The Left Are the Adults in the Room
Progressives have earned the party’s ear at the Democratic National Convention—here’s how to use it.
Osita Nwanevu
It has long been expected that this Democratic National Convention will be the most eventful in recent history. Months of protest against the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza will culminate in mass demonstrations outside the convention halls; inside them, a small but sure-to-be-vocal group of delegates, elected as “uncommitted” by protest votes cast around the country, will press their case against Biden on Israel any way they can. The promise of agitation and dissensus atop the convention’s setting — a return to Chicago — have made allusions to 1968 inevitable.
Improbably, over the past few weeks, the parallels to the tumult of that eventful year have grown stronger than anyone might have imagined. In late July, after an atrocious first debate performance and several excruciating weeks of resistance, President Joe Biden — like President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 — announced he’d be dropping out of the race. While Democrats coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris remarkably quickly (within 48 hours of Biden’s withdrawal), the convention will still be a slightly unsettled space, and the Left will assuredly have an opportunity to assert and present itself — as dissenters, yes, but also as the last remaining adults in the Democratic coalition.
The fact that Biden even sought reelection to begin with, after all, is emblematic of the Democratic Party’s inability to grapple with critical realities. In 2020, it was expected even among those close to the president that he would decline to run again given his age, but the inertia of Democratic leaders and a seemingly unconquerable ambition on Biden’s part put the party and the country in an abominable position. Some of the most serious calls for a contested primary came from the Left, including historian Gabriel Winant’s Dec. 23, 2023, op-ed for InTheseTimes.com (“Biden Is His Own Worst Enemy in 2024. Time for Someone Else.”) But complacency and risk aversion won out over reason and no serious contenders stepped into the breach to challenge him.
Complicating matters, prominent progressives in Congress, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), backed Biden’s candidacy at the bitter end, evidently in return for a series of policy concessions. As correct as they were that Biden’s lack of a solid second-term agenda created an opening — and as terrific as the priorities Biden signed on to for his first 100 days were, including a living wage, expansions of Social Security and Medicare, and eliminating medical debt — endorsing Biden’s reelection may have been a mistake. Biden was deeply unpopular and lagging behind Trump in the vast majority of available polls, while Harris, by contrast, had upsides as a candidate that are already being reflected in head-to-head polling. All they asked for was predicated upon actually winning in November, and Biden’s odds were poor — concessions from the next Democratic administration aren’t worth much if there isn’t a next Democratic administration.
Now that Harris is at the top of the ticket, the Left should remind her campaign that Biden was at his best when he took after progressives. He was at the peak of his favorability after signing one piece of big redistributive legislation informed by Left demands (the American Rescue Plan) while pitching another (his Build Back Better Plan). And action from the administration on progressive priorities like student debt relief and climate action are the direct result of the Left’s efforts to put them at the top of the Democratic policy agenda since 2016.
Since October, the Left’s energies have been focused on drawing attention to a very different matter — Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, which drove the voters of the Left’s “uncommitted” campaign to register protests against Biden’s judgment and leadership well before June’s debate. No other issue demands more urgent pressure on the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party as a whole. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been recorded dead in Gaza since the launch of Israel’s war in October 2023; in early July, The Lancet published an estimate that as many as 186,000 may have died since the fighting began.
Recently, commentators and analysts closer to the center have grudgingly acknowledged what figures on the Left and Palestinian advocates have charged from the beginning — that this war is being waged without plausible military objectives and with flagrant disregard for the lives of civilians, whom Israel holds collectively responsible for the October 7 massacre by Hamas. For months, even as Biden and other Democrats welcomed to Washington Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — now an internationally wanted war criminal — students and other figures who courageously made that charge have been slandered and derided by establishment figures and assaulted by the authorities. The same will no doubt be true in Chicago, but that shouldn’t deter the Left from using the convention as a stage for the demonstration of its moral and analytical clarity on Gaza — to make it clear to the American people that American support for the war in Gaza must end immediately, as it has said all along.
As far as domestic policy is concerned, the Left should press its case on immigration. It will be remembered as a great shame that, after years of decrying the Republican Party’s descent into nativism under the Trump administration, Democrats came to office under Biden without meaningfully prioritizing comprehensive immigration reform. While the Biden administration initially rolled back a number of restrictive measures Trump put into place, Biden entered the 2024 campaign season with a significant retrenchment in response to a surge of migrants at the border framed as a deep crisis. A failed bipartisan bill Biden championed featured remarkable concessions to Republicans, and he followed it with an extraordinary executive action suspending asylum claims at the border. The latter, in its cruelty, has succeeded in stemming the flow of migrants at the border to absolutely no discernable political benefit whatsoever. It’s been balanced out, as far as the administration’s concerned, by liberalizing measures that will grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants. Those moves are to be applauded, but the American people need a serious and humane rethink of our immigration policy as a whole, not an ad hoc series of decisions crafted in political fear. The 11 million thought undocumented in this country, some of the most vulnerable among us, deserve better than fair-weather friends.
In the absence of a strong message and coherent strategy on immigration, the anti-nativist majority is collapsing. For the first time in many years, most Americans, according to Gallup, now say that immigration — in general, legal or illegal — should be decreased, a constituency that the Democratic Party has created in its timidity and acquiescence. At the convention and elsewhere, the Left should push back, demanding that Democrats make a stronger case for a sensible but capacious immigration system — based substantially on the fact that immigrants have been an economic boon rather than a burden to the American worker.
Democrats are correctly sounding the alarm about threats to democracy after the conservative Supreme Court teed up a second-term Trump with more power than any president has ever had. The Left should remind those Democrats that while a Trump victory in November would pose unprecedented risks to the American political system, fulfilling the promise of American democracy will require more than defeating one man. The For the People Act—which would ban partisan gerrymandering and expand voting rights in federal elections — and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act—which would restore anti-discriminatory provisions in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (dismantled by the Supreme Court in recent years) — are two of the most important pieces of legislation the Democratic majority failed to pass this term. If there’s a Democratic majority in the next, the bills should be revived and passed immediately via the elimination of the Senate filibuster. The Left should also push Democrats to get serious about deeper reforms — ending the Electoral College by interstate compact, expanding and restructuring the Supreme Court, and securing statehood for the District of Columbia along with self-determination for the American territories.
The Left can also lead the way in expanding the Democratic Party’s understanding of what democracy means. While the democratic process itself has been critically threatened, our democracy is also threatened by economic inequality and the unchecked power of major corporations and the wealthy. Both have deepened their influence over our elections and the policy process, and disturbingly, many well-known companies have donated to Republican candidates who spread Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and voted against certifying it. As the Left has long warned and liberals have become increasingly attuned to since Citizens United, corporations and the wealthy have also deepened their influence over our elections and the policy process in other ways. That’s a case not only for campaign finance reform, but for making political donations from the wealthy pinch a little more financially by significantly increasing taxes on the rich and closing corporate tax loopholes — moves we ought to consider not only as revenue generation, but as basic democratic hygiene.
Commitment to democracy as a system of values also means we should take on domination at work. Strengthening unions by passing the PRO Act will give American workers the agency they need to demand better wages and conditions and help protect them from the arbitrary authority of executives and bosses — a measure of economic democracy that might be tethered to efforts to protect and expand political democracy.
These and other priorities, including continued action on climate change and Medicare for All, ought to be frontline demands in Chicago and beyond as the left looks ahead — less to the next federal election, than to the task of winning new converts and building power at all levels of governance. As horrifying as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is in substance, it offers up a glimpse of what movement politics in America ought to look like — a coherent and cohesive vision for the country, set to be advanced by actors inside and outside of government. Whoever wins this election, after all, the conservative movement will work to build on the extraordinary victories it has already won, from Congress to the court, which were built upon leadership, durable organizations and, dumb as the Right may often seem, a great deal of wonkery.
A fortress is being erected. It can and must be torn down not only through critique of all that is the Right and the fecklessness of a putative Democratic opposition captured by capital, but through organizing and creating institutions to take the Left from protest to power.
Chicago will be as good a place as any to recommit ourselves to that vital work.
