If you want to appreciate the return of the left as a significant force in American politics, treat yourself to a quiet evening with the 2012 Democratic Party platform. This vast accumulation of words, over 26,000 in all, contains no fewer than 42 invocations of “the middle class,” 28 calls for “innovation,” and 18 promises of “tax credits.” Its first policy section places “Middle Class Tax Cuts” atop the list of Barack Obama's achievements as president. And amid this great desert of focus-grouped language, boundless and bare, there rises not a single demand for a major universal public program.
How much has changed in the last few years. At the grass roots, the evidence for some kind of left-wing resurgence is too overwhelming for all but the most jaundiced or mechanical skeptic to deny: the wave of victorious labor strikes from West Virginia to Los Angeles, the advent of new activist movements like Black Lives Matter and the Women's March, the rise of left political organizations (the Democratic Socialists of America grew from 6,500 members in 2014 to about 60,000 today), and the election of avowedly radical candidates to city governments, state legislatures, and Congress itself.
Amid this hive of activity, national opinion has pitched sharply to the left: Surveys now show record-high levels of support for same-sex marriage, legal marijuana, and a range of affirmative-action programs. Most striking of all, perhaps, is the apparent leftward shift in economic opinion. Recent polls have discovered commanding public support for social-democratic programs long exiled from mainstream politics: a national single-payer health-care plan, a federal jobs guarantee, universal parental leave and child care, and tuition-free college, along with heavy income and wealth taxes on the super-rich.
As the 2012 platform reminds us, it was not so long ago that Democratic Party leaders refused even to acknowledge the existence of such policies, let alone pay lip service to them. In 2013, President Barack Obama responded to the nascent Fight for $15 movement, which was beginning to organize fast-food workers, with a bold proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9 per hour. Throughout Obama's second term, national politics churned on with barely a reference to a left-wing vision of the possible: In 2014, the phrase “Medicare for all” appeared in The New York Times just once, in a single forlorn letter to the editor.
Read Full Article »