"Democrats Need to Be the Biggest, Weirdest Tent They've Ever Been"
Democrats
“Democrats Need to Be the Biggest, Weirdest Tent They’ve Ever Been”: Progressives Throw Their Weight Behind Biden
With Republicans embroiled in their own civil war, progressives and moderates inside the Democratic Party are getting on surprisingly well. But they know crucial midterm elections loom. “We’re just in this lull before a massive storm.”
By Abigail Tracy
May 14, 2021
The post-election political landscape was expected to be one of dueling civil wars—Republicans battling over the role of Trumpism in their party, and Democrats torn between progressives and moderates. With Donald Trump critic Liz Cheney stripped of her leadership role on Wednesday, that war is well underway. But what of the other side? When prominent progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threw their political heft behind Joe Biden, it was seen as a deal to get him elected at any cost and his bill would come due. But intraparty strife has largely failed to materialize. In a political plot twist, progressives are happy with Biden, arguably a paragon of the establishment. As a senior aide to a Democratic senator put it, the left-wing cohort is “pleasantly surprised” by the Biden administration, but “watching vigilantly.”
Even Ocasio-Cortez, not one to shy away from ruffling feathers within the Democratic Party, said during a town hall last month that the administration has “definitely exceeded expectations” of progressives. “I’ll be frank, I think a lot of us expected a lot more conservative administration,” the New York lawmaker said.
Biden quickly engendered goodwill among progressives with the American Rescue Plan. Passed in March, the $1.9 trillion stimulus package is an expansive piece of legislation that included a number of progressive must-haves: another round of direct payments to Americans, expansion of the child tax credit, $350 billion in state, local, and tribal relief funds, and extended unemployment benefits, among them. “That was a good example of him proposing something fairly bold and then not allowing the voices of bipartisanship or moderates in the party to water down the ambition and the scope,” a senior progressive congressional staffer said. As the country climbs out of the COVID crisis, sources I spoke with said they view Biden as a president striving to meet the moment. “We think that he wants to be a transformational president,” this person added.
Progressives note that their ideas are more popular than ever as the country struggles to regain its footing in the ongoing pandemic. “Nobody wants a terrible, terrible tragedy to have to move our agenda forward,” Sanders told me in an interview last summer. “But I think what the current crises that we are seeing have really shown the American people is, in fact, that we need fundamental changes in the way our government works and the policies that exist.” And Biden, a politician whose career has been defined by the politics of what’s possible, is embracing these ideas. The senior Senate aide said Biden has “been making what I would say is a progressive argument about politics, which is that bipartisanship is not about whether Mitt Romney or Susan Collins supports a bill. It’s about whether people out in the world support the legislation and the ideas.”
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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/05/joe-biden-progressives
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