As her partisan colleagues grew ever more revolutionary, they came to regard her staid attachment to standards as retrograde.
Senator Dianne Feinstein died in office this week at the age of 90, following a career in public life that spanned more than a half century. Her passing prompted the New York Times to note that, as a U.S. senator, Feinstein was something of a maverick. “Ms. Feinstein called herself a political centrist, and she sometimes changed her mind,” the paper’s obituary read. Indeed, she “often embraced conservative ideas.” The paper fails to elaborate on the longtime California senator’s traditionalist bona fides save her occasional preference for “conservative suits.” But beyond Feinstein’s sartorial reserve, the label has been misapplied. It isn’t so much that Feinstein was a conservative. Rather, what she wasn’t was a radical.
The Democratic Party’s rapid ideological evolution from a party of center-left liberals to far-left progressives left the senator behind the times, but no conservative would have called her one of their own. The Times noted the extent to which Feinstein “supported gay rights in housing and jobs,” but she also “angered many advocates by vetoing domestic partner-rights legislation” as San Francisco’s mayor. Indeed, she did, but that was also 1982, and the position put her well within the mainstream of Democratic politics. California itself didn’t extend domestic partnership benefits to gay couples until the year 2000.
As late as 2004, the decision by Gavin Newsom, then San Francisco’s mayor, to open city hall to gay weddings became “a subject of considerable debate among Democrats.” Feinstein wondered if her fellow Democrats had done “too much, too fast, too soon,” contributing to the GOP’s election victories that year. But she wasn’t alone. Many of her colleagues, including the only openly gay member of Congress at the time, Barney Frank, joined his colleague in criticizing Newsom for failing to await state-level legislation sanctioning gay unions. Only a revisionist history places Feinstein in the conservative camp on gay marriage.
The same could be said of environmental legislation. She sponsored legislation that became law in 2007 requiring the EPA to measure and report major sources of greenhouse-gas emissions, crafted bipartisan bills augmenting tax incentives for renewable energy sources, and had a 91 percent lifetime score on the 426 roll-call votes scored by the League of Conservation Voters. What Feinstein did not do was back the absurd vision promoted by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, that would have remade the entire American economic and social landscape at a cost of just $93 trillion over ten years — the so-called Green New Deal.
Feinstein won the admiration of all the wrong people when she admonished a group of elementary-school students who, having been transformed into political props, lobbied ignorantly on behalf of that unrealizable legislative package. For that, she was demonized, accused of being a “climate denier,” and lambasted for apparently reserving more sympathy for Republican nominees than the generations that will suffer environmental hardships. But the senator hadn’t changed. Her party and its ideological center of gravity had.
Feinstein was always a champion of women’s rights and a role model for aspiring female office seekers. But she found herself on the wrong side of her party’s activist class when she refused to allow the exigencies of the Me Too moment to erase the standards of decorum and prudence to which she had been loyal all her life. A campaign of public shame was directed at Feinstein during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh because her office refused to release a letter authored by his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, and at Ford’s request (though she had “referred” it to law enforcement).
“Kept hidden, the letter is beginning to take on a life of its own,” The Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote of the Democrats lobbying Feinstein, publicly and privately, to break her pledge. When the letter was eventually leaked to the press, Feinstein appeared genuinely irritated by her colleagues’ conduct, and the reporters who detailed Ford’s ultimately unconvincing allegations did not attribute the leak to her or her office. When Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer revealed that Feinstein thought Democrats would be better off “focusing on legal, rather than personal, issues” in Kavanaugh’s hearings, preserving his accusers’ anonymity and exposing their fragmentary accusations to scrutiny, Feinstein was tarred for having “silenced Kavanaugh’s accuser to protect the status quo.”
Feinstein’s political views evolved over the years, but not nearly as rapidly as her fellow Democrats’. As her partisan colleagues grew ever more revolutionary, they came to regard her staid attachment to standards as retrograde. She was no conservative, but she was a stateswoman. Because the latter has become an endangered species on the left, it’s easy to mistake their remaining numbers as something alien to progressive politics.