Rahm Emanuel, the former Democratic mayor of Chicago, regrets in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that progressive Democrats’ “bad habit of disrespecting Clinton, Obama, and others who’ve gone before them” is a problem for the party. (Emanuel, who worked for both former presidents, also admits that he has a dog or two in the fight.)
I wouldn’t dare to try solving the Democrats’ intramural problems. Yet, it is becoming more evident that where progressive Democrats seek to dispense with insufficiently liberal Democratic legacies, it is because they suffer from an excessively presentist pathology, preventing them from seeing the value in, let alone compromising with, notions of the good entertained somewhere outside their own heads and times.
The consequences of this pathology are not limited to the Democratic Party, and that bodes poorly healthy governance from Washington.
In October, a forward-thinking Former President Barack Obama expressed his wish that liberal Democrats would, at a certain point during policy disputes, say, “All right. You know what? Let’s get this done, and then, let’s move on to fight another day.” But liberals are rejecting this paradigm, with all of its institutional precedent and compromise.
Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, and Ilhan Omar are demanding that the Senate ignore its parliamentarian’s ruling that a $15 minimum wage cannot be included in Democrats’ rescue package without violating the Senate’s Byrd Rule.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has come around, too. After expressing his disappointment in the parliamentarian’s ruling, Sanders committed to going another route on the minimum wage by taking tax deductions away from large corporations that don’t pay $15 per hour. Now that that effort has fallen apart, he has committed to forcing a vote on the minimum wage increase. “My own personal view is that the Senate should ignore the parliamentarian’s advice, which is wrong in a number of respects,” he said in a statement.
The liberal impulse, as demonstrated with particular clarity through the minimum wage debate, operates on a certain egoism and is fed by a persistent raising of the stakes. The progressive ego demands that the institution of its national prescriptions is just too important to respect precedent, or to respect legitimate policy differences, even from within the Democratic caucus.
“His own constituents believe in a $15 minimum wage,” Ocasio-Cortez said about Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who opposes overruling the parliamentarian. Surely, many West Virginians do believe in that, but a good many businesses in the Mountain State would have a hard time affording so steep an increase over what’s typically paid there. That’s why Manchin supports an increase to $11, although not by tearing up Senate precedent.
But liberal rigidity allows little room to discuss competing interests, and it diminishes local concerns (a $15 minimum wouldn’t be so consequential in California, where the state minimum already approaches that), all toward the end of achieving a large-scale ideological victory.
This rigidity discourages a respect for principles and procedural mechanisms, particularly in the Senate, which provide for the sharing of the responsibility of governance. That, in turn, makes for better governance. It also precludes bipartisan dealmaking, even where there are deals to be had, such as on a minimum wage increase. If liberals can’t give the Democratic Manchin’s $11 per hour idea a serious look, negotiation over a $10 per hour Republican proposal is never happening.
Emanuel isn’t wrong that Democrats have a liberal problem. The last year has born that out, though regrettably, it’s a problem whose effects reach far beyond Democratic Party walls.
