What Is A Progressive?

A new breed of Democrat is coming of age. Who are these emerging lefties, what do they want, and who's voting for them?

The primary victories of Democratic Socialist candidates like New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier and Colorado’s Melat Kiros have tipped the political right into a rare state. Much of the center, and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, have gone alone for the ride. I’m not sure I knew it was possible for people to feel both panic and amusement at the same time, but that seems to be where a lot of the country is right now.

The word “progressive” has never had a fixed meaning. There are consistent themes–an active vision of government, support for the downtrodden–but a temperance crusader of 100 years ago wouldn’t have an overwhelming amount in common with a prison abolitionist today. Orientation has stayed roughly steady through the ages but issue preferences have changed dramatically.

I was entirely comfortable identifying as a progressive as recently as 2020, when I voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary for a second time. Then, all “progressive” really meant was caring slightly more than a regular-order Dem about expanding access to healthcare and limiting corporate greed.

Now? Shit, I don’t know.

For the most part, I’m still for the things I was for in 2020, but the label carries a lot of extra baggage today. I’m content, just as an example, with the idea that people who murder people should be removed from society. I do not believe that it represents a moral injustice for a country to erect and police borders, and I honestly never spent so much as a moment wondering who should or shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s sports until chirpy activists got in my face about it.

Past that, I was okay with Bernie-brand skepticism of oligarchy, and with moving toward a guaranteed system of healthcare. That put me squarely to the left of most Democrats on kitchen table issues, but I was never quoting Angela Davis, posting about “seizing the means of production,” or wishing we could nationalize the blue jean or ice cream industries.

Bernie himself never talked like a full-throated commie. He seemed to want to move the country more in the direction of Norway than the Soviet Union, but what about these new kids? Where do they fit into this milieu?

Sanders may have endorsed a lot of these folks, but the new north star in the socialist sky appears to be NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The new players are not just grumpy curmudgeons, they’re not economics-before-identity liberals, and they’re not fucking around.

Matt Taibbi had the following to say about the progressive divergence from the Bernie era:

What happened this week is being described in many places as a big win for populist or “anti-elite” politics, but it’s the opposite. This was simulteneously a wipeout of Clintonian party hacks and Bernie’s staid F.D.R.-style big tent politics, in favor of a slickly marketed revolution with a young ethnic vibe. The Zohran movement is an obvious elite fixation, built atop the exotically batshit boutique ideas that America’s nitwit rich find thrilling, like publicly funded “gender-affirming care,” “humanity has no borders,” and my personal favorite, “the institution of the family acts as part of the carceral system.”

There’s truth to this. Although notably, the links provided go to sources that are much spicier than the winning candidates’ actual websites. One sees this a lot with the DSA. They run people who mostly look like they stepped out of an American Eagle ad, with issue profiles only slightly to the left of lefty Democrats, but they’re fueled by an hard core of activists who sound like they’d be right at home working for Pol Pot.

I read the full issue pages for Kiros and Avila Chevalier and compared them to the official websites for the incumbents they defeated (Diana DeGette and Adriano Espaillat, respectively) and also to the Democratic Party’s 2024 Platform.

Granted, DeGette and Espaillat are both progressive–or, progressive enough to be members of the Progressive Caucus–so perhaps this is unsurprising, but the actual platforms articulated by the incumbents and the up-and-comers who just trounced them are…not all that different.

Even if we take some of the newer progressive preoccupations at which West Wing liberals like myself balk–soft policing, permissive immigration, trans issues–there’s very little daylight between the young bucks and the dinosaurs they’ve just ousted. Avila Chevalier and Kiros are for dismantling ICE, and…so are Espaillat and DeGette. Avila Chevalier appears to be more extreme than the other three on law and order (she’s a prison abolitionist), but they’re all singing the same song. Or at least, singing in the same key.

As far as I can tell, there’s really only one major area of disagreement between the old losers and the new victors. If you haven’t guessed, I’ll reveal its identity in just a moment, but first, I think there’s an intangible here that’s bearing a significant load: vibes.

Melat Kiros and Diana DeGette agree on almost everything. When an electorate hungry for change is forced to pick between two very similar candidates, vibes are about all they have to go on. In this climate, a 29-year-old Ethiopian immigrant is going to have the edge over a 68-year-old, 15-term, liberal white lady. A Mamdani-endorsed upstart who grew up in Florida can unseat a Dominican-born career legislator from Washington Heights with an (almost) identical issue profile.

I’m less familiar with Espaillat, but I was surprised to see DeGette go down. She’s been around forever, and has always been held in quite high esteem by left-of-The-Left types. It’s almost–almost–like the Democratic Party label itself is a giant, stinking, festering albatross around the neck of anyone even vaguely associated with it. Who knew?

Some of us (*cough cough*) have been warning Democrats for a long time that if they continued, hand after hand, going all in on Trump derangement, people would start to forget what the point of them was. Diana DeGette may be in favor of Medicare For All on paper, but she’s been in Congress for 30 years and hasn’t really moved the ball down the field. You might say that for DeGette and Espaillat, M4A is more a vibe than an urgent priority, which makes for a vulnerability in the event that somebody with better, younger, more “exotic” vibes comes along to challenge you.

The new left isn’t much animated by economic issues. Look at who voted for Avila Chevalier. It wasn’t poor and minority voters, it was overeducated libs. If M4A was the Bernie-era signifier, today’s is abolishing ICE, reciting liberation gobbledygook, and that mystery issue I’ll be pulling back the curtain on in just another minute.

You may want to sit down for this, but sometimes, politicians running for office will say things that they don’t really mean in order to appeal to voters who they think will respond favorably to those things. I know, I know. It’s very shocking.

Another truism: voters will sometimes swallow a few bitter bites if they come as part of an otherwise yummy meal.

So say you’re a left-leaning Democrat. You’re annoyed with your party for no longer standing for anything except Donald Trump being bad. Then along comes this fresh face, making noises about things other than Trump being bad, and you figure, “Why not? I’ll give the newbie a shot, even if I don’t like the entirety of the new package.”

What this means [could mean, at least] is that for all the James Carville handwringing, and all the Matt Walsh red-baiting, nothing has really changed with respect to the makeup of the Democratic party. Nothing has really changed anywhere. What set Carville off was a now-deleted tweet from Avila Chevalier about black and Arab men “Fetishizing ugly colonizer women” (meaning: white women). It was nasty, but it was par for the course in the era of woke racism. And when is Matt Walsh not calling left-wingers communists?

It makes me wonder: is this all a teapot tempest? Are voters in already-deep blue districts just opting for feisty over experienced now? Are they just willing to choke down some Angela Davis shitposts and open borders/abolish the police hokum if it means sending a message that the gerontocracy needs to get with the program?

I’m mixed on both how I feel about this and how I think my farther right-leaning readers should feel about it. Even if I’m correct that this is not some redux of the Russian Revolution, it’s still not great.

I didn’t select the bridges that are too far for me at random. Soft policing and soft borders are legitimately poisoned pills. If people aren’t safe from criminal mischief, no other priorities matter. You can’t sustain a welfare state if everyone on earth–whether or not they pay for its maintenance–can access it. Trans issues aren’t destructive in the way those first two are, and voters routinely say they don’t care about them much, but they’re broadly unpopular, they’re dealbreakers for those who do care, and they signal a profound lack of courage and seriousness toward policymaking for candidates who espouse them.

If the Democratic Party’s takeaway from this primary season is that they need to double down on all that nonsense lest they be outflanked from the left again, they’re over. Bull Moose over. Whigs over. My money is on exactly that happening.

But if a credible, left-leaning populist were to come along with promises of better financial stability for normie Americans, and without a decade’s worth of knuckleheaded shitposts on Twitter about the dangers of “whiteness,” there might be an appetite. Who knows, they might even convince a few conservatives to try out the experience of actually getting something for their tax dollars, just to see what it feels like.

A lot of people took the Joe Rogan path from Bernie to Trump. Some might take it back the other way if given a chance.

Any time the pendulum is swinging this wildly–out past one post to Trump, then out past the other to latte socialists–something significant is happening. A thirst is spreading across the parched landscape, but the cracked earth doesn’t care whether it’s nourished with fresh water, blood, or neo-communist piss.

The clearest definition of a “progressive” may just be the regular one: somebody who wants things to progress past this rut. Not fiery pinkos, not brain-virused identity goblins, just people who think that 10, 20, 30 years in office is enough time to make your mark, and if you haven’t made it, the world needs more of the new and less of the you.

Oh and that issue where old and new diverged: Israel, naturally.

Diana DeGette and Adriano Espaillat were occasional critics of the Jewish state, but never where or when it mattered. Both have consistently backed military aid, and Espaillat at least was strong enough in his support to get AIPAC money. Avila Chevalier and Kiros are part of a new generation. They’re not outright Jew-haters–Kiros dedicates a section of her website to combating antisemitism–but for both, their positions on America’s relationship with Israel is clear: it’s time to break up.

But this isn’t exactly groundbreaking either by now. Israel’s fearsome response to the October 7th attacks cleaved a lot of Democrats away from the cause. This is only the 2nd major election cycle since the bombardment of Gaza began, so we’ll need more time to confirm whether Israel support has truly become a non-negotiable issue in America’s blue zones, but for now, signs point to yes.

The key question is: who is voting for these people? If they’re really being washed in by a red wave of newly-minted communists, that’s genuinely worrying. I just don’t think that’s what’s happening. I don’t think this is a new story, I think it’s a very old one: voters are tired, they’re frustrated, and they want change.

If nothing else, it ought to be a familiar dynamic to the people who picked Donald Trump from a field of much more regular Republicans.