Why Didn't the Progressive Movement Challenge Kamala Harris?

The Democrats won in 2020 with 81 million votes, the most in U.S. history. The 2024 race could not have been more different. Not only was there no primary (because of President Joe Biden’s ill-fated decision to stay in the race), but when Harris emerged as the party’s nominee, she did so as a moderate, distancing herself from the progressive policies that had defined the Democratic platform four years earlier. She went on to spend much of the campaign trail alongside former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). The shift was glaring: Harris abandoned her earlier posture as a reformer and progressive prosecutor, opting for a new message that mostly — with the exception of abortion rights — tried to shake off any hint of progressive politics, and it instead embraced Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric on the border, deferred to gun culture and American militarism, and distilled free-market principles through the dystopic language of ​“opportunity economy.” Harris deftly avoided the 2020 protests that were the reason she was selected as Biden’s running mate in the first place.

The Democrats’ sharp turn to the right can be mapped through their party platforms and political programs. In 2020, they offered a ​“new social and economic contract” of ​“shared prosperity” and racial justice. By 2024, Harris and running mate Tim Walz failed to directly or meaningfully mention the impacts of racism, police brutality, inequality or diversity in their 82-page policy platform.

Undoubtedly, some of this political retreat was in reaction to the right-wing backlash against so-called woke politics. What began as an outcry against the 1619 Project created by New York Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones — who argued in a Pulitzer Prize-winning essay that racism is endemic to the founding of the United States and pervades all aspects of American democracy — spiraled into a wider assault against any recognition of racism as a fact of American life. The right-wing attacks on critical race theory, affirmative action and diversity initiatives reached a fever pitch, with Trump leading the charge with accusations of anti-white bias across the country.

But the backlash did not only come from the Right. Even as Democrats benefitted from the growth of the progressive movement, there were also Democrats who denounced the progressive influence in the party. When activists, in 2020, made the political demand to ​“defund the police and refund the communities,” Rep. Karen Bass (now the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles) denounced the refrain as ​“probably one of the worst slogans ever.” South Carolina representative and former House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn blamed BLM activists who used the phrase as responsible for the gathering conservative backlash against the movement.

In the 2020 election, as Democrats lost seats in the House, Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger (Va.) said, ​“We need to not ever use the words ​‘socialist’ or ​‘socialism’ ever again.” After Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown lost his Democratic primary to democratic socialist India Walton in 2021, he won in the general with a write-in campaign and exhorted ​“mainstream Democrats” to ​“stand up and fight back” because the ​“intolerant” far Left is ​“not good for the country.” Brown left his post as mayor before the end of his term to leverage his nearly 20-year stint into a nearly $300,000 job as CEO of Western Regional Off-Track Betting.

But Democrats were not just positioning themselves against the political rhetoric of the Left; they were also trying to scrub away their reputation as big government spenders. Spanberger complained, ​“Nobody elected [Biden] to be FDR. They elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.” The editorial board of the New York Times, on behalf of the liberal establishment that hated Trump, lectured that ​“Democrats Deny Political Reality at Their Own Peril” and warned ​“the 2020 election was about removing Mr. Trump. … Mr. Biden did not win the Democratic primary because he promised a progressive revolution [but] because he promised an exhausted nation a return to sanity, decency and competence.”

For all of the complaints of centrist Democrats about the deleterious role of the Left and progressives, it is simply undeniable that, in 2020, these groups played an affirmative role in the party’s victory. On an individual level, voter registration ​“surged” at the height of BLM protests in 2020. Beyond that, progressive groups blanketed swing states — Georgia, in particular — to turn anger and protest into votes. Grassroots organizations like Mijente and Black Voters Matter helped turn a solid red Georgia blue, with two Democratic Senate seats. Indeed, the entirety of the BLM leadership turned its focus toward the election, on the hope of charting a new relationship of political collaboration with the Democratic Party.

Patrisse Cullors, co-founder and former executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, described the role of Black organizers and Black-led organizations as decisive in the Biden-Harris victory. ​“We created a multimillion dollar get-out-the-vote campaign,” Cullors explained. ​“We did not stand down, we actually stood up. … We reached over 60 million people in that effort. … I think our movement and I think our organization, alongside Black-led organizers across the country, won this election.” BLM, which had been the recipient of a windfall of donations from the public, organized a political action committee to facilitate their political participation. As Cullors described it in 2020, ​“Through our PAC, we signed up 6,000 volunteers for 10,000 shifts to phone-bank in battleground states. We’ve knocked on thousands of doors in Miami-Dade [County], Philadelphia and Atlanta to bring registered voters to polls on Election Day.” The Movement for Black Lives also created its own voter initiative, ​“The Frontline,” which it claimed ​“mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to defend voters around the country and turn out the vote to win massive victories at the federal and local level.”

In other key swing states, like Wisconsin, the Senate candidacy of Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and the field operations of on-the-ground groups like Black Leaders Organizing for Communities helped push Biden over the edge where the margin of victory over Trump was just 20,000 votes.

In the fall of 2020, during the homestretch of the election, the Movement for Black Lives (then a coalition of more than 50 ​“organizing groups”) — along with the Working Families Party, Service Employees International Union, Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives, the Sunrise Movement and, in the House, the Squad — initiated ​“The People’s Charter” as a list of demands to shape the post-election environment. Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, explained it as such: ​“People, in order to be enthusiastic about voting, need to vote for something — and The People’s Charter provides folks with something that is outside of candidates’ politics to vote for. It also sets up post-election conditions to articulate that this election was a referendum on this agenda.”

After President Barack Obama’s second term, the Democratic Party returned in 2016 to the old guard with Hillary Clinton as the nominee, a choice that alienated young voters enthralled by the rising BLM and climate movements. By 2020, debates over the future of the party were influenced by a new Left come to life through Occupy Wall Street, BLM, DSA and the rise of Sanders. These formations shaped the political discourse of redistribution, redress and restoration. The defeat of Trump fueled by a wave of unprecedented protest seemed to open a new frontier of politics and organizing.

Black organizers, in particular, believed that Biden should have been beholden to their efforts to mobilize ordinary Black voters.

Mary Hooks, founding member of Black Lives Matter Atlanta and co-director of the social justice advocacy organization Southerners on New Ground, pressed that, ​“For decades, Black people have shown up time and time again for a country that consistently tells us that our lives don’t matter. … Beyond a cheap thank you, we need this administration to be bold and unapologetic about paying that debt through enacting policy changes.” The Rev. William Barber, of the Poor People’s Campaign, spelled out that, ​“We’ll be expecting follow-through. … Biden needs to have a 50-day strategy, not a 100-day strategy, for addressing the issues.” Cullors, was more succinct: ​“We want something for our vote.”

After Biden won the presidency, he noted how the ​“African American community stood up again for me” and added, ​“You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.” But Biden’s Black agenda was mostly symbolic or oriented toward middle-class Black families, not the working-class Black majority. Juneteenth became a federal holiday and Biden signed anti-lynching legislation (nearly 100 years too late) and an executive order to advance ​“racial equity and support for underserved communities,” but by his own assessment the returns were pretty thin compared with the depth of the problems.

The continuity of police brutality and police killings stunted any sense of progress, while inflation surged to historic levels, undermining any growth in wages for ordinary voters, Black or otherwise.

Even as the administration backed off of (or failed to deliver on) its promises, the array of progressive forces that worked to get Biden elected largely failed to mobilize in any substantive way to demand more. In part, it’s because they imagined themselves as potentially collaborating with the administration — contrasting with their adversarial role during the Trump years — which complicated their efforts to mobilize.

Indeed, when Cullors was asked how she would respond to Democratic officials concerned about Republican attempts to tie the Democrats to BLM, she offered, ​“I do think the Democratic Party should lean on groups like Black Lives Matter. We made the effort to lean into the presidential race and we really do need the Democratic Party to reach out to us because we can, I believe, win these other races, if they leaned on us just a little bit more.” She added, ​“What we need from the Democratic Party is allyship right now.” And what of the Movement for Black Lives and the Working Families Party’s ​“People’s Charter,” which was supposed to shape the post-election political scene? It turned out to be a tool to turn out ambivalent voters but not really part of an organizing strategy to take on Biden once he became president. Click on the link for the effort today, and the website exists only as an archive.

But this begs the question: If the Left and progressive groups largely view Democrats as allies — rather than as political opponents who must be pressured and protested — then how do Left and progressive groups imagine they might leverage their political influence to make Democrats meet their demands? The strategy of working inside relationships and connections may provoke cynicism among activists perpetually ​“all out” against Republicans, but when Democrats are in charge, muted disagreement prevails. It was a failed strategy during the Biden administration, and it failed to move Harris from the disastrous stances that defined her failed bid for the presidency — which alone should be enough to question the strategy.

Beyond pressuring the Democratic administration holding power, the past four years saw the general retreat of big forces on the organized Left and among progressive organizations.

It doesn’t mean no one has been doing anything. Far from it. There are many small and struggling organizations fighting local campaigns against private capital and local and state governments for better and affordable housing, school funding, against police brutality. There have been local efforts to challenge the racist and homophobic book bans and censoring of school curricula. There have also been attempts by low-wage workers to form unions against all odds. But the scale of these smaller and local struggles raises the question of what happened to the massive uprising and demonstrations that upended the political status quo just four short years ago?

No mass organizations emerged out of the most significant movement against racism and inequality in the United States in two generations, despite the widespread sympathy and solidarity with the movement. Today, the Left feels small, marginalized, fractured and disorganized as enormous problems confront the communities we are attached to. The absence of focused organizing on building grassroots organizations with clear on-ramps and entry points for ordinary people has resulted in a political culture that views politics passively as donating money and occasionally showing up to an event or protest to register political discontent and express solidarity. All too often, movements and organizing have been conceived of having a professionalized core or center, while viewing the broader public as people to mobilize for an event — not as collaborators, and not for the purpose of building sustainable organizations.

By 2024, when Harris announced her surprise run for president, many progressive organizations supported her candidacy with few, if any, questions asked. Even as Harris promised a lethal military and refused to meaningfully confront Trump’s racist invective directed at Haitian and Latino immigrants, she faced no serious opposition from the left or progressives. Once again, the urgency of not allowing Trump to regain the presidency overwhelmed the capacity or willingness to question or criticize the Democratic nominee, let alone exert any pressure on Harris to commit to progressive and left demands. The United Auto Workers, led by Shawn Fain, took slightly more time before endorsing Harris, but still embraced her agenda as one for the working class. Sanders held out on an immediate endorsement, but eventually came around and stumped wide and far for Harris.

Almost immediately after Harris lost the race, Sanders had searing criticism of the Democratic Party for essentially abandoning the interests of the working class. But this level of criticism was necessary during the campaign itself to exert any pressure to change the disastrous course of the Harris candidacy. We all understand the pressure to coalesce around the Democratic candidate when the Republican Party is openly embracing racism, xenophobia and fascism. But if there is no way to hold Democrats accountable to their working-class constituents because of the fear of an even worse GOP, then we can expect this dynamic of right-moving Democratic presidential candidates to continue.

Only the movements in solidarity with Palestinian freedom offered a substantive challenge to the Harris coronation, as it remains the only issue impervious to party influence. To be sure, the absence of a primary for the Democratic Party lessened the ability of progressive forces to push back against Harris galloping rightward. Given the posture of the party’s leadership of hostility toward progressive and left forces, there is no guarantee Harris would not have deflected that pressure in an attempt to demonstrate her independence from left influence.

The questions concerning the relationship between progressives, the Left and the Democratic Party are still here, even as Trump has improbably regained the White House. Not only has there been no resolution to the questions surrounding those relationships, the current political culture of the broadly construed Left doesn’t necessarily allow for an interrogation. There are few platforms or outlets for constructive debate and disagreement. The online culture of American society that became even more embedded as a result of the pandemic has turned political debate — and even conversation — toxic. For others, the need to debate or even engage is seen as exhausting and a chore that the experience of oppression should protect them against. That it is someone else’s responsibility to engage in these debates, persuade the unconvinced, to ​“do the work.” These tensions running throughout the progressive ecosystem will make it difficult, if not impossible, to recreate the #Resistance to the first Trump administration. Moreover, the idea that we can just pick up the batons of protest from the earlier Trump administration ignores the political debates and questions from then, which were unresolved and buried as Biden was swept into office.

And yet, a response will be necessary as the new Trump administration unleashes its horrors on the undocumented, Muslims, trans kids and others.

How can we build an effective movement if we don’t address the questions concerning democracy and political accountability within it? How might those discussions create the possibility of engaging the debates on the relationship between the Left, progressives and the Democratic Party? And how do we guard against our activism becoming the latest directives demanding we drop everything for the 2026 midterm elections, and then again in 2028?

It doesn’t mean that elections don’t matter, but the Left’s lack of political independence leaves us beholden to whatever candidate is placed before us — as in the scenario of this 2024 election — continuing a cycle that reproduces and amplifies conservative electoral politics, regardless of party. 

Given the scale of the crisis in the lives of ordinary people, it’s politically unsustainable.