The left has, in many ways, felt the same general malaise that the Democratic Party has felt since the victory of Donald Trump in the November presidential election. Many did not view Harris as their ideal candidate, given the influence of her brother-in-law. Instead, they believed that she had garnered significant momentum and had a chance to win, at which point she could be influenced to take on more liberal policy stances like those that had animated her 2020 campaign.
These hopes were dashed, of course. Not only did Harris lose, but it also seemed that the entire country blamed the left for Harris’s defeat. The Trump victory was seen as the repudiation of leftism on multiple levels. Leftism was seen as DEI on the cultural level and inflation on the economic level. For Democrats to win, many pundits suggested, they had to fight back against any attempt by leftists to put them on the record supporting unpopular, radical proposals.
The national decline of leftism
It is true that the leftist political project has seemed adrift for even longer than the greater Democratic Party. It was just five years ago that the tide began to turn against the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. The party’s left wing was never truly happy with Joe Biden, even when he filled his ranks of staffers with former activists or ended the war in Afghanistan.
The Sanders campaign was one in a long line of missteps that reflects a glaring problem with the focus and scope of leftist politics. Like all politics, the frame of the Left is too broad. They will not achieve their goals by supporting third parties or torpedoing anything proposed by a president they do not consider one of their own. Instead of focusing on the nation, the left needs to turn back to the state and local level in order to prove again and again that their policies are popular and will work.
Local leftism
Leftist policies were often proved in the past on the local level. The most famous example of this approach was Wisconsin in the early 20th century. With the help of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the state implemented the initiative, referendum, and recall. It produced a political leader, Robert La Follette, who became nationally known and mounted a substantial third-party challenge in 1924. More recently, statewide projects in California and Massachusetts have helped expand social welfare ideas to public conscience and greater national visibility.
Socialism made a similar inroads on the local level. While there were never any socialist presidents or governors, numerous cities had socialist mayors beginning with John C. Chase in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1898. Their success helped to improve the movement’s reputation and test out various policies. Chase, for instance, gave credence to the effort of municipal ownership of utilities. Most importantly, the town did not collapse or erupt in revolution during his tenure. It was a test case that the socialist mayor passed and helped to inspire later socialist victories in Milwaukee and Minneapolis.
The idea behind focusing on state and local success is simple. Many of the left’s most ambitious programs are viewed as unworkable or impractical by a large percentage of Americans. The best way to show that these policies can work in practice is to implement them successfully on the local level and then hammer home that success to the rest of the country. Local administrators can be turned into national political figures and could even help build out what often seems like a weak Democratic bench.
National political dominance
Small-scale experiments can be effective at telegraphing the fate of different policies in both positive and negative ways. Many pundits even today give Joe Biden and national Democrats credit for burying the “defund the police” movement in 2020. But that effort was jump started by the smaller experiment of Chesa Boudin’s time as District Attorney in San Francisco. Boudin’s approach was much closer to defunding rhetoric than the contemporary efforts of Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. It is not surprising, therefore, that the party finished its move away from defunding over reform after Boudin was rejected by the liberals of San Francisco.
The dominance of national politics has decimated both local news and leftist activism. In order to fight back against the trend, donors and political leaders need to put together carefully crafted test policies that they can try out at a small scale. These attempts can color the eventual development of expanded health care or social welfare programs on the national level. They may be the secret to turning around the Left’s national reputation and bring it back to the national prominence it deserves.