The Fear of Populism
Pundits like to lump right-wing and left-wing populism together. Just stop.
A common habit of the pundit class DC centrists is to just throw all the people and movements and voters who are rebelling against the establishment into the same “populist” bucket. According to this way of thinking, Trump, Bannon, Bernie, and AOC are all just another form of scary extremism.
Besides being offensive to progressives, and the obvious fact that there are profound differences in the goals and policies advocated by progressive and right-wing populists, this kind of thinking is exactly what would allow Republicans to win in 2028. (Democrats are likely to win in 2026 no matter what.) If we dismiss working class voters’ anger and disdain at elites, and try to convince them that the establishment “center”, whatever that might mean at any given time, is the thing they should be voting for, we will not win their votes.
The latest example
The reason I am writing about this today is I just saw the latest example of this kind of thinking in a column from the Messina Memo by their Vice-President Tara Corrigan. It’s called The Center Can Hold.
Corrigan is writing about how establishment political parties can win and are winning against right-wing populism. I am all for joining forces with centrists and anyone else who is working to defeat right-wing politicians and political parties, but the framing in the column is troubling. More importantly, I think in her quest to elect centrists, she is choosing a strategy for Democrats which would be fatal: she wants us to try to talk voters out of their populism rather than embracing it. She writes:
“Populists run on grievance, fear, and fury. Their movements are born of frustration with the status quo, and so they instinctively frame elections as a simple binary: more of the same, or change. It’s a frame that strongly favors outsiders who promise to shake things up and return power to the aggrieved.”
Her solution is to:
First, make the election about “results, not change”. She writes that “A campaign framed around results, rather than sentiment, gives incumbents the ground they need to compete.”
Second, she says that the incumbent or establishment party should seek to “frame first, frame fast.”
Third, she wants the anti-populists to use fear as a weapon. She writes “Fear no longer just propels change; it also restrains it. Voters have seen what populist governance looks like, and many want no part of it.”
To Corrigan’s credit, she never actually lumps progressive populism in with right-wing populism, as some pro-corporate centrists overtly do. And, look, if you are running an incumbent’s campaign against a right-wing Trump style populist, and your candidate is determined not to be a “populist”, then the advice here is reasonable.
The question for Democrats, though, is why would you be determined not to be a populist? As even Corrigan’s article implies, it is so much easier to run against the establishment. Notice that she acknowledges that the anti-establishment frame “strongly favors outsiders who promise to shake things up and return power to the aggrieved”. And note the phrase “A campaign framed around results rather than sentiment…” When you are trying to come up with ways to overcome the sentiment that is out there, you have a much tougher road to hoe.
We need to embrace populism not fear it
I have written many times about how voters are becoming more and more angry and cynical about both political parties and powerful, wealthy corporations screwing over working people. With Republicans the party in power, and reveling in giving every advantage to wealthy, powerful corporations as opposed to working folks, now is the time for Democrats to embrace pro-working class economic populism: raising wages, stopping price gouging, fighting corporate corruption, breaking up monopolies, strengthening unions, and taxing the wealthy. These ideas are all massively popular with voters right now, especially the angry working class voters who are the main swing voters we need to win.
Democratic strategists and campaigns should not be spending their time figuring out how to win in spite of the voters’ populist sentiments. We should be embracing that populism full steam ahead.