Populism is the Socialism of Fools
Don't get fooled by its siren song.
Since the election, everyone from centrist hack to dyed in the wool socialist have come to the conclusion that "populism" is the answer. Looking past the thin veneer of sophistication this often obscures, one finds that by and large these new found converts mean by "populism" exactly what they believed prior to the election, with little retrospection. Yet while there are some differences when it comes to the particulars, there are a few broad presuppositions guiding this new economic populism:
That Democrats lost because they have become the establishment, and for them to win in the future they need an angrier, more outsider tilt.
That Democrats lost because of the economy, which Trump had the upper hand on, and in the future Democrats need to center economic issues and common sense, populist solutions in order to win back middle America.
That the Democratic party has alienated voters through its centering of social issues.
This line of argument has seemingly won out, and Democrats are now ironically under fire on social media for "tweeting about eggs, when there is a coup happening." Yet, it is also important to not lose sight of is the fact that for the most part, this was already the playbook of the Kamala Harris campaign. While in the first couple of weeks Harris relied on a message of "we’re not going back," this was quickly dropped and once the campaign got off the ground her narrative eschewed centering cultural issues that Democrats have traditionally rallied around (minus abortion). Unlike Hillary, Harris never made reference to her gender (or her race), instead referring to herself in generic middle class terms. In fact the only way that her and her campaign touched these issues was by sidelining them, either by attempting to appear tougher than Trump (as she did with immigration) or to awkwardly sidestep them (as she did with trans rights).
On top of ignoring the attempts at triangulation, the narrative that Harris did not message on bread and butter economic issues is misleading at best. While online discourse largely focused on her various media bungles, and her attempts to court conservative voters through Liz Cheney, much of Harris’s messaging hit on the exact economic issues she was supposedly ignoring. Restricting price gouging and bringing down the cost of housing were central to her campaign and featured heavily in ads, including in her closing message. Future Forward PAC, one of the main Democratic Super PACs, spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads that called for raising taxes on the rich, supporting unions, and affordability. While we can criticize how effectively this message was delivered, or how credible Harris seemed campaigning on it, it's unreasonable to argue that a candidate who ran on price controls was not sufficiently willing to propose solutions to the economic problems hindering the lives of most Americans. The problem lay elsewhere.
Setting aside the veracity of the facts at the basis of the populist position, zooming in on the details of what it would look like in practice is important. Centrists have blamed "the Groups" for the Democratic loss and already aim to throw trans people and immigrants under the bus in their drive to appear more moderate. Meanwhile, on the left, since the election it has been in vogue for a certain kind of left winger to jump on the anti-identity politics and anti-DEI bandwagon that Trump and his cronies are currently pursuing. While there are good left wing arguments to make about the problems of identity politics, particularly in how it is leveraged in the non-profit sphere, there's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The particular flaws of HR departments are less the real target of Trump's ire (just as CRT wasn’t the problem just a few years ago), with DEI merely being a floating signifier for racial and gender equality full stop. As the new administration attempts to tear down all of the gains since the Civil Rights era, we do not need to approach their arguments in good faith, or give credence to their framework—we need to oppose them to the hilt.
Looking a bit closer at the populists’s baseline claims is also fairly revealing. The three bullet points outlined at the start of this piece should be vaguely familiar to anyone who knows just a little bit about the politics of the early 1990s:
Change vs. more of the same.
The economy, stupid.
Don't forget health care.
That's right, if you want a pro-universal healthcare, outsider candidate who runs on the economy, while throwing aside Democratic support for social issues, look no further than Bill Clinton. Despite being the height of establishment politics in our mind today, Clinton was far from being a part of the liberal establishment of the Democratic party when he ran in 1992. As outlined in historian Timothy Shenk’s recent book Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, Clinton's 1992 campaign strategy was using populist rhetoric to win over blue collar and working class voters who had been turned off by the Democratic party in the 1970s and 1980s, something he was successful at. It was only after Clinton faced setbacks once in office, including the failure of his push for universal healthcare and the subsequent Republican Revolution during the 1994 midterms, did he shift further towards triangulation as a solution to being seen as too liberal by voters. That populists are more or less calling for a Bill Clinton type figure, is of course not lost on centrist pundits who are hoping for a return to a more moderate Democratic Party. Why some leftists are seemingly going along with it, should be a more concerning question.
Looking at last year's election, one can find parallels to Clinton's trajectory in the favored campaign of populists: Dan Osborn's run for Senate in Nebraska. Osborn first came to prominence as a leader of the two month long 2021 Kellogg's strike, which pitted BCTGM against the company over wages and benefits. Given his labor credentials and outsider image, Osborn was hailed by many on the left as being the perfect candidate for the Trump era and the future of the left (in spite of the fact that his economic platform was not all that different in policy than Harris's). Yet as the campaign went on he increasingly positioned himself as being to the right of his Republican opponent, putting out TV ads aligning himself with Trump, and attacked immigrants as a "pool of cheap labor." While some ignored this, we should not be shocked, it is the natural end point of trying to run a populist campaign. Finding the limits of the appeal of economic populism, candidates turn towards social conservativism in an attempt to win over Republican voters.
Even if the populism of today is infused with elements the left may find more appealing (labor, protectionist and anti-corporate messages to name a few) compared to that of the 1990s, we still should not trust it. In fact we already have a contemporary example of how disappointing such candidates can be once elected in office: John Fetterman. Since his election, Fetterman has turned sharply against the left and has become one of the most staunchly pro-Israel and pro-Trump Democrats in the Senate. While just a few years ago progressives were fawning over Fetterman, today he is reviled.
We cannot be so naive in our hope for a left wing populist to swoop down and save us, that we transform ourselves into James Carville, and capitulate on a range of issues such as immigration or trans rights. Throwing ourselves behind heterodox outsiders with right leaning views (who benefit from what is in effect masculine identity politics) is not going to help usher in a left wing populism that we dream of. This does not mean we should never compromise or be willing to modify our message to suit the mood of the electorate. But in doing so we cannot betray our principles—and more importantly the most vulnerable members of our society—in the name of electoral expediency. Is that not what we have always criticized Democrats for?
We can give the populists one point, however, and that is anti-establishment anger. Campaigning on joy and bringing the country together, as Harris did, pretty obviously did not meet the political mood of voters. While a return to normalcy worked in 2020, no such thing was possible in 2024. Voters, left, right and center are mad as hell, and they're not gonna take it anymore. Our country is polarized, unstable, and seemingly on the brink. While right wing anger may have brought Trump into office, we shall see what left wing anger—already manifesting into white hot rage at both Trump and Democratic weakness in the face of Trump—shall wrought in 2026.