Progressivism, Left Populism, Democratic Socialism and Social Liberalism: Teasing Out the Ideological Debate in the Democratic Party

 

Those of you who’ve followed me for a while know that my ruminations began with an interrogation of traditionalism and progressivism as the two grand traditions on the right and left that manifest two distinct orientations toward American national identity.

There is a lot of attention in the media currently to the battle within the Democratic Party between its establishment and more far left forces. Let me start by acknowledging that I deploy progressivism differently than the way it is used in today’s popular parlance. My writing defines progressivism as all the political forces to the left of the center in American politics who generally see a positive role for government in supporting the life-chances of most citizens. My definition of progressive nationalism includes social liberals closer to the ideological center and populist further to the left. In contrast, popular discourse today uses the term progressive to describe what I call left populism. So, for me Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and AOC are all members of the progressive American nation. Biden and Obama are social liberals. Bernie and AOC are populists (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Progressive American Nationalism

                      Left populism                                                               Social liberalism

              Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez                                                         Biden, Obama

Democratic socialism has forced its way into the American political lexicon via the successes of Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and most recently Zohran Mamdani and the wave of Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) candidates in this season’s Democratic primaries. I stated in my post of November 26 last fall that “socialism broadly is belief in any set of policies that tax or regulate the private sector of the economy in the name of collective well-being.” Democratic socialists in the US generally adhere to a public policy agenda much like the social democratic parties of Western Europe which are mainstream parties there.

In my academic work and earlier posts here I have discussed two dynamics. One is the overlap between social liberalism and democratic socialism policy preferences. The other is the way that left populism has exerted pressure on social liberalism in the time of economic crisis since the Great Recession 0f 2008. Like all populists, those on the left herald the plight of the common people against the insensitive institutional structures of big government and big business.

Left populism and democratic socialism both pressure the socially liberal Democratic Party establishment from the left, but they are not the same; and although there is overlap, their supporters aren’t exactly the same group of people.  The comparison between Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren serves to clarify this point. Let us recall that the populist left coming out of the Occupy Movement wanted Warren to run for president in 2016 following her leadership in the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. When she declined because she wished to build her power in the Senate she had just been elected to, the populist left moved to encourage Sanders to run.

I would categorize Warren as a social liberal. A former business law professor, Warren is no socialist. Her project is not to dismantle capitalism, but to make it work better for middle and working-class Americans.[1]  In contrast, Sanders is the elder statesman of contemporary democratic socialism. They have operated separately, but their paths have crisscrossed as they both endorsed populist-oriented candidates willing to fight more aggressively for the common folks in this continuing economic crisis.

Like Sanders, Warren endorsed Mamdani in his mayoral run in 2025. And after supporting Mallory McMorrow in the heated Michigan Senate primary, she quickly shifted to Abdul El-Sayed when he won. The two also endorsed Peggy Flanagan who just resoundingly won the Minnesota Senate primary. El-Sayed and Flanagan are both populists, but they are not democratic socialists. Yet they share many of the same policy goals as democratic socialists and were endorsed by them.

In Wisconsin, despite being a democratic socialist gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong did not receive endorsements from Bernie Sanders or AOC. Comments she made about canceling Thanksgiving years ago haunted her and probably helped to make her unelectable. Hence, the two DSA leaders stayed away from her. Were they acting more like social liberals in that case?

These examples demonstrate how the goals of social liberals and democratic socialists can blur in a time of economic crisis and push social liberals to the populist left. They also show how some democratic socialists can become more pragmatic in such times and compromise with social liberals to get things done.

In fact, we already have evidence that exactly that kind of coalescence can work in practice. It happened during the battle between the two factions to pass the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. The law “included lowers prescription drug costs, health care costs, and energy costs and unprecedented action on climate change.” [2] There were already 100 Democrats in the Progressive Caucus then and they coalesced with the social liberals to pass the legislation.  So they/we know how to do this!

Social liberals and democratic socialist broadly want many of the same things. They want to make the cost of living in the 21^st century more “affordable” for the common people. And they both view the trashing of our political and other societal institutions by Trumpism with contempt. They must work together no matter who wins in these bruising primaries to defeat the greater enemy represented by Trump MAGA. To the extent that they can come together around gasolene, groceries, housing, health care and education policies they would be acceding to left populist pressures coming from the Democratic Party base. They would also be representing the progressive American nation that I’m theorizing about (see Figure 2).

Still, differences between these two factions within the Democratic Party remain. Social liberals embrace capitalism for its economic openness and unparallelled wealth creation; and they seek to humanize capitalism via redistributive policy outputs. In contrast, democratic socialists emphasize the downsides of capitalism like economic polarization, its tendency toward monopoly and its degradation of the planet.

Democratic socialists tend to view issues like the border, the Gaza war and even the Black Lives Matter Movement through the lens of “racial imperialist capitalism.”[3] They see the border as the ongoing instability created by the Mexican War of the 1840s. Many would ask why there isn’t free movement across North America since NAFTA like there is in the European Union.

“Defunding the police” and “abolishing prisons” are ardently desired by the most passionate democratic socialists.. But it stems from an analysis that sees the Black ghetto as a racialized enclave in a White settler colonial system not unlike Indian reservations here and the “bantustaans” of apartheid South Africa.[4]  For many seasoned leftists shouting “defund the police” is simply a way to kick start a conversation over how to offer education and economic opportunity and addiction and mental health services to ghettos, barrios and reservations (and the White working class too!).

Democratic socialists would also point out that Israel also is a White settler colony. They see everything that’s happened since its formation in 1948 from that perspective. They then question why in this time of economic hardship the US is sending billions of dollars to bankroll the continuing dispossession of Palestinians but doing comparatively little to uplift common folks here at home.

The border is a tricky issue. Until this year polls show that most Americans favored deportation of undocumented immigrants and tighter border restrictions. But the ICE crackdowns in major cities culminating with the killing of two White protesters in the Twin Cities over the winter shifted public opinion on the deportation issue. Many White people are nervous about the browning of America, but the economy is dependent on LatinX labor in fields like agriculture, health care and construction. Trump’s heavy-handed approach here may have made more Americans come to the realization that we can’t live without these “foreigners” in our midst.

Social liberals don’t share a world-view blaming capitalism as a system for all these ills. But in many places police and criminal justice reform is occurring since the murder of George Floyd. And more and more Americans are questioning America’s blind support for Israel.[5]. And a populist left coalition with capitalist running critical industries dependent on immigrant labor is foreseeable in the near future.[5]  

That sets up the debate that is already happening between the factions of the party. I’ve said before that to retain the middle and working-class base the party will be pushed to the left on these issues. The party establishment doesn’t have to accept the democratic socialist world-view wholesale; nor do they have to call themselves populists. But they do have to ally with those in Congress and in society at large who are moved by the left populist message like they did when they coalesced to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. I have a dream where I see Chuck Shumer and Hakeem Jeffries hand in hand with Bernie Sanders and AOC declaring from the podium of Democratic Party convention that “we are all progressives now!

 

Figure 2.

Left populism à social liberalism to move left to retain its base à united progressive Democratic

                                                                                                                                        

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[1] Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act: A push for corporate accountability and worker rights | NationofChange

[2] https://damanipolitics.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-logic-of-populism-left-wing.html

 

[3] For the argument that the capitalism is systemically racist see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 3^rd edition. Chapel Hill North Carolina: Press, Introduction.

[4] Bantustaans were reservations that indigenous Black South Africans were forced onto beginning in the 1840s.

 

[5]  Trump Immigration Approval Is Falling. Is The 2024 Mandate Changing?

Beth Macy’s Paper Girl as a Counterpoise to Hillbilly Elegy

 

The publication of Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance in 2016 was hailed for its inside look at the life of working-class White Americans from the rust belt. His parents moved from Appalachian Eastern Kentucky to Middletown Ohio in the southwestern quadrant of that state. I grew up in Cincinnati, the major city of the region thirty miles south of Middletown and on the banks of the Ohio River which was the Mason-Dixon Line dividing North from South and free states from former slaveholding states.

 Vance’s story became interesting to me when, based on the popularity of his book and financial support from Silicon Valley tech mogul Peter Thiel, he came out of nowhere to win an Ohio US Senate seat in 2022. He obviously was acclaimed in conservative circles when they drafted him to run for the Senate. But Hillbilly Elegy also aroused considerable interest on the left as Democrats sought to understand White working-class voters who had trickled away from them since the 1960s.

 

Today I want to call your attention to another book written about the White working class in rust-belt Southwestern Ohio: Paper Girl by Beth Macy. Hillbilly Elegy was noted for ‘its raw, emotional portrait of growing up in and eventually out of a poor community riddled by drug addiction and instability.’[1] Unfortunately it fell into the long tradition of ‘blaming the victims’ who are products of an alleged ‘culture of poverty.’

 

Beth Macy grew up in Urbana Ohio less than 50 miles from Middletown where the landscape turns from rolling hills into the Midwestern prairie. Its inhabitants include some from Appalachia but many who have been there for generations. The cities do share the characteristics of places left behind by de-industrialization. Both were one company-dominated towns. A city of around 50,000 population, Middletown was the home of Armco Steel, a company that held its own into the 1960s. Urbana never had more than 15,000 people, but it was home to Grimes Manufacturing whose founder invented the airplane navigational systems still used today.

 

Both towns were severely affected by the flight of capital and automation that are characteristic of capitalism in the industrialized Global North since the fall of communism. Macy reported that by 2015 Grimes employed about one-third of the workforce that it had in 1970s. Middletown is only about 30 miles from where I grew up. On visits back home I had heard of the decline of Armco as part of the regional gloom and doom stories. I heard that Armco was bought out and had completely shut down its operations in Middletown sometime before the turn of the century.[2]

 

But the explanations that Vance and Macy offer about the sources of the problems of the White working class could not be more divergent. Vance tells a story of strong support from his grandparents that helps him to overcome his mother’s drug addiction in an environment of poverty and personal tragedy. His grandparents pushed young J.D. to get an education and pull himself up by his bootstraps. He blames Hillbilly culture for the hardship he sees around him. In doing so takes the side in policy debates of the those who argue that it’s a ‘culture of poverty’ and bad individual decisions that cause the poor to remain poor.

 

In Paper Girl Beth Macy takes the opposing side in that debate. As she tells her own story of an alcoholic father who was on and off the sauce and in and out of work. She anchors her success story on a mother who was there for her, public schools that still functioned reasonably well and the Pell Grant that paid for her college education. Macy taps a rich vein in policy debates that argue that poverty arises from the structural constraints of the de-industrializing economy.

 

Without becoming too wonky Macy chronicles the incapacity of local government to address the social problems produced by loss of manufacturing jobs and the tax base to support public services. She is especially concerned about the diminished support for education at all levels. She would not have been able to go to college without the Pell Grant she received. Those grants still exist, but grantees were demonized as ‘welfare recipients’ by Republicans in the 90s and vastly reduced the program from the early 80s when Macy received one.[3] 

 

Another big difference between Vance and Macy’s sagas is the question of race. Vance largely elides race, because his concern is with his peeps, the Hillbillies, or the ‘White’ working class. Vance talks about how the White working class turned to Richard Nixon in the 1960s because they resented people seeing people on welfare while they worked hard every day.[4] We know that the resentment about welfare occurred in a period when Black people were clamoring for civil rights and social services in the 1960s. The Black ‘welfare queen’ cheating the system at taxpayers’ expense became the posters child for conservatives wishing to slash government spending.

 

In defense of Vance some critics have pointed out that his hardworking White folks resented all people that they perceived to be welfare cheaters. But Nixon also built his 1968 campaign on law and order, which had two targets: the urban Black rebellions of the day, and the anti-Vietnam War movement. He rode to victory on those issues. And anti-Blackness was central to the defection of Whites of all classes from the Democratic Party.

 

The serious move to cut government spending, though always a Republican position, would not emerge more saliently until later paving the way for Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy. Vance doesn’t take a deep dive into the roiling political climate of that day or the role that race played in it, because that’s not the story he’s interested in telling.  All of the cities and towns of any size in southwestern Ohio have Black communities. Middletown and Urbana are no different. And though residential segregation could keep the races apart to some extent, at least by high school kids were in the same buildings. Urbana is small enough that neighborhoods were racially integrated.

 

 

The region has a rich history regarding race: both uplifting and tragic. Cincinnati is the economic metropole of the region. In the early 19^th century anti-Black rebellions occurred on three occasions. The 1829 uprising resulted in over 1,000 Black people being run out of town by White vigilantes. In 1841 racist Whites obtained a cannon and fired on the Black settlement along the Ohio River killing several people. But there was also a significant abolitionist movement in the city and the areas up and down the river around it were also ports of call for slaves striving to be free.[5]

 

Escaped slaves usually ventured farther north to get as far as they could away from ‘slavecatchers. The Underground Railroad featuring outposts all the way into Canada are all over the state of Ohio. Urbana is one such community. Macy shares how the town’s pro-slavery  residents lamented that it was a ‘black abolition hole.’[6]

 

Macy spent a lot of time in Urbana a few years ago when her mother’s health was declining. Her 40^th high school reunion occurred during that time. She was alternately astonished and depressed at how conservative most of her old friends were, and how they could laud Donald Trump, but then wrench and wring their hands when his racism was pointed out.

 

Black people are present in Macy’s Urbana. Pam Bullard, her first Black teacher in second grade stopped class when she heard a student mutter the ‘n’ word. She wrote it on the board in capital letters and held an impromptu lesson on it. She left an indelible impression, apparently wasn’t reported, and thus was able to keep her job.

 

Her high school classmate, Mark Evans, after many years was able to get an Underground Railroad historical marker placed in the city in 2013. As the class reunion approached Evans fell out with classmate Dave Curnutte. An avid Trump supporter, Curnutte had posted pro-Trump memes on the class of ’82 Facebook page. Evans responded that Curnutte was a racist, setting off viral exchanges that almost derailed the reunion. The two were able to reconcile over drinks with a group of classmates, but Curnutte remained puzzled. He told Macy he couldn’t ‘understand why Evans remained so obsessed with racism.’ He ‘miss(ed) the old friend Mark.’[7]

 

There are several other vignettes that demonstrate the ways in which White and Black people can live alongside one another yet reside ‘psychologically’ in different worlds. Urbana in this regard is a microcosm of an entire country in which most White people don’t want to have hard conversations about race.

 

But the need to have meaningful conversations go beyond race. Macy ends the book relating an interview she had with David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s chief consultant for his campaigns and presidency. Macy was lamenting about the low percentages of poor people who vote. Axelrod observed that people don’t vote because they don’t see that the system works for them. He asked ...

 

            How do we reestablish a dialogue with people about what’s going on in their lives that

 is respectful and from which policymakers can learn, but also that we as Americans learn

 about each other not as menacing people but as our neighbors?[8]

 

What a message to leave with readers! But Macy chooses to end the book by blaming only Donald Trump for duping the American people. After masterfully illustrating the impact of neoliberal policies supported by both parties since the 1990s, she could have indicted the entire political establishment.

 

Still, many who read Paper Girl will come to their own conclusions. If they are among those frustrated by the status quo they have two choices.  They can become the fodder for those on the right who continue to tap into America's rich vein of racism to blame POC for White folk’s problems. Or, they might look to democratic socialists who understand that reforming capitalism as we now know it is the way to improve the lives of most of us.

 

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[1] Krause, Eleanor; Reeves, Richard V. (September 2017). "Rural Dreams: Upward Mobility in America's Countryside". Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution. pp. 12–13

[2] I didn’t have time to research the fate of Armco, but I’m sure that at the very least it’s a shell of the company it once was.

[3] Beth Macy, Paper Girl: A memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America. New York: Penguin Books, 2025, pp. 12, 82.

[4] J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 2016, P. 140

[5]  John Kiesewetter (July 15, 2001). "Civil unrest woven into city's history". The Cincinnati Enquirer.   William Cullen Bryant (1994). "The Cincinnati Mob: August 10, 1836". Power for sanity: selected editorials of William Cullen Bryant, 1829-1861. Fordham Univ Press. p. 49.  Andrew Robert Lee Clayton (2002). Ohio: the history of a people. Ohio State University Press. p. 26. Cincinnati is the home of the ,’Freedom Center,’ the National Undedrground Railroad Museum.

[6] Macy, p. 31.

[7] Ibid., p. 228

[8] ‘David Axelrod Interview,’ with Beth Macy, November 26, 2024.

The People Are Not Fighting Over Ideas

 

The People Are Not Fighting Over Ideas

The seismic shift within the Democratic Party to determine its political direction for the next generation has taken place. Zohran Mamdani, flush off of his mayoral victory in New York City, supported two democratic socialists and another left populist in the recent Democratic primaries in New York. All three of Mamdani’s favorites won, with one defeating the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Then last week another democratic socialist, reminiscent of Anastasia Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in 2018, beat a 15-term incumbent in the Colorado primaries. And in Michigan, a state where Democrats must hold a Senate seat held by a retiring incumbent, Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed a self-proclaimed ‘progressive’ in the Democratic primary against a moderate Democratic House of Representatives member.

The Democratic Party establishment is beside itself seeing these results. On Sean Hannity’s Fox  Network show Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman described the situation as the ‘dancing days of the dirt bag left’ and wondered why more Democrats in Congress aren’t calling out these ‘communists’ who have appropriated the Democratic brand. [1] Long-time Democratic strategist James Carville has gone as far as saying that Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is against interracial marriage and has allegedly said Israel doesn’t have a right to exist some years ago should not be allowed to caucus with Democrats if elected.[2]

Carville and Fetterman’s response to democratic socialist successes in the primaries are sad but predictable. On Fox Carville admitted socialism was a broad body of ideas and breezily alluded to Scandanavian socialism, but he never talked about the principles that are central to socialism that might make a socialist outlook plausible for voters. Fettermen called democratic socialists communists, a reach that anyone following my posts knows is grossly inaccurate.

‘Socialism broadly is belief in any set of policies that tax or regulate the private sector of the economy in the name of collective well-being.’ Unlike Soviet-styled state socialism democratic socialism retains the private sector of the economy, and taxes and regulates it ‘to pay for health care, education and other social services.’ [3]

Carville, Fetterman and the rest of the Democratic establishment are social liberals. They say they want the same things as democratic socialists: affordable gasolene, groceries and housing, access to quality health care and education, etc. But after a second more blatantly anti-democratic and inhumane Trump administration, democratic socialists and the rest of the populist left want more aggressive stances by Democratic candidates, and more robust policy once in power.

I want to make two points here that may seem at odds with one another, but illustrate the range of responses Democratic leadership can marshall toward a base that sits further to its left on the ideological spectrum.  First, it would be possible to define democratic socialism in ways that show that it’s not so different from mainstream (social) liberalism. In the context of the current political landscape, they both want ‘affordabilty,’ Democratic socialist may want more assertive policies that require more government intervention (and more taxes, ‘cause somebody’s gotta pay for it!), but socialists and liberals want the same outcomes.

But the democratic establishment doesn’t wish to have a full-throated public conversation about socialism, because they feel the mere acknowledgement of socialism would discredit the party in the public eye. But the Dems have to find it within themselves to embrace those voters, brash as they may be, who want the same things they want!

Establishment Democrats would do well to heed the advice of former President Barrack, already a venerable elder despite his relative youth (64 years old). In a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, Obama, talking about the challenge presented by Zohran Mamdani in New York, said Mamdani ‘just wants people to be able to afford housing in New York. Obama added that ‘he ‘assume(s) liberals want the same thing.’ What Obama is more concerned about with Democrats is ‘do you just know how to talk to regular people like you’re not in a college seminar?’[4]

Amilcar Cabral, the Cape Verdean revolutionary that you’ve seen me quote before was a Ph.D. agronomist steeped in theoretical Marxism when his party organized peasant communities to fight Portuguese colonialism. Yet Cabral in speeches before his party leadership cautioned them that ‘the people are not fighting for ideas, ... They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.[5]

When people band together in common cause, whether it be to fight ICE abductions of community members, protest racism in the criminal justice system, or food desserts in urban working-class communities, they may come from a variety of world views, or political understandings. For some it might be systemic racism, or the contradictions of capitalism. For others it could just be that certain people are being treated unfairly. Let them talk about what motivated them to act as they come together fighting for material benefits to craft a better future for themselves and their families.

Affordability is a useful term for capturing the crisis of our system that covers a host of issues in our everyday lives. The only isms that matter these days are a humanism which centers the satisfaction of human needs and pragmatism which hammers out practical policies that address those human needs. Everyone from mainstream liberals to democratic socialists, noblesse oblige conservatives and libertarians can contribute to these debates.[6] The community organizers Obama and Cabral understand this. Come on Democrats! What are y’all waiting for?

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[1] Fetterman, Sen. John Fetterman: Some of these candidates are outrageous | Fox News Video 

[2] Carville, James Carville says socialist Democrat shouldn't be in the party, calls her views 'a bridge too far'. I dug around before writing this, and all I can find on Chevalier’s views on Israel is that she calls Israel a settler colony who occupied its current territory and dispossessed the Palestinian people. She (I’m guessing) would argue that a people under occupation always have the right to fight to alleviate that condition; a position that I share. I would add (and maybe she would) that Hamas extremism might never have had the chance to flourish if the US had muscled Israel into the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 Six-Day War.

[3]‘MSNBC Distortion of Democratic socialism.’ https://drvernondamanijohnson.substack.com/p/msnbc-distortion-of-democratic-socialism

 

[4] Joseph A. Wulfsohn, ‘Obama, Colbert gush over Zohran Mamdani as they discuss Democratic Party's future.’ Fox News Channel, https://www.foxnews.com/media/obama-colbert-gush-over-zohran-mamdani-discuss-democratic-partys-future?msockid=38f4baaeba1965361d70b49cbbaa6496

 

[5] Amilcar Cabral, ‘Tell No Lies,! Claim No Easy Victories! Revolution in Guinea. Monthly Review Press, 1969, p. 86.

[6] ‘Noblesse oblige’ is French for the ‘obligation of the nobility’ in a medieval aristocracy. It has been used to describe modern conservative elites who prefer less government, but recognize the obligation of the wealthy to give back to those less privileged than themselves in the name of the public good.