The Progressive Moment Is *Still* Over

But Democrats don’t seem to know it.

In late October of last year, I published a piece called “The Progressive Moment Is Over.” I observed:

It wasn’t so long ago progressives were riding high. They had a moment; they really did. Their radical views set the agenda and tone for the Democratic Party and, especially in cultural areas, were hegemonic in the nation’s discourse. Building in the teens and cresting in the early ‘20s with the Black Lives Matter protests and heady early days of the Biden administration, very few of their ideas seemed off the table…As far as progressives were concerned, they had ripped the Overton window wide open and it only remained to push the voters through it. In their view, that wouldn’t be too hard since these were great ideas and voters, at least the non-deplorable ones, were thirsty for a bold new approach to America’s problems.

So they thought. In reality, a lot of these ideas were pretty terrible and most voters, outside the precincts of the progressive left itself, were never very interested in them. That was true from the get-go but now the backlash against these ideas is strong enough that it can’t be ignored. As a result, politics is adjusting and the progressive moment is well and truly over.

The 2024 election, held not long after, seemed to provide an exclamation point on my observations. But, to paraphrase President George W. Bush, “Is our Democrats learning?” Let’s revisit some of the points I made in that article on the end of the progressive moment and rate how well—or poorly—Democrats have responded.

1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hated it. Aside from the economy, no issue loomed as large in the Democrats’ 2024 election drubbing than the immigration issue. Voters thought Democrats had completely lost the plot on illegal immigration and utterly failed to control the border. Voters cast their ballots accordingly, clearly preferring a much tougher approach to illegal immigration, including not just closing the border but deporting illegal immigrants already in the country.

Since Trump’s election, the southern border has been mostly closed and illegal immigration over the border slowed to a trickle. Support for this development from Democrats has been tepid to non-existent. As for deportations of illegal immigrants, some Democrats have ventured support for deportations of illegal immigrants, at least those implicated in criminal activity.

But even here, enthusiasm has been notably lacking. Take the Laken Riley Act which has passed Congress and is now law. Laken Riley was the Georgia nursing student who was murdered by illegal Venezuelan immigrant Jose Ibarra (recall that Biden, under pressure from the left, apologized for referring to illegal immigrant Ibarra as “illegal” as opposed to the approved nomenclature of “undocumented”). The legislation named after her provides for the detention of illegal immigrants charged with theft-related crimes, assault on a police office or acts causing death or bodily harm to an individual. Just 12 Democrats in the Senate and 46 Democrats in the House were willing to vote for the Laken Riley Act, with the left of the party, heavily concentrated in blue states, conspicuous by its absence.

By a very wide margin, Democrats’ most conspicuous interventions in the immigration area have been on specific wrongful or unjustified deportations like that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Mahmoud Kalil. The former case in particular has become a cause celebre among Democrats, with Democratic politicians like Senator Chris Van Hollen traveling to El Salvador to protest his wrongful deportation. Certainly, it is not debatable that Garcia was wrongfully deported to El Salvador, even though he had entered the US illegally and even though there were some indications of gang affiliation and domestic abuse in his record, since there was a court order specifically against deporting him to that country. However, making him the focus of Democratic immigration activism is a dubious approach to refurbishing the Democrats’ image of laxness on illegal immigration.

Trump has certainly given Democrats plenty of fodder to register their indignation about wrongful or unjustified deportations. Most voters would assume that if Democrats got back into power, such wrongful deportations would stop. But they would probably be much less sure Democrats would proceed with justified and desirable deportations. And they would probably wonder if a future Democratic administration would actually keep the border under control or just revert to the chaos of the Biden years. Democrats are doing little so far to assuage such concerns.

My grade for Democrats on improving their immigration image: D

2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hated it. In the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd and the nationwide movement sparked by it, the climate for police and criminal justice reform was highly favorable. But Democrats, taking their cue from progressive activists, blew the opportunity by allowing the party to be associated with unpopular movement slogans like “defund the police” that did not appear to take public safety concerns very seriously. This was twinned to a climate of tolerance and non-prosecution for lesser crimes that degraded the quality of life in many cities under Democratic control.

Crime did not loom as large as immigration in the 2024 election, but it was still a significant drag on Democratic fortunes. In the lead up to the election, a Democracy Corps survey of battleground states and congressional district found battleground voters favored Trump and the Republicans over Biden and the Democrats by 12 points on “feeling safe” and by 17 points on “handling crime.” The survey also asked these voters what they would worry about the most if Biden won the election. Topping the list was “the border being wide open to millions of impoverished immigrants, many are criminals and drug dealers who are overwhelming America's cities.” But a very close second—just a point behind—was “crime and homelessness being out of control in cities and the violence killing small businesses and the police.” Among black, Hispanic and Asian voters as well as among white Millennials, moderate Democrats and political independents, crime and homelessness worries actually topped the list.

Democrats have made some attempts to rehabilitate their image in this area but their biggest assist has come from the voters themselves who have tossed out excessively lenient Democratic public officials in a number of blue municipalities and replaced them with moderate Democrats who are more willing to enforce the law and crack down on public disorder. It’s slow going though and most Democrats are still reluctant to embrace an unapologetic law and order stance. Not for them former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s felicitous slogan: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” That’s too bad because voters really do want law and order—done fairly and humanely, but law and order just the same. Voters are still suspicious that Democrats are truly with the program.

My grade for Democrats on improving their crime and public order image: C-

3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hated it. In the last decade, huge swathes of a Democratic Party increasingly dominated by progressives became infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those engaging in them. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s justified or an argument by whether it’s true but rather by whether the people involved are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized group or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

This doesn’t make much logical sense and it has led the Democrats to take a number of positions at odds with the concerns of ordinary voters. Voters overwhelmingly believe illegal immigration by anyone is wrong and should be deterred not indulged as Democrats have frequently done. They believe crimes should be punished no matter who commits them, public safety is sacrosanct and that police and policing are vital necessities not tools of oppression. They believe, with Martin Luther King, that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” and therefore oppose discrimination on the basis of race no matter who benefits from that discrimination. They believe biological sex is real no matter who claims it isn’t, that spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved, and that medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available simply on the basis of declared gender identity, especially for children.

But Democrats don’t seem inclined to back down on their commitment to identity politics. Take their reaction to Trump’s efforts to dismantle DEI and affirmative action within the federal government and for federal contractors. Democrats appear willing to lie down on the railroad tracks on this one. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to Trump’s actions with the disingenuous argument that DEI is merely an expression of the American values in the Constitution. That’s absurd. DEI is of comparatively recent vintage and the programs are now indelibly associated with racial preferences, oppression hierarchies, ideological indoctrination, and language policing. Those aren’t American values at all.

Tolerance, anti-discrimination and equal opportunity, on the other hand, are—precisely what Democrats used to advocate. Defending these principles against Trump and his inevitable tendency to encroach upon them as he pursues his agenda would be a worthwhile and popular stance for Democrats. But first they must recognize that Trump’s drive for a color-blind, merit-based society is extremely popular while affirmative action and DEI are not.

Instead, Democrats are repeating their misguided, ineffectual response to the 2023 Supreme Court decision that barred race-based affirmative action in college admissions. At the time, Jaime Harrison, then-chair of the DNC, “condemned” the Supreme Court for what he described as “a devastating blow for racial justice and equality.” Jeffries said the ruling showed the court was “more interested in jamming their right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.”

Jeffries could not have been more wrong that opposition to affirmative action is an expression of a fringe “right-wing ideology.” In fact, racial preferences are very, very unpopular with ordinary Americans and have been for a long time. In polling from Pew in 2022, an overwhelming 74 percent thought that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions. A majority of all non-white racial groups agreed. Affirmative action also lost badly in a referendum in deep-blue California in 2020. Supporters of a measure to repeal the state’s ban on affirmative action outspent opponents by ten to one, but the measure still failed.

The usual overreach by the Trump administration is giving the Democrats cover as they circle the wagons on this one. But their inability to change their stance at all on these issues will probably lead voters to believe that everything they don’t like about affirmative action and DEI will come roaring back once Democrats get back into power.

Even more tone-deaf is the Democrats’ determination not to give an inch on trans issues. But voters, particularly working-class voters, hate the pronoun police, strongly disagree that trans-identified biological boys should be able to play girls sports and don’t support the easy availability of “gender-affirming care” (e.g., puberty blockers, hormones, surgery) for minors. A recent New York Times poll found that 80 percent of working-class (non-college) respondents opposed transgender birth males playing in women’s sports and 75 percent opposed allowing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to be prescribed for anyone under 18.

For all that, only two (2!) House Democrats—both conservative Hispanic Democrats from Texas—could find the wherewithal to vote for The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act which would prohibit the participation of biological men and boys in women’s and girls sports. Even Massachusetts Democratic representative Seth Moulton, who had raised questions about having biological boys in girls sports, did not vote for the bill presumably because of pressure from the left (they viciously attacked him for being a “Nazi”, transphobe, etc, etc.) And in the Senate, every single Democrat voted to kill the bill. Talk about being out of step with public opinion.

In the latest example of this madness, Maine Democrats in their House of Representatives voted to censure and then disenfranchised Republican representative Laurel Libby (i.e., wouldn’t count her votes in legislative roll calls) because of her social media post about a trans-identified male who had won a girls’ pole-vaulting competition.

My grade for Democrats on improving their identity politics image: F

4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it. Since the days of Barack Obama and an “all of the above” approach to energy production, Democrats have embraced quite a radical approach to energy issues. They have embraced the view that climate change is not a dynamic that is gradually advancing, but an imminent crisis that is already upon us and is evident in extreme weather events. It threatens the existence of the planet if immediate, drastic action is not taken. That action must include the immediate replacement of fossil fuels, including natural gas, by renewables, wind and solar, which are cheap and can be introduced right now if sufficient resources are devoted to doing so, and which, unlike nuclear power, are safe. Not only that, the immediate replacement of fossil fuels by renewables will make energy cheaper and provide high wage jobs.

This entire argument is highly dubious and voters, particularly working-class voters, don’t buy the policy claims here at all. They far prefer a gradual, “all-of-the-above” approach to transitioning the energy system to the frantic push for renewables and electric vehicles (not to mention heat pumps, electric stoves, etc.) that characterizes progressives’ Green New Deal-type thinking. In a survey conducted by YouGov, just a quarter of working-class (non-college) voters embraced the Democrats’ current approach, emphasizing ending the use of fossil fuels and rapidly adopting renewables. This was actually less than the number (29 percent) that flat-out supported production of fossil fuels and opposed green energy projects. The dominant position by far was an all-of-the above approach that called for cheap, abundant energy from many sources, including oil, gas, renewables, and nuclear, favored by 46 percent of voters.

The hard fact is that the standard Democratic hostility to fossil fuels is not widely shared by ordinary voters, who are fundamentally oriented toward cheap, reliable and abundant energy. In a 2024 result from the New York Times/Siena poll, two-thirds of likely voters said they supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” Or how about this remarkable result from an NBC poll. Testing a wide range of policy proposals to see whether voters would be more or less likely to support a candidate who espoused them, the most positive response among voters was to a proposal to expand domestic oil and natural gas production. By a very wide 67 percent to 15 percent margin, voters said they would be more likely, rather than less likely, to support a candidate who wanted to expand fossil fuel production!

Trump has taken steps that he says will increase fossil fuel production and make energy more abundant. He plans to eliminate many of the subsidies and regulations that are designed to accelerate the transition to green energy and electric vehicles. And he has restricted environmental review processes to reduce the costs of big energy and infrastructure projects.

Much of this has both merit and popular support. Democrats, however, have been unremittingly hostile. They are letting the usual suspects at environmental and climate change NGOs dictate their response. Alas for them, voters care more about cheap, reliable energy than fighting climate change. They are willing to consider electric vehicles, but resent any regulatory attempt to force them to give up gas-powered vehicles. And Trump is right: environmental regulations really have become a shocking drag on building practically anything in this country—be it energy-related projects, transportation infrastructure, or housing.

If Democrats can’t accept that much of this is both popular and necessary, they will be unable to mount a credible response to Trump’s energy plans where they overreach or go off the rails. Moreover, on current evidence, voters would not be unjustified in concluding that a Democratic return to power would mean a continuation of Democrats’ commitment to a rapid renewables-based energy transition which voters do not support and do not believe will deliver what they want: cheap, reliable and abundant energy.

My grade for Democrats on improving their energy policy image: F

I hate to be a tough grader on all this but that’s how it looks right now. The progressive moment is still over. It’s just Democrats don’t seem to realize it. When they’ll wake up is anybody’s guess.