My theory about Obama's boosting of Hillary was there must've been some kind of handshake agreement during the 2008 primaries, for her to not only bow out gracefully (finally) but to make sure those PUMA nuts didn't actually cause trouble. Of course, Obama could've always reneged on that promise. What's she going to do against an extremely popular sitting POTUS? But I think over the years, Obama reassessed the 2008 primaries and felt that Hillary had been right about a lot of things, like how incrementalist politics was better then big sweeping changes.
He'd never admit it (or maybe he did in one of his many memoirs), but Obama probably did see himself as a kind of messianic figure who could transform everything quickly. Then his presidency turns out to be a slog, so he comes to view Hillary as a wise elder and even regrets some of the more judgmental things he said or thought about her. So how fitting it would be that they'd both get to be POTUS? What a fairy tale ending: first black president followed by first female president! Plus, Hillary had been polling pretty well as Secy of State, so it also made political sense.
I'm guessing Obama has a huge tendency to think of his life as some kind of grand narrative and the Hillary decision was a part of this. It became about him and his journey. The tragic thing for him in this regard is that he's likely ruined his legacy as a result. I remember after his 2012 victory, there were headlines of "This is Obama's party now." And what has that party accomplished since then? Nothing but self-destruction and a horribly tarnished image.
I think that's right. He's a literary person who thinks in narratives and it was Hillary's "turn." First, we elect a Black man, then the first female president. It lined up perfectly. Hillary cements the Obama era, winning on his coalition.
He forgot how democracy works. The people don't play along!
A great column, for sure, and a wonderful scolding of your elders. Two comments:
1. Yes, there was a deal of sorts. When Obama and Hillary Clinton met at the end of the 2008 campaign, he gave her a choice between Secretary of State and Vice President. Hillary (rather arrogantly) replied about the latter option, "I've already done that job.” That choice carried with it an implicit commitment: the fix was in from the beginning.
For all of Biden's flaws, given all that he did to help get Obama's bills passed, one wonders if Obama would've had as a successful presidency with Hillary as Veep instead. And what exactly did Hillary Clinton do for Obama? At the beginning of the administration, I remember when several ardent Hillary backers claimed that she “will deliver a Mideast peace deal on a silver platter." While she didn’t have that much to work with, she barely tried, perhaps because she did not take the necessary risks, risks that might have jeopardized her chances in 2016. This is not to negate her significant accomplishment of restoring the State Department's morale by successfully restoring its dominance in foreign policy over the Department of Defense.
Given all that, Obama would have been wise to have changed his mind, overlooking the anointing Biden, gaffe-prone-ness and all. But even without the President's implicit backing, Hillary would have run anyway as Clintonworld was still very strong in 2016. The battle of the giants would likely have been quite bitter, with a split party possibly resulting in the same narrow Trump victory. Or even Bernie Sanders squeaking through and vanquishing both.
2. The “liberal left” is not just in a twilight phase, but a zombie one. The Wall Street and tech donors funding the party’s consultants will make it so. They will continue to find more Pete Buttigiegs or other new “stars” to trry and prevent the emergence of a young Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or (gasp) a more palatable AOC. It is very unlikely that any of these "liberal left" candidates will ever get elected President because they won't possess the solid principled positions that resonate with less-educated voters who comprise the majority of the electorate.
Richard Gephardt’s 2004 Presidential campaign was the last attempt to revive the New Deal coalition that had wobbled along since 1968. It will take a few more elections for the “liberal left” coalition to go gently into the night.
Wow! Are you arguing that the future is a hard right (proto-fascist) party and a somewhat less cruel and violent conservative “Democratic” elite corporate party? No room or possibility of a democratic left party? What an inspiring vision, I say with acrid, but well deserved, IMHO, sarcasm.
I think this back-and-forth with Chris and Ross, leaves too much of conjecture on the personage of one person, Barack Obama, his thoughts, feelings, actions. Need to look at the Democratic party as a power structure. In which the quick rise of Obama as candidate in 2008, made him suddenly dependent on the Clinton para-party machine both to campaign, and then to transition into governance.
Right-wing journalist Daniel Halper argues in his 2014 book, Clinton, Inc., that Obama cut a deal with the Clinton machine in 2008-ish. ( https://adbl.co/3O1gZQY ) I found the book's argument plausible on this point, and hair-rasing, even though I'm a left-green social democrat.
Obama's backing of Hillary Clinton probably was not just an idealistic stroke of political storybook writing on Obama's part. Much more likely it was as Halper puts it: a muddy arm-wrestled deal to fend off the ire of, well, Clinton, Inc. as Halper's book title puts it.
I think it's important to take in views of political staffing as well as half-way out, halfway in advocacy organizations that make up what some political scientists call the "extended party network" in and around the two major U.S. parties. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld call this instead "the party blobs", and Adam Hilton calls it in the Democrats' case "the advocacy party" by which Hilton means continual field of power players contesting and demarcating and sometimes colliding in semi-chaos as advocates each pursue one's particular aims.
Frances Fox Piven commented in a 2018 Jacobin interview with Daniel Denvir, that the Obamas seemed to want "an elegant presidency". ( https://bit.ly/PivDen-2018-2 ) I think Piven is onto something definitive, even though it was a casual interview answer and it may sound like just a ho-hum complaining quip in a long interview about many political considerations. If Piven gets that right and you really think what it means, a strong Obama motivation to low-conflict, elegant presidency, the overall picture of Obama for America becomes more self-serving than the grander conjectures of Obama as demographic diverisfier and identity-stories uplifter.
Even though sure, Obama does a lovely job of buffing and varnishing all that with patriotic stories that include demographic diversity and inclusion. Obama's 2006 book for example, The Audacity of Hope, is a joyful read (and the style is, elegant, ahem!). I read that book just a couple of months ago. I never taken by what the Economist called "Obamarama" in 2008. During Obama's 2008 campaign and during his presidency too, I rated Obama as a mainstream Democrat just one notch to the left of the Clintons' centrist opportunism. But this book reading in 2024, oh yeah. Nice feelz! But what is that? Public talk, no more and no less.
This right here times a hundred. (I was coming to post this but you beat me to it). You CANNOT understand the politics of the last two decades without understanding the power of the Clinton machine. If Obama had taken on that machine in 2016 by trying to deny Hillary ‘her turn’ there would have been something of a civil war in the party. Obama might have won it but he didn’t want to take it on, probably in part because he underestimated Hillary’s flaws as a candidate.
Obama’s first term should also be viewed as a continuation of Clintonisn, with some pretty negative results. Then post that term you get an increasing reaction against Clintonism in the party
"low-conflict, elegant presidency"- I remember reading an article (which unfortunately I cannot find right now) explaining Obama's governing style as being reflective of what he learned in Indonesia (?) as a child- rather than winning through conflict, just making the tent larger and larger (through negotiation? cooperation? Cooptation? I can't remember) and thus marginalizing an increasingly smaller opposition being outside the tent. If anyone remembers this article...
One of the best takes I have read, and particularly good on Obama’s non-legacy. I like your phrasing of how people who don’t understand why so many folks voted from Trump are out of touch with people who lead “precarious lives.” Maybe instead of using college education or it’s lack as a demographic marker we should start talking about people who have money and people who don’t, shed the euphemism that makes it sound like only dumb people vote for him, when really this election was largely about class and the way socioeconomic status has flipped between the two parties since 2008. I love your work.
Huh? One of the most important details about understanding the Trump coalition is precisely that it’s not at all about who has money and who doesn’t. Every journalist MA in Brooklyn making $30K voted Harris and every owner of a prosperous plumbing firm in Dallas voted Trump. It’s much, much more about education than about money.
A breathless, infuriated, truly unique take. One of the best I've read. So much of the legacy press still, bewilderingly, appears fixed on the same trite and tired analysis and incredulity. It's enough to make one despair that any truly meaningful narrative shift will take place at any point the next few years.
Your analysis is astute from a national political perspective Ross. However as a pre-Obama liberal who saw LBJ's Great Society undone by Ronald Regan, another not-so-bright but highly effective conservative, I know it is temporary. For now, NYC is my capital. New York State is my country. There is plenty to do here. Others will find their own liberal redoubts across the country to hunker down in--CA, OR, MN, and MA-- and advance liberal policies and a progressive agenda. To preserve the freedoms won. Liberals will wait for conservatives to overreach and fail. And they will overreach. Politicians of both stripes always do.
What conservatives will not win is the culture wars. Women will not go back to the 1950s to be merely wives and mothers. Queers will not race back into the closet to hide but will continue to exert influence no matter how many targets you put on trans kids' backs. Black Americans will continue their inordinate influence on the cultural zeitgeist, which has continued strong for a century now. The cultural levers of power can be as useful and as important as political levers. Conservatives fail miserably at those levers just as liberals fail so badly at the political ones.
So I will sit and wait in the tall grass of my little liberal shtetl, waiting for them to stumble. And they will. Good journalism takes the pulse of today. Good history takes a longer view. In defeat we all become historians. For the time being.
"Women will not go back to the 1950s to be merely wives and mothers."
Are stay at home mothers less than working women? Is working 40+ hours a week staring at a computer screen typing away for a soulless corporation more liberating than raising a family?
Women are more than uteruses and mammary glands. They have brains. They have interests and talents other having and rearing children. Any political leader or party that tries to diminish the progress they have made in not merely being a man’s brood mare will pay a price.
My observation of politics kinda resemblances your take.... it's a game of musical chairs. Yes, conservatives will eventually give away the house, the presidency and the Senate, not necessarily in this particular order. Democrats will regain political relevance, and then lose it again..... What's astonishing is people thinking their political party will reign forever.
For what it is worth, an essential problem with this critique by @rossbarkan is in its title and thus its framework. That problem? All of the Democratic Party leaders he cites are not of the left. At best, they are centrists, and, by European standards, center-right. Despite occasional rhetoric when they campaign, they all govern from a position of simply accepting the extraordinary power in American life since the 1970s of large corporations and more recently oligarchs. For instance of great consequence, recall that Obama, facing a meltdown of the banking sector, chose to pour money into Wall Street and put the bankers who had caused the problem in charge of fixing it. That is not a left solution! It is time we start talking about the true politics of "our leaders."
Obama, Clinton, Oprah, Beyonce, Pelosi, et al, ARE part of the oligarchy. Once they taste the riches power (political, cultural) brings, they construct whatever narrative that keeps them where they are — or is it a cognitive dissonance that propels them to assert they are somehow something other than oligarchs so out of touch with real people and real life?
I don’t know, but I do confess to a certain satisfaction around the change in perception of these people and their “legacies”.
I’d say the oligarchy is the tech billionaires way more than these guys, who actually do still want basically decent things for the majority or at least middle class although it’s a motley group
Yes. I don’t know what Ross thinks he is doing here. He seems to be lamenting the demise of a shadow play game of pretend. The Democrats are simply enemies of the working class.
Obama is far to the right of Biden on issues of corporate power. We're in the early stages of a revolution in antitrust. This take seems rather dated, although certainly many Democrats are still in the thrall of neoliberalism.
My response is, gee, Biden could have mentioned that. I know there is a pretty good person in charge of the SEC, but that’s not like organizing large numbers of people to understand and agree with the change that has to happen and to share a meaningful vision of what the country will be like after the change.
I feel like Biden was flummoxed by his unpopularity on the economy which was really bullshit, especially coming from workers. The far left and the MSM kept up its assaults on Biden re: helping workers but he had very little flashy options policy-wise because of Congress. He was also overtaken by negativity on Gaza and aging. Aging was really not his fault. It’s a real culprit for how much his rhetorical efficacy got muted. But yeah it was hard to shout this stuff out when the Left was battering him over Palestine (singularly obsessed with THIS issue, which wasn’t a unique-to-Biden policy choice, nor could anyone realistically expect the party to deliver what they demanded) and the media was obsessed with horrific reporting on that which was valid and also the college campus controversy. I feel like this whole narrative is being muted by everyone trying to talk about the Dems’ moves but maybe I’m just not seeing it anywhere.
The big government thugs who only spread poverty and more bureaucracy aren't the "Left" any more than the Centrist Democrats are. Europe is decades into a de-growth project that has left some of their countries poorer than Mississippi, so saying the Democrats would be considered "right wing" there, well that's a good thing.
One of the big problems in our politics is that whole swaths of people aren't actually interested in helping working people, but just want preen about being a leftist and to hawk their brain-dead boomer radical chic bullshit that has already failed everywhere it was tried.
Any version of "the Left" that gives a shit about what would have been considered a good socialist position in the 1970s needs to be launched into the sun.
I think Ross framing it as "liberal left" is perfectly fair as his column is about American politics and therefore uses terminology best understood by the column's audience. But note in my reply above I did put "liberal left" in quotes. The "liberal left" is really just another phase and flavor of neoliberalism as lefty academics have defined the word for decades, and as the "left of liberal left" has used the word since the Occupy Wall Street uprisings in 2011. Also note that this is not the outdated use of the word as defined by the late Charles Peters in the 1980s.
I know. I find it maddening that a lot of media simply divides politics left and right with no consideration as to what the always shifting and complex meaning of these labels might mean in the present context. Similar mush regarding class - as though the vast majority of Americans are "middle class", disappearing numerous other class categories that would be useful for better understanding of American society.
"Culture matters too, and the social justice left never understood that either. Cosmopolitan demands don’t work outside of college campuses and corporate boardrooms."
Sorry but demanding that cops stop killing unarmed Black people is not a cosmopolitan demand. I will neved care how uncomfortable that makes people. And now that "woke" is dead, I guess we can all finally move on from the word that hasn't been used by anyone I know since it was first used as pejorative by whichever Conservative first used it. Like Ross' work but frankly fed up with the autopsies of the last 72 hours.
Demanding cops stop killing black people is perfectly fine! Black people are our fellow Americans after all. But all the social justice scolding and hectoring and canceling surrounding these movements... THAT'S the problem. That's what we in the "heterodox" world have been saying for years.
For many of us, justice doesn't come without scolding and hectoring when simply dying isn't enough to will action. I stand by my feelings even if me and my community are the only ones acknowledging it. We are experiencing that same economy everyone else is. I just did not feel the need to justify a vote for a repugnant villainous bigot. No vote, I get. An affirmative vote, I do not. And in the same way many of the voters feel the need to gloat, I will stand by my feelings on what I believe drive their choices and reactions. Kamala Harris was not my choice and 2019 and likely wouldn't have been had the Democratic party not rigged this entire situation. Voting Trum will never be a justifiable expression of that outrage. But we are where we are now. Can't wait for the egg prices to finally come down. I know that's the day 1 priority for the new administration.
You can curse and look down all you want. But I, as a Black woman, am entitled to my raw feelings about what is coming and how to continue surviving along with those in my community with what is coming.
Your feelings, while yours by right, do not constitute reality or even an approximation of reality. If your world view only exists 3 standard deviations from the mean then don’t be surprised when 99.7% of people think differently/
I never said I waa surprised. I was not at all surprised especially after 2016. I'm still going to feel what I feel. I don't need others to acknowledge my feelings, and don't expect anyone to. They are as justified as anyone elses.
We have a population of 335 million people and cops hardly ever kill unarmed black people. Literally more people are run over every year by their own lawnmowers. Activists who sensationalized rare cases in the service of their anti-police ideology killed far more black people with the violent crime wave they unleashed.
The killings of unarmed black people are powerful symbols of a much larger problem, which is that black people are treated differently by police and the criminal justice system. The comparison should not be with lawnmower accidents but with (proportionally) how many unarmed white people are killed by the police every year.
And my genuine, heartfelt advice (what I am about to say is not meant in any kind of condescending or patronizing way) is to have a conversation with your Black friends or colleagues about this and see what they say. If you ask the question in the spirit of discovery (Do you believe Blacks are treated differently by the Police?) instead of confirming your own biases, I can almost guarantee they will respect you for having the conversation.
"Activists who sensationalized rare cases in the service of their anti-police ideology killed far more black people with the violent crime wave they unleashed"
Do you mean the uprisings that followed the murder of George Floyd? Or the beating of Rodney King? There was no sensationalism here. The videos were on the news for all the world to see and people got very very angry because of what these murders represented. I don't condone the violence and destruction. I don't condone the destruction of the property of the hardworking small business people who served these communities. But people should feel that the police are protecting them not out to get them. And most cops are decent people. But the culture of too many police departments is to protect the bad cop because he or she is a cop. Look at the George Floyd video or similar ones that have come along in the past few years. Other cops standing around while one bad cop commits manslaughter or murder.
I don't know how to fix this. but I do know something is wrong with policing in this country.
Cops kill about a dozen unarmed black men a year, most of whom are actively trying to assault the police officer. Meanwhile thousands of black men are murdered by their fellow black men.
Not bad. I especially liked the part near the end about the donor class and NGOs co-opting grassroots movements and idpol. On the topic of political economy, do you ever think Brad DeLong was right when he said the liberal left needs to rebuild their coalition around hard leftists since they could potentially be as powerful as the far right? (see https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/4/18246381/democrats-clinton-sanders-left-brad-delong) To put it crudely, letting hard leftists take over messaging overall while soft leftists tweak and critique in genuine good faith.
Also, another note: I don’t think Anand Giridharadas is wrong, inasmuch as the right have managed to construct their own independent, loose media ecosystem outside broadcasting. The center-left does have no response to Joe Rogan. Micah Loewinger on WNYC today pointed to Hasan Piker as the hard left’s closest analogue, which is heartening for the underacknowledged world of streaming, though discomforting for the party of Jackson and Obama. (Destiny’s brand is too noxious, Crooked Media’s too insider-friendly.) For other anchors, I could see The American Prospect becoming a big tent magazine for hard and soft left alike, and imreallyimportant as the next star of political streaming, but I’m not Nostradamus.
Tour de force. I just reposted, saying that. Bravo indeed.
And yet, I don't think the whole "liberal left" edifice can blow away. Yes, in NY we know that awakenings burn out. But they change things, too. It's not just people saying "NY is my state now -- as if "liberalism" or "back" or the rest of it were some static thing, women were a block, etc., etc. But thinking historically and organically is difficult. For trivial example, as a sometime New Yorker I'm wondering how the ponderous bureaucracy is going to respond. Will I stop having "mandatory training sessions"? How soon? I don't think the edifice was constructed because of George Floyd -- lots of people get killed in lots of circumstances in lots of countries by lots of actors, without political consequence. Nor do I think Trump's reelection makes these problems all go away. The problem of bureaucracy, and finding meaning in today's world, remains. The arc from Clinton to Harris tried to solve this through a weird form of moralism and an assertion of competence: the first was distasteful and the second failed in some spectacular ways, covered up by lies. Anyway, this isn't the place for a full response -- you've written a great essay. Thank you.
Actually, what you're about to see, good Lord willin' and the creek don't rise, is the rebirth of the real left, as opposed to what you and your Comfortable Class persist in pretending is personified in the Democrats. The myth they represent the left, which fairy tale has for the last 30 years been used to dupe the electorate, has worn so thin there's little remaining but tatters despite your desperate efforts to maintain the façade.
Tell 'em. As far as as Obama's concerned, he showed us whose side he's on when he picked up his phone in 2020 and bullied everyone but Biden out of the primaries. His side ain't ours.
Obama did leave the DNC a legacy, he shuttered and then turned over his organizing infrastructure to them. And the DNC turned it into fundraising--no host meetings, no state and local campaigns, no caucuses, just money.
Yep. that's what the DNC is -- a fundraising outfit. As Marshall Ganz has said, we don't have political parties in the USA -- not in the sense that they involve citizens beyond campaign season, and then it all money. Parties are infrastructure for the nation's professional rulers.
If your definition of "liberal-left" is the consultant-MSNBC anchor-think tank class, Obama as a symbol, occasionally AOC when she disagrees with Bernie. Distinct from those who analyze material conditions. Isn't that just the neoliberal majority of the Democratic party?
I think foregrounding the forever cultural war hides that. For example, that framing misses how ARPA SLFRFs were spent by municipalities to buttress the economic order (which was in tension with the racial justice executive order and Treasury's "disparate impact" black box analysis). Those municipalities (whose spending I know of in Massachusetts) weren't fighting culture wars, they capitulated before they even got started, resigned to existing social divisions more easily managed than challenging class interests. That's despite the strength of coalitions asking for a different paradigm, and the administrative fees municipalities could cover with the funding. ARPA SLFRF was the fastest acting domestic policy funding to show how the slight break with the prevailing economic order the Biden Administration made would work. Unfortunately that was undone by local implementation--an all too familiar stumbling block.
Another great example, that does include the actual "left liberal" Democratic response to social justice movements, is found in the lawfare waged against the Stop Cop City referendum by the mayor and city council in Atlanta. That seems to require a more complicated, imbricated, contradictory analysis though. It'd be easy to say the referendum being on the ballot may have changed the vote in one swing state, but that one hypothetical tactical victory ignores how politically powerful police unions are.
Was “stop cop city” the movement where a bunch of mostly white, often privileged Antifa types tried use domestic terrorism to stop a black-led government and black-led police force in a black majority city from building a training facility to improve police practices and reduce police violence? Yeah, not sure that has the lesson you think it does
The Stop Cop City signature campaign collected about 38,000 more signatures than the mayoral candidates received combined in 2021 in Atlanta. So it's a valid example of a broadly popular demand for direct democracy on a "social justice issue" that was categorically opposed by Ross' left liberals.
Kamala lost about 10 million votes compared to the 2020 electorate, Trump gained at most 500,000. So it was an issue of turnout.
From that vantage point: the 117,000 people who signed the stop cop city referendum would have come in handy in turning out the vote if the referendum they supported was on the ballot. If local elected democrats didn't sue the campaign to keep the referendum off the ballot.
That's where my implication becomes a point--
Ross' analysis misses the mark, it was the emptiness of the rhetoric, the opposition to and inaction on matters of social justice that lost them an election. From the local (Stop Cop City) to the federal level (John Lewis Voting Rights Act).
And, btw It seems to me that you and I have read very different sources of reporting and journalism on Stop Cop City, Atlanta's political economy generally, and Afro-American studies more broadly. So please forgive me for sidestepping some of your presumptions.
My theory about Obama's boosting of Hillary was there must've been some kind of handshake agreement during the 2008 primaries, for her to not only bow out gracefully (finally) but to make sure those PUMA nuts didn't actually cause trouble. Of course, Obama could've always reneged on that promise. What's she going to do against an extremely popular sitting POTUS? But I think over the years, Obama reassessed the 2008 primaries and felt that Hillary had been right about a lot of things, like how incrementalist politics was better then big sweeping changes.
He'd never admit it (or maybe he did in one of his many memoirs), but Obama probably did see himself as a kind of messianic figure who could transform everything quickly. Then his presidency turns out to be a slog, so he comes to view Hillary as a wise elder and even regrets some of the more judgmental things he said or thought about her. So how fitting it would be that they'd both get to be POTUS? What a fairy tale ending: first black president followed by first female president! Plus, Hillary had been polling pretty well as Secy of State, so it also made political sense.
I'm guessing Obama has a huge tendency to think of his life as some kind of grand narrative and the Hillary decision was a part of this. It became about him and his journey. The tragic thing for him in this regard is that he's likely ruined his legacy as a result. I remember after his 2012 victory, there were headlines of "This is Obama's party now." And what has that party accomplished since then? Nothing but self-destruction and a horribly tarnished image.
I think that's right. He's a literary person who thinks in narratives and it was Hillary's "turn." First, we elect a Black man, then the first female president. It lined up perfectly. Hillary cements the Obama era, winning on his coalition.
He forgot how democracy works. The people don't play along!
A great column, for sure, and a wonderful scolding of your elders. Two comments:
1. Yes, there was a deal of sorts. When Obama and Hillary Clinton met at the end of the 2008 campaign, he gave her a choice between Secretary of State and Vice President. Hillary (rather arrogantly) replied about the latter option, "I've already done that job.” That choice carried with it an implicit commitment: the fix was in from the beginning.
For all of Biden's flaws, given all that he did to help get Obama's bills passed, one wonders if Obama would've had as a successful presidency with Hillary as Veep instead. And what exactly did Hillary Clinton do for Obama? At the beginning of the administration, I remember when several ardent Hillary backers claimed that she “will deliver a Mideast peace deal on a silver platter." While she didn’t have that much to work with, she barely tried, perhaps because she did not take the necessary risks, risks that might have jeopardized her chances in 2016. This is not to negate her significant accomplishment of restoring the State Department's morale by successfully restoring its dominance in foreign policy over the Department of Defense.
Given all that, Obama would have been wise to have changed his mind, overlooking the anointing Biden, gaffe-prone-ness and all. But even without the President's implicit backing, Hillary would have run anyway as Clintonworld was still very strong in 2016. The battle of the giants would likely have been quite bitter, with a split party possibly resulting in the same narrow Trump victory. Or even Bernie Sanders squeaking through and vanquishing both.
2. The “liberal left” is not just in a twilight phase, but a zombie one. The Wall Street and tech donors funding the party’s consultants will make it so. They will continue to find more Pete Buttigiegs or other new “stars” to trry and prevent the emergence of a young Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or (gasp) a more palatable AOC. It is very unlikely that any of these "liberal left" candidates will ever get elected President because they won't possess the solid principled positions that resonate with less-educated voters who comprise the majority of the electorate.
Richard Gephardt’s 2004 Presidential campaign was the last attempt to revive the New Deal coalition that had wobbled along since 1968. It will take a few more elections for the “liberal left” coalition to go gently into the night.
Wow! Are you arguing that the future is a hard right (proto-fascist) party and a somewhat less cruel and violent conservative “Democratic” elite corporate party? No room or possibility of a democratic left party? What an inspiring vision, I say with acrid, but well deserved, IMHO, sarcasm.
I made an edit reflecting your concerns. Hope this is clearer.
I think this back-and-forth with Chris and Ross, leaves too much of conjecture on the personage of one person, Barack Obama, his thoughts, feelings, actions. Need to look at the Democratic party as a power structure. In which the quick rise of Obama as candidate in 2008, made him suddenly dependent on the Clinton para-party machine both to campaign, and then to transition into governance.
Right-wing journalist Daniel Halper argues in his 2014 book, Clinton, Inc., that Obama cut a deal with the Clinton machine in 2008-ish. ( https://adbl.co/3O1gZQY ) I found the book's argument plausible on this point, and hair-rasing, even though I'm a left-green social democrat.
Obama's backing of Hillary Clinton probably was not just an idealistic stroke of political storybook writing on Obama's part. Much more likely it was as Halper puts it: a muddy arm-wrestled deal to fend off the ire of, well, Clinton, Inc. as Halper's book title puts it.
I think it's important to take in views of political staffing as well as half-way out, halfway in advocacy organizations that make up what some political scientists call the "extended party network" in and around the two major U.S. parties. Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld call this instead "the party blobs", and Adam Hilton calls it in the Democrats' case "the advocacy party" by which Hilton means continual field of power players contesting and demarcating and sometimes colliding in semi-chaos as advocates each pursue one's particular aims.
Frances Fox Piven commented in a 2018 Jacobin interview with Daniel Denvir, that the Obamas seemed to want "an elegant presidency". ( https://bit.ly/PivDen-2018-2 ) I think Piven is onto something definitive, even though it was a casual interview answer and it may sound like just a ho-hum complaining quip in a long interview about many political considerations. If Piven gets that right and you really think what it means, a strong Obama motivation to low-conflict, elegant presidency, the overall picture of Obama for America becomes more self-serving than the grander conjectures of Obama as demographic diverisfier and identity-stories uplifter.
Even though sure, Obama does a lovely job of buffing and varnishing all that with patriotic stories that include demographic diversity and inclusion. Obama's 2006 book for example, The Audacity of Hope, is a joyful read (and the style is, elegant, ahem!). I read that book just a couple of months ago. I never taken by what the Economist called "Obamarama" in 2008. During Obama's 2008 campaign and during his presidency too, I rated Obama as a mainstream Democrat just one notch to the left of the Clintons' centrist opportunism. But this book reading in 2024, oh yeah. Nice feelz! But what is that? Public talk, no more and no less.
This right here times a hundred. (I was coming to post this but you beat me to it). You CANNOT understand the politics of the last two decades without understanding the power of the Clinton machine. If Obama had taken on that machine in 2016 by trying to deny Hillary ‘her turn’ there would have been something of a civil war in the party. Obama might have won it but he didn’t want to take it on, probably in part because he underestimated Hillary’s flaws as a candidate.
Obama’s first term should also be viewed as a continuation of Clintonisn, with some pretty negative results. Then post that term you get an increasing reaction against Clintonism in the party
"low-conflict, elegant presidency"- I remember reading an article (which unfortunately I cannot find right now) explaining Obama's governing style as being reflective of what he learned in Indonesia (?) as a child- rather than winning through conflict, just making the tent larger and larger (through negotiation? cooperation? Cooptation? I can't remember) and thus marginalizing an increasingly smaller opposition being outside the tent. If anyone remembers this article...
One of the best takes I have read, and particularly good on Obama’s non-legacy. I like your phrasing of how people who don’t understand why so many folks voted from Trump are out of touch with people who lead “precarious lives.” Maybe instead of using college education or it’s lack as a demographic marker we should start talking about people who have money and people who don’t, shed the euphemism that makes it sound like only dumb people vote for him, when really this election was largely about class and the way socioeconomic status has flipped between the two parties since 2008. I love your work.
Huh? One of the most important details about understanding the Trump coalition is precisely that it’s not at all about who has money and who doesn’t. Every journalist MA in Brooklyn making $30K voted Harris and every owner of a prosperous plumbing firm in Dallas voted Trump. It’s much, much more about education than about money.
It’s true that the suburban upper middle class has flipped, but all of those people have college degrees!
A breathless, infuriated, truly unique take. One of the best I've read. So much of the legacy press still, bewilderingly, appears fixed on the same trite and tired analysis and incredulity. It's enough to make one despair that any truly meaningful narrative shift will take place at any point the next few years.
Your analysis is astute from a national political perspective Ross. However as a pre-Obama liberal who saw LBJ's Great Society undone by Ronald Regan, another not-so-bright but highly effective conservative, I know it is temporary. For now, NYC is my capital. New York State is my country. There is plenty to do here. Others will find their own liberal redoubts across the country to hunker down in--CA, OR, MN, and MA-- and advance liberal policies and a progressive agenda. To preserve the freedoms won. Liberals will wait for conservatives to overreach and fail. And they will overreach. Politicians of both stripes always do.
What conservatives will not win is the culture wars. Women will not go back to the 1950s to be merely wives and mothers. Queers will not race back into the closet to hide but will continue to exert influence no matter how many targets you put on trans kids' backs. Black Americans will continue their inordinate influence on the cultural zeitgeist, which has continued strong for a century now. The cultural levers of power can be as useful and as important as political levers. Conservatives fail miserably at those levers just as liberals fail so badly at the political ones.
So I will sit and wait in the tall grass of my little liberal shtetl, waiting for them to stumble. And they will. Good journalism takes the pulse of today. Good history takes a longer view. In defeat we all become historians. For the time being.
"Women will not go back to the 1950s to be merely wives and mothers."
Are stay at home mothers less than working women? Is working 40+ hours a week staring at a computer screen typing away for a soulless corporation more liberating than raising a family?
Women are more than uteruses and mammary glands. They have brains. They have interests and talents other having and rearing children. Any political leader or party that tries to diminish the progress they have made in not merely being a man’s brood mare will pay a price.
That is my point.
My observation of politics kinda resemblances your take.... it's a game of musical chairs. Yes, conservatives will eventually give away the house, the presidency and the Senate, not necessarily in this particular order. Democrats will regain political relevance, and then lose it again..... What's astonishing is people thinking their political party will reign forever.
For what it is worth, an essential problem with this critique by @rossbarkan is in its title and thus its framework. That problem? All of the Democratic Party leaders he cites are not of the left. At best, they are centrists, and, by European standards, center-right. Despite occasional rhetoric when they campaign, they all govern from a position of simply accepting the extraordinary power in American life since the 1970s of large corporations and more recently oligarchs. For instance of great consequence, recall that Obama, facing a meltdown of the banking sector, chose to pour money into Wall Street and put the bankers who had caused the problem in charge of fixing it. That is not a left solution! It is time we start talking about the true politics of "our leaders."
Obama, Clinton, Oprah, Beyonce, Pelosi, et al, ARE part of the oligarchy. Once they taste the riches power (political, cultural) brings, they construct whatever narrative that keeps them where they are — or is it a cognitive dissonance that propels them to assert they are somehow something other than oligarchs so out of touch with real people and real life?
I don’t know, but I do confess to a certain satisfaction around the change in perception of these people and their “legacies”.
Wow, that’s an exaggeration
I’d say the oligarchy is the tech billionaires way more than these guys, who actually do still want basically decent things for the majority or at least middle class although it’s a motley group
Yes. I don’t know what Ross thinks he is doing here. He seems to be lamenting the demise of a shadow play game of pretend. The Democrats are simply enemies of the working class.
Obama is far to the right of Biden on issues of corporate power. We're in the early stages of a revolution in antitrust. This take seems rather dated, although certainly many Democrats are still in the thrall of neoliberalism.
Thanks for this.
My response is, gee, Biden could have mentioned that. I know there is a pretty good person in charge of the SEC, but that’s not like organizing large numbers of people to understand and agree with the change that has to happen and to share a meaningful vision of what the country will be like after the change.
I feel like Biden was flummoxed by his unpopularity on the economy which was really bullshit, especially coming from workers. The far left and the MSM kept up its assaults on Biden re: helping workers but he had very little flashy options policy-wise because of Congress. He was also overtaken by negativity on Gaza and aging. Aging was really not his fault. It’s a real culprit for how much his rhetorical efficacy got muted. But yeah it was hard to shout this stuff out when the Left was battering him over Palestine (singularly obsessed with THIS issue, which wasn’t a unique-to-Biden policy choice, nor could anyone realistically expect the party to deliver what they demanded) and the media was obsessed with horrific reporting on that which was valid and also the college campus controversy. I feel like this whole narrative is being muted by everyone trying to talk about the Dems’ moves but maybe I’m just not seeing it anywhere.
Yeah I don’t get what he meant by the “liberal left” at all
Sure, he did a whole lot of having a good policy but not actually advertising it.
The big government thugs who only spread poverty and more bureaucracy aren't the "Left" any more than the Centrist Democrats are. Europe is decades into a de-growth project that has left some of their countries poorer than Mississippi, so saying the Democrats would be considered "right wing" there, well that's a good thing.
One of the big problems in our politics is that whole swaths of people aren't actually interested in helping working people, but just want preen about being a leftist and to hawk their brain-dead boomer radical chic bullshit that has already failed everywhere it was tried.
Any version of "the Left" that gives a shit about what would have been considered a good socialist position in the 1970s needs to be launched into the sun.
I think Ross framing it as "liberal left" is perfectly fair as his column is about American politics and therefore uses terminology best understood by the column's audience. But note in my reply above I did put "liberal left" in quotes. The "liberal left" is really just another phase and flavor of neoliberalism as lefty academics have defined the word for decades, and as the "left of liberal left" has used the word since the Occupy Wall Street uprisings in 2011. Also note that this is not the outdated use of the word as defined by the late Charles Peters in the 1980s.
I know. I find it maddening that a lot of media simply divides politics left and right with no consideration as to what the always shifting and complex meaning of these labels might mean in the present context. Similar mush regarding class - as though the vast majority of Americans are "middle class", disappearing numerous other class categories that would be useful for better understanding of American society.
“The untethering of culture and politics, indeed, has begun.” Gods be praised!
"Culture matters too, and the social justice left never understood that either. Cosmopolitan demands don’t work outside of college campuses and corporate boardrooms."
Sorry but demanding that cops stop killing unarmed Black people is not a cosmopolitan demand. I will neved care how uncomfortable that makes people. And now that "woke" is dead, I guess we can all finally move on from the word that hasn't been used by anyone I know since it was first used as pejorative by whichever Conservative first used it. Like Ross' work but frankly fed up with the autopsies of the last 72 hours.
Demanding cops stop killing black people is perfectly fine! Black people are our fellow Americans after all. But all the social justice scolding and hectoring and canceling surrounding these movements... THAT'S the problem. That's what we in the "heterodox" world have been saying for years.
For many of us, justice doesn't come without scolding and hectoring when simply dying isn't enough to will action. I stand by my feelings even if me and my community are the only ones acknowledging it. We are experiencing that same economy everyone else is. I just did not feel the need to justify a vote for a repugnant villainous bigot. No vote, I get. An affirmative vote, I do not. And in the same way many of the voters feel the need to gloat, I will stand by my feelings on what I believe drive their choices and reactions. Kamala Harris was not my choice and 2019 and likely wouldn't have been had the Democratic party not rigged this entire situation. Voting Trum will never be a justifiable expression of that outrage. But we are where we are now. Can't wait for the egg prices to finally come down. I know that's the day 1 priority for the new administration.
You didn't learn a damn thing from the election, did you? You're doubling down on a strategy that failed in a very obnoxious manner.
You can curse and look down all you want. But I, as a Black woman, am entitled to my raw feelings about what is coming and how to continue surviving along with those in my community with what is coming.
Your feelings, while yours by right, do not constitute reality or even an approximation of reality. If your world view only exists 3 standard deviations from the mean then don’t be surprised when 99.7% of people think differently/
I never said I waa surprised. I was not at all surprised especially after 2016. I'm still going to feel what I feel. I don't need others to acknowledge my feelings, and don't expect anyone to. They are as justified as anyone elses.
We have a population of 335 million people and cops hardly ever kill unarmed black people. Literally more people are run over every year by their own lawnmowers. Activists who sensationalized rare cases in the service of their anti-police ideology killed far more black people with the violent crime wave they unleashed.
The killings of unarmed black people are powerful symbols of a much larger problem, which is that black people are treated differently by police and the criminal justice system. The comparison should not be with lawnmower accidents but with (proportionally) how many unarmed white people are killed by the police every year.
And my genuine, heartfelt advice (what I am about to say is not meant in any kind of condescending or patronizing way) is to have a conversation with your Black friends or colleagues about this and see what they say. If you ask the question in the spirit of discovery (Do you believe Blacks are treated differently by the Police?) instead of confirming your own biases, I can almost guarantee they will respect you for having the conversation.
"Activists who sensationalized rare cases in the service of their anti-police ideology killed far more black people with the violent crime wave they unleashed"
Do you mean the uprisings that followed the murder of George Floyd? Or the beating of Rodney King? There was no sensationalism here. The videos were on the news for all the world to see and people got very very angry because of what these murders represented. I don't condone the violence and destruction. I don't condone the destruction of the property of the hardworking small business people who served these communities. But people should feel that the police are protecting them not out to get them. And most cops are decent people. But the culture of too many police departments is to protect the bad cop because he or she is a cop. Look at the George Floyd video or similar ones that have come along in the past few years. Other cops standing around while one bad cop commits manslaughter or murder.
I don't know how to fix this. but I do know something is wrong with policing in this country.
Amen. Ride around with a black man a while and you’ll get an idea, a tiny idea, of this.
the increasing militarization of cops needs to be watched closely tho it’s been going on for a long time
I disagree with his framing about BLM…it started by well-meaning people in grassroots, but it did get co-opted along the way by NGOs.
Otherwise, Ross is spot-on with his critiques in the article.
Cops kill about a dozen unarmed black men a year, most of whom are actively trying to assault the police officer. Meanwhile thousands of black men are murdered by their fellow black men.
Not bad. I especially liked the part near the end about the donor class and NGOs co-opting grassroots movements and idpol. On the topic of political economy, do you ever think Brad DeLong was right when he said the liberal left needs to rebuild their coalition around hard leftists since they could potentially be as powerful as the far right? (see https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/4/18246381/democrats-clinton-sanders-left-brad-delong) To put it crudely, letting hard leftists take over messaging overall while soft leftists tweak and critique in genuine good faith.
Also, another note: I don’t think Anand Giridharadas is wrong, inasmuch as the right have managed to construct their own independent, loose media ecosystem outside broadcasting. The center-left does have no response to Joe Rogan. Micah Loewinger on WNYC today pointed to Hasan Piker as the hard left’s closest analogue, which is heartening for the underacknowledged world of streaming, though discomforting for the party of Jackson and Obama. (Destiny’s brand is too noxious, Crooked Media’s too insider-friendly.) For other anchors, I could see The American Prospect becoming a big tent magazine for hard and soft left alike, and imreallyimportant as the next star of political streaming, but I’m not Nostradamus.
The center left did have a response to Joe Rogan a few years ago: Joe Rogan.
Tour de force. I just reposted, saying that. Bravo indeed.
And yet, I don't think the whole "liberal left" edifice can blow away. Yes, in NY we know that awakenings burn out. But they change things, too. It's not just people saying "NY is my state now -- as if "liberalism" or "back" or the rest of it were some static thing, women were a block, etc., etc. But thinking historically and organically is difficult. For trivial example, as a sometime New Yorker I'm wondering how the ponderous bureaucracy is going to respond. Will I stop having "mandatory training sessions"? How soon? I don't think the edifice was constructed because of George Floyd -- lots of people get killed in lots of circumstances in lots of countries by lots of actors, without political consequence. Nor do I think Trump's reelection makes these problems all go away. The problem of bureaucracy, and finding meaning in today's world, remains. The arc from Clinton to Harris tried to solve this through a weird form of moralism and an assertion of competence: the first was distasteful and the second failed in some spectacular ways, covered up by lies. Anyway, this isn't the place for a full response -- you've written a great essay. Thank you.
"ponderous New Yorker writers with their grayish, interchangeable prose"
well put. They used to have elegant writing, back in the day.
A brilliant and insightful essay, Ross. Kudos.
thank you Vivek!
Actually, what you're about to see, good Lord willin' and the creek don't rise, is the rebirth of the real left, as opposed to what you and your Comfortable Class persist in pretending is personified in the Democrats. The myth they represent the left, which fairy tale has for the last 30 years been used to dupe the electorate, has worn so thin there's little remaining but tatters despite your desperate efforts to maintain the façade.
Tell 'em. As far as as Obama's concerned, he showed us whose side he's on when he picked up his phone in 2020 and bullied everyone but Biden out of the primaries. His side ain't ours.
Damn, Ross is dropping fire!
Awesome piece, as was your House of Strauss appearance. That episode came out on my birthday (Nov 7), and I couldn't have asked for a better present.
thank you, I hope you had better presents!!
Obama did leave the DNC a legacy, he shuttered and then turned over his organizing infrastructure to them. And the DNC turned it into fundraising--no host meetings, no state and local campaigns, no caucuses, just money.
Yep. that's what the DNC is -- a fundraising outfit. As Marshall Ganz has said, we don't have political parties in the USA -- not in the sense that they involve citizens beyond campaign season, and then it all money. Parties are infrastructure for the nation's professional rulers.
If your definition of "liberal-left" is the consultant-MSNBC anchor-think tank class, Obama as a symbol, occasionally AOC when she disagrees with Bernie. Distinct from those who analyze material conditions. Isn't that just the neoliberal majority of the Democratic party?
I think foregrounding the forever cultural war hides that. For example, that framing misses how ARPA SLFRFs were spent by municipalities to buttress the economic order (which was in tension with the racial justice executive order and Treasury's "disparate impact" black box analysis). Those municipalities (whose spending I know of in Massachusetts) weren't fighting culture wars, they capitulated before they even got started, resigned to existing social divisions more easily managed than challenging class interests. That's despite the strength of coalitions asking for a different paradigm, and the administrative fees municipalities could cover with the funding. ARPA SLFRF was the fastest acting domestic policy funding to show how the slight break with the prevailing economic order the Biden Administration made would work. Unfortunately that was undone by local implementation--an all too familiar stumbling block.
Another great example, that does include the actual "left liberal" Democratic response to social justice movements, is found in the lawfare waged against the Stop Cop City referendum by the mayor and city council in Atlanta. That seems to require a more complicated, imbricated, contradictory analysis though. It'd be easy to say the referendum being on the ballot may have changed the vote in one swing state, but that one hypothetical tactical victory ignores how politically powerful police unions are.
Was “stop cop city” the movement where a bunch of mostly white, often privileged Antifa types tried use domestic terrorism to stop a black-led government and black-led police force in a black majority city from building a training facility to improve police practices and reduce police violence? Yeah, not sure that has the lesson you think it does
The Stop Cop City signature campaign collected about 38,000 more signatures than the mayoral candidates received combined in 2021 in Atlanta. So it's a valid example of a broadly popular demand for direct democracy on a "social justice issue" that was categorically opposed by Ross' left liberals.
Kamala lost about 10 million votes compared to the 2020 electorate, Trump gained at most 500,000. So it was an issue of turnout.
From that vantage point: the 117,000 people who signed the stop cop city referendum would have come in handy in turning out the vote if the referendum they supported was on the ballot. If local elected democrats didn't sue the campaign to keep the referendum off the ballot.
That's where my implication becomes a point--
Ross' analysis misses the mark, it was the emptiness of the rhetoric, the opposition to and inaction on matters of social justice that lost them an election. From the local (Stop Cop City) to the federal level (John Lewis Voting Rights Act).
And, btw It seems to me that you and I have read very different sources of reporting and journalism on Stop Cop City, Atlanta's political economy generally, and Afro-American studies more broadly. So please forgive me for sidestepping some of your presumptions.
Said more simply the analysis presented here misses the point the same way the Democratic party did.
It will be amusing seeing the Times and the Post send their political reporters into rural Midwestern diners anew
Except they won’t; the writers are too afraid.