Loved this from Yglesias because I really think it largely captures what has become such an essential divide among those on the left-side of the political spectrum. Just how much and on what issues can we compromise? His take, and mine– all of them! I’m definitely of the half a loaf is always better than no loaf opinion. Some highlights:
The two kinds of progressives
Moralists vs. pragmatists
I always enjoy Eric Levitz’s writing, and our views are quite similar. But even though I found his recent piece “The 28 Types of Progressives” illuminating, I didn’t think it really captured the essence of today’s most salient intra-progressive disagreements. It wasn’t so much that I thought anything he said was wrong, but I think that in 2023, a survey of the political landscape that “focuses exclusively on the ‘economic’ dimension of ideological disagreement” misses some crucial points.
Personally, I love economic issues and I wish the kind of typology he glosses there described the political landscape. But voting behavior is increasingly driven by alignment on social and cultural questions. I think that’s true not only of the mass public but of elite actors, writer types, and intellectuals, too. For a good sense of what I think is actually the most important divide in the broad center-left camp, it’s instructive to listen to the April 23 episode of Georgetown University historian Thomas Zimmer’s podcast with Johns Hopkins political scientist Liliana Mason as a guest. The thesis of the episode is that it’s wrong to frame “polarization” as a problem because the real problem is that Republicans are bad. On climate change, for example, Zimmer says the parties clearly have moved further apart. But, according to him, “Democrats aren’t moving toward an extreme position,” they’re moving toward an expert consensus, while Republicans are “driving into fantasyland.”
Then Mason follows up by talking about the impossibility of compromise on what she sees as fundamental questions of rights.
“You can compromise on what level of taxation we should have,” she says. “You can compromise on things like, you know, how much aid we should give to foreign nations.” By contrast, “the problem is when we’re talking about whether an entire group of human beings in the country who are American citizens should be eradicated. There is no compromise position there. We can’t compromise on whether Black Americans should be treated equally as white Americans.”
And to be clear, Mason isn’t talking about a hypothetical situation where an extremist party gains critical mass and it’s impossible to compromise with them.
That’s her characterization of the present-day Republican Party’s stance on transgender rights and racial equality. Zimmer has occasionally tweeted unkind things about me in ways that I’ve found somewhat puzzling, and this episode helped me understand where he’s coming from. Because this idea they are articulating — that there is a set of identity-linked issues that are beyond the scope of normal political give and take — strikes me as truly the most fundamental divide in progressive politics today. A divide so important that it transcends disagreements about everything else, precisely because the claim being made on the Zimmer/Mason side of the line is that the imperative for a principled stand on these topics trumps all other considerations.
I want to first say, I think Mason is an amazing political scientist and I have nothing but admiration for her work. But I do think Yglesias is right to call her out here. One thing that I’ve really tried to practice in politics in recent years is the principle of charity, i.e., interpreting people’s argument in the best possible light, rather than the worst. Now, to be fair, many, many Republicans clearly do not deserve a charitable interpretation (e.g., Trump, Cruz, Hawley, etc.), but to say that the Republican position is that trans people should be “eradicated” is an extremely uncharitable view of the current debates. I would also argue that “We can’t compromise on whether Black Americans should be treated equally as white Americans.” is also quite uncharitable. Do you truly believe your run-of-the-mill Republican thinks black people should be treated worse than white people? Really? How about, instead, they are far more comfortable with a system that inherently disadvantages black people, but, on it’s surface treats black people equally (and many truly believe treats them better than white people). Yes, there’s some horrible inveterate racists out there with way too much influence in the GOP, but the reality is that far, far more common is a bunch of mostly decent people who just have very different ideas of what racial equality actually looks like (and I would argue, a fair amount of ignorance about the realities of race in this country).
Anyway, one thing that bugs me so much about this left moralism, i.e,. how can we compromise with this immoral other side, is that it is so profoundly uncharitable.
More Yglesias:
FDR’s civil rights record was, frankly, bad. He did less on voting rights and lynching than many of his Republican predecessors, and only established the Fair Employment Practice Committee under considerable pressure from A. Philip Randolph. And the FEPC itself was a very weak agency. Roosevelt has a noteworthy role in history as the first Democrat to do anything at all on civil rights, and (not coincidentally) the first Democrat to win the majority of the Black vote. But what he did was very little.
That said, enfranchised Black voters did vote for him, and Randolph absolutely accepted compromises. He threatened a mass protest unless the federal government acted on discrimination in wartime industries, and when he won the FEPC, he took yes for an answer. He didn’t compromise in the sense of giving up on the struggle for civil rights. That went on for decades. Randolph corresponded with Harry Truman about segregation in the military, and he won that battle in 1948. Brown v. Board of Education happened in 1954 (and itself followed several earlier court cases about segregation in graduate schools and colleges) and eventually entailed the Eisenhower administration sending troops to Little Rock. There was a weak Civil Rights Act of 1957 and a slightly less-weak Civil Rights Act of 1960 and eventually the big Civil Rights Act of 1964, then the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and then in 1968 the Fair Housing Act.
Throughout it all, the civil rights movement was pressing for more, and there were always people urging them to be more moderate and more compromising, saying “you’re going too fast.” And they rejected that. But they also clearly weren’t totally uncompromising, either. They treated all kinds of half-measures as meaningful and lots of deeply flawed politicians as worthy of support. There was no categorical distinction between civil rights and economic issues; it was all politics.
The de-centering of economics
Over the past 20–30 years, the voting base of the Democratic Party has become a lot more educated and upscale.
One might have predicted that would lead to the adoption of a more moderate stance on economic issues, but that hasn’t really happened. Instead, as political scientist Matt Grossman recently told Tom Edsall, there’s no “evidence that the Democratic Party has abandoned redistributive politics or changed its positions on business regulation. Instead, they are increasingly emphasizing social issues and combining social concerns with their traditional economic concerns.” Indeed, I would say that rather than moderating on economics, many Democrats have if anything moved left and become more forthright in arguing that the country ought to try to shift to something much closer to a European welfare state…
In particular, I think it’s worth considering the impact of this way of thinking on cross-pressured voters. Imagine a Texan who favors Medicaid expansion but thinks student athletes should play on chromosomally-appropriate sports teams. Well, you could tell that person that Medicaid has enormous concrete stakes for 1.4 million uninsured Texans while the sports issue impacts a tiny number of people.
But if progressives take the view that identity issues are fundamental moral principles and are too important to brook any compromise, that encourages people with the non-progressive view to see it the same way. And when you’re on the unpopular side of the fundamental issue of conscience, that just means you lose elections and lose on both policy issues.
Okay, I’m going to stop before I just quote the whole damn thing, but you get the gist. Here’s the conclusion:
I think the growing popularity of the Mason/Zimmer view reflects the demographic realignment of the parties. As Democrats have become more upscale, they haven’t shifted their policy platform on economics to the right. But they have become less interested in forming big tent electoral coalitions to maximize the odds of welfare state expansion and more interested in ideological purity and uncompromising moral stands. Because the uncompromising moral stand is more appealing if you are not personally counting on Medicaid expansion to make a concrete difference in your life.
Maybe not entirely right, but this generally take of Yglesias, obviously, very strongly resonates with me. I’d love to try and figure out a way to do some actual social science on this and see just how much we can measure and explain this divide within the left.
Fully Myelinated 
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