The U.S. Isn’t Moving Right — The Democrats Are

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

Some alarming news is brewing for the Left. It turns out that after a brief flirtation with progressive and socialist politics, the United States is now turning back to the right.

“Five years ago, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Harris catered to the social justice Left. Now she tells Oprah she’ll shoot intruders with her Glock. That’s what I call progress,” the American Enterprise Institute recently celebrated, pointing to Harris’s moves to “catch up” with a more conservative voting public. “Kamala Harris is running to the center-right because America is center-right,” National Review blared last month. Dave Weigel argues that Democrats have “adjusted to an electorate that’s shifted to the right” by making several major policy concessions “that they didn’t want to, or think they needed to, in 2016 and 2020.”

Don’t be so sure.

It’s not that there’s nothing to this. Immigration has become a more important issue to voters across the board, and far-right ideas like mass deportation, gutting the right to asylum, or simply curbing immigration now have support from majorities or pluralities of Americans, even leaping in popularity among Democrats. And polling shows that the public has lagged or moved the other way on topics related to transgender Americans, who the Right has been somewhat successful at turning into a wedge issue.

But it’s a mistake to treat the Democratic Party’s rightward lurch under Kamala Harris as an accurate measure of the country’s politics as a whole, or even to treat support for Donald Trump or Joe Biden and Harris as a proxy for ideology. (To be fair to Weigel, he takes care to take note this and other nuances.)

Take the issue of raising the federal minimum wage. Harris never talks about it: not at the debate with Trump, not in her first sit-down interview in August, not in the Univision town hall she just did. Though it might be part of the Democratic platform, for all intents and purposes, it has been dropped from her campaign and presidential agenda.