The Rise of Progressive Conservatives

The ultimate over-performer’s case for a new model of politics: Rep. Jared Golden (ME-02)'s full remarks from WelcomeFest.

I have a lot of respect and admiration for Rep. Jared Golden. As one friend of Welcome once remarked about him, “I may not agree with Jared 100% of the time, but I appreciate that Jared agrees with himself 100% of the time.”

Authenticity goes a long way, particularly in politics. We noted the miraculous nature of Rep. Golden’s leadership in a post earlier this year:

Joe Manchin’s retirement means there is a new holder of the title “Electoral Miracle” in Congress.

Rep. Golden is the Gold Standard for Democratic over-performers. Of the many Democrats who flipped House seats in 2018, Golden is the only one who has won a Trump district three times. And he’s done so by increasing margins each cycle.

Committed to independent thinking and nuance, Golden knows a thing or two about winning competitive races. I spoke with NBC News’ Alex Seitz-Wald about this in a feature he published on Rep. Golden last week, “Far from the convention, a Democrat runs from Harris and hands out beer in rural Maine.”

“He’s not only over-performed in a red congressional district, he’s been able to hold it for several cycles, which is truly a feat,” said Lauren Harper Pope, the co-founder of Welcome PAC, which works to recruit moderate Democrats in conservative-leaning areas. “We should be learning from him, not the other way around.”

At the inaugural WelcomeFest on July 30, Rep. Golden delivered scripted remarks — a rarity for him IYKYK — on being a co-chair and new face of the House Blue Dog caucus, how he’s won over voters in one of America’s most rural congressional districts, and what it may look like to discard of the left-right political spectrum to opt for something more people can actually relate to and understand: progressive conservatism.

POLITICO’s Sarah Ferris covered his speech the next day, writing:

Golden described a “backlash” among his voters to hearing about “ever-expanding levels of student debt amnesty for college kids they see trashing campuses on TV” while they’re worried about car payments and mortgages. He said they’re angry about being told their concerns about crime and an “unsecured southern border” aren’t real issues and “they’re wrong to be concerned about them.”

Bonus: Last week, Vox’s Eric Levitz wrote a piece on Kamala Harris embracing some aspects of progressive conservatism, noting:

By abandoning certain progressive commitments, embracing conservative rhetorical tropes, and claiming the mantle of economic populism, she has sought to define herself as the kind of Democrat who swing voters can trust…

She has made the case for liberal issue positions in philosophically conservative terms — framing her social policies as attempts to safeguard individual freedom from government overreach and her fiscal agenda as, among other things, a plan for helping strivers “build intergenerational wealth.”

As a reminder, you can support Rep. Golden and other electoral over-performers via our Win the Middle slate.

Below are Rep. Jared Golden’s remarks as delivered. You can also watch video of his keynote here.

The Rise of Progressive Conservatives

Hi everyone, and thank you. I’ve been a fan of the work Liam and Lauren and everyone at Welcome have been doing to help bring common sense and normalcy to politics, and it’s great to be here with all of you.

I am here primarily because I worked with a group of colleagues to save the Blue Dog Coalition from extinction and then took on the position of co-chair with an eye toward the future.

The Blue Dogs are a decades-old caucus that prioritizes fiscal stability, national security, and a willingness to work across the aisle to get things done for the American people.

But I believe The Blue Dogs can be much more than that. We can be proud progressive conservatives, defying the laws of physics in DC politics and forming a covenant with the true American majority.

Our success will depend on two things: First is our commitment to place-based politics, which transcends partisanship and defeats extremism. Second is by rejecting the unnatural left-right political spectrum that stokes division and polarization.

PLACE-BASED POLITICS

Let’s start with place-based politics. Blue Dogs are focused on people who are turned off by fringe elements in our politics and that means we are focused on the reality normal people are living.

We all know that our political culture amplifies extreme voices, sometimes so much that weird, unpopular ideas enter the mainstream. Consider some Democrats’ brief, dangerous flirtation with “defund the police.” Or Republicans’ long-running obsession with shrinking government so small that it can lurk right next to your bed to keep an eye on you during the most intensely private and personal moments of your life.

To most Americans, these ideas are both weird and wrong. And before they’ll support a candidate, they want to know that doing so doesn’t require their sign-off on these extreme visions or policies.

In other words, they want to know that their representative isn’t for extremists and weirdos, but for them, their families, and their communities.

My work with the Blue Dogs comes from my determination to make sure that we create space for people like that within the Peoples’ House. People like me, like the ones I grew up with in Leeds, Maine.

Let me tell you about where I’m from.

My family lived in Lewiston, Maine, an industrial town that for generations was dominated by textile mills and shoe factories but lost those jobs to globalization. So my father’s family moved 20 miles north to a town called Winthrop. Later on in life, by the time I was born my parents ran a multi-generation small business just a few miles away in Leeds, Maine, a dairy farm town back then but today the cows are mostly gone.

Maine’s 2nd Congressional District is massive, but it’s full of communities like Lewiston and Leeds. Our economy was built on the land and the water. Primary natural resource industries like fishing, farming, and logging fueled secondary industries like canning and food processing, lumber mills and papermaking.

Others made a living through tourism — different from production but equally tied to our land and water. Teachers, police officers, firefighters and others rounded out our working-class communities.

My community and so many others are full of normal people who want normal things from their government: Good schools, public safety, infrastructure that works, a viable path for working-class people to sustain themselves and their families.

But if you’d asked me as a kid, I couldn’t tell you which of the farmers in town were Republicans or Democrats, or whether my parents’ customers voted “Red” or “Blue.” In fact, most of them weren’t either. When I was 10-years-old, a guy with big ears named Ross Perot won the town I grew up in, and he nearly won the Congressional district I represent today. Sorry in advance to the defenders of neoliberalism, but that guy made a lot of good points.

But what bound everyone together when I was growing up in Leeds wasn't a political identity. It was the hours and years working together, and spending time together. The time spent in diner booths, church pews, on stumps around a fire and school gymnasium bleachers. What connected us was the place, the people, and the way of life. It was our culture – our local culture.

I joined the Marines after 9/11, and when I came home after four years in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was those bonds I relied on. Like a lot of veterans, re-entering civilian life wasn’t straightforward. But my family, friends, even strangers in the community, were there for me. They gave me work. They encouraged me to go to Bates and finish college. They encouraged me when I decided to run for the Maine Legislature and eventually for Congress.

I have always run as a Democrat. I believe in the power and necessity of unions, in equality and civil rights. But I won a lot of votes from Republicans and Independents, too, and from Democrats who no longer feel much in common with the Democratic Party. I believe they vote for me because they know I’m one of them. I’m from where they’re from. I live like them, talk like them. Always have.

The men and women, and their families, who I grew up playing sports with, getting into trouble with after school – those folks, and people like them, are the reason I’m here today, serving them as a 3-term incumbent Democrat, all while many of them also vote for former President Trump.

They trust that when necessary, I’ll stand up for them against elites who don’t care about them, or where they’re from, or how they’ve lived, even when that means standing up to my own party – actually, especially when it means standing up to my own party.

This is how placed-based politics transcends partisanship. When I oppose burdensome regulations by the Biden administration that would undermine our lobster industry, I’m not fighting him alongside Republicans. I’m fighting him on behalf of lobstermen.

When I vote for bills supported by Democrats, I don’t do it because I'm a Democrat who wants to give the president a win. I voted for the Infrastructure Bill because Maine is a massive, rural state with big infrastructure needs. I voted for the Inflation Reduction Act because ours is one of the oldest states, where seniors need lower healthcare costs.

I voted for the CHIPS and SCIENCE Act because being from a state still reeling from free trade deals that did lead to mill closures and jobs going overseas, I know how important it is to make investments that ensure we are a nation of producers, not just consumers.

That’s what place-based politics is all about. Putting loyalty to your district and your people first, putting their culture and their way of life first, before any agenda of a political party or president. And when you stick to it – when you demonstrate your loyalty to your district year after year – that is what proves to your people that no matter what the weirdos on the fringe of your party might do or say, there’s room for normal people. Because I’m one of them, and there’s room for me. There’s room for Blue Dogs. There’s room for progressive conservatives.

I want to go off script here and explain where that term “progressive conservative” comes from. It’s from a construction worker in my district. Back in 2018, when I was first running and flipped the seat, a member of our staff came into the office a few weeks before the election. He told us

“Guys, we’ve won the election.” We asked him what he was talking about, and he told us about a conversation he’d struck up with a man in a local bar.

He asked the staffer, who wasn’t from Maine and had a thick Southern accent, what he was doing in Maine. He told him he was working for this guy Jared Golden, who was running for Congress. The man, a construction worker, immediately proclaimed “Oh, he’s that progressive conservative Marine.” So that’s where it comes from.

DEPOLARIZATION BY REJECTING LEFT-RIGHT POLITICS

None of all that is to say that practicing this kind of politics always makes you popular. The fact I can win a district Trump also wins makes me a target for the national Republicans every election. And the team-sports activists in the Democratic Party howl whenever I break with leadership. Both would rather I be replaced with someone else.

To their credit, they can both sense the same thing we all do — that most people reject extremism. So the GOP spends millions to tell voters I am a dangerous leftist, pushing open borders and socialism. Some of my rigidly left-wing colleagues and the most extreme elements of our party’s base say I’m a DINO, an apologist for authoritarians on the right.

These are obviously lies. Others, especially in the press, try to label me with less incendiary terms. Some tag me as a “centrist” or a “moderate” — terms I know many people in this room embrace. And that’s fine. But for me, those labels evoke a place somewhere in the middle of the left-right axis. To be honest, I am just as uncomfortable with those labels.

The reason is this: I believe the most dominant lie of our political culture is the idea that we all can be reduced to our place on a left-right political axis. That’s an axis that, by the way, originates from revolutionary France, based on what side of the room the allies and opponents of the King sat on. In the centuries since, political scientists and academics and pundits have developed it into what we know today as left-right politics.

But it’s all imagined. The political spectrum does not exist in nature. There’s nothing real and tangible to where things belong on the political spectrum because it’s a construct of the human mind, and it is in constant flux, constant change, and it means different things place to place, country to country, and era to era.

And yet, we are subject to a constant narrative telling us the political spectrum is the only smart way to understand politics. And while this crude axis may provide some limited benefit as a shorthand in political conversation, I believe it is far more harmful than illuminating.

Left-Right politics is a root cause of much of the polarization we see today. After all, if this is the correct way to understand politics, then the only rational strategy for political parties is to move further to the extremes. Some pundits say this is a good thing, that polarization heightens the contrast between the parties and clarifies voters' choices.

There are two problems with that approach. First, Left-Right politics are divisive.

As the parties continue to polarize and rhetoric gets hotter and hotter, partisanship starts to feel existential. People peddling this narrative would have you believe party ID is the entirety of your identity. This view of politics would turn people with whom you had good faith disagreements into sworn enemies. Pressure builds to choose between party affiliation and colleagues at work. Lifelong friendships splinter along partisan lines. Even the bond of family, which should be the strongest of all, is tested. Too often, it breaks.

Second, left-right politics ignore the complexities of actual voters.

Each of us has progressive and conservative impulses alike. These are not in tension, and building a political system that puts them in opposition to each other is a recipe for disaster.

Here’s an example of progressive conservatism: I have told voters for years that I believe we should raise taxes on the wealthy to help cut the deficit. When I discuss this with voters, most of them agree. Both these ideas are popular, both are sound policies, both are mainstream.

But Left-Right politics doesn’t know what to do with a proposal like this. Progressives who normally favor raising taxes on the rich would reject it, convinced that any concern with the deficit is a dog whistle for cuts to social insurance programs for the poor. Conservatives would oppose it because their devotion to fiscal responsibility ends at raising taxes on the wealthy even to balance the budget and save the nation from fiscal ruin.

I speak with Democrats who support Trump’s tariffs as an effort to support American manufacturing. I speak with Republicans who love their union and want workers in other jobs to have the same power they have to advocate for themselves. This is what I mean when I talk about progressive-conservatives. In our day to day lives, these are not contradictions. They reflect the reality of an electorate that refuses to be neatly categorized.

Some people in this room and in our party may say this just sounds like a rehashing of the Third Way neoliberal politics of the late 20th century. But for me, progressive conservative thought is not about mixing “social liberalism and fiscal conservatism” as so many commonly refer to that center and center-left space of American politics.

For me, there is an obvious and rightful consensus within the Democratic Party and in America on the so-called “social issues” of the 20th century. These rights are still at risk because many of today’s Republicans deeply believe with conviction in restricting these rights, or try to use them as wedge issues to win elections. But most Americans do not agree with them, and when Republicans run elections on these issues they lose. Democrats everywhere should take note.

And so I think the concept of “social liberalism” is no longer a useful way to talk about the diversity of thought within the Democratic Party. And what does being a “fiscal conservative” even mean in an era where, let’s be honest, both parties continue to come up with new excuses to add to the national debt whenever they’re in control.

For me, if I had to distill progressive conservative down into a similarly brief phrase like “socially liberal, fiscally conservative”, I might say “progressive economics, cultural conservatism.”

Progressive economics is something you can probably grasp without me going into much detail. Tax the rich to cut the deficit. Pro-business and antitrust. Corporate welfare is bad, direct payments to families are good. Financialization of the economy is sometimes bad, protective tariffs are sometimes good.

But when I say “cultural conservatism” I want to be clear I‘m not referring to the social issues that split the 20th century Democratic Party. What I am referring to is a political faultline I believe most Democrats don’t even know exists.

The backlash among my constituents to climate change policies, like electric vehicle mandates and higher energy prices. (Notice I didn’t say electric vehicles, I said electric vehicle mandates.) Hearing about ever expanding levels of student debt amnesty for college kids they see trashing campuses on TV, while working people who didn’t go to college are just trying to make their car payments and maybe someday buy a home like their parents could. Their concerns about crime and an unsecured Southern Border, and being told those aren’t real issues, and they’re wrong to be concerned about them.

Some pundits have tried to explain this mix of economic and cultural impulses as populism. Their idea of populism is that it is a force that can be harnessed by people like Bernie Sanders and The Squad on the Left, or Trump, JD Vance, and Josh Hawley on the right. The idea is these politicians share some political DNA despite being polar opposites on the Left-Right scale.

Populism is a real force in politics, and provides a far better way to understand the electorate than the old left-right spectrum. But not as a force to be harnessed in service of Left-Right politics. Populist energy comes from the vast majority of Americans who don’t fit neatly on the political spectrum. It is expressed in alternating waves of rage, disgust, and despair toward the centers of power in Washington and Wall Street.

Populism is the public’s disdain of an elite consensus that seems stacked in favor of the powerful and wealthy — regardless of party or ideology — at the expense of everyone else — regardless of party or ideology.

It’s rage at trade policies championed by Democrats and Republicans alike that shipped jobs or entire industries overseas, putting our trade sheets in deficit in service of CEO and shareholder profits.

It’s disgust with politicians who leverage their public service to land seven-figure lobbying jobs within days of losing an election.

It is despair that even after dutifully voting in every election they are told is the most important one of their lives, they are still facing the same challenges in their day-to-day lives.

In politics, newcomers or outsiders can sometimes ride the wave of populism into office. But once they’re in office, it’s over. Populism will always be a force aimed at the powerful. Our job isn’t to harness populism. It’s to feel it, and to use our power as elected officials to chip away at the consensus that so many Americans feel is rigged against them.

Left-Right politics tells us we must join a partisan team. Rejecting it frees us to join voters in attacking the root challenges that fuels their anger and frustration. Anyone in any party who does that will be able to overcome the challenges of partisanship and polarization. That’s the promise of progressive conservatism.

In Congress, it’s not enough for any one member to take this on by themselves.

Luckily, the Blue Dogs are not alone. While we have our differences, we share common cause with other factions of democrats and republicans in Congress. Our visions and strategies differ, but we are running in the same direction.

I am confident that this project can be a success. So many of us are fed up with the status quo of hyper-partisanship, polarization, and politics as a team sport where no matter who wins, everyone seems to lose.

The Blue Dog bark is getting louder. And with support from organizations like Welcome, I think our pack is going to get bigger.

Thanks again for having me.

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