If the left is going to take control of the Democratic Party, the Pacific Northwest, with its oversupply of culturally progressive, college-educated white people, is where it would happen first. It is therefore notable that voters in Oregon struck a devastating blow against the left in three elections Tuesday.
In one primary, mainstream Democrat Janelle Bynum defeated progressive favorite Jamie McLeod-Skinner to face off in a winnable purple district. In another, Representative Maxine Dexter prevailed over Susheela Jayapal in a primary in a heavily Democratic district. And most revealingly, Nathan Vasquez unseated progressive prosecutor Mike Schmidt in Portland, one of the most left-wing cities in America.
Centrists often talk about the extreme left and right in American politics as though they have equivalent influence over the two parties. And while it is true that the far left and far right have many parallel qualities in their intellectual style — conceiving every question as a pure moral binary, dismissing liberal norms, fetishizing the will to power — their ability to exert influence through elected politics is totally different.
The conservative movement took complete control of the Republican Party over the course of decades, turning moderation into an epithet among their voters. There are progressives who would like to try something similar on the left. But their efforts keep running into a brick wall with the electorate.
Imagine the entire electorate is splayed across an ideological spectrum. As you move from the center of the political spectrum toward the left, you will encounter growing levels of enthusiasm for Joe Biden, but only up to a point. As you get closer to the far left, enthusiasm will give way to grudging acceptance, and then outright hostility. The vocal protest movements on campus labeling the president “Genocide Joe” are just one illustration of a deep hostility toward the Democratic Party on the far left.
On the right, there is no equivalent opposition to Trump. As you go farther and farther right, loyalty to Trump intensifies. There is no stopping point. Nazis, white nationalists, and other far-right factions are the most intense adherents of the Trump cult.
Trump’s occasional habit of posting social media with Nazi themes inadvertently reveals the deeper problem. It is not that Trump is a Nazi, or is even trying to send dog-whistle messages to Nazis. The problem is that Nazis adore Trump, and the library of online social-media content devoted to glorifying him is filled with white-nationalist imagery. Trump’s staff has to work diligently to keep Nazi themes out of his social media, and to keep Nazis away from him personally, because they feature so heavily in the world of Trump superfans.
Biden’s supporters don’t have this problem. Of course, Biden is not a social-media addict, but even if he wanted to share supportive social-media posts by far-left supporters, it would be almost impossible, because they barely exist.
The American left is far from impotent. It continues to exert influence in academia, media, culture, and other left-leaning institutions, as well as a small number of elected officials. But it is proving to be unable to take control of the Democratic Party as the conservative movement took control of the Republican Party, and the reason is that the voters are a hard brake on its power.
The wave of campus protests has captured media attention and magnified the scale of the left-wing opposition to Biden’s presidency. But the more revealing thing about this movement is what didn’t happen — a frontal challenge to Biden in the Democratic primaries.
There was nothing stopping progressives from organizing a candidacy to challenge Biden for the nomination. The most they did was try to get voters to vote “uncommitted,” and they set expectations low enough that even a landslide defeat could be spun as a victory. Now the movement is trying to leverage the threat of left-wing disaffection electing Trump to force Biden to support their position. The tactic itself reveals weakness. They’re not even trying to win at the ballot box, because they know they can’t.
There are left-wing Democrats representing deep-blue districts, and some of them are trying to maximize whatever leverage they possess to push the party in their direction. But at the moment, their foothold is tenuous, and perhaps even shrinking.
A counterpose to the successful Oregon revolt by Democratic moderates is a failed effort by mainstream Republicans in Idaho. In Northern Idaho, traditional Republicans hoped they would take control of the Republican Party leadership from a far-right faction that had developed close ties to white nationalists and other formerly-fringe elements. The mainstream faction is not “moderate,” or even anti-Trump, but merely arch-conservative as opposed to a mix of Christian nationalist, white-nationalist, and militia-right.
The traditional Republicans expected they would not only win a majority of the seats needed to control the party, but an overwhelming rout. “I want a full sweep,” Christa Hazel, a Republican organizer behind the effort told the Washington Post last week. “I want a full referendum on the ugliness, chaos and division.”
Hazel and her allies did not get a full sweep. They didn’t even get a majority of the seats. The arguments that carried the day cast them as “RINOs,” a catchall term Republicans use to discredit anybody who defects from the most extreme stance on any issue.
I don’t mean to draw a comparison between the progressive Democrats who lost in Oregon and the radical Republicans who won in Idaho. The Republican Party’s radicalization has gone through so many cycles that, by the standards of a previous generation, everybody on all sides is an extremist.
Conservatives talk about the Democratic Party as if it is still 2020, and the passions that burned through the streets in that very strange time have continued unchecked. Perhaps the Democrats are bound to continue an unchecked trajectory away from the center because their own party has followed that course for decades on end. It turns out the voters in the Democratic Party, unlike their counterparts in the GOP, care a great deal about effective, practical governance.
