By Chris Satullo

Not bad for a doddering old fool. Early this week, just before he hopped aboard his Marine One chopper, Joe Biden talked to a press gaggle about the debt ceiling deal he’d struck with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Here’s the first thing he said: 

“Look, one of the things that I hear some of you guys saying is, ‘Why doesn’t Biden say what a good deal it is?’ Why would Biden say what a good deal it is before the vote? You think that’s going to help me get it passed? No. That’s why you guys don’t bargain very well…You guys, you realize you’re not in the real world?”

Biden was gently mocking the media reps, who deserved it. But he could just as easily have said all that about the progressive wing of his party. 

In the fantasy world of progressive Democrats – which some mainstream political journalists seem to co-inhabit – certain truths are taken to be self-evident:

1. Twitter is an accurate mirror of America.
2. “People of color” will soon become a cohesive and stable political majority.
3. No. 2 is a good thing, because progressives are good while the other side is evil and must be stopped.
4. Thus, compromise is always wrong. It is a sign of weakness and fuzzy old thinking.

Please understand, I consider myself philosophically more of a progressive than not. I think progressives have the best grasp of what’s wrong with American society, and the historical roots of those ills. They offer some bold and promising ideas to address those ills. I appreciate their stubborn passion in advancing those ideas – even the ones I’m not sure about – because America needs an antidote to the tired Reaganism and the toxic Trumpism on offer from the other side. Progressives shift America’s Overton Window – its sense of what’s politically palatable and possible – and that’s sorely needed.

But they’re just not very good at practical politics. Sometimes they’re very bad at it.  

Because of that, they’re a big reason why Trump won the Oval Office in 2016 and an even bigger reason why he did not receive the no-doubt thrashing he deserved and could have gotten in 2020.

How do they mess up? Well, the intertwined Beliefs 1 and 2 listed above are both untrue, so any political plan based on them is doomed. Meanwhile, Belief 3 – even when there’s evidence for it – is a recipe for off-putting self-righteousness and political blinders. And it leads to the flat-out wrong political behavior of No. 4.

Let’s look at each misconception in a little more depth.

1) Twitter is an accurate mirror of America. 

Even before Elon Musk took over, and people began to drop Twitter on principle, this was not true. At its peak, Twitter had about 65 million American users i.e., 1 out of 5 Americans. And many of those accounts were fallow, never posting. The data indicate that 90 percent of Twitter posts come from 10 percent of users. Several studies have found that the hyperactive sub-slice known as progressive Twitter was, pre-Musk, far younger, further left, and had more degrees and income than the bulk of Democrats.  

What’s more, Twitter’s algorithm has always rewarded extreme thinking, snark, and outrage – i.e., performance – while discouraging nuance, complexity, or a compromising spirit. So, the stars of lefty Twitter were likely to be the ones who could put on the most angry, cocksure, judgmental, and sarcastic performances. 

And here’s another turn of the screw: Social psychology studies have found that if you put a group of people with similar views in a room, with no outside influence, the views of the group usually will migrate to the margins, to the position of the group’s most extreme members.

In modern America, for years, Twitter has been that room.

2) “People of color” will soon become a cohesive and stable political majority.

This notion took off after two smart political scientists, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, put out a book titled The Emerging Democratic Majority in 2004. Their thesis: Demographic trends – growing numbers of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans – created an opportunity for Democrats to build such a majority – if the party did the right things. It was not a declaration of inevitability.  And Teixeira these days is as grim and emphatic as Cassandra in warning that the party’s progressive wing is doing exactly the wrong things, making his old prediction look increasingly unlikely.

“People of color” is a sloppy catchall that has gained magical powers in progressive rhetoric. This may be partly because, at some level, progressives who see American history through the lens of race – a hugely important, but not the only useful, one – still grasp that Blacks by themselves will never form a majority.  (Based on my random field tests with Philadelphia acquaintances, though, progressives do tend to overestimate by a factor of 2 or 3 the actual percentage of people who identify as Black in the latest Census estimate: 13.6 percent). So, to get above 50 percent, progressives needed to enlist other racial/ethnic groups into their “inevitable” demographic coalition.  

Here’s a problem, though: Based on recent elections, a whole lot of Asian-Americans and Latinos seem to resist being drafted into this glorious coalition without their consent. (Maybe unforced errors like a small group of coastal academics deciding, without any consultation with the actual people involved, that Hispanics should begin to refer to themselves by the “ungendered” term Latinx had something to do with it. Or: Telling Asian-American parents that merit-based admissions to magnet public schools had to end because too many of the slots were going to their kids.)

Even American Blacks often view with puzzled brows such brilliant emanations of the Twitter left such as “defund the police” – given that polls repeatedly show that strong majorities of urban Blacks actually want more police in their neighborhoods. (“Defund the police,” I contend, is the main reason the 2020 election was not a full-out Biden landslide.)

We’ve actually conducted several recent real-life experiments into how big a chunk of the Democratic party the Bernie/AOC left really represents. In the last two years, we’ve had mayoral elections in three of America’s bluest cities: New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Each campaign featured a Bernie-blessed, MSNBC-inflated progressive darling: Maya Wiley in the Big Apple, Brandon Johnson in Chicago and Helen Gym in Philly. Here are their percentages of the vote in the first round of voting: Wiley 21.1; Johnson, 21.6; Gym, 21.4. Gym, interestingly, got whomped by a Black candidate who vowed to hire more police and bring back “stop and frisk.”  (To be fair, Johnson in Chicago did rally to win a subsequent runoff vs. a notoriously weak moderate opponent, Paul Vallas.)

So, it would seem that, even in deep-blue territory, the high-octane progressive agenda attracts only 1 out of 5 voters. (In studies, The Pew Research Center puts the size of the progressive left nationally at 6 percent; More in Common pegs it at 8 percent.)

Acting as though you’re a majority when your real numbers look like that is a huge political blunder.

3) Progressives are good while the other side is evil and must be stopped.

First, yes, sedition and white nationalism are evils. But the group on the right that actively subscribes to such toxic views is not much bigger than the Twitter left.  That leaves a lot of other Republicans and independents whom Democrats for the last six years should have been working to lure away from Trumpism.

But … “Hi, you’re evil and ignorant, but we’d like your vote” has never been a winning political message. In fact, Democrats’ reliance on that approach has alienated many people who harbor qualms about Trumpism. Whereas Trump tells them that the people who call them dumb and evil are actually the dumb and evil ones – and they love him for that.

And when the left says dumb stuff like “defund the police” and “Latinx,” it only cements the bond.

4) Compromise is always wrong. It is a sign of weakness and fuzzy old thinking.

In a democracy, you can’t create the changes you want until you get to 50 percent plus 1. (Ignore the damn U.S. Senate and its filibuster rule for a moment, please; let’s focus on the general point.)

Being a “change agent” actually means doing whatever it takes to get to 50 percent plus 1, so that something useful can happen. In 2020, Joe Biden told us he was good at that and was brutally mocked for it. He has since proven, repeatedly, that he’s good at it, yet he still gets scant credit from progressives who have a fetish for making the perfect (their perfect) the enemy of the good.

When you compromise, you take heat not just from your enemies but also some of your friends. (Just ask Kevin McCarthy). So it’s an act of courage and strength, not weakness. It takes no bravery just to perform for your choir on Twitter, or to cast a “protest” vote against your own party’s president, secure in the knowledge that your vote won’t matter and a disastrous default will not occur.

Face it: Through those aviator sunglasses of his, Biden sees America and what the progressive moment needs far more clearly than any lefty Twitter visionaries do.

He is, dare I say it, the Ted Lasso of presidents.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia