Biden 2024: Why No Challengers from the Left?

Why are the presumably progressive elements around the Democratic party not thinking and acting more boldly?

I encountered this question in two different ways during the past week.

The Too-Early AFL-CIO Endorsement of Biden

Earlier this month, the AFL-CIO endorsed Joe Biden for re-election, seventeen months before the election. As noted by labor journalist and Substack blogger Hamilton Nolan in The Guardian, this action was the earliest such endorsement the labor federation had ever made in a presidential election. By endorsing Biden so early in the election cycle without extracting any pro-labor commitments from him in return, the AFL-CIO is, in effect, telling its members, "This is the best we can do. These are the crumbs we have to settle for." Read Nolan's article for a thorough explanation of this.

The Lack of Opponents to Biden for the 2024 Democratic Nomination

At the June meeting of our local Modern Monetary Theory discussion group, New York Deficit Owls, discussion arose around the fact that no one from the progressive side of the Democratic party has begun to challenge Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024. No one is attempting to fill the political space occupied by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020.

Yes, we are all aware of the difficulty running against incumbents. Did anyone run against Clinton in 1996? Against Obama in 2012? But two qualified candidates (Eugene McCarthy and Robert F Kennedy) ran against Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and forced him out of the race. Teddy Kennedy ran against Carter in 1980 and did reasonably well. Was Carter a stronger candidate in 1980 than Biden is today?

And, of course, there's something to be said for picking your battles carefully and husbanding your political resources for maximum effect. In New York state, for example, the Democratic Socialists of American (DSA) have had success at both the state and congressional levels by following a practice of only endorsing candidates for whom they can mount a ground-level campaign.

But there's also something to be said for launching a race that you know you're unlikely to win now but that permits you to set the stage for another run four years down the road. Ronald Reagan took on incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976, failed to get the Republican nomination, but came back to win the presidency in 1980. What is striking is that there does not appear to be any Democrat now with ambitions comparable to Reagan then.

The Message of the Mainstream Democrats

Biden had effectively defeated Sanders and secured the Democratic nomination by early March 2020, just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since that time, the mainstream Democratic position, as articulated by Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and (former) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has been:

1. After Donald Trump's term in office, we don't need calls for dramatic change. Rather, we need to lower the political temperature and deliver "common sense" governance.

2. To that end, we'll refrain from seeking truly big political change: no Green New Deal, no Medicare for All. We'll just try for the minimum politically viable level of new or modified programs. We'll tout these programs as being the biggest ever of their kind (when at best they are only the biggest of the past fifty years).

3. In particular, we won't attempt large-scale political mobilization of people to oppose the Republicans' 1/6/2021 coup attempt and the country's subsequent drift toward a quasi-fascist authoritarianism. We'll treat Trumpism as a problem to be dealt with strictly through the criminal justice system.

4. The bar for being "pro-labor" being very low, we'll seek union endorsements but won't fight hard for revisions to labor laws, won't have the President endorse strikes or encourage workers to unionize, and will readily suppress strikes.

5. In foreign policy we'll cut our losses in Afghanistan but otherwise continue the neoliberal foreign policies of the Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama and Trump administrations. We'll use Americans' distaste for the governments of China and Russia as the pretext for increasing diplomatic tensions or conducting a proxy war.

It seems to me that the Democrats are vulnerable in all these areas. They could and should be actively challenged in each of them. The very least that ordinary people can do is push new ideas that widen the scope of political discourse in the U.S. -- that open the Overton window wider.

The recent controversy over the federal debt ceiling was helpful in this respect. More people are aware that the national debt is not something to be frightened of. Even more people are aware that the debt ceiling law is an anachronism and that the Democrats' failure to scrap it is just as objectionable as the Republicans' use of it to hold previously agreed upon federal spending programs hostage.

In the second half of 2023, this blog will attempt to contribute to the process of expanding the range of political ideas up for discussion in the 2024 electoral cycle.