What Jonathan Chait And The Bow-Down-To-The-1% Democrats Don’t Get

What Jonathan Chait And The Bow-Down-To-The-1% Democrats Don’t Get

Jonathan Chait is out with a new piece in The Atlantic, which is the latest in a series of commentaries from the happy-to-be-pro-oligarchy wing of the Democratic Party. They argue that since Biden did some good things for workers but the Democrats still lost, we therefore shouldn’t bother with all this pro-worker populism.

Chait and his fellow neoliberals just don’t get it. Forty years of damage to the economic well-being of working families in this country is not going to be easily remedied, especially in a media environment dominated by Sinclair Broadcasting, right wing talk radio, and social media. Working-class voters aren’t going to jump for joy about long term policy changes in an economy that still feels tough on them.

Chait makes the following points:

• Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich had big policy fights, and so did Barack Obama and Paul Ryan, therefore you can’t lump them all together as neo-liberals. (Which is a fair point on some issues, but all of those politicians were aligned on trade and bailing out Wall Street when it crashed the economy.)
  

• Maybe Hillary Clinton was just a bad candidate, so you can’t blame her losses in the Rust Belt on neoliberal economic policies. (If you look at where Hillary Clinton’s vote collapsed compared to Obama, it was precisely in those old Factory Towns most impacted by trade and deindustrialization.)

• Yes, Harris ran as a moderate and was not a populist, but she did better in swing states than in the country as a whole, so her loss was the fault of Biden’s populism, not her own non-populism. (In fairness to Chait, his argument on this point was so muddled and confusing that I may not have gotten the point he was trying to make here exactly right. Apologies if I missed it, Jonathan.)
  

• The idea that a lot of the Biden policies will have more long-term effects and aren’t being noticed yet is overstated. (Yes, a few things got implemented more quickly, but the long-term impacts of the investments being made now will far outstrip the short-term benefits people have already seen.)
  

• A bunch of counties that got jobs because of Biden gave Harris a lower percentage of their votes in 2024. (Yeah, we are losing working-class voters everywhere.)
  

• Inflation happened because Biden was convinced by a bunch of liberals not to worry about it. (This is complete bullshit – inflation was a worldwide problem, driven by factors out of his control, which Biden handled better than most governments.)
  

• Just because Biden was old doesn’t mean he and his policies wouldn’t have been unpopular anyway. (This argument also seemed a little convoluted, so I may not be summarizing it in the proper way.)

There is so much to unpack here, and I don’t want this article to be a tedious point-by-point takedown of Chait, but let me make an observation or two.

Chait’s argument can be boiled down to: Joe Biden did a bunch of stuff for working people and took on some corporations, and we lost; therefore populist messaging and policy making doesn’t work for Democrats. The problem with this argument is that Chait has conveniently forgotten most of what happened in our recent history, and ignored practically every bit of polling data that has come out in recent years. For us to believe that populist messaging and policies were failures, we would have to ignore a few points:

• Nearly every major incumbent party in the world lost last year, in part because COVID supply chain problems and the Ukraine-Russia war triggered inflation that ravaged the world economy.
  

• We all lived through the tortuous post-debate month, the worst month for the Democratic Party in American history, weeks of limbo where the campaign was in suspended animation while Democrats argued bitterly over whether Biden should run or not.
  

• Biden’s populist agenda and message helped us win not only the 2020 election but have the best midterm election cycle for a presidential party in 60 years.
  

• Democrats with more populist messaging than Harris ran several points ahead of Harris in all but one contested Senate race in the country.

You would also have to ignore that Harris’ more populist campaign when she began her campaign moved her quickly into a tie with Trump, while her less populist, less economy-focused second half of her campaign lost that momentum and let those polling gains deflate. And you would have to ignore one poll after another throughout the last two years, including from the Factory Towns project I run, that showed the more populist and more economy-focused message the better.

Chait mocked the progressive praise for the Biden administration’s accomplishments, but what Biden and his team got done, with the smallest congressional margins in modern history (up until the Republicans won the House by even smaller margins), is stunning. The fact that those policy successes didn’t make Biden and Harris popular was due to several factors, including the worldwide inflation we have already referenced, a broken media landscape dominated by right wing media infrastructure, and the fact that many of these accomplishments will be felt more in the long run than immediately. That combination of factors resulted in the tragedy of Biden’s unpopularity, but there is little to no evidence in the polling or other data I have seen that would suggest the policies themselves, or the messaging behind them, were unpopular.

There is a major battle for the soul of the Democratic Party going on, and journalists are taking sides as well. On one side are Democrats aligned with monopoly capitalists and the billionaire oligarchs who say Democrats should not be economic populists and should not be challenging the power of those corporations and people. On the other side is the labor and progressive movement. Joe Biden, to his eternally great credit, chose to join labor and progressives in empowering working people and taking on the oligarchs. He did it from the first days of his administration and did it up until his farewell address. Democrats need to continue this part of Biden’s legacy. They weren't rewarded this time, for all kinds of reasons, but they will be if they double down and go even further in fighting for working people.