So What Does That Mean in Practice?

Democrats ponder whether to do real or fake populism.

You folks like this, right? (Photo: Getty)

The worst part of the week after the presidential election has been the bombardment of “What the Democrats Must Do Now” messages from people who certainly do not know the answer to that question. “Regular Folks, my Students at Yale Tell Me, Are Tired of the Elites,” by David Brooks. “Some Friendly and Helpful Suggestions to My Friends on the Left,” by Bret Stephens. “Guhhh… Woke! Buhhh” by Pamela Paul. Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up! Let us suffer in peace! The zombie opinion-creation industry does not even require a reflection period to trot out an entire set of prescriptions. They just changed the date on the label on the old prescriptions.

You can divide the post-election reactions of people in power into two groups: Genuine Attempts to Grapple With Reality, and then the larger group of Soothing Rationalizations of What Just Happened Which Will Allow People in Power to Continue on in Their Nice Lives. The danger is that the first group gets seduced by the second group and as a result we get the next four years of the same people doing the same things to the same effect. (You may notice that straightforward ideas like “fire everyone in Democratic Party leadership positions automatically after a national election loss” do not appear to be on the table.) This sort of conversation, in which many participants are concerned with covering their own asses, and all theses are unverifiable, is always in peril of puttering out into a grand conclusion of “Change nothing,” despite that being the one plan that has already been proven to be bad.

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One reason why these discussions spiral into uselessness is that the veneer of “nonpartisanship” in mainstream media which causes them to focus on horse race analytics rather than on interrogating the morality of policy questions has seeped into the mind of the general public and now causes a great deal of election analysis to be amateur message analysis rather than substantive discussions of what humans need from politicians. If you find yourself thinking, “How should we change our messaging to win the next campaign?” I suggest you hit yourself hard on the head with a hammer a few times. That might knock you out of that frame. Recognize that the important question is what should be done to improve people’s lives, not what should be said. I am not James Fucking Carville, thank god. You can indulge in the sport of picking your favorite messaging as a balm to the election loss if you want, but be aware that the more time you spend on that, the less time you are spending thinking about changing the policies that change the world that change lives, which is the point of politics in the first place. Messaging is easy if you have actually fixed people’s problems.

(Not to grind old axes, but this is the “Defund the Police” problem: a good policy addressing a substantive issue that the public found themselves completely unable to discuss substantively because all anyone would talk about was the slogan itself. “It’s a bad slogan,” they would say, and then nothing was done to fix the underlying problem. Complaining about slogans is not helping the lives of people who have the problem! Demonstrate that you have a superior solution that will address the issues that the Defund the Police movement was raising if you think you know better than them! Fix the fucking problem first and then you are allowed to complain about the slogan. The Democrats’ utter sellout of BLM on policy, while everyone goes around with their nose in the air about how this or that slogan would have been better, should make you sick.)

“But hey, I have some great ideas about how Dems should talk about how they care about both public safety and racial equity!” Please hit yourself with a hammer right now.

I am not here to play messaging guru. What the Democrats should do substantively going forward is: Fix people’s problems. Attack the crisis of economic inequality. Tax the rich and send the money to the poor and working class and create universal public health care and child care and free education and strengthen the labor movement and restrict the power of capital and watch the nation’s deepest problems shrink, because the nation’s deepest problems stem from the fact that America allows capitalism to arrange everything for the benefit of capital, which results in an array of awful consequences for humanity. This is not some novel insight. This is the same shit I would have said before election day. Note that the election response of, for example, Bernie Sanders is a list of policy prescriptions along these lines. That is because Bernie Sanders is a person who believes in a set of principles and sees politics as a way to try to achieve those principles. That is also why he is one of the most popular politicians in America. Many other politicians, whose election responses are panicked statements about who they plan to throw under the bus to appease certain swaths of imaginary voters, could learn something from this.

The immediate concern I want to touch on today is this: The people in the Democratic Party who are genuinely struggling with the question of what to do next are in great danger of being seduced into doing nothing, or worse than nothing. This is due to the political reality that selling out a weak constituency is easier than angering a strong constituency.

The populist and the maybe.

To illustrate what I mean, consider Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, stalwart of the “pretty good progressive but not ‘The Squad’-level progressive” slice of the party. He posted a much-discussed post-election Twitter thread saying that “The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism… The left skips past the way people are feeling (alone, impotent, overwhelmed) and straight to uninspiring solutions (more roads! bulk drug purchasing!) that do little to actually upset the status quo of who has power and who doesn't.”

“We don't listen enough; we tell people what's good for them. And when progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base,” Murphy wrote. “We cannot be afraid of fights - especially with the economic elites who have profited off neoliberalism… Real economic populism should be our tentpole. But here's the thing - then you need to let people into the tent who aren't 100% on board with us on every social and cultural issue, or issues like guns or climate.”

Setting aside the weird use of “the left” as a synonym for “the progressive half of the national Democratic Party,” Murphy comes across as the perfect representative of the well-intentioned Democrats who are, at this very moment, poised to stride in either the direction of progress, or straight into the chasm of bullshit. He has correctly identified the fact that America’s political quandary today is the result of decades of neoliberals policies that fucked over much of our nation’s working class, hollowed out unions, and allowed rich people to accrue almost all of the economic gains of the past generation. Yes. Big problem. Pissed a lot of people off and a lot of those pissed off people are now Trump voters. As Murphy realizes, the path out of this situation will involve squarely facing the fact that the Democratic Party has wasted decades on a superficially socially liberal but economically neoliberal policy mix that led us here.

“Economic populism?” This is a thing that people say instead of “socialism” because they think socialism is politically radioactive. In the name of tolerance, sure, we can say “economic populism.” Real economic populism is exactly what Bernie and the (actual) left have been calling for for all this time: tax the rich and help the poor and build a strong universal safety net. Basic stuff. If Murphy and his peers in the mid-left part of the party take up this banner and run with it, there is hope that Democrats have truly learned at least one lesson of Trump: If you don’t take care of people and let them suffer they will be mad and mad people will do things that you don’t like.

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However! Murphy’s screed also hints at the trap in front of these same politicians. When he writes things like “Listen to poor and rural people, men in crisis. Don't decide for them… Build a big tent. Be less judgmental.” Sounds fine. But what does that mean in practice? In practice, in national politics, what this sentiment often translates to is “Let us be more racist and also ‘tough on the border’ and also throw trans people under the bus.” This is what “Listen to poor and rural people and men in crisis” means in the mind of much of the DC political consultant class. Pissing off wealthy Democratic donors by raising taxes and gutting private health care industry profits by fighting for Medicare For All? Hard. Difficult. Likely to prompt serious political backlash. But “listening to” these desirable voting constituencies by trying to grab onto the same prejudices that Trump waved around to great effect? Cheap! Easy! Does not piss off any rich people! If you think I am being cynical here, consider the Bill Clinton on welfare and crime, and Barack Obama’s years opposing gay marriage. This is an old playbook for Democrats who believe themselves to be savvy. And you can be sure, quite sure, that the playbook is right this minute being passed around Capitol Hill as the key to scraping off just enough of those Trump voters to get the Democratic Party out of its current troubles.

I would like to believe that Chris Murphy and his peers will choose to take on the “big fights” of “economic populism” and also be brave enough to stand up and say “Trans people and immigrants are our brothers and sisters and we reject the cowardly attempts to scapegoat vulnerable groups as a way for rich people to hide from their responsibility to make sacrifices to fix this country that they have looted.” Yes. I hope that Chris Murphy will do that. But I also observe that Chris Murphy was a leader in pushing the “bipartisan border bill” that was a Republican border bill, because he saw that as politically advantageous, and that Chris Murphy has not been able to bring himself to call for an arms embargo on Israel after they have spent a year blowing up thousands of children in Gaza with our weapons. I am not saying that Chris Murphy is, in any sense, a bad Senator, by Senate standards; I am instead saying that if Chris Murphy is what counts as a good Democratic Senator, then it is reasonable to expect that most Democratic Senators will be quite willing to throw politically weak groups to the wolves. And I know from experience that it is a very short step from “Let’s pick big hard fights in order to advance real economic populism and let’s also tell our white working class friends that we hear them on letting girls in the boy’s bathrooms!” to “Okay let’s do the bathroom stuff and the border stuff and then put a pin in the real economic populism—we’re getting lots of internal pushback on the real economic populism. They’re doing ads calling us socialist. How about if we do Opportunity Zones instead?” And then, next thing you know, you’re Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and inequality has been rising for another few decades.

But I hope that the good Democrats do not fall into that trap. Coal miners who fought in the Battle of Blair Mountain—members of the white working class circa 1921— resisted racism and focused on going to war with evil rich people. I believe we can too.

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Independent Media Is The Future

A tiny silver lining to the awful election we just had is that it has made many, many people realize that America’s media ecosystem is very fucked up. Rather than saying “We need a liberal Joe Rogan!” allow me to suggest to you that a useful thing to do is to support all of the quality independent progressive media outlets that already exist. This publication, How Things Work, is 100% funded by readers like you who choose to become paid subscribers. (I wrote here about why there is no paywall on this site.) If you enjoy reading How Things Work and want to help this place survive and thrive for the next four years, please take a second and become a paid subscriber today. It’s affordable and it’s a good cause. Thank you for reading, my friends.

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• Related reading: Talk Louder About Defunding Police; Demonize The Rich; To Unfuck Politics, Create More Union Members.

• I wrote a book about how the labor movement can save America from all of this bullshit. The book is called “The Hammer,” and you can order it wherever books are sold. TODAY, Tuesday, November 12, at 12:15 pm, I’ll be speaking about it at the Harvard Center for Labor and a Just Economy. Come by if you’re in Boston—event info is here. I’ll also be in Baltimore on December 5 at Red Emma’s, in conversation with the great labor journalist Max Alvarez. If you are into hearing voices, I spoke about the labor movement on A Song Called Life podcast recently, which you can listen to here.