Where the Left Won

The austerity paradigm shifts - perhaps for good

There has been, inarguably, a sustained backlash to the social justice movements of the last decade—one that might have damaged cherished causes of the left. Black Lives Matter morphed into Defund the Police, which burned brightly before petering out. Police reform is not discussed nearly as much as it once was; small-bore reforms have come to departments around the country and progressive prosecutors were elected, but the sweeping change sought by the activist class has yet to materialize. Some of these prosecutors, in subsequent elections, have been driven from office, and a Democratic governor in New York, Kathy Hochul, has steadily chipped away at the bail reform laws passed in 2019. Another high-profile police killing may revive Black Lives Matter, but it’s a frail movement that needs tragedy to galvanize voters. It’s also no longer clear that will be enough: the brutal police killing of New York City teenager Win Rozario, captured on film, did not trigger any mass protests. Liberals, sadly, have ignored the family, to the point where I’ve failed to get magazine editors interested in the story.

The immigrant rights movement, #meToo, and Covid hawkishness engendered a similar blowback, as Nick Rafter recently pointed out. All were well-intentioned. Donald Trump’s open hostility to immigrants spurred the movement on, bringing new scrutiny to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the policy of child separation. Democrat-run cities proudly declared themselves sanctuaries that wouldn’t cooperate with federal law enforcement. Support for open borders, or something close, surged, and the Times’ Nicholas Kristof would come to call Trump’s immigration policies “evil.” Six years later, the rapid increase in migrants crossing the border has led Joe Biden to aggressively restrict their entry and Kristof to declare that America must “settle for accepting a fraction of those eager to come, and determining that fraction is the political question before us, with many trade-offs to consider.” Kristof, something of a liberal weathervane, captures the new sentiment, with few Democrats championing immigration like they did in the Trump years. The Abolish ICE movement is long gone—even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of its early champions, doesn’t mention it anymore. In some sense, #meToo hasn’t quite faded in the same way. There is, for good reason, far more attention paid to workplace harassment in 2024 than there was before the movement rose to prominence in 2017. There will never be someone like Harvey Weinstein who harasses and assaults women, for decades, with impunity. Overreach, though, sapped momentum for the cause. Kirsten Gillibrand forced Al Franken out of the Senate, only to make Franken something of a liberal martyr and Gillibrand herself a damaged political entity. When she ran for president in 2019, she attracted little support, and her profile in the Senate is much lower these days. The darker turn of the #meToo backlash has been the rise of women-hating celebrities like Andrew Tate and the birth of reactionary online spaces for men. The movement, overall, wasn’t helped by the crumbling of the Women’s March. There simply aren’t any prominent leaders, free of scandal, to push the cause forward today.

And what of Trust the Science? Enough time has passed that we can begin to think honestly about what happened in the early years of the pandemic. Covid was devastating for the nation and world, and leaders everywhere scrambled to react to such an unprecedented, deadly threat. After initially decrying the use of face masks and even Covid alarmism itself, liberals rapidly evolved into Covid hawks once it became clear Trump was going to downplay the virus as much as possible. (It must be remembered, in early 2020, it was considered right-coded to care too much about coronavirus because it was coming from China and Silicon Valley types seemed most troubled.) Early shutdowns were very much necessary and leaders in California and Washington State saved lives through fast action. New York politicians dithered and the city suffered for it. Covid policy, though, became far less straightforward in the latter half of 2020 and into 2021. Liberal Covid hawks insisted on prolonged school closures that have proved deleterious and likely harmed any future lockdown efforts if another pandemic arises. Vaccine policy was confounding enough that the anti-vax movement is far stronger than it was before the pandemic, with the virulently anti-vax Robert F. Kennedy Jr. making a prominent third party bid for president. Public health officials promised the new vaccines could stop the spread of Covid completely and helped craft policy designed around this premise, limiting bars, restaurants, and other indoor spaces to the vaccinated, and taking the radical step of binding employment to vaccination status. Once it became clear the new Covid vaccines could not stop the spread of the virus—they did help prevent serious illness but people were still getting infected, regardless of their boosters—the policies that public health officials and Democratic politicians defended no longer made much sense. To make matters worse, there were rare side effects to the vaccines, and these were greatly downplayed on the left—allowing, in turn, anti-vax misinformation to flourish further, as it became verboten to ask any questions about the vaccines. In 2024, the New York Times acknowledged, for the first time at length, those who were suffering from side effects to the Covid vaccines. None of this, really, should have been a surprise: unlike most other vaccines, which are studied and tested for many years before heading to market, the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines were developed and distributed over the course of a single year. The point, here, is not to relitigate the Covid wars. It’s simply to suggest that it all could have been different if the politics weren’t so rigid. More honesty and less absolutism from public health officials would have gone a long way. Vaccine passports fueled conspiracy theories. The public health left in the U.S. today is in a far worse position than it was at the start of the decade. Skepticism of Covid vaccines has bled over into a wider distrust for all vaccines, even those that have clearly worked for more than a half century. Measles is now making a comeback.

All of this—the decline of Black Lives Matter, the slippage of #meToo, the end of the Trust the Science era—points to a left in retreat. On the electoral front, it’s become harder for progressives to upset moderate incumbents, and it’s plausible two members of the Squad in Congress, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, lose their elections this year. But amid these struggles is another reality that few in America can’t ignore, if they pay close enough attention—austerity politics is a dead politics. And it’s dead, in part, because the left was able to revive itself so dramatically in the 2010s. Without Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign, there is no renewed focus on economic issues and income inequality. There is no shifting of the terms of debate. It might be simplistic to argue a losing presidential campaign and an amorphous protest movement dealt a blow to neoliberalism, but it all mattered in the sense that today’s centrist Democrats look very different than those who were campaigning two or three decades ago. The Blue Dog Democrats of the 2020s do not stump on shrinking welfare, cutting corporate taxes, and boosting free-trade. On their website, they write vaguely about “fiscal responsibility” and the deficit, but they have offer no specific federal budget cuts—no social safety net or anti-poverty programs to target. Most of them, especially in the House, do not triangulate; a vast majority voted for Joe Biden’s far-reaching infrastructure and climate change legislation, which was impacted directly by progressives. On trade, they are all largely protectionist and anti-China. They are skeptical of Big Tech. Endangered swing district Democrats like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez maintain a populist sheen. Her top campaign issues, for example, are rejecting corporate PAC money, safeguarding abortion rights, and combating inflation. But unlike some economists and pundits on both the right and center-left who might argue that slashing federal spending and reducing demand is needed to bring down prices, Gluesenkamp Perez wants to raise the minimum wage and stop corporate “price gouging.”

This, quite frankly, is remarkable. If austerity politics were going to make a comeback, it would be right now, with enough prominent voices blaming the major stimulus spending passed during the Trump and Biden administrations for the inflation we see today. Pundits like Matt Yglesias have been pining for the old Simpson-Bowles commission, established under President Barack Obama to forcefully reduce the deficit. The commission argued for tax hikes to be paired with cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Obama, in this same period, partnered with Congress to initiate the sequester, mandatory cuts to domestic spending and defense. These politics, popular with both parties at the time, proved to be both strategically and economically harmful. The post-crash economy was under-stimulated and required more deficit spending to boost employment and growth. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, jobs were scarce, wages were low, the housing market had collapsed, and local governments were laying off employees in droves. The stimulus Obama was able to pass in the Democrat-controlled Congress helped the United States avoid a second depression but it was not nearly large enough to combat an economic malaise that would last nearly a decade and boost the fortunes of a populist Republican outsider who decided to seek the nomination in 2016.

It’s been Trump, as much as Sanders or Occupy, who has doomed austerity politics. The right-wing populists of the early 2010s were the Tea Party politicians who sought radical reductions in taxes and government spending. They railed against the stimulus, the Affordable Care Act, and any expansions of the social safety net. They cheered on the gutting of local governments. Their stars included Ted Cruz, Michele Bachmann, Tim Scott, and Jim DeMint. Paul Ryan, a charismatic deficit hawk, was their intellectual architect, and funding was pumped in by the Koch Brothers and Dick Armey. What characterized the Tea Party, as much as a bitter antipathy for the first Black president, was a savage fiscal conservatism. If the culture of the Tea Party has remained in the GOP—the toppling of Kevin McCarthy was, in every way, a page ripped from the Tea Party’s playbook—the lust for budget-cutting has mostly vanished. Trump himself, in 2016, campaigned as a skeptic of free-trade and large corporations and promised, unlike his rivals, to not slash Social Security and Medicare. He proved the Republican base didn’t care much for supply-side economics or the ideology of Milton Friedman. It wanted culture war, which the incendiary Trump could do better than any Republican alive. Today’s Tea Party successors, like Marjorie Taylor-Greene, care far more about flaying liberal pieties, denouncing immigrants, and indulging in peculiar conspiracy theories than shrinking anti-poverty programs and healthcare. Once Trump and the Ryan-led House failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the issue disappeared almost entirely from the stump. Few talk about trickle-down or Reaganomics today. For most Republicans, Trump has supplanted Ronald Reagan in the pantheon, anyway.

This does not mean Trump is a genuine economic populist. As president, he oversaw a sweeping corporate tax cut, and he’s been much friendlier towards mega-corporations as he runs again this year. Trump no longer bashes corporate bosses and he’s been actively courting the cryptocurrency lobby; he is, as Matt Stoller argued, retreating from the rhetoric that powered his 2016 campaign and threatening to unravel the tangible populist accomplishments of the Biden administration. Biden’s appointees have revived antitrust and taken a much more skeptical approach to how banks and corporations treat consumers. There is a burgeoning bipartisan coalition in favor of antitrust and Trump, if he wins a second term, could crack it apart. If Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance have to choose between their wariness of corporate consolidation and Trump, they’ll probably elect for the latter. But what will remain a part of the American political fabric is the latent hostility to austerity. No Democratic faction wants it and the Republicans care about other things. Inflation has not buoyed the deficit hawks and the supply-side champions; this might be because many politicians and voters remember how frail the post-2008 economy was and how unpopular austerity proved to be. The right-wing populists in American and Europe have, in a similar fashion, chosen culture over economics, and politicians in both continents remember how aggressive budget cuts scarred a generation of working and middle-class families. European austerity was even more severe than the American variety and weighs heavily on the legacy of the German-centric European Union today. And in the U.S., it’s possible inflation has not spurred an austerity revival because there is a growing recognition that price increases are a global phenomenon. If austerity remains buried, far away from Democratic and Republican platforms, this will represent one of the great undersold victories of the economic left. After decades in the wilderness—from the Carter era neoliberalism to Reagan’s attacks on the New Deal to Bill Clinton’s Third Way—the left can lay claim to a future that doesn’t promise the retreat of government from everyday life.