Yes, Progressives Are Annoying. But That’s Exactly Our Point.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a champion of the progressive wing, is often credited as moving the party Democratic Party left with his at times lofty calls for change. Photo by Gage Skidmore.
Almost a decade ago, progressives launched the so-called “Fight for $15,” a sprawling national movement to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15. They argued, correctly, that the benefits of such a wage hike would go far beyond a few more bucks in workers’ pockets—including sweeping reductions in worker depression levels, sleep deprivation, teenage pregnancy, and chronic stress. Even still, moderate liberal Democrats proved unwilling to commit to progressives’ ask, offering up a lukewarm counterproposal of $10.10 per hour. While a sign of progress, this figure wasn’t even halfway between the old and proposed minimum wages.
So, progressive activists kept pushing. Unions organized strikes. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont led his conversation-shifting crusade for the presidency. And today, after years and years of activism, the Democratic Party establishment has finally come on board, with President Joe Biden vowing to push for a $15 minimum wage in Congress.
$15 per hour, however, is no longer good enough for many progressive activists. The cycle has started all over again. “It should be $25 today,” said Briahna Joy Gray, former National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. Representative Cori Bush, a firebrand progressive of Missouri’s 1st congressional district, added, “We need to pass the $15 minimum wage immediately. Then we need to get right back to work to raise it to an actual livable wage.”
In all of this, a clear trend emerges: Progressives set a goalpost, wait until the party establishment sluggishly follows along, and then move the goalpost to a new, bolder standard. Ever so slowly, much of the radical becomes mainstream.
It’s the same phenomenon that marked President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s introduction of social security in the mid-1930s. For a nation on the heels of a Great Depression and three consecutive conservative presidents, the notion of a broad, pay-it-forward social safety net wasn’t an easy sell. But over time, Roosevelt made his “sound ideal”—one pulled straight from the European economic playbook—into the overwhelmingly popular policy it is today, appealing directly to Congress and the American people through formal presidential addresses and fireside chats. Indeed, in a sign of the policy’s full integration into the political mainstream, many political scientists now consider social security America’s political “third rail,” denoting a political issue so “untouchable” that even its staunchest ideological opponents are afraid to nakedly criticize.
Once again, as they did on the $15 minimum wage, progressives are leaping to move the goalposts on social security—pushing not just for its preservation, but wholesale expansion. Maggie Astor of the New York Times notes that the “shift towards progressive economics is clear and quantifiable” on the issue of social security. In 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders’s (D-VT) proposal to expand social security had exactly zero co-sponsors. But by 2017, sixteen senators—sixteen of our nation’s elder statespeople—had locked arms with Senator Sanders to co-sponsor the bill. Here, again, it was progressives’ aversion to complacency (along with a healthy dose of Sanderian hand-waving) that moved the radical into the mainstream.
And if progressives’ “never enough” approach to politics annoys you, it should. As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us in his Letter From Birmingham Jail, change never comes about in the “absence of tension;” it demands “a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” So it is with the modern progressive movement, whose tendency to annoy is not a fluke but rather the entire point.
More often than not, history vindicates annoying progressives. Progressives were right, for example, to call for greater oversight of the meatpacking industry at the turn of the twentieth century. They were right in 2012 to push for a $15 minimum wage. And today—although many moderate liberals may not see it yet—they are right to advocate for, say, a single-payer healthcare system, something every other industrialized nation in the world has recognized as a given.
Yet despite the critical role progressives play in left-wing politics, moderate liberals often treat them as the children in the room, rather than as good-faith actors working to meet the moment. Former President Obama captures this liberal annoyance with progressives well in his recent memoir, A Promised Land. He recalls an episode from his time at Columbia in which “some smug bastard”—a progressive, no doubt—“dropped a newspaper in front of me, its headlines trumpeting the U.S. invasion of Grenada or cuts in the school lunch program or some other disheartening news.” Was this “smug bastard” not fundamentally right, though, to criticize an invasion that the United Nations General Assembly itself called “a flagrant violation of international law”? Was he not fundamentally right to lament “cuts in the school lunch program”? Like many moderate liberals, President Obama seems more bothered by the often sanctimonious tone of progressives than by the bitter truth behind their claims.
It’s hard to imagine how the “smug bastard” could have broached the issue of cuts in the school lunch program without implying that Mr. Obama wasn’t paying enough attention to hungry schoolchildren. Sanctimony, or the perception thereof, is inherent to any exchange in which one person tells another they’re not doing enough to help a certain class of people. And if that’s what it takes for progressivism to win the day, so be it. Ambition—smug, crisis-inducing ambition—is how we will come to meet this moment, not tepid pragmatism.
The dynamics at play here might be best imagined in the context of a giant steamboat representing the Democratic Party. Aboard the USS Democrats, progressives are the loud, creaky engine, propelling the ship forward to the Land of Tomorrow. Technocratic liberals, like former President Obama, are the proud captains of the ship, their course set for the Island of Complacency. The engine might be loud, creaky, and defiant, but it’s getting us from Point A to Point B, from $15 to $25, from a small to adequate social safety net—and that’s something worth getting on board with.
Tim Vanable is a first-year at Columbia College studying American Studies. A jazz guitarist from Syracuse, NY, he is pursuing a Special Concentration in Jazz Studies and loves to talk politics.