The energy in the 2020 Democratic campaign has been coming from the left. Candidates are pushing Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, a wealth tax and other ideas that are more progressive than anything a recent Democratic nominee has favored.
Much of this shift – which has been focused on economic policy – is smart. Republicans may cry socialism, and affluent centrists may not love it. But the American public leans decidedly left on economics. A clear majority favors higher taxes on the rich, a higher minimum wage and expanded government health insurance. After four decades of slow-growing living standards, people want change.
And yet there are also risks in the Democrats’ move to the left – risks that the sillier criticisms of the party’s new progressivism sometimes obscure.
So far, the 2020 candidates have mostly been competing with one another to see who can come off as the most boldly and purely liberal. Bernie Sanders talks about completing his revolution. Kamala Harris has spoken about the joy that marijuana brings. Sanders, Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand have all talked about eliminating private health insurance. And so on.
Ideological purity doesn’t tend to play well in general elections, however. Every modern president has found ways to appeal to Americans’ fondness for consensus – even if that fondness is based partly on a naive view of politics and even if the candidates’ appeals have sometimes been more stylistic than substantive.