The Left has often styled itself as “progressive,” which implies not only improvement over time, but a progression: Correct the perceived injustice most immediately at hand, then move on to the next one. In some cases, the next injustice comes into focus only once a previous injustice has been removed. During the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969, generally regarded as the birth of the gay rights movement, it seems doubtful that participants had the goal of marriage equality in mind. The community had more immediate needs that, once satisfied, would in turn reveal its next-most immediate needs.
Critics have often claimed the Left supports “group rights” over the rights of individuals — for example, affirmative action programs offering special consideration to members of minority groups or women in employment or contracting or for college admissions. The Left’s contention, however, is not typically that blacks deserve special consideration because they are black, for example, but that an individual black candidate applying for a job may deserve special consideration because white applicants have benefited from improper privileges in the past. You could say that the unselected white applicant was denied on the basis of his or her race; but you would then be obliged, in the view of the Left, to take into consideration all the ways in which being white has provided and still provides advantages. Special consideration for minorities or women in employment or admissions is not, in this view, the point at which discrimination starts, but the point at which broader social discrimination begins to be remedied.
Obama staked his legacy on patching the largest remaining hole in the New Deal social welfare safety net. Guaranteed lifelong access to affordable health care has been at the top of the Left’s policy agenda since fdr. Bill Clinton tried, failed, gave up for good. Obama would not give up. Despite an economy that continued to sputter contrary to his own expectations and those of his advisors, despite public opinion polls that early turned against the reform effort, despite ominous electoral signals, and despite having to abandon the Left’s cherished “public option,” he persisted. And he prevailed. It was a political risk on the order of the one Ronald Reagan took in cooperating with Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s successful effort to wring inflation out of the economy in 1981–82 at the cost of a brutal recession. Obama lost Democrats their House majority in doing so. Not that they thought it would happen, but in the view of many on the Left, health care reform on the scale Obama was able to achieve, though imperfect, would be worth losing a House majority. The remainder of Obama’s first term would be a domestic policy desert if not worse, entailing various capitulations to the gop, at least in the eyes of many on the Left at the time. But he had his signature achievement, subject to validation by the Supreme Court and the ability to sustain enough Democratic political power in Washington to prevent its repeal.
But perhaps the 2012 election changes that. The Obama campaign in Chicago was a masterpiece of political technology in terms of identifying voters and ensuring they got to the polls. The challenge here was considerable. The Obama campaign knew that its candidate’s support had declined from his 2008 levels. It knew that he was going to lose among independents. There was margin for error in the size of the Obama victory in 2008, but Obama would need to become the rare incumbent reelected with less popular support than he won with four years before.
The changing demographics of the electorate are also inauspicious for the gop. The country is less white than it used to be. The Democratic Party has discovered that it can win nationally without the support of white men, a fact which in turn lessens the need to try to fashion appeals to them. This is pleasing to Left 3.0, which views such appeals as unnecessarily centrist. Republicans, meanwhile, have not yet found a reliable way to make up for the votes lost to demographic change.
Tod Lindberg is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of its task force on the Virtues of a Free Society, under the auspices of which he is completing a study of heroism in the ancient and modern world for Encounter Books. He became editor of Policy Review effective with its April/May 1999 edition, succeeding Robert L. Scheuttinger (1977–79), John O’Sullivan (1979–83), and Adam Meyerson (1984–98). This essay appears in the final edition of Policy Review, which is ceasing publication. His appointment as a Hoover fellow is ongoing.