The Democrats Have Bigger Problems Than the Squad

The milquetoast politics of moderate and conservative Democrats in Congress are backfiring big time on their party and threatening its hold on power before the midterm elections.

Last year, after President Biden signed his Covid relief bill into law, the White House worked with congressional leaders to develop a strategy for the rest of his agenda. The plan was simple. Democrats would work on two bills — an infrastructure package and a social policy package — that they would pass together. Progressive Democrats, who needed moderates to pass their bill, would support the infrastructure plan. And moderate Democrats, who needed progressives in turn, would back the social policy plan.

Both bills were moving through Congress until, during the summer, several members of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus threatened to derail the social policy package unless the House took an immediate vote on the infrastructure bill, which had been negotiated and passed by Democrats and Republicans in the Senate.

“Some have suggested that we hold off on considering the Senate infrastructure bill for months — until the reconciliation process is completed,” read a letter from Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and like-minded Democrats in the House. “We disagree. With the livelihoods of hardworking American families at stake, we simply can’t afford months of unnecessary delay sand risk squandering this once-in-a-century bipartisan infrastructure package.”

Ironically, it was this letter — and similar statements from Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — that brought the Democratic Party’s momentum to a sudden halt. Democrats would spend the next three months negotiating the two-track process and struggling to meet the shifting demands of moderates and conservatives over the substance of the social policy bill.

The immediate effect of this split within the Democratic Party was to undermine Biden, whose popularity was already on the decline. He took one hit from the Afghanistan withdrawal, another from the ongoing pandemic and still another from the chaos and division in Washington.

If there was one goal in mind among the moderates and conservatives who froze the Democratic Party’s agenda in place, it was to pass their priorities in law while distancing themselves from their progressive colleagues. What happened, instead, is that they weakened Democrats across the board, as candidates struggled to overcome a sense of failure that had settled over the party. Terry McAuliffe, a moderate former governor of Virginia, couldn’t clear that hurdle. In November, he lost his bid for a (nonconsecutive) second term to Glenn Youngkin, a conservative Republican.

In the wake of that defeat, moderate and conservative Democrats in Congress demanded that the House pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill so that the party would have something to tout on the campaign trail. Having made concession after concession in an effort to secure votes for the president’s social policy package, progressives now agreed to end the two-track process and hold a vote on the infrastructure bill.

The House voted, and the bill passed. Moderates had their win. But rather than go on the offensive, infrastructure spending in hand, they sat quiet. There would be no publicity blitz, no attempt to capture the nation’s attention with a campaign to sell the accomplishments of moderation, no attempt to elevate members who might shine in the spotlight and certainly no serious attempt to push back on the right-wing cultural politics that helped Republicans notch a win in Virginia.

Nor have moderate and conservative Democrats tried to devise an agenda of their own. Instead, they’ve used their remaining political capital to kill the most popular items on the Democratic Party wish list, from tax hikes on the richest Americans and an increase in the minimum wage to a plan for price controls on prescription drugs. They couldn’t even be bothered to save the revamped child tax credit, one of the most effective antipoverty measures since at least the Great Society. Its expiration in December pushed millions of children back under the poverty line.

Now, having immobilized the president’s agenda and plunged their party into disarray, the same Democrats are casting around for someone to blame. Not surprisingly, they’ve settled on their progressive colleagues. Axios’s Mike Allen, summarizing the view from “top Democrats,” writes that “the push to defund the police, rename schools and tear down statues has created a significant obstacle to Democrats keeping control of the House, the Senate and the party’s overall image.”

Groups aligned with moderate and conservative Democrats, like the centrist advocacy organization Third Way, insist that “Squad politics” are the central problem for the Democratic Party. And despite inconclusive evidence that it actually had much of an impact on the 2020 election, some Democrats continue to slam the activist slogan “defund the police” for the party’s current woes.

Perhaps this isn’t a bad-faith attempt to pass the buck for failure. You could be forgiven, however, for thinking that it looks like one.

Specifically, it looks as if moderate and conservative Democrats are doing everything they can to obscure the fact that, under their leadership and following their agenda, the Democratic Party has run aground and can’t get back on course. They sense a blowout in November and would rather play the blame game than do anything concrete to regain the ground they’ve helped lose. Their refusal to either pass popular economic legislation or fight the cultural battles of the moment have left them with only one option: find a scapegoat.

In which case, those moderate and conservative Democrats (and their allies) would do well to look in a mirror. No one forced them to derail the president’s agenda, to bog the party down in petty infighting or to take a hands-off and defensive approach to the Republican Party. They sowed their seeds; now it’s time for them to reap the results.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.