How to Choose

Passing policy that helps people is what drives every public servant. For liberals, the periods of greatest progress also involved some of the most painful choices, such as the New Deal and the Great Society. Yet today, the art of prioritization has been subsumed to twin forces: the impulse to coalition-manage, and the management-consultant impulse to find a solution that supposedly achieves the desired outcome with as little friction as possible.

The problem is that the friction generated by choosing is a necessary, even elemental political force, and eliminating it removes important, tangible texture from our politics—the very stuff that voters use to assess their leaders. If politicians can’t choose, what do they stand for? If they are pleasing everyone, aren’t they—as the maxim goes—pleasing no one? 

Moreover, the idea that you don’t have to choose is a passive fantasy that eventually runs headlong into active reality. If you don’t choose your legislative priorities, someone else will choose for you. Democrats learned this the hard way after wasting a year on
Build Back Better (BBB), the legislative embodiment of the failure to choose, until Senator Joe Manchin set their priorities for them. 

If liberals are going to succeed—if they are going to win the public’s trust and regain the power to pass policies that improve people’s lives—they are going to have to rediscover how to choose.

The forces against choosing

A unique feature of our era is that the forces against choosing are stronger than ever before. 

Activists have existed in every era, of course. Their role in our system, a critical one, has always been to push politicians to stick to their principles, and strive for progress beyond what seems possible at the time. Typically, this means prodding them to step outside their comfort zones and say or do things that are politically risky or at least unproven. In every era, there have been active pressure campaigns on multiple issues at the same time (think of the 1960s-era confluence of feminism, consumer protection, environmentalism and civil rights, to name just a few). This creates a familiar dynamic where lawmakers are being called upon to do everything, all at one. 

None of that is new. What is new is that in recent years, activist-led causes have morphed into an entire industry of freestanding institutions with budgets in the millions of dollars, and professional staffs that can number in the hundreds for a single organization. These institutions tend to be led by members of the political elite who enjoy direct access to lawmakers, and they have extensive media operations that are constantly bombarding reporters and social-media platforms with stories favorable to their cause, and disfavorable to those who oppose—or even decline to take up—their demands.

This came about because under President George W. Bush there was a pervasive sense among progressives that they were being outspent and outmaneuvered in terms of outside infrastructure. In response, Democratic-aligned strategists and donors began to organize and build their own infrastructure. This infrastructure became supercharged in the 2010s, after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision loosened spending rules. For example, the Democracy Alliance—a network of major liberal donors founded in 2005—steadily expanded its portfolio of grantees and contributions so that by 2019, its partners had directed about $1.83 billion to progressive groups since 2005, with much of that coming in the late 2010s.

Trump’s election added rocket fuel. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) more than quadrupled its membership from 400,000 to 1.84 million in the 15 months after the 2016 election and raised nearly $120 million in that period—a huge jump from its typical $3 million to $5 million online haul. The Center for American Progress (CAP), a leading liberal think tank, had annual revenues around the low tens of millions in the mid-2000s, but by 2020, its budget had grown to over $50 million a year. The sheer number of groups grew as well. By the 2018 midterms, more than 70 new activist groups had sprung up, according to one estimate.

The way these groups exert influence is by bombarding elected officials and candidates with policy demands—to take a certain position, or speak about an issue in a certain way. They use polls as lobbying tools to convince elected officials that their issue demands are popular; however, their polls tend to be unreliable, since pollsters know how to deliver the results their interest-group clients want (this a different dynamic than in campaigns, where a pollster’s work will be measured against reality on election day). If the groups encounter resistance or opposition, they tend to be quite effective at ginning up negative attention in the press and on social media. At the end of the day, these groups are not invested in the success of the elected official—they are only accountable to their funders for whether they succeeded in getting the electeds to support the group’s position, or adopt their preferred language. 

In recent years, an additional layer has formed across the individual issue silos: the “unicause,” the idea that groups dedicated to one issue must stand in solidarity with groups dedicated to all other progressive issues. This is how you end up with environmental groups demanding police reform, and so on. 

Together, all of these factors fuse into a wall of sound pressuring candidates and elected officials not to choose between the various demands being made of them—or rather, to choose all of them, all at once. 

Why choose?

In the face of this multimillion-dollar pressure infrastructure, why bother choosing? Why not just go along with the tide? After all, in our era of diminished political parties, many of these groups claim to be able to supplant the nuts-and-bolts functions of traditional parties, such as field operations and paid media. There are a few reasons.

The first is a simple cost-benefit calculation. Typically, the downside of taking the outside-the-mainstream positions urged by the groups vastly outweighs the upside of the resources they can provide. Sure, the groups have resources, but so do your opponents. The positioning urged upon you by the groups supercharges the other side’s attacks and instantaneously puts you on the defensive. In effect, the groups are asking you to jump in a hole and then promising to help you climb out of it. With studies showing that their typical tools, such as paid canvassing, perform poorly, they probably are not capable of doing even that. 

Moreover, the positions the groups are urging often go against the sincerely held beliefs of candidates and lawmakers. Did the eight Democratic candidates for president who raised their hands in favor of decriminalizing border crossings at the 2019 primary debate really believe in open borders? Almost certainly not. Bernie Sanders, for example, was a longtime critic of legal immigration, and favored strong border security as recently as his 2016 campaign. By taking positions you don’t believe in, you come across as inauthentic. 

If those are the downsides to not choosing, the upsides are that choosing is an effective way to carve out a clear and compelling identity. The American people tend to be heterodox in their mix of policy views, especially the farther away you get from the ivory tower. Studies show that Americans with college degrees tend to be the only ones with ideologically consistent views. In 2024, candidates who overperformed the fundamentals in their races tended to be those who mixed in conservative-coded views, such as cutting taxes or cutting government bureaucracy, with stalwart liberal principles. 

Another reason to choose is that it is simply necessary in order to govern effectively. The impulse to find a path that upsets no one is common in our management-consultant era. But the goal should not be to make everyone happy; it should be to pass policies that help people. To do that, you must decide to choose.

A cautionary example of the dangers of not choosing took place in Virginia in 2021. In the lead-up to that year’s election, state lawmakers and candidates came under pressure from interest groups to adopt a range of left-wing issues, ranging from police reform to delaying the post-COVID return to school and prolonging onerous and ineffective Zoom schooling at the behest of teachers unions. Riding what commentators described as an “anti-woke backlash,” Republicans turned Democrats’ 55–45 majority in the House of Delegates into a 52–48 GOP majority and took back the governor’s mansion. State lawmakers failed to choose—and paid a price. 

What does choosing look like?

At the risk of being reductionist, choosing means deciding to do some things and not others. Importantly, though, it does not mean lowering your ambitions. To the contrary, it can be a more effective way to accomplish big things. It means setting priorities, and driving hard at them.

The eras liberals lionize as high points of progress invariably saw leaders making painful choices. To pass the New Deal, FDR chose to deprioritize civil rights. From the late 1920s through the 1930s, a number of bills to combat discrimination were moving through Congress and in several instances had sufficient support to pass. Advocates including his wife, Eleanor, and A. Philip Randolph urged FDR to throw his support behind them. 

Randolph went so far as to threaten a march on Washington (a plan that became the model for the 1963 march). But FDR rejected the activists’ demands in order to placate Southern senators, whose votes he needed to pass the New Deal program. He did issue an executive order establishing a temporary Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), but that’s it. It was a brutal choice, but it would require some highly creative revisionism to argue that he could have passed the New Deal without making it. 

To pass his Great Society program, LBJ chose first to cut government spending and pass a tax cut, muscling both priorities through Congress early in 1964, much to the frustration of progressives. However, this laid the groundwork for the passage of the Civil Rights Act early that summer. After passing that landmark bill, LBJ quickly pivoted away from the issue and took actions that triggered the ire of activists. A few months after passing the 1964 act, LBJ chose not to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a high-profile act that infuriated activists but reassured voters who were not thrilled about LBJ’s aggressive push for the civil rights law. By striking this balance, he went on to win the biggest landslide since FDR in 1936 and secured majorities that enabled the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, and other core components of the Great Society.

Unfortunately, in recent history we have seen more examples of leaders failing to choose than making smart choices. 

Take the sad arc of the expanded child tax credit. An incredibly effective policy, its enactment as a temporary measure in 2020 slashed the rate of child poverty by a third. Extending it or making it permanent became one priority among many in the gargantuan Build Back Better bill—the legislative apotheosis of deciding not to choose.

By the summer of 2021, it was clear that BBB was not going to pass. Intelligent observers could surmise this based on public reports. More decisively, at a private meeting in August, Senator Manchin told Senator Chuck Schumer that he would not vote for BBB under any circumstances—going so far as to put it in writing, several months before he went public with his opposition. 

However, the other thing Manchin put in writing was what he would vote for—a $1.8 trillion package that closely resembled what would become the Inflation Reduction Act. He also made clear what he needed politically: a robust focus on reducing inflation, something that he was, shockingly, one of the few voices urging Democrats to do. Eventually, Democrats took him up on both the substance and the politics, but only after close to a year of fumbling around and pretending they would not have to choose. 

The victim of this failure to act decisively was the child tax credit. Absent from the agenda Manchin told Schumer he’d support in the summer of 2021 was any extension of the credit. Yet at the same time, Manchin was publicly stating what conditions could get him to the table, with a work requirement as the leading demand. Child tax credit advocates oppose work requirements—for understandable reasons, since they tend to prevent benefits from getting to people who actually meet the requirements, simply because the “time tax” involved in filling out the paperwork and navigating the bureaucracy is so burdensome. 

Democrats had a choice. They could choose to negotiate with Manchin to find a version of the program that he could support, or they could simply not choose—to passively let the program expire, and put their faith in the groups to mount a pressure campaign to get it reinstated. 

Tragically, Democrats chose not to choose. They let the program expire and let millions of children fall into poverty. 

Hindsight is 20/20. At the time, polling showed that the issue was popular, and it seemed plausible that enough opposition to reinstate the tax credit could be mobilized. Except it was knowable. Having been on both sides of the wall between the groups and Congress, I have seen time and again that the promised grassroots mobilization does not usually materialize. Moreover, once a program expires, inertia kicks in and it becomes very hard to get it going again. At the time, I advocated from the strategy outlined here—at first privately, then publicly. Choosing would have angered the groups that, supposedly, had the best interests of poor children in mind; yet it also could have saved millions of those very kids from hunger and poverty.

In a pattern that is all too familiar, lawmakers succeeded in not angering activists but failed at what really matters—in this case, improving the lives of poor kids. 

Choosing is not just about politics, although it is that. It is also about policy, and about results. The common thread is simple: Decide what you believe in, and choose to focus on that—and not other things. Be loud and proud about the choices you are making—believe in them, stand firm behind them, and don’t back down when people yell at you.

No lawmaker can succeed by trying to be every-thing to everyone. In our era of prioritizing coalition politics ahead of smart decision-making, it has become common for people to fool themselves into thinking they can. It is time to stop pretending—it is time to remember how to choose.