The Democrats Are Divided, Just Not in the Way We Think

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Democrats have been rallying around former Vice President Joe Biden, but they are struggling with serious internal divisions. The more you examine what they’re actually saying, the more you see that it is hopelessly inadequate to say, as most people are doing, that some Democrats are in the center while others are on the left.

If you hope to understand the tensions within American progressivism — and most Democrats do qualify as progressive to one degree or another — your best bet is to explore the work of three influential writers from a century ago, when the U.S. saw a flowering of left-wing thinking.

The first was Walter Lippmann, who believed in scientists and experts, and who wanted to solve the nation’s problems by increasing their role in American government. The second was Max Eastman, who focused on economic inequality, class conflict and the rights of working people. The third was Randolph Bourne, who emphasized, and celebrated, separate social identities, and who wanted to ensure that no social group would be subordinated to another.

The three offered radically different diagnoses of what ails our country — and radically different prescriptions. The deepest splits within the Democratic Party reflect not some center-to-left continuum, but their competing legacies.

Lippmann, the writer and journalist who helped found the New Republic in 1913, insisted that in the modern era, citizens’ opinions are constantly being manipulated, and that consent is manufactured by powerful forces. He had little faith in the press: “It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision.”

A skeptic about populist conceptions of democracy, Lippmann prized “the disinterested expert” who “finds and formulates the facts.” In his view, “the responsible administrator” must play a large role in modern government.

Like his contemporary successors, Lippmann left many progressives cold. When they were both young, John Reed, the journalist who later became a Communist and Soviet sympathizer, wrote a devastating poem about his occasional friend:

Our all-unchallenged Chief! But were there one
Who builds a world, and leaves out all the fun,—
Who dreams a pageant, gorgeous, infinite,
And then leaves all the color out of it,—
Who wants to make the human race, and me,
March to a geometric Q.E.D.—
Who but must laugh, if such a man there be?
Who would not weep, if walter l. were he?

In Reed’s view, Lippmann took the color out of life, and he was far too serious; he lacked a sense of mischief or edge.

Max Eastman would have agreed. Editor of the Masses, a journal far to the left of the New Republic, he lacked enthusiasm for experts. He had fun, and he had edge: “The world can be significantly divided into those who are always glad when a convict escapes, and those who are always sorry — with a small remnant who use judgment about individual cases. I don’t use judgment about individual cases. I’m always glad.”

More earnestly: “Another thing about the Income Tax is that it really offers a method by which a great big redistribution of wealth could be effected, if the right people got the power.” He called for “a Great Big Redistribution.” (Eastman changed his political views over the years, shifting to become an admirer of free-market economist Friedrich Hayek and the conservative thinker James Burnham; I’m speaking of the young, left-wing Eastman here.)

Randolph Bourne’s focus was altogether different from Lippmann’s or Eastman’s. He did not oppose redistribution, but his real concern was the subordination of those who were taken to be “different.” Born with a facial deformity, he contracted spinal tuberculosis as a child and ended up hunchbacked; he died young, in 1918, during the Spanish flu pandemic. Bourne’s ideas spread after his death. Many people believe we are still catching up with him.

His most influential (and most prescient) essay was published in the Atlantic in 1916. Titled “Trans-National America,” it celebrates the dismal failure of the American idea of the “melting pot.” America, he wrote, was becoming “not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors.” Bourne added, “We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born.”

He insisted that we should stop celebrating “mere doubtful triumphs of the past, which redound to the glory of only one of our transnationalities.” For Bourne, “Our American ideal can make no progress until we do away with this romantic gilding of the past.” We should instead aspire to a “future America, on which all can unite,” assembled as those who are different, and will continue to be different, come to “understand each other more warmly.”

Many contemporary progressives are marching in Lippmann’s footsteps. On climate change and Covid-19, they are attempting to rehabilitate science and expertise. They may not call themselves technocrats, but in an important sense, that’s what they are. “We will lead with science,” Biden says. You can certainly find echoes of Lippmann in the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton and (especially) Barack Obama.

Other progressives, like Senator Bernie Sanders, sound much more like Eastman: “The wealthy and multinational corporations in this country will start paying their fair share of taxes. We are going to end austerity for working families, and provide some austerity for large, multinational corporations.” When Senator Elizabeth Warren speaks of “big, structural change,” she is focusing on a Great Big Redistribution. Some of Biden’s campaign rhetoric tends in this direction.

But among many younger progressives, Bourne’s arguments have the most resonance. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez often emphasizes the importance of immigrants, the treatment of subordinated groups, the centrality of identity, and the need for an “agenda of reparations.” She says that white supremacy “is our nation's original sin; the driving logic of slavery, of Native genocide, of Jim Crow, of segregation, of mass incarceration, of ‘Send Her Back.' It never went away. It was just dormant."

In terms of their priorities, temperaments and core concerns, Lippmann, Eastman and Bourne lived in different political universes. If you want to know what divides different groups of Democrats today, don’t try to put them on an ideological spectrum. Ask whether, in their heart of hearts, they are followers of Walter Lippmann, Max Eastman or Randolph Bourne.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Cass R. Sunstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the author of “The Cost-Benefit Revolution” and a co-author of “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness.”

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