Biden's Critics On The Left Should Rethink The Concept Of 'Leverage'
Our flawed political system gives them less power than they deserve, but more than many of them realize.
The 2000 election turned out as it did in part because a small but decisive number of voters convinced themselves the major parties were fundamentally similar and similarly unappealing. (Plus the whole Supreme-Court-stopping-the-count thing.)
The consequences have shaped the entirety of my adult life; for people of a certain age—my age and just a bit older—the lessons against complacency and collapsing important distinctions have proven lifelong.
To see something very similar happen on the basis of similarly lazy thinking in 2016 was a history-repeating trauma. One fateful error ought to have been enough to create a whole oral tradition and stigma against falling into the same traps. Casting enough protest votes to hand Republicans a slim electoral-college victory against the popular will, only to watch them wreck the country, ought to be prime Fool Me Once material—the kind of thing that should be off the table for decades, to say nothing of twice more in 20 years.
But here we are in 2024 staring down the real possibility that it will happen again just like it did eight years ago, and 16 years before that. It’s even possible to imagine that enough Biden-2020 voters will defect or stay home to hand Trump outright victory.
Part of the reason this madness is on the table is that as the progressive movement has matured, it has overtrained activists to think of politics as little more than a series of high-stakes leverage standoffs: Condition support for candidates on a particular set of policies, threatening their electability if they dissent, and discipline officeholders by leveling similar threats whenever they veer from those priorities.
We see that most acutely today—quite understandably—with respect to President Biden’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
“Biden, after losing the support of everyone who opposed what Israel has been doing, will now lose the support of everyone who loves what Israel is doing,” wrote the reporter
. “And all the while he facilitated a slaughter of historic proportions.”“Giving Israel every single thing it wanted for 7 months bought Biden exactly zero goodwill from Israel supporters,” echoed the writer David Klion, “and meanwhile the left will never forgive him.”
I share their disgust with Israeli war crimes and Biden’s policy, which has shifted over eight months from strong-if-wary support to reluctant or resigned support. I’m especially galled by the fact that Biden didn’t sideline Benjamin Netanyahu in early 2021 for his open complicity with Donald Trump’s corruption, and then embraced him instead of isolating him after the October 7 Hamas massacre. But unlike them, or the left-wing critics they have in mind, I don’t believe it’s right or advantageous to deem Biden “unforgivable” over it. Not just in the sense that I bristle at the notion of being grateful or unforgiving to political leaders (by contrast to applauding or criticizing them) but because I understand that contributing to Biden’s defeat means another Trump presidency, and an across the board increase in suffering, including among Palestinians. I also gather that the damage to progressive ideals will be long-lasting even if the Trump storm passes more quickly than we should expect it will. Biden has been more solicitous of progressive interests than any Democratic president in decades, and it has earned him remarkably little slack or good will among actual progressives. That’s a recipe for receding back toward Obamaism, rather than for greater progressive clout in the future.
I thus align myself with politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and thinkers like
, who dispense withering criticism, but also consider the whole picture, and prioritize harm reduction above all else.
In our system as currently configured, particularly within coalitions, real, shut-it-all-down style leverage is a rare commodity. Make or break threats, implicit or explicit, to throw elections to the opposition can’t be a source of leverage in a coherent movement where everyone understands the other party to be worse across all major issue areas. It’s only leverage for those who reject the analysis, or for political hobbyists who treat elections like flea markets, and are happy to say “neither” whenever their preferences aren’t sufficiently met.
In the current era—particularly in the Trump era—we need a new, if somewhat unsatisfying, conception of what it means to be a stakeholder in progressive politics, or the movement will kill itself, and perhaps millions of others, in a murder/mass-suicide.
DEVILS, BARGAIN
The term “leverage” doesn’t have to connote a negotiation between adversarial parties, but that’s often the idea it conjures: a unionized labor force demanding higher wages under threat of a work stoppage; a reluctant buyer who makes a best-and-final offer at a fire-sale price, knowing the seller is distressed. Take it or leave it.
If that’s how factions within a political coalition conceive of and wield leverage internally, it’s only a matter of time before one of them miscalculates and everyone in the alliance loses. Striking workers can threaten the viability of a business, greedy counterparties can sabotage a mutually-desired acquisition. But failure isn’t typically the goal, and in the event of failure, everyone can pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and try again. They would understand their bargaining power much differently if failure resulted in death or imprisonment. But that, in an only slightly hyperbolic sense, is the proposition on the table when factions within the progressive coalition try to “leverage” a Democratic president in this way, as fascism looms in the near distance.
People on the left understand the distinction between leverage and sabotage quite clearly when they’re on the receiving end or witnessing their opponents descend into self-destructive recriminations.
When Republicans threaten to plunge the economy into a credit-default depression, as they do every couple years, all liberals and progressive activists understand it as both faithless opposition and illusory leverage: faithless in that it’s immoral to extort concessions from anyone of any kind under threat of mass harm; illusory because Republicans presumably don’t want to wreck their own communities or personal wealth. Democrats have not always been steel-spined about calling the bluff, but they have adamantly rejected the tactic.
Likewise, when MAGA activists take aim at popular Republican politicians in competitive states and districts over their insufficient fealty to Donald Trump, most progressives understand it as a form of self-sabotage. Occasionally the far-right Republicans who replace popular incumbents on those ballots win, but more often than not they lose. When a group of Trump loyalists in the House forced a vote on ending Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, the overwhelming consensus on the left was to not interrupt the enemy in the midst of a mistake.
The broad left is susceptible to similar errors, though they tend to manifest in different corners of the political system. Democrats did trigger one (extremely brief) government shutdown during Trump’s single term, but they don’t generally make leverage errors in legislative negotiations with the GOP. If anything, they under-exploit the leverage they do have. Democrats are also much less prone to bouncing popular incumbents in swing seats.
When Democrats are negotiating among themselves, as they did many times in 2009 and 2010, and 2021 and 2022, progressives have some leverage, but no more than their peers in the party’s centrist wing, and in many cases less. President Obama needed every Senate Democrat to support the Affordable Care Act; President Biden needed almost every Democrat in all of Congress to support the Inflation Reduction Act. Under those circumstances, everyone in the party had leverage, and everyone had a claim to be treated respectfully and dealt with in good faith. But conservative Democrats won most of the internal fights over provisions in both bills because progressives are more invested in policy reform than centrists. Progressives would (for instance) claim they’d rather have no health-care reform than lose the public option. But it was just a bargaining tactic. Everyone saw through the bluff. They’d already identified themselves as the eager buyer. Joe Manchin, by contrast, could claim he’d be happy spending $0.00 on Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, and it was at least plausible that he was telling the truth.
In American elections, progressives threatening to withhold their votes for Biden are playing the spoiler just like Manchin—except instead of coming up empty on an infrastructure bill, we’ll get Donald Trump. Some leftists will claim to prefer that outcome and were just waiting for a pretext to oppose Biden. They imagine, wrongly, that they’ll have more clout in the political system if he loses. Others are happy to let Trump burn the whole place down, “after Hitler, our turn”-style. This essay is obviously not for them.
But in unguarded moments, most people on the left will acknowledge that another Trump presidency would be an existential threat to democracy and progressive politics long term. “Leveraging” Biden despite this understanding will sometimes move White House policy, and may thus be a worthwhile, calculated, high-stakes risk in rare circumstances. But it can’t be a permanent condition of coalition-wide politics. If you’ve ever worried that, through serial hostage taking, Republicans will one day blunder the country into default, then you see the problem: Eventually, perhaps just five months from now, the leverage-wielders will hit the brakes too late and drive us off the cliff.
NUCLEAR SPLINTER
In fairness to the progressives who think this analysis sucks: I agree. Or rather, I agree that the state of affairs sucks.
More representative democratic systems create many more opportunities for factions within coalitions to make demands. In a parliamentary system, progressives could rally to increase the size of progressive parties, and then demand more concessions in power-sharing arrangements when attempting to establish a governing coalition.
In the U.S. system, there is no power-sharing arrangement per se, and the party agenda gets sorted out in the primary. Factions thus have credible leverage during and immediately after primaries. Progressives made solid use of this leverage after Biden beat Bernie Sanders in 2020, as my friends
and detailed thoroughly in their book The Truce. This year, there was no competitive primary. One of the only viable opportunities progressives ever have to exert leverage thus wasn’t available.And so they’re left with the nuclear option: The threat to boycott the election and let Trump win. Or, alternatively, the dismaying sense of running out of moves.
The strange thing about it is that activists didn’t reach this bind out of nowhere. Lawmakers and party leaders will frequently tell coalition activists that the pressure is welcome. Together, they propound the myth of FDR telling New Deal activists, “You’ve convinced me. I agree with what you’ve said. Now go out and make me do it.”
Activists will thus convince themselves that certain forms of resistance are constructive when they are not; politicians will reinforce this impression, when for all practical purposes they can’t deliver, and don’t actually find the pressure welcome. Sometimes a convinced president doesn’t have the votes; sometimes a convinced president doesn’t have room to maneuver without fatally dividing his base; sometimes a president is convinced, but cuts a pragmatic deal to ease the politics of an unrelated issue. That’s when activists have to choose between making good on their threats, or standing down. And that’s how a misbegotten understanding of leverage ends in the re-election of Donald Trump.
Thus, for the foreseeable future, for at least as long as the GOP is a fascist formation, we should rethink the concept. Much like the legislative negotiators in the early Obama and Biden majorities, factional representatives can demand real consideration and leaders possessed of good, uncorrupted judgment. They can and should advocate for their causes, they can and should feel unafraid to criticize leaders who refuse to listen, or who deal them dirty.
That’s what AOC was getting at when she told Hasan “I would rather, even in places of stark disagreement, I would rather be organizing under the conditions of Biden as an opponent on an issue than Trump, who…seeks to dismantle American democracy.”
It’s why I started Off Message as a hub for intra-liberal critique. For related reasons, I see a lot of strategic merit in the recent tactics of the anti-abortion movement (please, bear with me). The president of the Susan B. Anthony List expressed “deep disappointment” with Donald Trump for refusing to endorse a 15-week national abortion ban, but, understanding the nature of the system, added, “With lives on the line, SBA Pro-Life America and the pro-life grassroots will work tirelessly to defeat President Biden and extreme congressional Democrats.”
Her objective is ghastly, but she’s correctly identified her shortest path to greater power. She understands that saying “we can never forgive Trump and won’t help him beat President Biden” would be a recipe for Democratic victories and maybe even the codification of Roe v. Wade. It’s why we’ll never hear the president of the Chamber of Commerce say “Donald Trump imposed tariffs on imports, and for that I can never forgive him.” Progressive leaders once modeled the movement they were building on the conservative movement, but when core values are on the line, right-wing activists will ultimately embrace a constructive approach to advancing their horrendous goals1. Meanwhile, the progressive movement that ultimately emerged…also frequently advances right-wing goals. Or threatens to.
This is also why I’ve spent the better part of two decades advocating for political and procedural reforms instead of fixating on policy litmus tests. Eliminating the filibuster would make the pivotal senator 10 votes more progressive than he or she currently is. Court reform would expand the realm of the possible for all Democratic presidents. Electoral College reform would equalize the political clout of progressives across the country and swing voters in swing states. Strategic primarying can help ensure that the Democratic caucuses contain fewer Kyrsten Sinemas and more Ruben Gallegos.
But the idea that boycotting politics amounts to savvy bargaining is wrong. Mistaking Biden for Henry Kissinger, and spreading free-floating misery to underscore a preference for radical reforms, and mocking the anti-Trump resistance are not effective forms of progressive political work. They’re bad ideas, and they need rethinking—soon.
Sometimes you do, in fact, gotta hand it to ‘em.
I loved this. I heard a fellow progressive recently call some online leftists “high vocabulary, low information.”
I’m always surprised at the amount of conversations I have with people whose politics I ostensibly share who say things that (a) betray a lack of knowledge of basic civics, or (b) are actual if accidental Russian disinformation. I talk to a lot of young left-leaning people who say Biden lied about forgiving student loans. So I tell them, “actually SCOTUS struck it down, because Trump gave them a conservative majority, so Biden is trying other ways and has forgiven [insert however many billions he’s forgiven by now].”
They will then say, “why didn’t he expand the court? He’s the president.” And I explain why, and the answer they give is “he’s the president,” or “that’s why the system is broken and voting has no point.” OR they will say, “Biden never wanted to forgive student loans, so he intentionally used a tactic he KNEW wouldn’t work.” (Utter nonsense given the billions of aid he’s unilaterally forgiven)
But then there’s people who seemingly have no idea that in 2016 Russia targeted black voters more than any other demographic. Russia created Facebook groups like “a vote for Jill Stein is not a wasted vote,” or encouraged black voters to stay home on Election Day.
Russia doesn’t even need to bother this time, because prominent “leftist” influencers are making these exact arguments for them. Voter apathy is STRONG, and I think most liberals just don’t even know lefty spaces promoting this mentality exist.
The people in your comments shilling for Jill Stein probably aren’t Russian bots. They’re probably people who listen to popular YouTubers who, as it happens, are grifting idiots.
Each of us potential voters have to have our priorities straight in the 2024 presidential election. The NUMBER #1 priority should be the prevention of the re-election of Donald Trump. We can fight about the other priorities later during the second Biden administration.