I am seeing a whole lot of commentary from pundits and columnists about Elizabeth Warren and her new unity message. Many people can’t get their heads around the idea that the fighter has turned unifier. They think those two things are contradictions, that Warren is turning “soft”.
The pundits just don’t get it.
Here’s the thing the establishment will never understand: you can’t buy unity with pats on the head and saying nice things about your fellow candidates. You can’t say “why can’t we just all get along?” and walk away thinking you have unified people. Folks, we’ve been there and done that (see 2016), and news flash: it didn’t work. To get true unity, you have to forge it in the fire of truth.
Warren’s unity message has no resemblance to “why can’t we all just get along”. Instead, it is grounded in asking the hard questions our party’s nominee is going to have to ask to be successful, and genuinely confronting the choices we will need to make as a political party.
I lived through this in the 2016 election, up close and personal. I stayed neutral in the 2016 primary specifically because I knew how bitter it was going to get. I wanted to be able to keep talking to both campaigns and play a role in working things through when the primary got done. I helped work out some of the trickiest politics in the platform negotiations, and when Donna Brazile took over at the DNC for the last two months plus of the general election campaign, she asked me to come inside with her to focus on reaching out to Bernie voters and other progressives who had left burned by the Clinton campaign.
One thing I can assure people, contrary to the myth-making since that campaign: Bernie did everything we asked him to do for Hillary and the Democratic ticket. He traveled the country on our behalf, gave us his best staff, worked his network of supporters hard. Donna Brazile and he were close friends from the old Jesse Jackson campaigns in the 1980s, and Donna talked with Bernie every few days. I spent a lot of time with Bernie people I knew from the top of his campaign and from all around the country.
But the bitterness from the campaign, and frankly from the mistakes of Democrats in the decades before, did not go away, and they cost us badly. We lost more than 20% of the Bernie primary voters- some of them voted for protest candidates, some hated Hillary so much they voted for Trump, and most of those we lost just didn’t vote.
It wasn’t just the bitterness from the 2016 primary that hurt us with those crucial voters, activists, volunteers, and small dollar donors. There were two other incredibly important factors, factors that will hurt us all over again in 2020 if we don’t confront them.
First, the Clinton campaign did not change its message to incorporate the Bernie view of the world. They mostly avoided populism on economics; they joined Obama in talking about how great the economy was; their ads were mainly targeted to upper income suburban moderates, not the young and working class Bernie people who were feeling hard pressed economically in their daily lives.
Second, and most profoundly is the cynicism by the upcoming generation of progressive young people about the Democratic Party in general. From their perspective, the Democrats have let them down on some of the most central issues in their lives. When I talk with my young progressive friends, what I hear goes something like this:
After being the party of big ideas and major progress in the New Deal era and the 1960s, Democrats became both more cautious and more likely to be in bed with big business. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Obama all failed to aggressively pursue labor law reform while deregulating major industries, and wages have stayed flat for 40 years. Clinton and Obama pushed trade deals that hurt working people. Clinton and Biden partnered to push a bill activists believed dramatically accelerated mass incarceration, and Obama didn’t move to change it. Clinton pushed a bill to deregulate Wall St, which was a major reason for the crash, and then Obama let the execs at bailed out firms keep their bonuses while insisting union members give up wage increases in their contracts in the auto industry, then failed to push DOJ to prosecute bankers who broke the law. The DOJ’s anti-trust division mostly stopped enforcing the law even in Dem administrations in spite of greater and greater industry concentrations. Clinton supported bills that consolidated the media industry, and he supported a bill to cut benefits for poor people (welfare reform). Charter school policies disliked by teacher unions and favored by corporate charter investors got pushed aggressively by both the Clinton and Obama administrations.
Meanwhile, In addition to the above mentioned criminal justice and labor law reform bills not passed, positive legislation on climate change, immigration reform, campaign finance reform, indexing the minimum wage, making bigger investments in infrastructure and rebuilding public schools in low income neighborhoods, reining in credit card interest payments, housing issues, helping people burdened with student debt, and other progressive priorities never got passed even with big Democratic majorities in both houses in 2009-10. Clinton similarly failed to get very much done on the progressive economic wish list.
And even on the good things Democrats did accomplish, my progressive working class friends still have very mixed feelings. Health care reform did not include a public option or price controls on drugs or hospitals; the insurance companies are still in charge when people get sick. Dodd-Frank included the CFPB, but did nothing to break up the Too Big To Fail banks, which are far bigger than they were before the crash. The family leave bill Clinton passed did not include pay, so most poor and working class folks can’t or can only rarely take advantage of it. Taxes were raised on high income people, but only modestly by historical standards.
So for most working class people, their lives have not gotten measurably better, and for many of them, things are a lot worse.
Is all that fair, given the power of big money and the complexity of passing ambitious legislation? No, and it’s not like there aren’t a lot of Democrats trying hard to do better. But those are insider arguments, and we are not going to heal our party’s divides by papering over those disappointments and going back to the same old incrementalism in our ideas. To truly unite this party and bring Bernie people to the table, we are going to have to have a candidate who gets these issues to their core, and who will run on the big, structural change that Bernie and Elizabeth have both been preaching.
But unity will take some give from Bernie world as well. To win the 2020 election, Bernie’s voters, volunteers, and contributors are also going to need to understand the need for reaching to the middle and finding some compromises. This is equally true whether Bernie wins the nomination or not; it is equally true if he becomes the president when we are trying to get big, complicated legislation passed. The great thing about Bernie’s people is the passion they bring to politics, and the fact that so many of them have never been involved before. But that passion and fresh perspective will need to be tempered by a willingness to work with Democrats who don’t think exactly the same way. You can’t take the politics out of politics, and it is destructive to try: the nature of democracy is building broad coalitions, and you need to compromise to succeed.
Elizabeth is the right person to unify our party precisely because she is a fighter from the progressive side of the party, at the same time she knows how to get things done on the inside. Elizabeth has the credibility on fighting for big, structural change because that is what she has been doing her whole career, and that is how she is running her campaign. At the same time, though, her inside skills are also formidable. Working with her as she stood up to Wall Street and many Democratic insiders on TARP supervision, on passing the CFPB, on getting the CFPB up and running so effectively, and then on the personnel and budget battles she fought as a Senator has been one of the great joys of my life, because she is a progressive who knows how to fight and how to win.
Only a strong progressive like Elizabeth will have the credibility with that young progressive movement demanding big change. Only a tough Democrat with inside skills can convince establishment Democrats that it is time to join arms with the progressive movement.
Unifying the Democratic Party is incredibly challenging. Only a person who knows how to fight as well as unite can truly pull it off. That’s what Elizabeth Warren was born to do.