The Trouble With the Left’s Efforts to Apply ‘Leverage’

This post originally appeared in Jonathan Chait’s &c. newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

Many Democratic voters are baffled and infuriated that some left-wing activists are threatening to withhold support from Joe Biden’s campaign over his Israel policy. Don’t they understand that Donald Trump would be even worse on the Middle East, not to mention everything else? Are they out of their minds?

The answer is that they’re not merely throwing a temper tantrum. They are using a tactic. The problem, Brian Beutler argues persuasively in his newsletter, is that it’s an ineffective tactic.

Progressive activists are inculcated in using “leverage” to force politicians to bend to their will. (The foundational activist story is a historical myth that Franklin Roosevelt told activists to “make him” move left.) The leverage they employ in elections is to threaten to stay home if the president does not give them everything they want.

The main work of these organizations is to warn that “the base” will fail to turn out unless Democrats give into various demands. The demands can never be fully satisfied, because the very reason these groups exist is to issue them.

As Beutler argues, threatening to facilitate the election of a Republican president, especially one as noxious as Donald Trump, is fundamentally a self-defeating tactic. The left has used it repeatedly, and spoiler campaigns by Ralph Nader in 2000, Jill Stein in 2016, and now Cornel West in 2024 have all been the tip of the spear of this threat. But it grows out of a belief that “leverage” is how left-wingers should do politics.

Beutler’s advice is directed at the left. But this raises an important question of what Democratic elected officials and staffers should do about the left’s hostage-taking methods. Beutler warns that the party will respond to a potential Biden defeat by giving the left less access and influence, a prospect he treats as negative:

I also gather that the damage to progressive ideals will be long-lasting even if the Trump storm passes more quickly than we should expect it will. Biden has been more solicitous of progressive interests than any Democratic president in decades, and it has earned him remarkably little slack or good will among actual progressives. That’s a recipe for receding back toward Obamaism, rather than for greater progressive clout in the future.

But would that be a bad thing?

It is true that Biden has worked much more closely with the left than has any Democratic president in generations. The contrast with Obama is stark. Obama gave progressive activists the cold shoulder, relying on his own judgments as to what choices were possible and what weren’t and employing moderate rhetoric to sell them rather than using progressive-approved language. Unlike Biden, he did not staff his administration with supporters of his left-wing rivals within the party.

The result, I’ve argued, was pretty positive. Obama passed far more transformative legislation in his first term than Biden did. He won election twice, rather handily. He left office with a 60 percent approval rating. And despite his much frostier relationship with progressive activists, whom his administration famously dismissed as “the professional left,” he did not face any serious spoiler candidacies or election-boycott threats in either of his two elections.

The lessons of this contrast suggest that Biden is not facing a left-wing revolt despite his efforts to woo the progressive movement, but perhaps because of it. The whole political relationship is premised on “leverage,” which is backed up by hostage-taking threats. It seems to me the lesson here is that Democrats are better off abstaining from the alliance in the first place rather than signing up to be extorted.