It’s still way early in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, with a mere ten major candidates having entered the race while another half-dozen are still making up their minds. But it’s not too early to divide the field into two categories: The Yes-We-Can Democrats and the No-We-Can’t Democrats.
Leading the Yes-We-Cansters are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—champions of policies that would bring some systemic change to the way America works. Identifying himself as a democratic socialist, Sanders has always supported more democratic and egalitarian alternatives to American capitalism, but those alternatives have never really gone beyond those adopted by European social democrats. Indeed, in his 2015 speech at Georgetown University, he illustrated his concept of democratic socialism by referencing the reforms put through by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson—Social Security and Medicare—and the aspirations voiced by Martin Luther King Jr. Warren also points to Roosevelt as a model—the reformer who had to reform capitalism in order to save it—but her social democratic proposals, such as that for universal child care, which she unveiled earlier this week in California, as well as her tax plans are often as far-reaching as as Sanders's. He calls himself a socialist and she calls herself a capitalist, but both fall well within the social democratic ambit.
That said, it's their proposals (and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's) that are driving Democratic discourse. In 2016, Sanders pried open the Overton Window of acceptable policies and found that a clear majority of Democrats had been just waiting to embrace such ideas as Medicare for All, free college tuition and a $15 minimum wage. AOC and Warren are now finding similar levels of support for a Green New Deal and a fairer tax system. All three have also won substantial public backing when they've gone after the super-rich for their takeover of America's economy, politics and government—a theme not sounded this clearly on the presidential campaign trail since Franklin Roosevelt's re-election campaign of 1936 (which culminated in the most sweeping victory in U.S. electoral history).
Already, the 2020 Democratic primary process is shaping up as a referendum on the sweeping changes that the Yes-We-Cansters are proposing. The other candidates are being compelled to give their responses to both the spirit and the letter of the Cansters' ideas. In the process, some have already become No-We-Can'tsters—their messages often being reduced to explanations of why we can't afford free public college or universal public health coverage. Amy Klobuchar is bidding to lead the No-We-Can'tster pack, with seemingly daily cautions as to which reforms are unreachable. Joe Biden, should he enter the fray, may well strike a similar posture.
Kamala Harris and Sherrod Brown (should he run) have generally inclined toward the Yes-We-Can side of the party, though neither has expressed comfort with a Roosevelt-‘36-style excoriation of the plutocratic rich. Cory Booker's career-long coziness with Wall Street plunks him down on the Can'tster side of the party, though he has embraced some halfway-house proposals—full-employment pilot programs, for instance—that suggest he understands he's in need of reinvention.
Can'tster-ism isn't a platform, however; it's not even a basis for a candidacy, and certainly not at a time when more Democrats say they have a favorable assessment of socialism than they do of capitalism. In an early attempt to fill this void, Booker is opining that the nation needs universal love, while Klobuchar is turning out daily announcements of mini- or micro-reform pieces of legislation she has introduced with Republican co-sponsors—a reading of the Democratic zeitgeist I find bewildering, and one which holds unfortunate echoes of Hillary Clinton's penchant for multiple policy-adjustment proposals, which didn't exactly work wonders for her campaign.
As I noted at the top, it's still way early, and there's ample time for reformulating messages. The polls tell us that Americans are more in the mood for big, system-altering ideas than they've been in eons. No-We-Can'tsters, take heed.
