Five ways progressives can stop losing
Requires attitude readjustment
Jeffrey Denny
After American voters bullied the Advocacy Industrial Complex in the 2024 elections, progressives are looking for love.
But in all the wrong ways, failing to read the room, as in the American people.
The professional class of left-leaning nonprofits, policy think tanks, academics and their fellow coastal elite amen-chorus media certainly has they/them/their hearts in the right place.
They proudly stand to advance America’s social, economic, and climate well-being and justice. From a stance above most Americans — more educated than the 62% without a college degree and earning more than the $62,000 median U.S. salary.
(Note: The average nonprofit salary in the advocacy industry epicenter of Washington, DC, is $94,000-$176,000 a year, per Glassdoor. Nonmedical nonprofit leaders can bank over $1 million, Charity Watch reports.)
No question that progressive advocates care deeply about the underblessed and should feel good noblesse obliging them.
But it must be confusing that a majority of voters — even the underblessed — rejected them for Donald Trump who will screw them.
While more liberally pragmatic than progressive dreamer, I’ve worked in the private, public and nonprofit sectors to advance public policy in various ways throughout my career. Like a Monkee, I’m a believer.
But even if I agree with the enlightened goals of progressive policies — to make life better for everyone — I’ve been frustrated by the somewhat condescending and clueless we-know-best, brook-no-opposition tone that advocates strike all too often. And how they hate capitalism but beg for and live from capitalist funding.
As Democratic pundits, pollsters and prognosticators “come down from the hills after the battle is over and shoot the wounded,” to quote the late, great journalist Murray Kempton, the progressive sector can arise by stepping back, helping itself to vegan humble pie, and soul-searching how it served to hand-maiden Trump’s new reign of horror — and what to do.
Five discussion topics:
1. Resist knee-jerk doubling down
Many advocates insist they’re right and most Americans are wrong. Anyway, Trump hardly won a mandate. As he threatens to reverse hard-gained progress, it’s crucial to fight harder for righteous goals.
Plus, fear is a powerful motivator — Trump is Hitler — and a chance to boost support such as revenues. Fear works wonders; it’s how Trump won MAGAs.
Problem is, progressive stubbornness dismisses the best lesson from losing, that you’re doing something wrong. Like the formerly hubristic Dallas Cowboys, it’s time for progressives to reboot.
2. Don’t serve old whine in relabeled bottles
Some advocates are simply rebranding.
— The DEI industry — yes, it’s become a lucrative commercial sector — is pushing new eyerolling buzzwords such as belonging, accessibility and representation. When a fresh, hard look at what diversity means and its goals and outcomes is needed. Like maybe economic diversity representing the working class.
— Socialism is out; populism is in. But with the same old progressive wish list, starting with universal government-guaranteed living wages and affordable housing, healthcare and childcare. When even liberals — the adulting ones — carp about taxes and government bureaucracy.
— Climate action? It should become “Green Economic Populism,” the Climate and Community Institute says. “If Democrats want to win voters with policies that avert catastrophic climate change, they need to bring immediate, material benefits to the working class,” the institute co-founders say. “That means folding climate policies into an agenda that tackles the cost-of-living crisis.” To wit, recycling the old progressive wish list.
The problem with this rebranding? It haughtily believes the working class is stupid enough to buy two hard sells if they’re combined and pig-lipsticked.
3. Reach beyond the choir
The Climate and Community Institute co-founders pitching Green Economic Populism are UC Berkeley assistant professor in sociology, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Providence College associate professor in political science, Thea Riofrancos.
Neither are climate scientists, but they bring elite college educations to their climate justice academic activist careers.
(Sidebar: While proudly progressive, Cohen’s UC Berkeley admits only an exclusive 11% of applicants and a BA costs $300,000. And Riofrancos earned postgrad degrees at even more costly and exclusive Ivy Harvard and Penn.)
And while never serving in any elected or appointed government policy position that demands realistic solutions, they sniffed at President Joe Biden’s Green New Deal because it delivered merely a “Prius economy” — “a hybrid model of green energy and fossil fuels, wedged together side by side.”
Their pitch was published in — guess where? — The New York Times, where 91% of readers identify as Democrats, 72% have a college degree, and 38% earn over twice the U.S. median salary, per Pew Research.
To quote the David Bowie song, this is not America. Just a small part but with outsized influence. Like the MAGAs they hate.
Advocates need to get out of their humid policy hothouses where progressive experts violently agree while sweating to one-up for funding. If they want to make public policy, a good place to start is by asking the public they affect and need for support.
4. Quit scolding and guilt-tripping
Many advocates passionately believe in their deepest heart and soul that their way is the One True Way, like evangelical Christians. Anyone who disagrees is stupid, misguided, or even a terrible horrible no good very bad person.
But even dogs don’t respond well to shaming. Worse, it often backfires and even fuels opposition. Effective advocacy in a democracy needs to respect and engage different hearts and minds and compromise to make progress — often settling for incremental.
5. Apply that good ol’ American common sense sniff test
Most people, even those who voted for Trump, can smell BS a mile away.
Many may swallow or at least grudgingly accept Trump’s legendary BS either because a) it’s BS they want to hear; b) Democrats lacked better BS; or, c) it’s less irritating than the elite progressive advocate BS that talks over their heads in pointy-head patois that turns off even allies like me.
For instance, not to pick on Green Economic Populism’s Daniel Aldana Cohen, but it’s doubtful that many heartland minds would be opened or hearts stirred by his treatise on “Multidimensional well-being of US households at a fine spatial scale using fused household surveys” or “Tree-Based Spatial Microsimulation Technique.”
***
Progressive policy nonsense, from Ivy Gaza protests to defunding the police, pronoun wokeness and beyond, wouldn’t matter except that it was too easy to tar and feather mainstream Democrat pander bears with the many excesses that inspired tweens to lecture their liberal parents about morality.
Progressives can stop setting America back, as they did by helping elect Trump, if they can get real about the America that is as they push for what America could be.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer
