What is Revolutionary About the American Left?

What is revolutionary about the Democratic left? Its supporters love to claim that they are a revolutionary “movement” that is about much more than electing Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren as president, and Sanders himself sometimes claims that his election would be a revolution. What does this mean? What is revolutionary about the Democratic left? What is it that excites its members? One thing is certain: the policy proposals of the Democratic left are not revolutionary. They are incremental changes to the status quo.

Unrevolutionary Proposals

The left’s policy proposals amount to a restoration of normal American politics and policy.  To see just how unrevolutionary the left’s ideas are, let us review a few of the proposals from the campaign web site of Bernie Sanders, the darling of the left.

Medicare for All

One signature issue of Sanders’s campaign is Medicare for All. He would expand Medicare to cover everyone in the United States.  This is hardly revolutionary. It is an expansion of an existing program, and the reasons for the expansion are the same as the reasons for the initial creation of Medicare.

Medicare was established in 1965 because it had become almost impossible for old people[i] to get health insurance.  Old people were starving or eating cat food because they could not pay their medical bills. So, we established Medicare, and it has become the most successful anti-poverty program in our history. Today, again, the cost of health care is driving millions of Americans into poverty.  Health emergencies are the most common cause of personal bankruptcy in our country, and every day, more of our people cannot afford adequate health insurance.  To solve this problem, Sanders proposes that we expand a very successful program to cover more people. That is not revolutionary. On the contrary, it is precisely the sort of pragmatic, incremental change that has always characterized American politics at its best.

Free College

Another signature issue in Sanders’ campaign is free post-secondary education at public colleges and universities. This is completely unrevolutionary. In fact, we used to have it, but under prodding from the Radical Right’s anti-tax crusaders, we gave it up. When I attended the University of California in 1958, the tuition was free, and the fees were $140 per semester. State universities in other states were just as inexpensive.  That was also the period of the GI Bill under which military veterans could have even these modest expenses paid by the federal government.

In the years since, radical rightist anti-tax crusaders have persuaded us gradually to reduce the states’ support for higher education and shifted the burden more and more onto the students. We have gone so far in that direction that Sanders’s proposal now seems revolutionary to some people, but it is not. It is merely a restoration of the normal, American way to pay for the higher education of our people.

Green New Deal

Sanders has adopted the idea of a Green New Deal from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  Under this rubric, he proposes large investments in green energy projects that would reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and help to save our planet from global warming. At the same time, in theory, the projects would create millions of good jobs.

The Green New Deal sounds revolutionary, but in fact, it continues our long-standing policy of promoting the development of energy sources.  We have always believed that adequate supplies of energy were crucial to the development of our economy, and the Green New Deal merely redirects our energy policy toward promoting new energy sources that fit our country’s current needs in a time when the use of fossil fuels is endangering our country and its economy.

Today, we spend enormous amounts subsidizing the fossil fuel industries, as we have for many years. The Green New Deal proposes that we continue to subsidize energy production but that in doing so, we should focus our subsidies on green energy rather than fossil fuels. Today, the climate crisis has given rise to new needs, and we must shift our policies to meet them. Again, that is not revolutionary. It is precisely the sort of pragmatic, incremental change that has always made our country successful.

Why Are Moderate Proposals Seen as Revolutionary?

Why are proposals that are clearly in the main stream of American politics seen as revolutionary departures? One reason is that we on the political left like to describe our proposals that way. We like to think of ourselves as saving the world rather than merely making modest changes in our current policies. So, we describe what we are doing in revolutionary terms. Moreover, it is hard to mobilize millions of young people to work for a political campaign with the goal of tweaking the status quo. So, we call ourselves a revolution even when we aren’t really one.  We exaggerate as Bob Dylan did in the 1960s.

The political right also exaggerates the radicalness of leftist proposals, but they exaggerate in order to frighten people away from supporting such proposals. Ronald Reagan did that when he spoke of “socialized medicine” in his campaign against Medicare in the 1960s, and Pres. Trump used the same kind of language in his State of the Union speech on Feb. 4, 2020. Thus, both the left and the right tend to paint the left’s policy prescriptions as more radical than they really are. For the right, they are changes to be avoided at all costs, and for the left, they are changes that we must fight for if we are to have a better society.

However, there is a deeper reason why things like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal are seen as revolutionary when they are not. Since the 1970s, the Radical Right[ii] has shifted American political discourse so far to the right that policies that would once have been seen as main stream policies now seem to belong to the radical left. Radical rightists have promoted the idea that government is never the solution. Government is the problem, and the solution is to shrink government as far as possible and to rid ourselves of the idea that the agencies of government can ever produce results that are superior to those produced by the free market. We can see these ideas in the current administration’s opposition to environmental regulations, in its preference for private school vouchers over public schools, and in its opposition to Medicare for All.

The idea of shrinking government is of course very popular with the extremely wealthy because it can be used to justify reducing the taxes that wealthy people must pay and to increase the profits from their businesses. For that reason, the wealthy have been generous in supporting rightist think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, political actions groups like ALEC or the Freedom Caucus, and politicians like our current president. The money that has been spent on such groups has allowed them to issue a torrent of propaganda that has driven American political discourse to the right, and as a result, moderate ideas now seem radical, and American politics is dominated by the interests of the extremely wealthy who make up our ruling class and who fight to prevent the adoption of policies to solve the pressing problems of our time. The extremely wealthy fight against such policies because they will require an increased role for our government, and that means higher taxes on the members of the ruling class.

What is Revolutionary about the Democratic Left?

This brings us to the heart of our question: what is revolutionary about the American left? The answer is that the American left wants to alter the balance of power in our country to limit the power of the ruling class. The left understands that the domination of our politics by a wealthy elite is preventing us from solving our society’s acutest problems. We could have a decent health care system, but we don’t. We could reduce our dependence on fossils fuels, but we don’t. We could improve our educational system, but we don’t. We don’t do any of these things because our political system is paralyzed by the wealthy elite that governs in the name of keeping taxes low so that rich people can keep their money. The Democratic left wants to change the balance of power in this country that is preventing us from solving our most pressing problems.

The conflict between the monied elite and the rest of us is a perennial one in American history. The Jacksonian Democrats, the Populists of the 1890’s, the Progressive movement of the early 20^th century and the New Deal of the 1930’s all made claims similar to those of the contemporary Democratic Left, and the conflict has swung back and forth. The 1920s saw an increase in the power of the ruling class until the Great Depression brought on the New Deal. Ruling class opposition to the New Deal brought on the election of Ronald Reagan and the rightist era we are now living in. Perhaps, the current election will see a swing back to the left.

We can think of this struggle as our ongoing attempt to fulfill the ideals of the American Revolution. Our Founding Fathers declared that we were all created equal and that we were endowed with inalienable rights, but the republic they founded was never a full expression of those ideals. it included slavery; it subordinated women; it often excluded anyone who was not white.

Among our people there have always been those who saw how imperfectly our ideals were realized. The abolitionists insisted that slavery was wrong; the women’s movement insisted that women, too, were people with inalienable rights; black people today insist that black lives matter; many people today insist that healthcare is an inalienable right.  Through the struggles of these groups, we have gradually and haltingly moved closer to realizing the ideals of our founders, and the struggle of today’s Democratic Left is the latest incarnation of the movement toward realizing our ideals. The struggle of the Democratic left is a continuation of the American Revolution.

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[i] I am old, and I hate euphemisms like “seniors” or “elderly.”

[ii] I use the term “radical right” rather than “conservative” advisedly.