clinton, and Obama) that have lacked the confidence, or the will, or the desire to move the country in a progressive direction.
Too many on this site take what I consider too narrow a view: what will generate the most votes for the next election? But there's more at stake than that; in addition to those six million with nothing but food stamps to live on, global climate change doesn't care about what's politically feasible.
Pragmatic Democrats tend to take the political environment as a given, while Republicans have long understood the Overton Window concept: what is politically feasible can be changed, and the task of a political leader is to change what's possible. The result is that "pragmatism" often represents a policy of incremental surrender to Republicans, by gradually enacting Republican ideas, so that controversial issues will be taken "off the table".
We need to do something else.