Last night, it finally became official. Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee for President. It’s a great moment for the former Secretary of State, who stands a very good chance of acquiring the most powerful office in the country. But Bernie Sanders has won the more consequential contest: the battle for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.
Sanders has shifted the Democratic Party leftward
In the 1990s, Joseph Overton, a vice president at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy—a right-leaning think tank in Michigan—articulated an important concept that is often overlooked by horserace-oriented political commentary. Overton had observed that the openly-stated policy preferences of most elected politicians are range-bound by what’s considered “respectable” by public opinion.
For example, eight years ago, it wasn’t considered respectable to support gay marriage—so much so that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton opposed it. In a span of seven years, we went from that climate to one in which the Supreme Court of the United States has opined that opposition to gay marriage is irrational and animated by anti-gay bigotry.
Overton’s point was that if you wanted to change what politicians preferred, it was less important to elect different politicians. It was more important to change what was considered respectable in the court of public opinion, what we now call the Overton Window in his honor.
In the 1990s, when Overton was describing this idea, Bill Clinton had successfully moved the Democrats’ Overton Window rightward. He had campaigned in 1992 on reforming welfare, curtailing affirmative action, jailing criminals, and eliminating trade barriers.
Bill Clinton succeeded in large part because Democrats had lost three presidential elections in a row. There was a hunger among Democrats to shed the Sixties hippieism for a more pragmatic, centrist approach.
Today, things are just a little different.
Socialism is now in the Overton Window
President Obama may be a dyed-in-the-wool progressive, but the far left sees him as excessively cautious and pragmatic. The left sees no need for conciliation at a time when Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections.
And the great irony of the Obama years is that, for all his rhetoric about income inequality, nearly all of the Fed-fueled income growth under President Obama has accrued to the top 1%. If you had millions in the stock market, or took your tech startup public, served as a bank executive, or owned 7-digit real estate, Obama’s near-zero interest rates have been awesome for you. Not so much if you were a blue-collar worker whose job prospects have been crushed by EPA regulations or rising college costs.
It’s not surprising, then, that a combination of partisan victories and policy defeats have led many Democrats to believe that the prescription is more socialism, not less. That is the cause to which Bernie Sanders has devoted himself. And if you thought that cause has been defeated because Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic primary, think again.
While Bill Clinton was an ardent free trader, Hillary Clinton has come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership. While Senator Obama campaigned in 2008 on entitlement reform, President Obama last week called for expanding Social Security. Polls show that Millennials have a higher opinion of socialism than they do of capitalism.
Sure, Hillary Clinton has won her party's nomination for President. If she gains the White House, there can be little doubt that she will try to run the Oval Office like she ran the Clinton Foundation: with an ear bent to the interests of multinational corporations and friendly dictators.
But if she wants to win and gain reelection, she will have no choice but to kowtow to the Sanders-led base of her party. She will have to work with Congressional Democrats whose policies have far more in common with him than with her.
Hillary will get what she wants: the formal levers of power. But Bernie has acquired something more powerful: the stewardship of the progressive movement and the Democratic Party.
