Over the last few months, various factions on the left side of the political spectrum have been in heated debate on the comparative merits of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. The debate has increasingly gotten rather shrill, not unlike the Obama-versus-Hillary discussion in 2008. Bernie supporters are called “mansplainers” or “brocialists” whilst Hillary supporters are decried as neoliberals or establishment shills.
On the one hand, it’s not helpful to pretend that Bernie and Hillary are the same, nor to pretend they would govern the same. However, far more interesting than litigating their differences would be to analyze the constraints they would face in implementing a progressive agenda — and shift those constraints in a leftward direction.
A recent Ryan Lizza profile of Elizabeth Warren includes an important anecdote that highlights how Clinton would act as President:
They met alone for half an hour, and, according to Warren, Hillary stood up and declared, “Well, I’m convinced. It is our job to stop that awful bill. You help me and I’ll help you.” In the Administration’s closing weeks, Hillary persuaded Bill Clinton not to sign the legislation, effectively vetoing it.
But just a few months later, in 2001, Hillary was a senator from New York, the home of the financial industry, and she voted in favor of a version of the same bill.
That is, if Lizza’s reporting is correct, Hillary in one context effectively vetoed a bill and in another voted in favor of it. This suggests that focusing on Clinton’s motives and personality is far less important than the political constraints she faces.
We can see something similar when examining Bernie Sander’s position on guns. Over at Vox, German Lopez explains it this way:
Sanders’s record isn’t atypical for a Vermont Democrat. Although the state is very liberal, its rural culture makes it unusually moderate on guns. As Anthony Pollina, Sanders’s chief of staff at the time, told the local news outlet Seven Days in 1991, “Bernie’s response is that he doesn’t just represent liberals and progressives. He was sent to Washington to present all of Vermont. It’s not inappropriate for a congressman to support a majority position, particularly on something Vermonters have been very clear about.”
And indeed, as Bernie has run for national office, he has moved more in line with mainstream Democratic stances on guns, as would be expected. In a recent New Yorker profile of Bernie, Margaret Talbot discusses his rather successful time as Mayor of Burlington:
Yet Sanders turned out to be a popular and effective mayor, and more pragmatic than some might have predicted. True, he travelled to Nicaragua, where he met with Daniel Ortega and found a sister city for Burlington. (Vermont reporters dubbed the mayor and his coalition the Sandernistas.) But he also presided over economic development that transformed the city into a hipper, more forward-looking place—one of those small cities that appear on lists of the most livable. And he did so without the kind of wrenching gentrification that he abhorred. His administration devised creative solutions for preserving affordable housing, including a community land trust that enabled low-income residents to buy homes. It became a model for other cities.
A key to his success then, was working within the structure of the office, but also pushing those structures outward. Such calculus is not limited to Democrats. On the other side, history tells us that Nixon signed into law quite a few good bills that he disliked, because he was a conservative president in an overwhelmingly progressive environment. Reagan signed into law the Therapeutic Abortion Act, not because Reagan supported abortion but because he knew his veto would be overrode, and felt that he could weaken the bill.
Now, acknowledging political constraints can often be a cop-out. People tend to see constraints to policies they don’t particularly like, and reject constraints with regards to those that they do. We should hold leaders accountable, and often leaders duck behind non-existent constraints as cover. But if we believe, as many do, that “Hillary changes with the wind,” then it’s a damn good idea to change the wind.
There are two key constraints that policymakers face: First, they need money, and second they need votes. Both of these necessities currently push them towards policies that progressives dislike, but this is not inevitable and with better policies, we can force politicians to be more responsive to average Americans, rather than elites.
Money:
The increasing importance of money in elections has been bad not only for Democrats (careful political science suggests money has helped Republicans at both the Presidential, congressional and state level) but for the broader progressive movement. The chart below from political scientist Christopher Witko’s essay in Matt Grossman’s “New Directions in Interest Group Politics” shows how as Labor’s share of contributions to Democrats has increasingly been replaced by Corporate, Trade, Membership and Health, policy-making has grown increasingly conservative.
Though this is merely correlation, there are reasons to believe there is a causal link. First, there is the extensive narrative work of political scientists like Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker, who have documented how the race for money pulled Democrats away from progressive policy. Witko and Adam Newmark find, “the dominance of a state’s campaign finance system by business interests makes policy more favorable toward business.”
