The Left is Learning How To Win
The most popular Democrats are finally converging around single payer.
From election cycle after cycle, the general left of American politics, from center-left social democrats to radical anarcho-communists, have been disempowered politically. This disempowerment has conditioned this broad left-wing coalition to be a movement based on agitation and frustratingly rational cynicism. The left has had so few wins in an increasingly unequal and reactionary system that many on the left can't even fathom success.
This week, California Senator Kamala Harris came out in support of Senator Bernie Sander’s Medicare for All legislation, standing as a co-sponsor for the proposed single-payer healthcare system. This comes after her meteoric rise from California Attorney General to darling of the Democratic donor class, having met with a cadre of the most powerful donors of the Democratic party in the Hamptons this summer. Harris was, seemingly out of nowhere, adopted by the obsessively faux-woke liberal who can't help but tokenize the African-American, South Asian, and female senator by her demographics while asking how “breaking up the big banks would do anything to end racism”?
To many on the left, Harris’s meeting with donors in the Hamptons was damning, just highlighting Harris’s questionable record as California Attorney General concerning the 2008 financial crisis and the epidemic of mass incarceration. She was, after all, meeting with big CLINTON donors. Was Harris just going to be the vehicle for Operation Centrist Democrat 7: WoC Revenge?
Perhaps not. With this new turn, Harris is showing not just where the base of the Democratic Party is, but hopefully breaking some cynical doubts about the ability for the Democratic party to adapt to the growth of the millennial left. Ignore the obsessively anti-Sanders and anti-left media personalities whenever they talk about these conversations about the internecine warfare within the liberal-left. By adopting the populist position and supporting Medicare For All, Harris is showing us that these factional disputes tend to be rooted in the personal aggrievement of Twitter pundits than insurmountable barriers of political will. #Resistance twitter, I banish thee!
With Harris on board, this means a huge chunk all of the most visible members of the Democratic senatorial caucus are for a single-payer model for healthcare. From Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown to Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, Democrats have come a long way from Hillary Clinton saying that single-payer will “never, ever pass” as recently as last year. Democratic leadership must follow Harris’s lead if they wish to galvanize the base and push for popular universal policy.
Let’s celebrate senator Harris’s choice to join with Sanders on this bill. Her record is still deeply problematic; she chose to avoid pursuing cases under her jurisdiction concerning massive financial fraud by Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, as well as serving as the attorney general over a massive extension of the prison industrial complex in California. This is the feeling of liberals slowly realizing that the base wants universal programs want, not a means testing market solution to accommodate the capital of the healthcare industry. Whether the leadership of the party wants it or not, this is the direction the party is going.
These events show the value in the work done at the grassroots level, changing the conversation from “defending Obamacare” to envisioning something better and politically popular. These events highlight the impact of figures like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren pushing their caucus to the left in 2015 to now. For the progressive/socialist/leftist front that has been pushing for a better Democratic party, these events show that establishment aligned figures can be pushed when the environment is primed for it.
Ben Udashen is a writer, teacher, and musician in Seattle, WA.
