The Spirit of 2006. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Matthew Yglesias

12 - 15 minutes

Everyone is fated to grow up and become a nostalgia-addled middle-aged person, as I was recently reminded when listening to the “2006 Movie Draft” episode of my favorite podcast, The Big Picture.

You see, 2006 happens to have been the year when I was at my very peak consumption of cultural products. No wife, no girlfriend, stagnating a little bit professionally. Netflix didn’t do streaming yet. I lived with a bunch of roommates in a kind of gross house and went to the movies (and the 9:30 Club and the Black Cat) a lot with whichever friends were up for doing something, or sometimes just by myself. Was that genuinely the best year ever for American cinema? Probably not. But I have a particular personal relationship to movies I saw that year and feel nostalgic for that time.

But precisely because I have a special relationship to that time, I can recommend some good 2006 films across a variety of genres. There were some bangers!

I was reminded of all this when I saw that John Fetterman essentially dared House Republicans to impeach Biden, saying it “would just be like a big circle jerk on the fringe right.”

It reminded me not of the cinema of 2006, but of the politics of 2006 and the kind of politicians we elevated in the “Netroots.”

Fetterman initially entered the discourse as a Pennsylvania mayor and Bernie Sanders endorser in the 2016 cycle. He performed well enough as a surrogate in that campaign that he gained a certain amount of political fame, which he leveraged to become Lieutenant Governor. He then beat a moderate House Democrat for the nomination in a Senate race, and, of course, defeated Dr. Oz in the general. But somewhere between Fetterman’s shifting political identity between 2016 and 2022 and the shifting nature of left politics in that same period, I think Fetterman stopped being a left-wing factional candidate. He is instead a feisty partisan — someone who likes to be in the mix, dishes out good quotes, and slams the other side hard; someone who is not seeking the approval of Ross Douthat, but who isn’t necessarily distinguishing himself with particularly edgy policy positions.

This is an identity that was once very important in Democratic politics and which flashed briefly in the recent past but is now largely in abeyance.

But I miss it. Just like I miss novelty remixes, debating the Pitchfork Top 50, and walking into The Last King of Scotland at E Street with no idea what the movie was even about (it’s not about Scotland).

I think that to understand what the Netroots Dems were, you have to understand some of the political history of the earliest years of the 21st century.

Joe Biden recently announced that for the first time ever, Medicare will negotiate the price of 10 prescription drugs. Shortly after, a younger friend expressed surprise to me after learning that the ban on price negotiation was a George W. Bush administration thing. But that sells it short: before Bush, Medicare didn’t cover seniors’ prescription drug costs at all, and promising to do that was one of Democrats’ best issues in 2000 and 2002. In a very different political era, Republicans felt they had to “defuse” the issue by providing some form of prescription drug coverage in a way they deemed acceptable.

What happened next was, roughly, this:

    The Senate passed a bipartisan (but mostly Dem-backed) bill that provided a prescription drug benefit in a way that liberals approved of.

    The version passed by the House (and written by Republicans) created the prescription drug benefit using private insurance companies as cutouts for the government and banned price negotiation.

    A bipartisan, bicameral conference committee wrote a “compromise” bill that mostly reflected the House version.

    The conference report then passed the House and the Senate where, crucially, it only got 54 votes; a critical mass of senators voted for cloture but not for final passage. 

Some of the disagreement among Democrats was ideological. As structured by Republicans, the bill was, in a sense, a “giveaway” to insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. On the other hand, you had Republicans willing to vote for a substantial increase in the scope of the welfare state, and there’s no question that the passage of the bill helped make a bunch of people’s lives better. Max Baucus, one of the Democrats who voted for the bill, later took some of the giveaways out of the bill and used those savings to offset some of the cost of the Affordable Care Act. He’d tell you that he was playing the long game and the Democrats who voted against it were short-sighted.

But from the perspective of the then-nascent Netroots, Democrats were acting like the Washington Generals. Why were they giving Bush a political win while letting him reward his campaign contributors, and doing it while the GOP literally didn’t have the 60 votes in the Senate they needed to pass the legislation? Why not sink it and say that if you want the political credit for delivering on prescription drugs, you’re going to have to do it my way? That way you either get the big policy win (if he says yes) or else you get the big political win (if he says no). Either way, why not play to win?

The Medicare bill is a good illustration of the divide precisely because there are merits to both sides of the argument. But what gave the Netroots such a boost was the war in Iraq, something that turned out to be both an era-defining mistake of substance and also something that an embarrassingly large number of Democrats supported. Oftentimes, in the case of people like then-senator Joe Biden, they supported it precisely because they viewed George W. Bush as a good-faith actor who genuinely needed congressional authorization to strengthen his hand in diplomacy. Those people were suckers. People like Howard Dean and Al Gore — not particularly left-wing Democrats — who rejected this argument were heroes. People who genuflected to Bush when he had sky-high approval ratings in the wake of 9/11 were patsies; the people who helped tear him down and bring those numbers back to earth were fighters. And after John Kerry got beat in 2004, we wanted combative figures.

Bush’s priority, in the wake of his re-election, was an ambitious program to privatize Social Security. Over and above its various fiscal effects, part of the vision was to create an “ownership society” in which everyone owned at least some shares of stock and would therefore associate their financial interests with the interests of the capitalist class.

Whether or not that idea ever made any real sense, a lot of people on both sides of the debate thought it was plausible and took it seriously. And there was a widespread sense that Democrats would in some sense “have to” engage with Bush’s requests on this front and enter a negotiating process with him. That was important because Congress can’t alter Social Security in a reconciliation bill — Republicans were going to need Democratic votes. But Bush got Democratic votes for his war and for his two rounds of tax cuts, so the conventional wisdom was that he would also get them on Social Security. A media chorus demanded that Democrats put forward their own proposal for changing Social Security to serve as a basis for negotiation. And it was Pelosi who devised the winning strategy — do nothing:

    As the spring of 2005 wore on, some pestered her every week, asking when they were going to release a rival plan.

    “Never. Is never good enough for you?” Pelosi defiantly said to one member.

The privatization plan went down in flames and Bush’s presidency never recovered.

Pelosi’s origin story in politics goes back much deeper than the Netroots, but she voted against the war in Iraq and she was savvy about tapping into that kind of energy.

Her counterpart in the Senate, Harry Reid, was in some ways an even clearer example because while Pelosi was a progressive, his policy record was as a moderate Democrat. But Reid held his caucus together with a Senate version of Pelosi’s “never” strategy on Social Security and it worked. He also very specifically engaged with the Netroots and the then-emerging cohort of more progressive writers who agreed tactically and substantively with the strategy.

Reid, of course, ended up becoming the Majority Leader and advancing a lot of legislation. But I don’t think he was ever particularly known as an advocate for any particular cause. What he was known for was party-building in Nevada and articulating the idea that Republicans are bad; for fighting a little dirty against Mitch McConnell and for being the most prominent person to actually fight back against James Comey’s successful effort to throw the 2016 election to Trump. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Fetterman’s chief of staff used to be a senior Reid staffer. It’s not that the two guys are particularly similar, but they do have in common a knack for dishing out a news-making quote that doesn’t involve a lot of policy particulars.

Eventually, the spirit of Netroots partisanship came to be totally conflated with being substantively left-wing and, in particular, being tied to the blob of progressive advocacy groups. By 2019, the Netroots Nation convention was an Elizabeth Warren show; in 2023, it’s Pramila Jayapal.

Warren is a brilliant, effective politician, and there is certainly a sense in which she’s a fighter.

But she’s fundamentally a factional leader. One of her early coups as a senator was successfully blocking Antonio Weiss from getting a gig as Undersecretary of Treasury under Obama. That flex felt relatively low-stakes at the time (though probably not to Weiss, who got a raw deal), but she’s exerted a lot of influence over staffing in the Biden administration, which is exactly what she spent years saying she wanted.

This is a completely valid form of political practice, even if at times I disagree with her individual judgments. But it’s genuinely the opposite of the spirit of 2006. The Spirit of 2006 meant raising the bar on partisanship and competitiveness but also welcoming to the fight everyone who was ready to stand up and say “Bush is bad and we’ve got to get the Republicans out.” The whole point of Warrenism is to throw people out of the tent because being anti-Trump doesn’t mean you’re sufficiently on board for the kind of big structural change that she wants. And of course Bernie Sanders, who’s so non-partisan he literally won’t put the little “D” next to his name, is almost the inverse of that mid-aughts Netroots spirit. At the end of the day, Sanders always comes down on the side of “there’s actually a big difference between Democrats and Republicans, you should vote for the good guys in November,” but lots of his off-hand rhetoric seems aimed at minimizing the distinction between the parties and raising the bar ideologically for what you need to sign on to.

Joe Biden’s political persona, meanwhile, is all about being a nice guy.

This has, at times, been really helpful — it’s certainly helped him be surprisingly successful on a legislative level. And I don’t think it’s bad that the party includes friendly dealmakers like Biden and honest-to-god moderates like Joe Manchin and grim ideologues like Warren. But I do think there’s something lost when you don’t have prominent politicians who are partisan punchers.

I also think that in a lot of ways, that’s the key to understanding Trump. It’s something a lot of progressives miss because they insist on reading him as a kind of ultraconservative. But to his admirers, the thing about Trump isn’t that he’s the most right-wing politician in the world (that’s Ron DeSantis’ schtick and nobody likes it) — it’s that he’s extremely committed to defeating the opposition. He says mean, funny things about his adversaries, he gives no quarter, and he’s not interested in being singled out as “one of the good ones” by people who normally dislike Republicans. But part of that fighting spirit is that he’s sometimes less ideologically rigid than the average Republican, not more.

Fetterman probably can’t consistently play this role for Democrats because of his health problems. But it’s a good role for someone to play. Not so much because the mass public loves partisan brawlers (they don’t) but because it gives rank-and-file partisans something to cheer for that isn’t ideologically divisive. There was something similar in 2017–2018 around the Women’s March and the #resistance to Trump, but that was very rapidly channeled into issue litmus tests and Indivisible trying to get people to vote for Warren. Sometimes, though, you just want to let partisanship be partisanship.