Historical source: 2020 report. References to past elections, people, programs, and contact details reflect the original period.
How We Got Here: Asymmetric Polarization
Our politics have become fundamentally unbalanced by an asymmetry between the Left and the Right: The Right controls the GOP, but the Left does not control the Democratic Party. Big business controls the GOP, but working people do not control the Democratic Party. Political scientists refer to this problem as “asymmetric polarization.”
The Triumph of the Conservative Movement
The conservative movement didn’t just emerge; it was created.
In the 1950s, as liberalism was ascendant, conservative intellectuals saw the need to bring together groups worried about the direction of their party into a unified front. William Buckley, one of the leading intellectuals of the Right, said, “[A] conservative electorate has to be created out of that vast uncommitted middle — the great majority of the American people who, though today they vote for Democratic or [moderate] Republican candidates, are not ideologically wedded to their programs or, for that matter, to any program. The problem is to reach them and to organize them.” While he was at the helm, the National Review worked to fuse a political identity that aligned the various strands of conservatism.
The success of the conservative movement was the result of that alignment. It included neoconservatives, evangelicals, the business class, and grassroots activists motivated by white supremacy and the enforcement of traditional gender norms. Together, they forged a “conservative” identity that came to mean lower taxes, less government, control over women’s bodies, and more aggressive American foreign policy. Today, most voters know what it means to be “conservative,” and Republican politicians must cater to those who identify as conservatives, knowing they could lose their positions if they were to anger their base.
In the late 1960s, business elites were in full retreat. With the civil rights, antiwar, women’s rights, consumer rights, and union movements at high-water marks, reactionary forces realized they needed to organize a counteroffensive. In 1971, Louis Powell, a conservative activist who would become a Supreme Court judge, wrote a memo outlining a detailed plan for how business leaders could organize a counter-revolution.
“The American economic system is under broad attack.” This attack, Powell maintained, required mobilization for political combat. Moreover, Powell stressed, the critical ingredient for success would be organization: “Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”
Powell’s assessment was that all of the institutions of American public life — from the media, to the university, to the courts, to politics — were bastions of liberalism. Powell’s suggestion was to create new conservative institutions that could either capture or replace the institutions of the liberal establishment. While some historians consider the recent attention to Powell’s letter apocryphal, there is no question that his thinking was shared by many other New Right activists.
The ensuing two decades saw conservative billionaires and affiliated activists prodigiously building independent institutions. The rise of a new conservative ecosystem included think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, independent media organizations like the Christian Broadcast Network, and membership groups like the Moral Majority to organize new constituencies. They took on specific issues like women’s rights through Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and STOP ERA, or labor rights through the National Right to Work Committee. Crucially, they also had leaders like Paul Weyrich who were consciously bringing these New Right forces together into a conservative wing of the Republican Party.
By 1980, this network had grown to the point that it was capable of taking over the Republican Party. The ascendent New Right powered the Reagan revolution and catalyzed the shift in the Republican Party away from the moderate postwar consensus toward the radical conservatism of Reagan, Gingrich, the Tea Party, and Trump. “Conservatism is the wine,” William Rusher, longtime publisher of National Review liked to say, “the GOP is the bottle.”
To achieve their goals, conservatives also consolidated around a narrative strategy, created by Republican operatives in the 1960s who used racist dog-whistles to divide the working class. This wasn’t an entirely new strategy: The use of race antagonisms to divide the working class has been employed throughout the history of the United States. But in the 1960s and 1970s, this narrative was the heart of the “Southern Strategy,” which enabled Republicans to take over political power in most of the Southern states. By the 1980s, Reagan and conservative Republicans had succeeded in peeling off evangelical and many non-college-educated whites by discrediting the idea of government support and regulation and becoming more extreme in terms of race, gender, and immigration.
The Collapse of the New Deal Coalition and the Rise of the Third Way
Following the defeats of the Reagan years, New Democrats and the Third Way sought to win back “Reagan Democrats” by encouraging the Democratic Party to be more business-friendly and weaken the party’s allegiances with traditional Democratic constituencies. Their electoral success caused the party to back away from the union-affiliated economic agenda of the New Deal, the civil-rights-movement-backed agenda of racial justice, and the feminist agenda of reproductive rights and the ERA.
Well into the 1990s the Democratic Party still carried with it vestiges of its Dixiecrat faction along with its anti-Black, conservative base among white voters in the South. Consider for instance that John Neely Kennedy — a protege of the notoriously racist Governor “Buddy” Roemmer and now Republican Senator of Louisiana — was at the 2004 Democratic Convention endorsing John Kerry. Between 1987 and 2007, according to research from Brown University scholar Micheal Tesler, less than half of White voters opposed to interracial marriage could differentiate between the racial views of the Democratic Party from the racial views of the Republican Party. And until the uprisings of Ferguson, MO and the injections of the #BlackLivesMatter movement into the national debate, the majority of White Democrats disagreed with the statement “racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days”.
Prior to that point in the early 2010s, the Democratic Party was home to white voters with racist tendencies, and many elected officials and operatives resisted a racial-justice agenda in order to win white votes. In that era, racial and economic “moderates” dominated the Democratic Party, and the Left had little sway.
“The people in contemporary politics who are most committed to a revolutionary approach and deep structural change are on the Right. There isn’t parity on the Left; they use the GOP as a vehicle for an agenda, but there is nothing comparable on the Left.”
In 2004, after George W. Bush’s victory in the presidential election and a wave of Democratic losses around the country, Rob Stein created a famous PowerPoint presentation that showed wealthy right-wing donors were making huge investments in ideologically motivated infrastructure that was independent of the GOP. The conservative movement was winning, he argued, because they had spent years building think tanks, membership organizations, training infrastructure, candidate pipelines, accountability organizations, and media groups. The presentation showed a vast network of organizations that essentially functions as a conservative force within the Republican Party. The conservative movement was waging long-term, ideological warfare to ensure conservatives controlled the GOP.
As a result of 40 years of building a conservative wing of the party that was independent of the GOP, the conservative movement essentially runs the Republican Party. They succeeded in shifting the Republican Party to the right by winning ideologically motivated primaries, waging a constant battle in the media to persuade grassroots conservatives to value ideology over party, and disciplining Republican elected officials through pressure campaigns.
The Limitations of the Progressive Movement
The progressive movement has not been a counterweight to the conservative movement because our institutions have too often followed the Democratic Party, rather than leading it, and have limited capacity and power to challenge it.
This was on full display during the 2020 presidential primaries. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren both put up strong fights and together had almost 50% of the electorate. And yet the establishment wing of the party was able to consolidate to defeat the Left. Complex issues of race, gender, and clashes between economic worldviews (a form of democratic capitalism vs. socialism) made it challenging for a progressive faction to align under one candidate enough to win in key primary states, including South Carolina. Unfortunately, this means that we are less prepared to deal with the crises that are demanding deeper structural change.
For the past several decades, Democratic donors have attempted to copy the Right by funding anchor organizations, often based in Washington, D.C. However, the vast majority of the infrastructure set up by wealthy liberal donors since 2004, after Stein’s presentation, exists to win a partisan conflict between Democrats and Republicans — not to engage in a long-term conflict between progressivism and neoliberalism (at least not on behalf of progressivism). Unlike the ideological infrastructure of the Right, the Center-Left infrastructure has not gone to scale to train, hold accountable, or replace members of the Democratic Party who veer from the progressive line.
The existing progressive institutions are also much less diverse than the rest of the party. The lack of investment in Black and Latino leadership, as well as a culture dominated by white leadership that is often timid on issues of racial justice in progressive institutions, has limited the impact of the progressive movement. Progressive groups like MoveOn are able to raise money from middle-class white people, but progressive groups led by people of color often have a difficult time raising money if they’re independent of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party.
The lack of well-funded, representative, ideologically-rooted progressive infrastructure means the progressive movement follows and reacts to the Democratic Party by default, rather than working with or for the people. Meanwhile, the Republican Party works for the conservative movement.
The Path Forward
If we want to solve the crisis of American democracy, we must work to make the Democratic Party a vehicle for this progressive vision. To achieve this goal, progressives need to spend the next decade building institutions that can hold Democrats accountable to a progressive agenda.
Develop a Willingness to Challenge Democratic Leadership – as Donors, Organizations, and Progressive Electeds.
In DC, Democratic Party leadership has historically done a good job of keeping progressives in line without having to make policy or political concessions. While the number of progressives in state capitals and Congress is growing slowly but steadily, progressive caucuses rarely have the alignment or numbers to win policy fights with leadership.
Progressives need more legislative and political organizing capacity in DC and state legislatures to support the formation of stronger progressive caucuses. We need a stronger pipeline of staffers who are able to work in hill and legislative offices and who have a commitment to progressive values over careerism. And the progressive groups that work on legislation in Congress and state legislatures need more support to build power in opposition to party leadership when leadership is making the wrong compromises.
To reiterate a point we made before: there’s a justifiable concern about intra party conflict. But the fact is that leadership is being pulled hard by corporate and special interests, and therefore needs a progressive counterweight. This conflict is in the service of making the party actually better succeed at its own stated goals, helping it actually deliver the promises it has made to its base. In this sense, conflict should be understood as part of how good policy gets made. [There is a tradition in political theory that refers to agonistic politics, which comes from the Greek word for “struggle.” This struggle has a permanent place, and is the space of positive creativity.]
There is certainly a time when members of the Democratic Party should consolidate and strategize together, such as when a nominee has emerged from a presidential nomination process. But much of the political process is a process of ongoing debate and negotiation, and those representing the poor and working class should not sit on the sidelines while that debate takes place.
Wage a Battle of Ideas
Too often, progressive ideas are presented like a laundry list from different issue areas. To win for the long term, it’s crucial that progressive ideas be part of a coherent analysis of social transformation.
One core element that distinguishes political perspectives is an understanding of the relationship between government and the market. The fundamental argument of the Right is that government should be as limited as possible, focused primarily on national security, and the free market should be uninhibited. Neoliberals similarly see a primary role for the market, with a slightly larger role for government around social protections. Progressives believe that the government is the only force that can check the abuses of private power — setting labor standards, providing public goods like education, health care, and retirement, and breaking up monopolies when they become too large and powerful.
In the event of a pandemic like COVID-19, we can see the failure of the market to create sufficient supplies, like ventilators and masks. Government, not the market, can respond to crises and can coordinate the distribution of goods when profit is not the primary motive. Government can take initiative to address future crises, like climate change, which the market, in its responsiveness to short-term feedback, will not address on its own.
Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation serve a crucial role in actively organizing the conservative wing of the GOP around policy fights. They’re not just putting out white papers into the void — they’re working closely with leaders in Congress and the grassroots to develop the ideas, win the media battles, and coordinate legislative and political strategy. Progressives have much less capacity to develop policy ideas, write legislation, organize politicians around our ideas, or successfully wage a media battle to define our ideas. We don’t have a shortage of ideas, but we do have a shortage of operatives waging battles to popularize and legitimize our ideas, and translating them into legislative wins.
The state of progressive media is similar to the think tanks: A shift is taking place, but many of the existing institutions have not yet caught up. There is unmet demand for independent progressive media outlets, spokespeople, and content. In addition to developing new channels that popularize and explain progressive ideas, we need more training and placing of progressive spokespeople on TV.
The New Right was successful in creating an entire media ecosystem — from the National Review to Newt Gingrich, from Fox News to the Christian Broadcasting Network — that supported the conservative wing of the party. The Left has nothing comparable.
Some of the best work being done on this front is the Race/Class Narrative (RCN) developed by Anat Shenker-Osorio, Ian Haney Lopez, and Heather McGee. This work creates a framework to talk about how the working class has been divided along racial lines, in a way that undermines their ability to organize for economic justice for all. White supremacy has become a tool of the wealthy to retain power and erode support for government programs. By coming together across lines of race, we can fight for a more just economy for all.
Elect More Progressives (Through Primaries)
If progressives want to transform the Democratic Party into a progressive party, we must be able to win competitive primaries. Winning primaries makes the Democratic Party more representative in terms of race and gender, and also shifts the party ideologically toward the progressive agenda. Thus, one way to move the party to the left and make it more reflective is to invest in primary elections with candidates who are values-aligned and reflective of the voters in reasonably safe democratic seats. With 10 more people in Congress as clear in their beliefs as Representatives Ocasio-Cortez or Pramila Jayapal, the center of gravity in the party would shift dramatically.
It is currently very difficult for progressives to unseat neoliberal incumbents — or even defeat them in competitive primaries for open seats. Winning elections requires a significant amount of money and resources. It also means engaging much earlier in election cycles, to support outsider candidates achieving viability. The most difficult incumbents to defeat, recent history has shown, are neoliberal people of color elected officials who have deep roots in a community but have taken actions that do not serve the interests of the community.
Groups that back primary candidates — especially working-class, people of color with a bold inclusive populist vision — are taking a huge risk. They are told they are wasting their money and should only be working to elect Democrats against Republicans. Thus, there is very little individual or institutional support for progressive candidates who come from working-class backgrounds, especially people of color, and who are looking to provide a new vision for the party.
Make Sustained Investments in Leadership Development — Particularly Amongst Black and Latino leaders
One of the most urgent needs within the progressive movement is developing more leaders who can win and wield political power. Leadership development of progressives is unfortunately broken. On the Right, institutions like the Leadership Institute provide ideologically rooted, politically valuable training to thousands of people every year. The Leadership Institute alone has revenue of over $15 million per year and a full-time staff of 83. They train staffers, campaigners, candidates, and organizational leaders in a shared ideology and up-to-date best practices. There is simply nothing comparable on the Left.
As a result, there is a dearth of candidates, campaign staff and office staff who are qualified and trained on progressive ideas. The lack of ideologically aligned candidate and staff training, and the absence of political education alongside skill-based training, means that Democratic leaders who come out of our trainings don’t see themselves as part of a shared project in the same way that conservatives do.
Many of the organizations that exist independently of the Democratic Party leadership have historically been white-led. There are few career opportunities for Black and Latino leaders who are interested in working outside the neoliberal wing of the party. It’s particularly important to invest more in Black and Latinx led organizations who are part of the progressive wing of the party.
Build the Infrastructure to Co-Govern
Membership-based organizations are an essential ingredient to winning elections for Democrats and co-governing the day after the election. State and local community-based organizations like Living United for Change in Arizona, the Texas Organizing Project, New Virginia Majority, New Florida Majority, and Pennsylvania Stands Up, are essential to growing the progressive wing of the party. They organize new individuals into the progressive movement, offer political education on issues and on the dynamics of power, they help turn people out before an election, and afterwards, they move legislation and advocate for their communities.
However, the leaders of these organizations report that their funding dips drastically in off-cycle years, between elections. This is when their work of turning ideas into law actually begins. These organizations are building capacities to work with legislators to move an agenda and hiring staff to coordinate with Capitol Hill, their city, or state leaders. But they need more capacity to develop programs that pressure elected Democrats, support primary campaigns for progressives, push progressive policy campaigns, and lift up narratives and messages that shift public opinion.
In addition, only some of these organizations have the capacity to recruit candidates or run elections and issue campaigns independently of the Democratic Party. These groups need to be supported to develop more electoral skills and capacity, and a new generation of local organizations needs support to win local and state races.
Align the Coalition
In addition to expanding the base, progressive organizations, elected officials, and leaders need to align on the need to build a progressive wing of the Democratic Party together. While a growing number of progressive organizational leaders and elected officials understand the need to build political power together, efforts to do so are at a very early stage.
Currently, many issue-based organizations feel accountable solely to their unique issue. There is little incentive to join together with other groups — particularly those that work on different issues — to build political power together. The funding structures for candidates, elected officials, and multi-issue groups similarly disincentivize collaboration and collective power-building. On the right, donors like the Koch Brothers fund entire integrated ecosystems, which minimizes competition amongst groups for funding. Like many other conservative donors, it is a given the groups they fund will work together and engage in the conflict within the Republican Party.
Organizations like Sunrise and United We Dream have had tremendous success at shifting the Democratic Party towards the movement’s demands by intervening in the fight within the party. Sunrise has successfully put a Green New Deal on the national agenda, and works with other organizations on shared goals. United We Dream went to battle with Democrats over strategies for immigration reform and won significant victories.
However, on many issues, there are no national organizations that align with the progressive wing of the party in the fight against the neoliberals. The gap could be filled by existing organizations moving in a new direction, or by new organizations set up for that purpose.
The more existing advocacy organizations understand themselves to be part of the progressive wing of the party, the more powerful they will be. However, that will take an increased openness to conflict with Democratic Party leadership by major funders and leaders of big NGOs.