The Politics of Double Deadlock

Max Elbaum’s “A Path to Pushing MAGA Out of Power” properly identifies the Left’s critical task in the next four years: to ensure that the Trump regime is a political failure, and to replace it with a sustainable progressive governing coalition. He asks what alternative governing bloc might be “possible to achieve” and “capable of providing more than a temporary respite from fascism’s forward march.”

The “temporary respite” is, of course, a reference to the Biden administration, and answering Elbaum’s question requires understanding what went wrong with that administration. In 2020, a left-center coalition removed Trump from power, and in 2021, clearly responding to a strong progressive primary challenge, the Biden administration entered office with the most sweeping progressive legislative agenda of any Democratic president since the 1960s, incorporating everything from universal support for childcare to a robust green industrial policy. If this hadn’t already happened, it would be exactly the sort of thing both Elbaum and I would call for.

But it did happen—and it didn’t work. It proved a temporary respite and a political failure—and led us into a second Trump presidency which, in its first six months, has proven to be far more dangerous than the first iteration. The central question for those of us who agree with Elbaum on goals is to analyze what went wrong, what has changed, and what will be different next time.

On these issues, Elbaum is not altogether persuasive. The “governing bloc” he suggests we pursue is little different from the one we tried under Biden: Centrist Democrats plus progressive forces, with progressives wielding significant influence over policy, but with centrists likely still in the driver’s seat. There are two problems with that prescription: It didn’t work in 2021, and it won’t be available to us in 2028. Bidenism failed in 2022, and the lesson centrists took from that failure was that working in coalition with an empowered Left is a political dead end. The Left can’t succeed as an influential junior partner in a centrist coalition, and in any case we’re no longer welcome in such a coalition. As hard as it may be to imagine, a path forward out of MAGA will require us to shift the balance of power so dramatically that we put the Left in the driver’s seat.

Conditions and contradictions of the Biden Administration

It’s hard to remember now, but as Elbaum rightly points out, the first two years of the Biden administration marked an astonishing Left turn in Democratic policymaking across a range of issues. The Biden administration attempted a major expansion of the welfare state through Build Back Better, put massive federal funding behind a green transition, endorsed the PRO Act and appeared on a picket line, substantially liberalized border policy, appointed progressives to head key agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, attempted to cancel student debt, etc.

Why did the Biden administration do all this? Certainly nothing in his past corporate-centrist career indicated a penchant for bold progressive policy. Rather, the progressive aspects of Biden’s agenda reflected (1) the new strength of the Left within the Democratic Party coalition, achieved primarily through Bernie Sanders’s successive strong primary runs, but also through the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, and other social movement work; and (2) new openness to the Left on the part of a Democratic Party policy elite traumatized by the failures of the Obama administration, the failure of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the election of Trump, and the Covid-19 crisis. In the wake of these disasters, key figures around Biden were newly open to the Left’s longstanding argument that the key to political success lay in populist policymaking.

This moment of openness to ambitious Left-wing proposals didn’t last long. By late 2022, with Biden sliding in the polls, Democratic elites were learning a different set of lessons: That expansionary fiscal policy is a political disaster if it leads to even relatively moderate inflation, that bold progressive policies do not necessarily call forth the movement support required even to enact them (much less to reap the political rewards of doing so), that pro-immigrant policies are a recipe for mass popular backlash even in Democratic strongholds, that “populist” antitrust and financial regulation are not particularly salient to swing voters but are radioactively unpopular with wealthy Democratic donors.

After the October 7 attacks, Democratic elites’ dissatisfaction with the Left took on a more bitter and dangerous edge, as key liberal institutions and the donor networks supporting them participated in a witch hunt against pro-Palestine activists. At the same time, Democrats became increasingly concerned about the defection of traditionally Democratic Silicon Valley donors over crypto and antitrust regulation. If, at the beginning of the Biden administration, Democratic elites saw it as urgent to win back the working class, by the time Harris launched her presidential campaign, they had begun to prioritize winning back the likes of Larry Summers and Marc Andreesen. For many Democratic elites looking forward to 2028, the key lesson of the Biden administration will be that they should avoid coalition with the Left; Biden already tried that, and the Left led them into a series of political minefields before abandoning them in 2024 over Gaza.

What lesson should the Left take from the Biden years? Naturally, the opposite one: The Biden administration failed politically not because it went too far in the direction of progressive policy, but because it didn’t go far enough. The failure to pass Build Back Better meant that many working-class people experienced his administration as a contraction of expansive Covid-era social spending rather than an expansion of the welfare state. It attempted to pass expansive social policy in a full-employment economy, but was not prepared to tax the rich to pay for it, or to intervene in the private sector with price controls to beat back inflation. It liberalized border enforcement but did not make the political case or policy changes that would have allowed the integration of new immigrants. It attempted a significant leftward shift on domestic policy without abandoning the bipartisan US commitment to Cold War with China and permanent apartheid for Palestinians, shredding his moral authority and fragmenting his coalition.

Is the lesson for the Left, then, that there’s nothing to learn—that we just need to do it again but even more so? Alas, not quite.

Biden’s failure to go farther was in large part structural, rather than personal. In a way it was baked in from the start. A party dependent on funding from tech and finance billionaires cannot impose taxes and price controls; a president with a narrow Senate majority really is dependent on the most conservative members of a profoundly antidemocratic body for his legislative achievements; a president will struggle to conjure mass movement support for policies like Build Back Better and the PRO Act at a moment of profound working-class disorganization. If we elect a progressive in 2028, we’ll face all the same problems that Biden did.

The lesson for the Left, then, is twofold. On the one hand, an escape from the dead end of centrist-neoliberal policymaking can’t be done gradually and nonconfrontationally; if we want a progressive domestic agenda, we need to take on the task of substantially increasing taxes and intervening more forcefully in the private sector. On the other hand, a divided Democratic Party will struggle to make this leap, because it is accountable to wealthy donors who will oppose it. In a way, the deadlock of Democratic policymaking parallels that of the MAGA coalition: In both cases, promises to the base and promises to business elites can’t be kept simultaneously, leading to incoherence and disappointment.

The unsustainable won’t be sustained

Where does this leave our prospective governing bloc? At first glance, the prospects are bleak. Elbaum is obviously correct that “progressives alone do not have the strength to prevent MAGA from consolidating authoritarian rule”; whatever we do, we will need to do it in and through a broad coalition that includes centrist Democrats. That coalition may be more difficult to form in 2028 than it was in 2020, however, because Democratic elites clearly hope to form a cordon sanitaire to their Left. And even if we force a coalition (for instance through a strong primary challenge, or even a primary victory), we may only get back to where we started: a coalition too broad and too disunited to make the break with neoliberal governance required to beat MAGA once and for all.

The good news is that if the Left doesn’t have a sustainable governing bloc, the Right doesn’t seem to have one either. MAGA is powerful as a brand but incoherent as a political strategy; Trump can’t simultaneously deliver rising asset values to his billionaire backers, tariff-driven nationalist reindustrialization to his voter base, and pursue the ethnic cleansing through mass deportation his white supremacist backers want without depleting the cheap labor supply his wealthy employer constituency relies on. The MAGA agenda is unpopular where it isn’t incoherent—and so there is every possibility that a center-left coalition will win its way back to power in 2028.

We won’t face the same conditions that applied in 2020. The second Trump administration is turning out to be far more dangerous than the first one. The new Trump administration’s full-spectrum assault on the federal government, the welfare state, and congressional prerogatives, along with its attempt at truly mass-scale deportation, will shift the ground of anti-Trump resistance—from the halls of Congress to the streets. Centrist Democratic elites’ initial gestures towards bipartisanship in the wake of the 2024 election and attempts to move right on some issues have already begun to look absurd in the face of the Trump blitz.

Trump administration cuts to the federal government, universities, and the welfare state, together with the likely economic impact of his trade policy and the humanitarian catastrophe of mass deportation, are directly impacting the lives of far more ordinary people than anything he did in his first term—and are beginning to build a wave of powerful outrage. The Left is far better prepared to incorporate and channel this outrage than the Democratic center is, and so the Left has an opportunity to lead the fight against MAGA.

That may sound like wishful thinking in a country where only a handful of politicians at any level can be considered Leftists. New York’s recent mayoral primary, however, provides grounds for at least qualified optimism. DSA-backed legislator Zohran Mamdani’s astonishing primary victory over several better-known centrist and liberal candidates, including former governor Andrew Cuomo, demonstrates the strength of the city’s organized Left—but it speaks even more clearly to the total inadequacy and disorientation of centrist Democratic politics in this moment. Voters simply did not find either the meliorist liberalism of the mainstream progressive candidates credible, and they rejected the compromised centrism of Cuomo and incumbent mayor Eric Adams, both of whom share donors with Trump. In the past, Mamdani’s bold promises might have sounded fanciful to many voters—but a few months into Trump’s term, it seems fanciful to limit one’s goals to what is achievable within the ordinary procedural framework of US politics even as that framework is being torn apart.

New York is unique, and it would be a mistake to anticipate a nationwide outbreak of ideologically self-conscious socialism in 2028. But it is reasonable to hope that voters nationwide will recognize what New Yorkers have: that Trump’s assault on the basic norms and assumptions of US politics requires a response unconstrained by those assumptions, and that the leaders capable of providing such a response have a very different political orientation from Biden.

A 2028 presidential election occurring in the context of mass movement outrage may just put progressives in the driver’s seat—and a president elected in the wake of mass politicization and confrontational protest will be better prepared, in every respect, to build a sustainable governing bloc than Biden was. To be sure, a left-wing president will still rely on centrist voters and centrist Congressional majorities, but in the wake of Trump’s assault on the Constitutional order, a Democrat who succeeds him may have more room to advance sweeping change. But only a left-wing candidate can do that. A centrist aiming to “restore normalcy” will fail, as Biden failed.

Featured illustration by Kimmie Dearest