What remains of the progressive project?

Feeling adrift in the 2020s.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

I spent pretty much all of the 2010s — my first decade as a writer and pundit — advocating for various progressive causes, on my blog and in the pages of Bloomberg. I always called myself a “liberal” instead of a “progressive”, but with the understanding that those two things weren’t actually very different.¹ I called for expanded immigration, national health insurance, and a bigger welfare state, extolled the benefits of diversity, cheered for a revival of labor unions and stronger antitrust, criticized mass incarceration, dreamed of a phase-out of fracking, and even endorsed reparations for slavery. In the late 2010s, it felt like a long wave of progressive sentiment that had been building since the late 1980s or early 1990s had finally reached a critical level of intensity — social changes were already occurring at a rapid pace, and it felt like major changes to our economic system were possible.

A few years later, I’m not so sure. My values haven’t become more conservative — my desire for a more economically egalitarian and socially tolerant society has not diminished an iota. You won’t see me bellowing “I didn’t leave my party, my party left ME!!” and storming over to the GOP in a huff. But I have to say that I now doubt the practical effectiveness of some of the policies I embraced in previous years. Others still seem like good ideas, but I’ve been dismayed at their botched implementation where they were tried. And many progressive ideas simply don’t seem like they’ll be able to win majority political support in the near future. It’s looking more and more likely that America is headed for a more conservative decade.

I’m not the only person to have noticed the shift. Dave Weigel recently wrote a post detailing all the ways that Kamala Harris’ campaign is to the right of Biden’s 2020 run, both in terms of tone and rhetoric and in terms of actual policy. Harris and other Dems have touted their tough stances on the border, abandoned big new spending programs, stopped talking about a public option for health insurance, trumpeted their support for Israel, embraced oil drilling, and gone tough on crime. Harris’ policy agenda includes plenty of pro-business and deregulatory ideas. She even brags about owning a gun and being willing to shoot intruders.

If this all gives you a sense of whiplash after the seeming ascendancy of the left in the 2010s, you’re not alone. The shift has come so quickly that I think a lot of people haven’t even processed it yet — Harris is running as a centrist, but the majority of Americans still say she’s to their left. Perceptions of the parties probably take several cycles to adjust — Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale ran as centrists in the 80s, but America didn’t believe Democrats were really moderate until Bill Clinton in 1992.

But I don’t think the shift is a cynical election-year ploy on Harris’ part — I think it’s here to stay. The fact is, on issue after issue, the progressive project has been stymied, either by the realities of American political opinion or by its own failures. In 2012 or 2019, progressivism felt like it had forward momentum; now it feels adrift.

None of this makes me support the Democrats any less, of course — quite the opposite. Kamala’s moderation shows that she’s reasonable and pragmatic, unlike the increasingly maniacal and unhinged Trump. But it does give me a feeling of pensiveness and uncertainty. I do see some good and important future directions for the progressive cause — abundance, YIMBYism, industrial policy, and the like. But I don’t know if those remaining good ideas be wholeheartedly embraced, and I don’t know if they’re enough to build a broad political movement around.

So anyway, I want to go through a bunch of progressive issues from the 2010s — immigration, DEI, energy and climate, crime and policing, the welfare state, universal health care, unions, and trans rights — and explain why I think they’re all mostly stuck.

Immigration

In the 2010s, immigration went from a technocratic consensus to a progressive cause célèbre. This happened for two reasons. The primary reason was that Donald Trump and his reactionary movement were against immigration, probably on racial grounds (though they never explicitly admit this). For many progressives, that made fighting for immigration a way of fighting against racism. A more minor reason was that many progressives either implicitly or explicitly bought into the idea that immigration would create a permanent Democratic majority.

In the 2010s, pro-immigration sentiment soared. In 2020, Gallup reported that for the first time since it started keeping track in 1965, the percent of Americans who said they want more immigration was larger than the percent who said they want less:

Source: Gallup

Accordingly, progressives felt pretty comfortable promoting immigration by any means available — not just through the standard legal immigration system, but by helping asylum seekers remain in the country after crossing the border illegally. One close progressive friend even told me that letting asylum seekers do this was a human right. This wasn’t open borders per se, but conservatives could be forgiven for failing to see the functional difference.

I even began to see leftist arguments for immigration as a form of reparations for colonialism. This was the central argument of the book This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, which I found because I saw it recommended by some prominent progressive media figures. (In my defense, I was always horrified at arguments like this, which I always felt undermined the basic case for immigration as a positive-sum policy.)

What a difference a few years makes. Almost as soon as Joe Biden took his oath of office, anti-immigration sentiment began to soar, and is now stronger than at almost any point since 1965:

Source: Gallup

Poll after poll now shows that Americans — even Hispanics — now favor mass deportation of illegal immigrants. Most Democrats don’t, but a substantial minority do:

Source: Pew

It’s important to note here that Americans have not turned against immigration in general. They largely favor high-skilled immigration, immigration to alleviate labor shortages, and admitting more refugees. The same polls that show majority support for mass deportations also show majority support for a path to citizenship for people who have been in the country illegally a long time.

America has absolutely not become a xenophobic, closed society; we still like immigrants and immigration in general. Trump’s attitudes are not representative. Americans simply do not like the practice of rewarding asylum seekers for crossing the border illegally. They do not want a policy of “more immigration by any means available”, if those means involve condoning the violation of the nation’s laws and borders. They demand to choose, as a nation, who gets into the country, and not to have their choices abrogated by lawyers and courts.

The 2010s progressive idea of immigration permissiveness as a culture war issue is thus dead in the water.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion