Want to Make Progress? Stop Being Progressive.

The Trump presidency has been a disaster. It has transformed a once diversified Republican party focused on defending economic liberalism and social conservatism (think Marco Rubio) into a nativist party growing increasingly reliant on its rural and overwhelmingly white base—as of the 2018 midterms, Republicans control none of America’s 34 purely urban congressional districts. The Trump administration has provoked a spike in political violence and polarization. Most worryingly, it has heavily eroded the democratic norms our society relies upon. Under the Trump administration, the public’s trust in media and government has decreased, bipartisanship has become an anachronism, and the concept of “presidential” conduct has been shattered.

Yet Trump remains a formidable, if beatable, political adversary. There is no evidence that any of his innumerable transgressions, from frivolous tirades on Twitter to impeachable quid pro quos with foreign leaders, have weakened his standing among his base; his approval ratings have remained consistent. Trump was elected off of a wave of anti-establishment populism, economic anxiety, cultural angst, and nationalism. He has governed in exactly the unabashedly partisan, defiant, and combative style his base demands.

In light of the threat that Trump and an obsequious Republican party pose, it is dismaying to see that rather than rejecting Trumpism, many Democrats have borrowed from his playbook. Indeed, there are clear parallels between the modus operandi and rhetoric that the progressive wing of the Democratic party—led by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the now-infamous “Squad”—uses and those of Donald Trump.

It is dismaying to see that rather than rejecting Trumpism, many Democrats have borrowed from his playbook.

Firstly, just as Trump wrested control of the Republican party from Paul Ryan et al. and dragged the party to the right, alienating moderates, Sanders and his progressive coterie appear to be doing the same in the opposite direction. This election, Democratic candidates have proposed a myriad of progressive policies that were not even under consideration in 2016, including decriminalizing border crossings and offering reparations to the descendants of slaves. This has happened in a party where it was only in 2018 that, for the first time, a majority of Democrats said they considered themselves to be “liberal.” It is not surprising that, just as Americans found themselves shaking their heads at Trump in 2016, 37 percent of Americans are feeling “very uncomfortable” with Sanders’s campaign and another 21 percent say that they have “some reservations.” Indeed, nearly half of Americans say that the Democratic party has moved too far to the left.

Nonetheless, progressives insist that their policies will not only benefit Americans but unify them. “The way you bring people together is by presenting an agenda that works for the working people of this country,” Sanders proclaimed during the New Hampshire Democratic debate. The progressive agenda, per Sanders, is “what the American people want.”

Nearly half of Americans say that the Democratic party has moved too far to the left.

Needless to say, he’s wrong on both counts; the progressive agenda is neither popular nor desirable.

Sanders’s headline proposal, Medicare for All, would cost $34 trillion over its first decade—more than the federal government’s projected total cost over the coming decade for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid combined and a nearly 60 percent increase in total expected federal spending—and would force 180 million Americans off of their insurance plans. Putting aside the fact that Medicare for All would create a healthcare system lacking market incentives and meaningful consumer options, the wisdom of aggressively pushing for it when 85 percent of Americans are “somewhat” or “very” satisfied with their current insurance is questionable at best. Resistance to any attempt to pass Medicare for All promises to be high: the majority of Senate Democrats (let alone Republicans) don’t support it. Indeed, analysts at JPMorgan put the likelihood that Medicare for All is enacted at less than five percent.

Progressives often defend Medicare for All by citing the “success” of similar systems in Europe. However, such an argument is lazy in that it both overlooks the plethora of issues with European healthcare, forgets that Sanders’s Medicare for All is far more expansive than its counterparts in other nations and assumes that the U.S. and its European counterparts are comparable, which they aren’t. The U.S. has a far greater population, a federal system of government where power is decentralized, and a greater debt-to-GDP ratio; it also spends far more on its military due to its foreign policy commitments and is more heterogeneous than any European country—homogeneity tends to induce more generous welfare states. Along with the aforementioned issues, these fundamental distinctions between the U.S. and its peer nations make Medicare for All a non viable policy option in the U.S.

It is problematic enough that progressives choose to champion a chimeric agenda. The manner in which they choose to do so is worse still.

Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is an even more quixotic proposal. Costing a whopping $93 trillion over 10 years, it is a smorgasbord of overambitious climate proposals and progressive policy goals. Firstly, it’s aimed at converting the entire U.S. energy supply to renewable energy in just a decade and establishing a "zero-emissions transportation system” at a cost of $8.1 trillion. It fails to acknowledge that eliminating U.S. emissions wouldn’t have much of an effect on the climate: if the U.S. were to go carbonless today, the difference in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by 2100 would have no palpable effect on average global temperature. A climate policy that primarily burdens the American taxpayer rather than focusing on international cooperation with countries such as India, China, and other significant carbon dioxide emitters is both unnecessarily costly and doomed to fail. The Green New Deal also includes proposals such as a federal jobs guarantee—these jobs would come with “a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations and retirement security”—an overhaul of transportation systems, and the upgrading of all (read: all) existing buildings in the country for energy efficiency. Ultimately, the Green New Deal is a list of overambitious and idealistic goals that aren’t, in the words of Democratic Senator Dick Durbin (Ill.), “legislational.” Unsurprisingly, when the Green New Deal was voted upon in the Senate, 57 Senators, including four Democrats, voted against it.

The rest of the progressive platform is equally questionable; one is hard-pressed to find a proposal that’s not either impractical, irresponsible, or ignorant. Notable proposals include a $2 trillion takeover of electrical power production that’s sure to face the same cost and inefficiency issues as the Green New Deal, the abolition of ICE—Sanders surrogate Ocasio-Cortez has also called for the abolition of the Department of Homeland Security—and a pause in the deportation of undocumented immigrants. The progressive immigration platform touted by Sanders would also decriminalize the act of crossing the border illegally and offer taxpayer-funded health care to undocumented immigrants.

This set of policies portrays the vetting of immigrants and the enforcement of immigration law as a manifestation of nationalist cynicism, rather than an acknowledgment of the reality that not everyone seeking to cross the border is an economic migrant or a legitimate asylum seeker. Indeed, the Honduran and Salvadoran migrants—non-Mexicans accounted for 62 percent of apprehensions at the southern border in the fiscal year 2018—making their way to the U.S. hail from countries that are poorer than Mexico. This suggests that, for many undocumented immigrants, the decision to come to the U.S. (rather than remain in their home countries or seek asylum in Mexico) is motivated more by economic opportunism than necessity; if these undocumented immigrants were simply seeking refuge or improved economic conditions, they would choose to remain in Mexico rather than seek to enter the U.S. Even ignoring the financial and moral issues inherent to a progressive immigration plan, its political downsides seem potentially fatal: only 25 percent of voters believe the federal government should get rid of ICE, 32 percent believe that free healthcare should be offered to illegal immigrants, and 27 percent support decriminalizing border crossings. An unpopular immigration proposal such as this would undoubtedly help Trump, ever eager to paint his opposition as weak on undocumented immigration, win in November.

It is problematic enough that progressives choose to champion a chimeric agenda. The manner in which they choose to do so is worse still.

Just as Donald Trump ran his campaign against a liberal elite undermining “American” values and a media in cahoots with said elite—“the enemy of the people”—Bernie Sanders is running against the wealthy, claiming that they have created an economy that benefits themselves at everyone else’s expense. “Billionaires are committing economic murder,” Vermont Governor David Zuckerman claimed at a Sanders rally. Ocasio-Cortez has asserted that “a system that allows billionaires to exist” is immoral and that “no one ever makes a billion dollars. [They] take a billion dollars.”

Progressives premise their policies on a class-war “theyism”: America’s ills are the fault of greedy corporations and executives whose wealth came at the expense of us all. The solution? A draconian and redistributionist taxation policy, a historic expansion of the scope of government, and the barring of the wealthy from a political process controlled by “billionaires”—refusing to accept campaign donations from the ultra-rich has become a purity test among the progressive left.

This populist demagoguery is particularly pernicious because it comes at a time of economic prosperity and targets the foundation of said prosperity. 71 percent of Americans said the economy was “excellent” or “good” in 2019, an 18-year high. Contrary to Sanders’s claims that this economic growth has only benefited investors and elites, 59 percent of Americans say they are better off financially today than they were a year ago. 74 percent, the greatest percentage since 1977, when polling began, are optimistic about the future, believing that they’ll be on better financial footing a year from now. Unemployment is low, the stock market is thriving, and wage growth is on the rise. Indeed, even rising wage inequality, a decades-long trend, has reversed: the wages of blue-collar workers have been accelerating faster than those of their white-collar counterparts.

Nonetheless, progressives continue to advocate for policies driven less by economic evidence than by a deeply entrenched, overzealous, and ideological view of a world biased in favor of big business and the rich. Their policy prescriptions include a wealth tax that failed in Europe, would slow economic growth, and is almost certainly unconstitutional. At the root of all of these policies is a fundamentally flawed view of capitalism as a zero-sum game where one person’s wealth can only be a result of another’s exploitation. Even a rudimentary understanding of economics is enough to know that there isn’t a fixed “pie” of national wealth (everyone can get richer at the same time) and that a market economy is premised on voluntary and mutually beneficial exchanges that lead to economic growth. Americans have such an understanding: 65 percent have a positive view of capitalism.

This misguided advocacy has had consequences: progressives have sown discord and weakened our democracy, much like President Trump. Sanders has said that “we have a corrupt political system” that’s turning into an “oligarchy,” and has insinuated that some of his political rivals have been influenced by their wealthy donors. These audacious claims are based on Sanders’s belief that “we have a corrupt campaign finance system” that allows “billionaires and their SuperPACs to destroy our democracy.” The Citizens United decision in particular, which held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in elections cannot be restricted, is a progressive bete noire.

There are fundamental issues with progressivism as an ideology, mainly that progressivism is inherently hostile to moderation, that progressives view tradition and any concern over its erosion as a puerile rejection of progress, and that progressivism is bellicose and Trumpian.

The idea that the financial backing of interest groups corrupts officeholders is specious. Firstly, there’s little evidence that interest group contributions affect the way politicians vote; a 2015 Stanford study found that “campaign contributions do not influence policy outcomes.” Indeed, an interest group’s power is more strongly linked to the size of membership rather than the size of its donations: interest groups with more members generally hold more electoral sway. Therefore, the primary means through which interest groups influence elections are advertisements and endorsements. Instead of spending money attempting to “convert” politicians on the opposing side of the aisle, interest groups help legislators who agree with them get elected; for example, 96.4 percent of donations from environmentalist interest groups in 2018 went to Democrats (the more environmentalist party). This pattern contradicts the progressive idea that interest groups offer financial incentives for politicians to “sell out."

Furthermore, it is important to note that even though interest groups play a significant role in American politics, voters’ interests are still paramount. Indeed, the prevalence of interest groups is a feature of our democracy rather than a defect within it. Interest groups are an essential part of democracy—there's a positive correlation between the presence of interest groups in a nation and how democratic said nation is—because they allow groups of citizens to coalesce and make sure their voices are heard in the halls of government. The diversity among (and number of) interest groups in the U.S. today means that every cause, and every American, is represented: just as there are interest groups lobbying for gun control, green energy, and an increase in funding for social safety nets, there are interest groups that lobby for gun rights, the coal industry, and cuts to social safety nets. If you still find yourself worrying about the power of money in politics, remember that elections are won on votes, not dollars: regardless of the quantity of money a candidate has in their campaign warchest, their fate is ultimately up to the voters. Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Mitt Romney are just some notable examples of candidates who were prolific fundraisers, outraised their opponents, and lost. Finally, big-money donations aren’t even necessary for a campaign to be financially competitive or electorally viable: this very election, Bernie Sanders has outraised all of his primary opponents (barring Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, who are both self-funding their campaigns) despite funding his campaign via grassroots donations.

Clearly, there’s little to be worried about (in a practical sense) in our campaign finance system. From a moral point-of-view, there’s nothing wrong with corporations, interest groups, or the wealthy spending money on elections. Just like you and I, they are stakeholders in this country’s government. There is no moral difference between a union member donating to Bernie Sanders because he expects him to protect his union, and an oil executive donating to a candidate who wishes to protect the American oil industry. Both parties have legitimate interests that deserve representation in our democracy. Indeed, progressives are on the wrong side of history here: during the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, the government, pushing for more campaign finance restrictions, argued that the First Amendment allows for the banning of a book if it’s published by a corporation. That should say it all.

Ultimately, the fact that there’s no evidence that campaign donations have a disproportionate impact on political or voting outcomes makes progressive rhetoric about a “corrupt” system nothing more than fear-mongering and demagoguery.

Progressivism is “a politics that says, if you don’t go all the way to the edge, it doesn’t count. A politics that says, it’s my way or the highway… that beats people over the head and says they shouldn’t even be on their side if [they] don’t agree 100 percent of the time.” - Pete Buttigieg

The progressive left and Sanders are left-wing populists with a Trumpian adversity to compromise and a comparable appeal to Americans looking for structural change. They thrive by promoting an us-versus-them political ideology based on blaming the opposition. It should come as no surprise that Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter account is riddled with adolescent retorts or that Bernie Sanders recently questioned “whose side” veteran and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is on. Indeed, the so-called “Bernie Bros,” currently preoccupied proliferating vile comparisons between Buttigieg and rodents, have become infamous for their vitriol and Trump-esque character.

I am a teenager and a first-generation immigrant. As a high school senior, I am worried about how I will pay for college; many of my family members supported Bernie Sanders in 2016. My demographic suggests that I should be a progressive; I understand and sympathize with the frustration that led to the rise of Sanders and his acolytes.

However, I also recognize that there are fundamental issues with progressivism as an ideology, mainly that progressivism is inherently hostile to moderation, that progressives view tradition and any concern over its erosion as a puerile rejection of progress, and that progressivism is bellicose and Trumpian.

Pete Buttigieg articulated the foundational issue with progressivism adroitly: progressivism is “a politics that says, if you don’t go all the way to the edge, it doesn’t count. A politics that says, it’s my way or the highway…that beats people over the head and says they shouldn’t even be on their side if [they] don’t agree 100 percent of the time.”

Such a politics will get Democrats nowhere. In the 2018 midterms, it was the moderate wing of the Democratic party that performed best; progressives running campaigns based off of the Sanders-inspired idea that they’d draw legions of new voters to the polls, such as Andrew Gillum in Florida, underperformed. If the Democratic party nominates Sanders, America will have two options: a belligerent right-wing populist and a belligerent left-wing populist who self-identifies as a “democratic socialist”—76 percent of Americans say they would not vote for a “socialist” political candidate. Given that most Americans are moderate or conservative, that matchup could prove to be a favorable one for Trump; for this reason, there is actually a Republican effort underway to help Sanders win the Democratic nomination.

If you want to oust Donald Trump from office, rebuild American democracy and ensure that the next four years are productive ones in terms of legislation and creating positive change, then progressivism isn’t the way; a unifying, optimistic brand of politics is. If you want to make progress, stop being progressive.