What happened to the progressive revolution?

The left’s hopes for sweeping change from the 2010s have crashed into the reality of the 2020s.

The energy of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns and the George Floyd protests is a distant memory. Some members of the Squad have moved toward the Democratic mainstream, while others lost primaries. Several of the progressive prosecutors elected in recent years have been ousted from office (by voters or due to scandals) or appear headed that way. 

In Democrat-dominated spaces — like cities and mainstream media outlets — there’s been growing pushback against the left. Ambitious progressive rallying cries of just a few years ago, such as defunding the police and Medicare-for-all, are now absent from the discourse. Politicians who assiduously cultivated left activists are now increasingly tacking to the center — most notably Vice President Kamala Harris, who has abandoned many of the positions she took while running in the Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary. 

Altogether, it’s seemed that progressives have moved from being on the offensive to being on the defensive — in both politics and the nation’s culture.

Of course, it’s not as if progressives’ gains over the past 20 years or so have been entirely wiped away. The Democratic Party remains significantly further to the left than it was a decade ago and certainly two decades ago (see, for instance, my recent article about the rise of the New Progressive Economics). 

Yet, as bloggers Noah Smith and Tyler Cowen have argued, there are growing indications that the leftward drift of the party and of the country’s culture broadly has stopped. On some fronts, there has indeed been a reversal. “No matter who wins, the US is moving to the right,” Semafor’s David Weigel argued last week, citing “immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, climate change policies, and criminal justice reform” as issues where progressives are on the defensive.

Being on the defensive is not new for the left — it’s the historical norm. Bursts of activist energy and successful reform are typically followed by long stretches where either the new status quo persists or a backlash reverses at least some recent change. 

Still, it’s certainly a shift from how politics has looked for most of the 21st century. So how and why did this change happen? Why did the progressive advance happen in the first place, and why did it stop?

The era of rising progressive ambitions lasted from about 2005 to 2020

Historical periodization is a tricky thing, but here’s a rough attempt at it.

From about 1980 to 2005, the left was mostly irrelevant to national politics. The Cold War was over, and capitalism reigned ascendant. The Republican Party moved right, while the Democratic Party moved to the center. The country cracked down on criminals, unauthorized immigrants, and non-working welfare recipients. 9/11 made patriotism mandatory. Same-sex marriage was viewed as politically toxic.

But 2005 to 2020 was, broadly, a period where progressives and the left became increasingly influential inside the Democratic Party, in Democrat-dominated spaces, and in the larger culture. Call it the era of rising progressive ambitions.

The disasters of George W. Bush’s second term kicked off the shift, discrediting Republican governance. This enabled the election of the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, whose agenda was strikingly ambitious and progressive when compared to the Clinton years.

Democrats’ leftward shift accelerated in the 2010s, which saw:

• The increased cultural influence of the social justice left, which transformed how much of the country thought and spoke about racial and gender issues (“the Great Awokening”)
• The launch of viral protest movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Me Too
• The nationwide spread and Supreme Court’s protection of same-sex marriage rights, followed by increased advocacy for trans rights
• The rise of more economically progressive and even democratic socialist politicians, as seen in the support for Sanders’s campaigns, the Squad’s arrival in Congress, and party leaders’ embrace of some of Elizabeth Warren’s ideas
• A leftward move of mainstream Democrats on issues like immigration and criminal justice, where activists had made the case that status quo policies were cruel and harmful
• Increased public discussion about causes like Medicare-for-All, the Green New Deal, and student loan forgiveness

Basically, on a host of issues, the “Overton window” — the boundaries of which political and policy ideas are deemed fit for mainstream discussion, rather than fringe or self-evidently absurd — opened far further left.

Trump’s election didn’t stop the left’s rising influence. Indeed, it intensified it, raising the stakes of politics and heightening passions. (Trump’s rise simultaneously opened the Overton window further right on some issues, as leading Republicans increasingly embraced bigotry and flouted democratic norms.)

The assumption spread among Democrats that the establishment’s approach had failed and that bold new progressive ideas were necessary. During the party’s 2020 presidential primary, most candidates — including Harris — scrambled to the left, wooing activist groups. Joe Biden, the most old-school major contender, won, but rather than a full-on pivot to the center for the general election, he embraced much of the progressive agenda. It was a political necessity for helming the Democratic Party of 2020.

That year then brought further chaos as the country battled over the pandemic and the election, while the George Floyd protests led to a racial reckoning that played out in communities, companies, and institutions in intense and often controversial fashion.

The backlash and disillusionment of the 2020s

Things feel different in the Biden years.

In part that’s due to the constraints and disappointments that always exist when a party tries to turn a bold campaign agenda into governing reality. Narrow congressional majorities limited Democrats’ legislative possibilities (and then they lost the House). The conservative Supreme Court, meanwhile, blocked some Biden actions like student loan forgiveness and rolled back abortion rights protections.

But the trend was broader. Democrats in cities disavowed police cuts as they struggled with rising crime and complained they couldn’t handle a migrant influx. Corporations have laid off DEI workers. Mainstream media companies, increasingly influenced by progressive causes (and sensitive to left criticism) in the 2010s, are now more forthrightly asserting their journalistic independence and challenging progressive ideas. Activism in protest of Israel was met with fierce pushback at universities. Commentators started declaring that “wokeness” had peaked as social justice controversies grew less intense and frequent.

The common thread is that the Democratic Party, corporations, and the media have all become less deferential to the progressives who’d been trying to push them left.

And the main reason for that, I’d argue, is a spreading sense among many who are in the center, center-left, or politically neutral that the left has overreached or screwed up.

Indeed, one reason for the left’s 21st-century resurgence was that, at that point, they’d been irrelevant for so long that it was difficult to blame any of the country’s current problems on them. The flaws of centrism, neoliberalism, and conservatism seemed glaring and obvious, while left and progressive ideas simply hadn’t really been tried for some time. 

But by 2020 the left’s influence on our politics and culture had become quite significant. And though Trump’s critics had been united around the common cause of ousting him when he was in power, once he left office, those with misgivings about recent trends felt freed up to focus more on them.

The right got more effective at stoking these misgivings. Conservative boycotts of Bud Light and Target helped send a message that it was risky for corporations to get too political. Elon Musk bought Twitter — which had been so central to the social justice trends of the 2010s — and turned it into the right-wing-friendly X. Christopher Rufo helped stoke a nationwide war on DEI.

Yet Democrats and progressives also simply had a hard time dealing with various challenging governance problems. The post-pandemic years have been a tough time to be in power: Incumbent parties have been struggling around the world. But in the US, progressive ideas were blamed, fairly or unfairly, for causing or worsening problems like inflation, border chaos, and crime. 

Some commentators who’d previously been aligned with progressives now had second thoughts. “I have to say that I now doubt the practical effectiveness of some of the policies I embraced in previous years,” Smith wrote in his Substack newsletter last week. He said he now believed some of those policies were bad ideas, others suffered from “botched implementation,” and yet others simply had no path to broader political popularity.  (Smith is just one of many commentators who have become increasingly critical of the left in recent years.)

To what extent has the broader public turned against the left? I’m hesitant to generalize about public opinion, which contains many conflicting strains. Immigration is the issue where the clearest backlash to progressive ideas is seen in polling; on other issues (like the economy), dissatisfaction is harder to disentangle from Biden’s record. Though some stalwart progressives have lost primaries, others have held on without difficulty. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats did quite well in swing states. But the GOP gained ground in blue states like New York, which could suggest a frustration with governance in deep blue areas. 

Overall, though, Harris’s positioning clearly reflects a belief that many of her left positions of four years ago would be electorally detrimental in 2024.

All of this has happened before

Meanwhile, there’s also been a conspicuous decline of energy and intensity among progressive activists. While many certainly remain committed to their longtime causes, others have disengaged or shifted their focus to opposing Israel’s war in Gaza (an issue that bitterly divides the Democratic Party and where Democratic leaders are disinclined to embrace the left).

Perhaps if Trump wins, progressive energy would surge again in opposing him — but perhaps too many people are now burned out and apathetic, and the mobilization won’t match the bygone days of Trump’s first term. And a backlash against Trump’s governance would not necessarily spur the Democrats to resume their leftward march.

Activists naturally get disappointed and disengaged when major change proves elusive. 

“Every major social movement of the past 20 years has undergone a significant collapse,” the activist Bill Moyer wrote in 1987, “in which activists believed that their movements had failed, the power institutions were too powerful, and their own efforts were futile.” Fatigue, burnout, and organizational crisis then ensue; some move on to new causes.

But Moyer argued that that is not, necessarily, the end of the story for such movements. The next step, he wrote, was for activists to pivot and to focus on the long, slow slog of changing public opinion in their favor.

So one possibility is that we’re headed for a political situation resembling the late 20th century, where the left is weakened and politically irrelevant for years if not decades.

That’s no sure thing, though. The challenge for the progressives now is regrouping around ideas and causes that can both energize activists and win popular support — while addressing doubts that have arisen about their competence. 

If they can pull that off, this period of left decline may prove to be just a blip. If not, their stay in the political wilderness could be a long one.