Joey Sendaydiego/Vox

This week, Vox launches The Left, Explained, a series about the ideas, people, and policies that define the contemporary left and the Democratic Party. Today, Explained is giving readers a look at one of the project’s first pieces, about how progressive economists took the reins of economic policy, and how Kamala Harris’s candidacy could stymie their influence. 

When Kamala Harris gave her campaign’s biggest economic speech yet in Pittsburgh last month, she tried to keep everyone in her party happy.

She did not succeed.

Attempting to strike a balance between progressive and pro-business themes, Harris said she’d hold corporations accountable if they didn’t play by the rules — but opined that “most companies are working hard to do the right thing.” Rather than being “constrained by ideology,” Harris said, she’d seek “practical solutions to problems.”

The speech had little populist fire, and, coming amid extensive courting of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, it set off alarm bells among some on the left. “My God,” the progressive economist Hal Singer wrote on X afterward. “We lost Kamala.”

The “we” is an alliance of advocates that has, over the past 10 years, come together in a surprisingly successful project to reshape the Democratic Party’s economic agenda. Some wanted to take on Big Tech and Big Business. Others wanted the government to revive US manufacturing, while ditching free trade and getting tougher on China. And others wanted big new spending on social policy.

But these advocates joined to fight a common enemy: neoliberalism. The status quo, they believed, had hurt the American people and backfired on Democrats electorally. These post-neoliberals triumphed during the Trump and early Biden years — converting many party elites to their cause, securing key appointments, and shaping what became known to some as the New Progressive Economics. 

Some are urging Harris to undo some of Biden’s changes and steer the party closer to where it was in the Obama years — for instance, by being less hostile to big business and big tech. 

But for now, winning is Harris’s top priority. “I don’t think she has an economic philosophy, and I don’t think she wants to have one until she wins the election,” one advocate in close contact with the campaign told me. 

Harris and her party will have to choose a path forward if she wins. Understanding the present crossroads requires reckoning with why Democrats adopted this agenda in the first place.

During Barack Obama’s second term, some progressive thinkers and activists’ disappointment and frustration with his administration boiled over.

The country had recovered from the Great Recession, but slowly. Banks were now somewhat more regulated, but Obama hadn’t fundamentally transformed the finance sector or punished bankers. Progressive critics believed this was because Obama’s top appointees were too sympathetic to the old economic establishment’s thinking. 

Critics argued that there were far deeper problems with the US economy that required far more sweeping change. Inspired in part by Occupy Wall Street, “inequality” became a new funding priority of progressive donors and foundations. 

Traditional antitrust policy had been that the government should intervene when corporate concentration raised prices for consumers. But advocates like Sen. Elizabeth Warren wanted to rethink and expand the concept of antitrust — to make it about challenging the concentration of corporate power.

Then came Trump’s 2016 victory, a seismic shock to Democrats. Party elites were so stunned by Clinton’s defeat that they began to question their fundamental assumptions about how politics worked. The establishment was grappling for answers; some of them looked in the mirror and wondered: Was this our fault?

A well-funded effort to convince them that it was indeed their fault soon materialized. Influential progressives who wanted to challenge the party’s consensus saw opportunity. Money flowed into think tanks and advocacy groups old and new, in a project inspired by conservative donors’ decades-long project of building a right-wing counter-establishment. 

The left did not technically win the 2020 Democratic primary, as Joe Biden — the most old school of the major contenders — emerged triumphant over Warren, and Bernie Sanders. But Biden embraced the new agenda anyway. He had long been close to labor and skeptical of pointy-headed economists from elite universities. (“He’s so old,” Felicia Wong of the Roosevelt Institute later said, “that it turns out he’s actually pre-neoliberal.”) 

Mark Makela/Getty Images

Quickly, Biden’s administration took on a starkly different character from Obama’s. With Democrats in control of Congress for the first time in a decade, the party wanted to make the most of their governing majority — and that meant going big. 

They started off with a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill for pandemic recovery. The rest of the Democrats’ big bold legislative agenda ran into the constraints of a 50-50 Senate. Republicans helped pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, but for other progressive priorities, Democrats had to tailor their plans. Republicans also signed onto the CHIPS Act, a bill to award billions in grants to bolster a US semiconductor manufacturing industry.

Meanwhile, Federal Trade Commissioner Lina Khan and Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter swung into action on antitrust, suing Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Google, among other companies. Both became key to what the administration dubbed “Bidenomics” (and the New York Times would later dub Harris “The queen bee of Bidenomics”).

But now that the new agenda was actually being implemented, its critics began to speak up — while its inherent tensions became more evident.

The nitty-gritty of implementation also made clear that no one approach could make every constituency happy. Did the administration really want to bolster US companies to help them compete globally — or did it want to take those companies down a peg?

Yet in the public mind, the new economic agenda was largely overshadowed by a problem the reformers had not anticipated: the highest inflation in four decades. “People don’t like inflation and we got a lot of it,” economist Adam Ozimek told me. In the end, Biden’s economic policy ended up historically unpopular. 

And then, in a wild turn of events, Kamala Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket — and conversations about what Harrisnomics would mean immediately followed. You can read all about what happened next here.

Read more:
The present — and future — of the American right

In eight pieces, Vox explains the current state of the movement: its dominant ideologies, its newest obsessions, and its defining thinkers. 

Briarcliff Entertainment

Trump impressions are mostly bad. The Apprentice is different. The latest imitator to take on Trump is Sebastian Stan, who, with the magic of prosthetics, plays a young Donald Trump in Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice. And Stan is not doing Trump. He’s being Trump.

Where voters will consider two ballot measures on abortion at the same time: Voters in 10 states will weigh in on abortion-rights ballot measures this November, but only Nebraskans will cast ballots on two competing initiatives. If that’s confusing, that’s the point. 

Rethinking autism research: Mice are small, breed quickly, and are relatively easy to genetically manipulate, making them ubiquitous in biomedical science research. Yet, all attempts to make drugs that help people manage some of the more challenging effects of autism have failed. Is it the mice?

What will protect Social Security? There’s more being taken out of Social Security than being put in, and by 2035, the trust funds keeping the benefit alive could dry up, leaving Social Security beneficiaries who live below the poverty line with even fewer resources. It’s time to think about increasing the Social Security tax, particularly for wealthier taxpayers. 

Should we have a say in AI – especially if we even want it? Why do tech CEOs get to decide whether our whole world should be turned upside down? Consider that “permissionless invention” might have implications for all of us and that there’s plenty we can say about it. 

Attention Kmart shoppers: It's over.  The last mainland, full-size US Kmart store is closing up shop on Long Island, effectively ending the discount retailers' 60-year run. [The New York Times]

Harris takes her message to Fox News viewers: The Democratic presidential contender is continuing her slate of interviews in unexpected places this week with a surprising turn with Fox News's Bret Baier -- an interview that could net her greater exposure to undecided or on-the-fence voters. The interview with air Wednesday at 6 p.m. ET.  [Fox News] 

Paul Morigi/Getty Images

Aubrey Hirsch for Vox

Read more as Aubrey Hirsch explains — in comic form — how abortion bans adopted across the country are making pregnancy  and even common occurrences such as miscarriages less safe. 

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by staff editor Melinda Fakuade, with contributions from senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan. We'll see you tomorrow!

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