E.J. Dionne - Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country

Will progressives and moderates feud while America burns?

Or will these natural allies take advantage of a historic opportunity to strengthen American democracy and defeat an increasingly radical form of conservatism?

The choice in our politics is that stark. This book is offered in a spirit of hope, but with a sense of alarm.

My hope is inspired by the broad and principled opposition that Donald Trumps presidency called forth. It is a movement that can and should be the driving force in our politics long after Trump is gone. His abuses of office, his divisiveness, his bigotry, his autocratic habits, and his utter lack of seriousness about the responsibilities of the presidency drew millions of previously disengaged citizens to the public square and the ballot box. The danger he represented inspired young Americans to participate in our public life at unprecedented levels. Tens of thousands of Americans, especially women, have gathered in libraries, diners, and church basements to share wisdom, to organize, and, in many cases, to run for office themselves. These newly engaged citizens have created an opportunity to build a broad alliance for practical and visionary government as promising as any since the Great Depression gave Franklin Roosevelt the chance to build the New Deal coalition.

To seize this opening, progressives and moderates must realize that they are allies who have more in common than they sometimes wish to admit. They share a commitment to what public life can achieve and the hope that government can be decent again. They reject the appeals to racism that have been Trumps calling card and the divisiveness at the heart of his electoral strategy. Together, they long for a politics focused on freedom, fairness, and the future. This new politics would be rooted in the economic justice that has always been the lefts driving goal and in the problem-solving approach to government that moderates have long championed.

Its true that these camps often battle over whether the nation should seek restoration or transformation in the years after Trump. In fact, our country needs both. To restore the democratic norms we have always valued, we must begin to heal the social and economic wounds that led to Trumps presidency in the first place. Yet there is resistance to common ground among progressives and moderates alike. They often mistrust each others motives, battle fiercely over tactics, argue over how much change the country needs, and squabble over whether specific policy ideas go too far, or not far enough.

The moderate says: Hey, progressive, you think that if you just lay out the boldest and most ambitious approach to any given problem, the people will rally to your side. Really? For one thing, people may like your objective but think youre changing things way more than we have to. And we can battle to the death over, say, a Democratic Party platform plank or the first draft of a bill, but without the hard negotiating and compromising that legislative politics requires, a bold idea will remain just a platform plank. That really doesnt do anyone any good. You subject everyone to so many litmus tests that we might as well be in chemistry class. And God save us from your abuse on Twitter if we disagree with you. You lefties have no idea how to win elections outside of Berkeley or Brooklyn, and some of your ideas are so sweeping that they will scare potential voters and allies away. At this point, the moderate is likely to wield the sturdy old punch line: Dont let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

But hold on, says the progressive, you moderates spend so much time negotiating with yourselves that you compromise away goals and priorities before the real battle even begins. Your ideas get so soggy and complicated that they mobilize no one and mostly put people to sleep. Better to have the courage of your convictions, lay out your hopes plainly and passionately, and inspire voters to join you. Besides, you middle-of-the-roaders were so petrified of Ronald Reagan and the right wing that you caved in to the Gippers economic ideas, let inequality run wild, and gave us a racist and grossly unfair criminal justice system. The extremists have pulled the political center so far right that the only way back to sanity is to show our fellow citizens what a real progressive program looks like.

At the risk of sounding like a perhaps unwelcome counselor attempting to ease a family quarrel, I would plead with moderates and progressives to listen to each other carefully. If the events since 2016 do not teach moderates and progressives that they must find ways of working together, nothing will. If they fail to heed each others advice and take each others concerns seriously, they will surrender the political system to an increasingly undemocratic right with no interest in any of their shared goals, priorities, and commitments.

Moderates are right about the complexity of getting things done in a democracy. Even when the boldest ideas have prevailed, they did so because complex coalitions were built, important (and, it should be said, often legitimate) interests were accommodated, and some lesser goals were left by the wayside, to be fought for another day. Moderates are also right that democracy requires persuading those who are open to change but worry about how this or that reform might work in practice or affect them personally. (Think: losing their private health insurance.) Disdaining as sellouts those who raise inconvenient questions or express qualms is not the way to build a majority for reform. Moderates are also right that Americans in large numbers are tired of a politics that involves more yelling than dialogue, more demonizing than understanding.

But progressives are right to say that for the last three decades, moderates have spent too much time negotiating with themselves. Consider all the effort Democrats put into wooing Republicans by responding to their proposals to amend Obamacare, only to have the GOP oppose it anyway and spend a decade trying to repeal it. Much the same happened with the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial services reform act. Moderates have too readily accepted the assumptions of their opponents, wasting energy and squandering opportunities by trying to accommodate a right wing that will never be appeased. Progressives are also right in saying that our political system tilts toward the wealthy and the connected. And whether they call themselves socialists or not, progressives have the intellectual high ground when they say that todays capitalisma radical form of the market economy shaped in the 1980s that is quite different from earlier incarnationsis failing to serve the needs of Americans in very large numbers.