How can progressives best produce meaningful change? Navigate the corridors of power from the inside, or rally the public to pressure politicians from the outside? Aim for incremental progress or demand sweeping, transformational policies?
For the past several years, we have watched an experiment unfold, as three prominent progressives—Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Senator Elizabeth Warren—have brought outsider energy to their insider perches. Two new books size up the accomplishments, and the agonies, of the trio: The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics by Joshua Green and The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution by Ryan Grim.
Both offer a zippy narrative of noble warriors taking on entrenched powers. Both trace how the paths of the three collided in the 2020 presidential primary. Both end on ambiguous notes, tacitly acknowledging that any lessons for ambitious progressives from the battles of the past several years are not easily derived.
But they diverge on who is the main protagonist. Green puts Warren at the center of the narrative, making her the primary focus in four of the book’s 11 chapters, compared to one each for Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. Grim only mentions Warren on 34 of his book’s 315 pages, a subplot in a larger story about AOC and the rise of the youthful left.
The choice of central character is reflective of the deeper story each wants to tell. Green, a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek (and a contributing editor to the Washington Monthly), wants to tell the story of how Democrats lost their way and Warren helped them rediscover their populist roots.
Green sets the stage with a condensed history of how, in the years since the election of Jimmy Carter—through and including the presidency of Barack Obama—the Democratic Party grew closer to rich donors and financial industry–friendly policy advisers. (Grim covers similar ground in his prior book, We’ve Got People.) As financial markets collapsed in late 2008, in entered Warren. The Harvard Law School professor with an expertise in bankruptcy was tapped by then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to serve as the chief watchdog of the congressional panel monitoring the multibillion-dollar bank bailout.
Warren’s academic research, says Green, “had long ago radicalized her against the financial industry,” which was just fine for Reid, who was uncomfortable with the bailout. But Obama was less appreciative of what Green describes as Warren’s “insurrectionary” approach to questioning the president’s economic team. He writes that “she was willing to pinpoint issues Obama officials were eager to obscure, and she didn’t hesitate to criticize those same officials publicly when she felt they weren’t being forthcoming.”
Green sees Ocasio-Cortez as evolving into a more effective inside player, who “came to see that direct action and righteous demands don’t, on their own, produce the outcomes many activists imagine they will.”
Warren briefly got closer to the Obama administration, joining the Treasury Department to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She initially proposed such an agency before the Great Recession in a 2007 magazine article, and the idea was incorporated into Obama’s 2010 financial regulation law, commonly known as Dodd-Frank. She wanted to be the first person to lead the agency, but, Green argues, “Obama didn’t have the nerve” to take on her opponents in the financial industry.
Upon becoming a progressive martyr with a national profile, Warren instead ran for the U.S. Senate, taking out Republican Scott Brown, and proceeded to stymie Obama’s ability to nominate officials with Wall Street résumés. By the onset of the 2016 campaign, Green writes, “in the war between Warren and Wall Street, hers was the advancing army.”
But then, from Green’s perspective, Warren makes a misstep: She doesn’t run for president in 2016.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign, writes Green, led Warren “to believe she’d have influence in a Clinton administration.” Warren believed that “personnel is policy,” so, “after years of playing the outside game, Warren decided that she’d have better odds of advancing her agenda on the inside.”
Green deems that “a choice that would soon go disastrously wrong,” contributing to a chain of events leading to President Donald Trump. He sketches out an alternative timeline in which Warren does run and leverages her “outsider status and scathing critique of establishment politicians” to weave an “irresistible campaign narrative.” He doesn’t assert that she would have defeated Clinton for the nomination and Trump for the presidency, but a reader might have that impression.
Instead, Senator Bernie Sanders fills the progressive void and gives Clinton a run for her money. Green is impressed by how Sanders won 43 percent of the aggregate Democratic primary vote and credits him for “shifting the Democratic Party to the left.” But he also calls Sanders a “flawed presidential candidate,” suggesting he couldn’t go all the way.
For Grim, the Washington bureau chief of The Intercept, the story of the 2016 campaign is not one of how Warren missed her chance and let Trump swipe the populist banner, but of how Clinton weaponized racial issues to deny Sanders the ability to build a populist movement that could take the White House.
The title of Grim’s first chapter is “Ending Racism,” an ironic allusion to Clinton’s strategy for derailing Sanders after he won the New Hampshire primary. “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow,” Grim quotes Clinton on the Nevada stump, shortly after New Hampshire, “would that end racism?” she asked. “Would that end sexism?” These questions were answered by her rally-goers with a resounding “No!”
Sanders had already been struggling to win support from older African American voters, and faced criticism among some activists for a lack of emphasis on social justice. “So, when Hillary Clinton … finally recast Sanders’s critique of the big banks as a way for him to avoid confronting racism,” writes Grim, “the Democratic voting base had been primed to hear the attack as a reasonable one.”
Warren’s biggest role in Grim’s narrative comes four years later, when she and Sanders are jostling for progressive primacy in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. As Warren’s campaign picked up steam in the fall of 2019, she won the endorsement of the populist, but not overtly socialist, Working Families Party. Instead of unifying the left, the endorsement “exposed a bubbling rift on the left.” Grim reports that “Sanders himself thought the vote had been rigged,” suspecting that the WFP leaders overrode a vote by its members. Those suspicions fueled a “swarm of denunciations” on social media by Sanders supporters targeting the party.
The two top leaders of the WFP on the receiving end of many of the denunciations were Black, and some of the attacks were racist, feeding a stereotype of “Bernie Bro” supporters who were insensitive to the trials of women and minorities.
Ocasio-Cortez, whose conversations and text message exchanges with Grim are peppered throughout The Squad, expressed her concern in real time: “I feel like Warren is scooping up LGBT, progressives, women & progressives of color because of how [Sanders’s supporters] isolate … it feels like they are forcing an unnecessary choice between class analysis and race analysis.” Her remedy was to endorse Sanders in dramatic fashion—right after he suffered a heart attack on the campaign trail. Warren had been intensely courting Ocasio-Cortez, and believed that getting her endorsement after Sanders’s heart attack would have made the nomination “a lock.” Instead, “losing AOC” as well as fellow Squad members Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib—all women of color—to Sanders “was a blow from which the Warren campaign never recovered.”
But despite the Squad’s progressive cache, they were not able to fully immunize Sanders from further attack on his social justice bona fides.
On January 13, 2020, CNN reported on a dinner Sanders had at Warren’s condo in December 2018 just before she launched her presidential campaign, in which sources claimed he said “that he did not believe a woman could win.” Warren quickly backed up the account. Sanders vehemently denied it.
Unnamed Sanders campaign members complained to Grim that the story was “revenge” from the Warren camp, and the campaign’s internal polling showed that “we lost about ten points with women” in the aftermath.
As the two progressive titans squabbled with each other, they failed to connect with some of the most essential voters in a Democratic primary: African Americans. The nearly forgotten Joe Biden was able to resurrect his campaign in the South Carolina primary, secure the nomination, and win the presidency.
Despite progressives’ failure to unite and defeat the quintessential establishment moderate, both Green and Grim see substantive impacts from the populist movement they sparked. Grim dedicates a short chapter to detailing how Warren’s commitment to the idea that “personnel is policy” was finally realized. Warren successfully lobbied to install anti-monopoly advocates at several key Biden administration posts, including Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter as head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division. Green also notes that Biden has “absorbed” lessons from the new populists and taken “aggressive actions to break up concentrated corporate power.”
Green sees Ocasio-Cortez as evolving into a more effective inside player, who “came to see that direct action and righteous demands don’t, on their own, produce the outcomes many activists imagine they will.” He knocks her famous Green New Deal, introduced in 2019, as a “nonbinding resolution that lacked legislative detail” and “couldn’t draw the support of a majority of Democratic members.” But after Biden’s nomination, AOC accepted an appointment to his climate task force, and “two years later, in August 2022, Biden … delivered the largest climate investment in U.S. history” with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
The Squad version of the Inflation Reduction Story is less pat, going deeper than The Rebels into the fractious legislative process in which Ocasio-Cortez and several House progressives tried to procedurally pair Biden’s sweeping multifaceted Build Back Better package to the relatively narrow Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill. Linkage, in theory, would force Senator Joe Manchin and his fellow centrists, who crafted the infrastructure bill, to swallow giant investments in climate and health care, plus an extension of the American Rescue Plan’s child tax credit expansion that was slashing child poverty rates.
But according to Grim, internal strife at the Sunrise Movement, 350.org, and the Sierra Club, partly involving charges of racism, distracted climate activists and lessened pressure on Congress. House progressives and Biden were initially on the same page regarding the stall tactic, even as it fed a Democrats-in-disarray narrative. But after Democrats were staggered by Republican Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, Biden pressured the House progressives to pass the infrastructure bill separately, and most of them surrendered; only AOC and five of her allies stood firm. Manchin then outraged progressives by pulling the plug on Build Back Better, though months later he worked with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to craft a smaller but still significant climate and health care package. The expired child tax credit expansion, however, was not resurrected.
For Grim, the story of the 2016 campaign is not one of how Warren missed her chance and let Trump swipe the populist banner, but of how Clinton weaponized racial issues to deny Sanders the ability to build a populist movement that could take the White House.
Unlike Green, who draws a straight line from AOC’s cooperation with Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign to the 2022 climate bill, Grim is careful not to overstate the progressives’ collective role, noting that “Sunrise imploded” and that former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain felt the linkage strategy only “delayed getting something done.” Still, Grim observes a shift from the 2016 campaign when “Sanders drew laughter during a debate when he called climate change the greatest national security threat” to 2022, when “the political class” understood that “to win the youth vote, you had to be a climate champion.”
Grim also channels the frustration of Ocasio-Cortez’s earliest, and most revolutionary, supporters, writing, “Influencing the Democratic Party was good, and the hundreds of billions of dollars in climate spending may never have happened without them, but the ambition had not been to nudge power in a decent direction, but, rather, to take power. And they hadn’t.” Green praises AOC for evolving into a more effective politician. For example, he credits her for cutting loose two of her House aides, Corbin Trent and Saikat Chakrabarti, who had violated decorum with caustic public comments about other congressional members and staff. “Good politicians adapt. Ocasio-Cortez was no exception,” Green writes. Grim doesn’t outright make the opposite case, but he gives Trent a platform to defend his scorched-earth approach:
The problem, Trent said, was that they had tried to do a half a revolution. “We talked about raising the profile of staffers deliberately, so that it would be more of a movement. But then we didn’t do anything with it,” he said. “The whole office got too big for its britches. If we weren’t going to move fast and break things, if you’re not trying to fuck with people, why are you fucking with people?”
Neither The Rebels nor The Squad ends with overly confident prescriptions for how progressive populists can increase their influence going forward.
Grim winds down his book lamenting that “endless clashes with the racism, sexism, and xenophobia of Trump” had nudged “the fight over the shape of the economy … off center stage.” In turn, “a left that had felt organized around a collective agenda had disintegrated into infighting.” His lone suggestion for progressive reunification and renewed influence is a Hail Mary play: Ocasio-Cortez running for president. At the very end of the book, she ponders aloud to Grim about running against Biden, but doesn’t commit.
Biden, like every other Democratic president in the past 110 years, has tried to balance the needs of labor and capital in a way that improves living standards for the working class without posing excessive hardship on the corporate class.
Green laments Warren’s refusal to run for president in 2016, questioning her choice to instead ingratiate herself with the candidate she thought would be the next president. Yet in the epilogue of The Rebels, he sees promise for progressive populism if its leaders make the transition to insider players. “If you really want to reshape the political order,” Green argues,
at some point you have to engage with people inside the system or nothing gets done. The activist’s dilemma, which Warren, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez all confronted, is that you can’t float above the sordid mess forever … you have to work with people who don’t already agree with you—who may not even like you. You have to compromise.
The legislative accomplishments in the Biden era all involved concessions from progressives, either to Republicans or to moderate Democrats. Grim partially blames culture war infighting within the activist left for a dilution of populist power. But to place blame on Sunrise Movement squabbling and the like ignores legislative math: To get sufficient majorities or supermajorities in the closely divided 2021–22 Congress, concessions would be necessary, no matter how many protest signs were held outside the Capitol.
Green is hopeful, crediting Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Warren for pulling “the Democratic Party back toward its roots,” as well as Biden for picking up planks of their agenda. But he’s also uncertain about the future of the populist trio, cautioning, “We don’t know yet whether history will remember them as harbingers of a new Democratic age or insurgents who ultimately didn’t change the party as they’d hoped.”
The struggle of the two authors to chart a clear course for progressives going forward stems from a shared, flawed premise about the past: that the Democratic Party lost its progressive soul beginning in the Jimmy Carter administration, culminating in how Obama “coddled Wall Street” (per Green), “agreed to slowly bleed out the homeowners,” and executed a “pivot to austerity” (per Grim).
But the story of the Democratic Party is not one of a good party gone bad, but of a party that has long navigated cross-pressures from populists and elites to produce policies that better the common good.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman are often held up by economic progressives as model Democrats, but they did not always cater to populist demands. At the very beginning of his presidency, Roosevelt rejected calls to nationalize the banking system in favor of a bank bailout (“Roosevelt’s great mistake,” wailed Senator Bronson Cutting). To win Chamber of Commerce support for a system of industry codes, which would establish minimum wages and maximum work hours, Roosevelt suspended Woodrow Wilson–era antitrust laws. (“The Democratic Party dies tonight,” grumbled Senator Huey Long.)
Truman forcefully broke with his union allies in 1946 to end a crippling nationwide railroad strike. First, via radio broadcast, he gave the strikers 16 hours to return to work or he’d direct the U.S. Army to restart train service. At the deadline, Truman upped the ante in a congressional address, proposing to draft striking workers into the Army. As the president spoke, the unions settled on terms previously proposed by Truman, but his crude tactics left labor livid. The biggest rail union leader, and former backer of Truman, sniped, “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and you can’t make a President out of a ribbon clerk.” Another labor leader, and member of a far-left third party, charged that “President Truman has sold out to our native fascists [and] betrayed the program of Roosevelt.”
Such counternarrative examples add historical context to the actions of more recent Democratic presidents. Bill Clinton enacted financial industry deregulation and muscled through the North American Free Trade Agreement over union opposition, but he also raised taxes on the wealthy and hiked the minimum wage by 20 percent. Moreover, he fought a bruising battle with the health care industry in a losing effort to provide universal coverage and control consumer costs.
Obama bailed out banks and didn’t prevent all home foreclosures. But he ended the Great Recession and reduced unemployment with a nearly $800 billion stimulus program. (Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, in his memoir, Stress Test, argued that creating good jobs for unemployed and underemployed homeowners was the best way to end the foreclosure crisis.) He also began a new era of post–New Deal financial industry regulation with the Dodd-Frank law. He passed the Affordable Care Act and raised taxes on the wealthy to help finance it. He made progressive appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, which was then able to issue rulings designed to facilitate union organizing.
Green and Grim view Biden’s policies on pandemic relief (the American Rescue Plan was more than double the size of Obama’s Recovery Act) and antitrust (with an aggressive focus on the Big Tech oligarchy that Obama eschewed) as ideological breaks from his recent Democratic predecessors. Similarly, Rana Foroohar, in a recent Washington Monthly article, “The Great Reordering,” argues that those policies, along with new investments in domestic manufacturing and crackdown on international corporate tax evasion, were evidence of a “true economic paradigm shift.”
No doubt these are significant shifts. But they do not mean that Biden has completely closed the door on financial industry concerns or bowed to every populist demand. He bailed out the failing Silicon Valley Bank. While he has pursued tighter bank regulations, he has not resurrected a Glass-Steagall-style division of investment and commercial banking, or proposed limits on bank size. He has not gone as far as Sanders or Warren have proposed to cancel student debt. He has not pressured the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low. He stuck with Obamacare and put “Medicare for All” on ice.
Biden, like every other Democratic president in the past 110 years, has tried to balance the needs of labor and capital in a way that improves living standards for the working class without posing excessive hardship on the corporate class. Some might have done a better job than others to walk this fine line, but all have been guided by the same north star.
Green asserts that “it took the emergence of a left-populist faction to steer [Democrats] back toward the party’s historic concern with the economic lives of ordinary people,” but that view overlooks those policies championed by Clinton and Obama that were driven by that historic concern.
However, The Rebels, more squarely than The Squad, recognizes the practical need for populists to work within the confines of a big-tent party, and for moderates to give populists room in the tent. Politicians “who have been around for a while, like Joe Biden, understand that for Democrats to win, they must be what Adlai Stevenson once called ‘the party of everyone’—a broad coalition that includes a younger generation closer in outlook to Ocasio-Cortez than Biden.”
True enough. But Stevenson never won a presidential election. Clinton and Obama each won two. Both faced public discontent and impatience with economic progress midway through their first terms, but neither would have been reelected if their policies had not ultimately improved the lives of ordinary people compared to four years prior.
Understanding the exact nature of the Democratic Party is crucial to effectively influence its direction. Is the party a friendly big tent filled with well-intentioned liberals of differing ideological stripes? Or is it a brutal cage match between populist progressives and Wall Street centrists?
The Rebels treats the Warren-Geithner rift over the bank bailout as evidence of how far the Democratic Party had strayed and the catalyst for the subsequent populist uprising. But as with so many intraparty Democratic divides, the bailout divide is better explained as a good-faith difference of opinion regarding how best to help ordinary people, rather than a difference in philosophy over the importance of helping ordinary people in the first place.
Understanding the exact nature of the Democratic Party is crucial to effectively influence its direction. Is the party a friendly big tent filled with well-intentioned liberals of differing ideological stripes? Or is it a brutal cage match between populist progressives and Wall Street centrists? If there’s an enemy to vanquish, then the logic of confrontational revolution makes more sense. But a party bound by shared goals can be navigated with good ideas, smart lobbying, and flexible dealmaking.
Green’s counsel to progressive Democrats to aim for “compromise” with their moderate brethren is far more grounded in reality than Trent’s wish, highlighted by Grim, to “move fast and break things.” But if Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Warren oblige, don’t expect a “new Democratic age.” In the Democratic Party, collaboration, however contentious, between the left and the center is an old story.
