CAROLINE BREHMAN/AP PHOTO
The Sunrise Movement’s June 28 protest was a rare moment of dissent from progressive groups.
This article appears in the July/August 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
On June 28, over 500 members of the Sunrise Movement, D.C.’s most vocal youth climate group, blockaded the entrance to the White House for hours. Their demands included a fully funded Civilian Climate Corps, a New Deal–style jobs program, as part of the administration’s infrastructure package. A modest $10 billion CCC, less than one-tenth of Sunrise’s initial vision, was part of President Biden’s American Jobs Plan proposal when it was first unveiled months earlier; in the emaciated bipartisan infrastructure framework Biden agreed to in June, not one dollar remained. In fact, nearly all of the major climate commitments, save some money (a fraction of what was proposed) for electric vehicles and public transit, were similarly absent from the $579 billion revision.
The protesters were joined by progressive House Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Cori Bush (D-MO), and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and the tone was something new for progressive groups in the Biden era: openly combative. Over a dozen protesters were arrested. Sunrise members hoisted signs reading, “#NoClimateNoDeal, No Compromises, No Excuses,” and “Biden, You Coward, Fight for Us.” Rep. Bowman, on the inadequacy of the new infrastructure proposal, was even more direct: “Fuck that!”
Just a few days prior, not outside the White House steps but on a private Zoom call, D.C. climate groups, along with a wide swath of senior staffers from major progressive organizations, huddled with White House officials for the unveiling of that very same bipartisan infrastructure deal. Progressive groups meet with the White House every other Thursday; this was a special Friday session. Among the groups in attendance was Real Recovery Now!, a progressive coalition spearheaded by veteran progressive strategist Sasha Bruce and former MoveOn executive director Ilya Sheyman, highlighted in Politico in March as the primary entity that would “keep pressure” on Joe Biden to deliver the most ambitious possible infrastructure package. The alliance, with members from Center for American Progress Action Fund, the Service Employees International Union, MoveOn, the National Domestic Workers Alliance/Care in Action, Community Change Action, and the Working Families Party, has articulated four top priorities on jobs, climate, care, and immigration.
In rare moments and on fairly niche issues, progressive groups have called out Biden publicly, and it’s worked.
Across those paramount concerns, Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure proposal left out the entirety of the care proposal, offered nothing on immigration, and featured startlingly little on climate; a reconciliation bill was still almost two months out. And yet the reception featured no four-letter words and no accusations of cowardice. According to sources who were in the meeting, Sheyman was particularly obliging, raising his hand to personally congratulate the administration on the deal.
“This is the meeting for progressives and progressive advocacy organizations,” said one adviser close to the White House. “The bill doesn’t include a single one of his priorities, and yet the tone is incredibly civil, nobody is even saber-rattling.” Biden, meanwhile, was soon pledging not to veto the bipartisan package if it came to his desk without a reconciliation bill full of other Democratic climate priorities, threatening the absence of major environmental spending to come.
Criticism has been in surprisingly short supply during Biden’s first six months, from a left flank that’s been somewhere between docile and unctuous. D.C. progressive groups have lavished praise on Joe Biden as the next FDR, and when he’s indulged some un-FDR-like tendencies, they’ve continued lavishing. “The idea of Joe Biden being FDR 2.0 was just a message point without a body of work to back it up,” Murshed Zaheed, progressive political consultant and former political director of CREDO, told me. “They just desperately needed the folks who were fired up.”
The result has been a progressive flank that has been defanged in Bidenworld, unwilling to make public criticisms even as much of the legislative agenda has slipped away. Already, gun control, judicial reform, student debt relief, and much of health care and immigration reform have fallen by the wayside. Policing and criminal justice reform has bogged down in seemingly endless bipartisan negotiations, with Biden pushing no deadlines for action. Democrats have split on drug pricing, with moderates on the Hill chasing modest tweaks and progressives trying to go big to save hundreds of billions for additional fiscal spending. Tax reform, despite making it into the reconciliation bill, remains on the ropes. There’s no real plan to pass meaningful voting rights protection, which Biden admitted preemptive defeat on in a July speech. The PRO Act and some small percentage of immigration, like the $15 minimum wage before it, will be decided by the whims of the Senate parliamentarian. The president himself is one of the stronger remaining defenders of the filibuster. Yet the self-censorship and happy talk endure.
A DISEMPOWERED PROGRESSIVE FLANK during a Democratic administration is not a new phenomenon. One need look no further than President Biden’s former boss, President Obama, for precedent. Obama’s strategy to gag progressives relied on the asperity of his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, in a program former blogger Jane Hamsher once coined “the veal pen.” In a series of weekly meetings between progressive groups and administration officials called “Common Purpose,” Obama adviser Erik Smith, the White House comms team, and sometimes even Emanuel himself would impress upon progressive groups their duty not to criticize the White House’s priorities—on the bank bailouts, on health care—in the name of message discipline. This kept those groups in the veal pen, at risk of a cattle prod if they ventured out.
Occasionally, Emanuel would unleash his personal fury toward anyone even thinking of criticizing the Obama administration’s thoroughly unprogressive agenda, even though it directly contravened their own priorities. In one such meeting, Emanuel infamously called MoveOn “fucking retarded” for running radio ads against moderate Blue Dog Democrats who successfully downed progressive priorities in the health care package. Groups had to “earn their seat at that particular table by not bucking the White House,” as Hamsher wrote in 2009. Silence was the cost of access, and for at least a term and a half, it worked.
Progressives’ diminished standing in the Biden White House looks much different. While Emanuel would kill progressives with threats, Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, has killed progressives with kindness, with even more access and personal discussions. For veteran D.C. progressives, that has made for more amity, but an unwillingness to criticize Klain, a perceived ally. “Everyone talks about how it’s so much better than before, how they have way more access under Biden,” said one White House adviser.
ABACA PRESS/SIPA USA VIA AP
White House chief of staff Ron Klain, a perceived ally of the left, has been effective in keeping progressive criticism of the president to a minimum.
While leaders of progressive D.C. groups have found themselves at the table at various engagements, events, shared press stunts, dinners with the vice president and at the White House, with a warmer reception than they ever got under Obama, it has not gotten their hands on the reins of the Biden agenda as it veers off course from its campaign-trail commitments. That, combined with the inchoate nature of calling out a president who just weeks ago was hailed as their vision of the next FDR, has translated into a kind of self-censorship. Groups have become unwilling to pressure the president, and subsequently unable to wield power.
As Bidenworld whittled away at the family care components of the package, not a single major women’s rights group rallied its members in support of the critical issues of universal pre-K, home health care, and child care, or put out a call saying that they would not support a bill in which these elements were left out. When Bidenworld left the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights out of the American Families Plan, the National Domestic Workers Alliance instead cheered the domestic work parts of the proposal that did get in. Those pieces vanished from the bipartisan framework; some reappear in the detail-scant reconciliation bill despite very little public pressure exerted on the White House from the biggest groups that support it. In mid-July, care advocates announced a four-day interactive art exhibit on Capitol Hill, with an “art installation of miniature homes representing symbolic communities of care squads around the country,” and 3,000 care workers in attendance. It’s unclear whether tiny-home villages will make the care provisions sacred in the president’s eyes during negotiations.
Even as Biden has refused to lift a finger for H.R. 1, the voting rights bill that was a top priority of Public Citizen, the group has refused to strongly criticize him. Ditto MoveOn, which continues to blame “GOP obstruction,” despite Republicans being in the minority. No major progressive group has drawn a hard line on any legislative priority or whipped its members to call the White House in support. The result, of course, is that roughly one-quarter of the American Jobs Plan and all of the American Families Plan now reside in an uncertain limbo, waiting to reappear in a reconciliation package. “There’s no strategy on everything else,” said Zaheed.
In rare moments and on fairly niche issues, progressive groups have called out Biden publicly, and it’s worked. When news leaked that the president had chosen to go back on a campaign promise and would not raise the refugee limit from its Trump-era lows of 15,000 people per year, there was broad outcry from progressive and humanitarian groups. Biden quickly reversed course.
Still, fearful to cross Biden, progressive strategy has been reduced to training frustrations on Joe Manchin, who, critically, does not care what D.C. progressives say about him. And Manchin is likely soaking up enmity on behalf of a number of Democratic senators who are similarly opposed to more progressive ambitions, including Kyrsten Sinema, Jeanne Shaheen, Mark Warner, Maggie Hassan, and, most importantly, Chris Coons, who is seen as Biden’s right hand.
While outside groups have been disarmed, progressives in Congress have found it increasingly difficult to steer the agenda from inside. During negotiations of the American Rescue Plan, the only major legislation Biden has passed so far, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest and most organized sector of the party’s progressive wing, got functionally shut out of the $2 trillion package, with its top priority on raising the minimum wage left behind. Still, the entire CPC voted for the package despite having the votes to hold it up, just as they did (save for AOC) during a moment of leverage a year prior, as the stock market cratered ahead of the CARES Act. Indeed, the CPC has pointed to the size of the ARP package, more than any particular provision within it, as its biggest win.
Some progressive solace has been found in a series of Biden’s executive actions, like returning to the Paris climate agreement, raising the minimum wage for nearly 400,000 federal contract workers, and most recently issuing an executive order on combating monopoly power. Even there, though, Biden has taken a middle ground and avoided the most expansive executive actions, like canceling student debt or revoking pharmaceutical patents to lower drug prices.
There was some expectation that progressives would get at least some of their agenda enacted on the next legislative go-around. That has not yet happened, even though the $3.5 trillion package remains an encouraging figure for progressives. But there’s no more certainty with that aspect than there was in the spring when the bills were introduced, and three months have ticked away. As the agenda wanes, critical time runs off the clock ahead of the 2022 elections, which thanks to redistricting, will almost certainly result in Republicans retaking the House. The Senate is in play as well.
The early days of the Biden era were hailed as a win for progressives, who placed non-antagonistic staffers within the higher ranks of the administration. But those same people have ably brought progressives into the fold and preempted their criticisms, offering access instead of influence. In many cases where progressives won the battle of personnel, they’re losing the war of legislation.
