Yves here. This piece sets out the plight of what next for Democrats in class warfare terms, which is a useful frame. I am not even sure, however, that many who are in positions of influence relative to the party are even able to swallow the idea that the path for the Team Blue to recover is to embrace much derided populism, which has come to be equated with anti-intellectualism and bigotry, contrary to its historical tradition.
Les Leopold also points out, as a step in restoring some semblance of cred, that elite Dems would also have to admit where they made policy errors. But this again seems impossible; I can envision key figures recoiling, as if presented with a raw roadkilled squirrel carcass on a fine china in a fancy restaurant. Most members of our soi-disant leadership have deeply internalized that their status depends on never admitting they were wrong, much the less apologizing. That is why Democrats never fail but can only be failed by their feckless voters.
Mind you, even though this is a US issue, the repudiation of PMC elite politicians may be moving a bit faster in Europe due to worsening economic conditions on top of mainstream leaders being all on board with cutting social spending to fund military spending, which voters soundly and roundly oppose.
By Les Leopold, the executive director of the Labor Institute and author of the new book, Wall Street’s War on Workers: How Mass Layoffs and Greed Are Destroying the Working Class and What to Do About It. (2024). Read more of his work on his substack here. Originally published at Common Dreams
For the Democrats to become a truly populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. But that won’t just happen. A movement must be built and harnessed.
Donald Trump’s victory is causing James Carville, the outspoken raging Cajun who was Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in 1992, to call for the Democratic Party to go all in on a populist agenda. He wrote recently in the New York Times,
“Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress, and force them [Republicans] to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.”
Is Carville really agreeing with the Center for Working Class Politics, which in October published the results of their YouGov survey, “Populism Wins Pennsylvania?” That report found that:
“… working-class Pennsylvanians responded most favorably to populist messages and messages that emphasized progressive economic policies. What’s more, we found little evidence that focusing on economic populism risks decreasing voter enthusiasm among core Democratic constituencies outside the working class.”
Ezra Klein, another Democratic Party influencer, picked up on that survey just before the election in November, but then dismissed it as an outlier: “Surveys like that should be treated with some skepticism”, he wrote. “The Harris team is running plenty of its own polls and focus groups and message tests.”
But the results of elections matter, and there is now a chorus of Democratic Party nouveau populists, including Rahm Emanuel, Bill Clinton’s close advisor, who went on to earn tens of millions on Wall Street.
It’s time to take a deep breath and recall how these recently minted populists helped to create the very conditions that crushed the working class. As former Senator Sherrod Brown discovered in Ohio, to this day, workers still blame the Democrats for NAFTA, the 1994 trade deal that Clinton, Carville, and Emanuel pushed that ended up costing millions of U.S. jobs.
Emanual seems these days to have become a closet Sanders supporter, claiming that Obama was way too soft on the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008:
Not only was no one held accountable, but the same bankers who engineered the crisis were aggrieved at the suggestion of diminished bonuses and government intervention. It was a mistake not to apply Old Testament justice to the bankers during the Obama administration, as some called for at the time.
Some did, at the time, but Emanuel did not. Buy hey, people do change, don’t they? Why shouldn’t we believe that the old Democrats can become real populists?
Let’s start with an understanding of how that Harris polling could have been so wrong. Why did their results cause them to shy away from the kind of strong populism that the Center for Working Class Politics found attracted the most working-class support in Pennsylvania? A state Harris had to win.
I don’t know the Harris pollsters personally, but I do know how the Center for Working Class Politics operates. They are meticulous. They know that their polls will be ripped apart by establishment academics and party gatekeepers, so they can’t make mistakes. They can’t let their own personal beliefs tilt the survey towards what they’d like to believe is true. Their goal is to ask the questions others aren’t asking, to better reflect the opinions of people of all types about working class values and beliefs.
Not so with the pollsters who cashed in on the Harris campaign. They know what their client wants to hear (and is capable of hearing). And it’s not that a strong anti-Wall Street message sells, and therefore that she should mercilessly attack what Sanders calls “the billionaire class.” After all, Harris made a public point of holding a Wall Street fundraiser in the middle of her campaign, and her staff made clear that Wall Street helped to shape her agenda. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, was special adviser to her election campaign, and has deep ties to Wall Street through Uber and Pepsico.
It’s not that Democratic Party pollsters cooked the books. They just knew to ask questions that hovered within the corporate Democratic comfort zone. They didn’t ask the strongest populist questions because they didn’t think those results would be welcomed within the campaign.
I once saw this process in action. I was watching a focus group through a one-way mirror. The topic was healthcare in the leadup to Obamacare, but it was stunning to see how the discussion was shaped by the types of questions the facilitators asked. They limited them to various types of health insurance and avoided more radical reforms of the healthcare system.
At one point a younger Black man expressed his frustration: “Why all this talk about insurance? I’m interested in health care and getting access to it.” He was thanked for his comment and then ignored, while I yelled at the mirror, “Talk about Medicare for All!” It didn’t happen because the group paying for the focus group, as well as the pollster, didn’t think Medicare for All was feasible, and therefore refused to discuss it.
Today, the Democratic elites not only run away from Medicare for All, but they refuse to acknowledge their financial ties to Wall Street. They are more than comfortable, however, accepting large consulting and speaking fees from what should be the targets of their populism. This goes back to Bill and Hillary Clintons’ tone-deaf acceptance of $153 million in speaking fees, including 39 speeches from the very banks that crashed the economy in 2008. During Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign she collected $1.8 million for eight speeches to Wall Street banks.
It’s not hard to understand. The Wall Street barons who pay the speaking fees are the same kind of people who went to Yale with Hillary and Bill. They’re all from the same newly minted class of highly successful strivers. If there were any working-class roots in their backgrounds, they withered long ago. Nearly all Democratic Party elites are swathed within this moneyed class. During their leadership of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, author David Halberstam called them “the best and the brightest.” Now they are just the richest. In this milieu, light years away from the working class, getting $225,000 per speech seems like a trifle.
But let’s try to be fair. Can’t the party change its stripes now that Democratic influencers are talking populism in the wake of Trump’s victory?
Unfortunately, I don’t think their talk is credible. It’s doubtful that Carville, Klein, and Emanuel are capable of offering a sustained anti-Wall Street message. They are different from Bernie Sanders, and not just because of their word choices. It’s about their entire careers, the things that made them who they are, their entire way of being. Sanders has been an overt social democrat all his adult life. It’s obvious that he means what he says. He says it over and over again. He really couldn’t care less what Wall Street thinks about him.
As for the nouveau populists, I’m waiting for Carville to say, “Look I was dead wrong when I helped Bill Clinton undermine unions through NAFTA.” Or for Emanuel to confess that “I was wrong to take millions in Wall Street fees while workers were losing their jobs through mergers, leveraged buyouts, and stock buybacks.” Or for Ezra Klein to admit in print that the Center for Worker Class Politics, “were right about populism. The Harris pollsters were wrong, and I was at fault for dismissing their solid work.”
Or maybe the Democrats could finally show some outrage about Wall Street-induced mass layoffs that are destroying the livelihoods of working people. (For more information, please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
For the Democrats to become a populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. And for that to happened, we need a working-class movement that forms outside of the two parties and demands economic justice for all, as the original American populists, the Peoples Party, did in the 1880s. Today, that might look like a sustained, organized version of Occupy Wall Street, which fights against mass layoffs caused by Wall Street’s greed and for a $20 federal minimum wage.
Meanwhile, get ready for more faux populism from Democratic Party elites while Wall Street feasts on the riches Trump showers upon them.
“…workers still blame the Democrats for NAFTA, the 1994 trade deal that Clinton, Carville, and Emanuel pushed that ended up costing millions of U.S. jobs.”
Don’t forget Robert Reich.
Freaking Robert Reich. That guy’s videos still show up frequently in my YouTube feed no matter how many times I click “Don’t recommend posts from this channel.” If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would put this one on my list.
All this chatter since Nov 8th about the Democratic Party and how it’s gonna change by golly yes sir, this time is different, etc is lunacy. Quite the opposite. The top of the Democratic Party establishment and most of their large donors must be really loving this Trump win. They and their Wall St. buddies will cash in big time and all blame will be deflected to the Republicans. A solid win for their bank accounts, especially when private equity funds gain access to 401k plan funds. How about tax dollars getting spent buying worthless crypto? Let the riches rain down, I mean, trickle up from the working class to those who deserve it most because the meritocracy. For the next four years the new an innovative ways to steal from the working class will be limited only by the imaginations of Thiel, Musk, Andreessen, and a cadre of other billionaires who all worked hard for every cent and really deserve to own 99.9% of everything due to how amazingly smart they are. If you don’t agree you’re just too woke and should go die.
Encouraging division is a huge piece of this – it’s a feature, not a flaw. Those who encouraged identity politics fragmented the party.
I got a call from a friend yesterday about an upcoming gathering / protest on the 18th in a nearby town put on by a women’s group, we are allies. After hearing they were having speakers on immigration, the NAACP, reproductive rights, I asked if someone would be there discussing working people. My friend agreed it would be a good idea – but it was surprising none of them had thought of it. These are wonderful people, they are involved on the ground, my friend has helped put together a home for homeless high school students.
So there is a bit of habitual thinking to overcome. It means among other things:
Stop complaining about Rs
Address your own party’s shortcomings
Find the largest amount of common ground among working people that you can
Actively work to heal division
Rebuild community
Stop contributing to the larger party orgs
Raise money for your local party
Check out braverangels.org – largest group in the country seeking to heal division between left and right.
Best…H
Many in PMC community are nice people but their focus is on culture not class-struggle as we in the once-upon-a-time left used to call working class issues. The oligarchs love cultural and identity politics and allow it and the PMC is culturally hostile to the working-class and us former leftists.
The folks I was mentioning don’t fit easily into the PMC definition. They are certainly not oligarchs!
Best…H
Okay, on paper braverangels seems to be good but how much does it fight income inequality?
If BraverAngels can help unit the lower classes, then all power to em’. They aren’t gonna get much room negotiating with their local millionaires.
The main function of Brave Angels is learning / teaching ways to heal division, focusing on finding common ground. Best thing to do is get involved and look for kindred spirits. They are there.
Best…H
Please tell me what the “common ground” looks like between the oligarchs and Starbucks or Amazon employees. I’m afraid the Angels are too far up in the clouds.
Haven’t met any oligarchs through BA, not sure common ground applies to them except as a way for those of us in the masses to oppose them. Tom Frank told me the only counter to oligarchic control was a broad based populist movement, like white Kansas and black North Carolina farmers in the late 1800s who created the populist party, or the labor unions in the 1930s, or the civil rights movement of the 60s. He also said – I have no idea how to make that happen…
That’s been stuck in my mind ever since – according to Batya Ungar Sargon (“Second Class”) MAGA is a broad based populist movement. She’s right – but it isn’t broad based enough imo.
From my standpoint, BA is really about one thing – healing division. This is a critical piece of the puzzle – division allows corruption, corruption creates inequality, inequality creates more division. The weak spot of that chain is division – it’s something any of us can work on.
Best…H
“It’s doubtful that Carville, Klein, and Emanuel are capable of offering a sustained anti-Wall Street message. They are different from Bernie Sanders, and not just because of their word choices. It’s about their entire careers, the things that made them who they are, their entire way of being. Sanders has been an overt social democrat all his adult life. It’s obvious that he means what he says. He says it over and over again.”
Agreed about Carville, Klien, and Emanuel, but I no longer believe that Bernie Sanders means what he says. Why not? It’s a matter of the dog that didn’t bark. After his 2016 campaign, he had amassed a huge list of small donor supporters. After he dropped out of the race and his personal political ambitions were no longer in play, what did he do with that incredibly valuable list? Turn it over to the Dems and sit on it. If he was serious, that list and those donors would have formed the nucleus of a truly populist campaign to get us single-payer healthcare. Anyone with an once of political sense, and actual commitment to the cause they were espousing, would have done something with all that “political capital.” Sanders did not.
Yes, Sanders has as much to do with the death of the real left as anyone–he has no credibility with those few of us who actually understand what it means to be on the real left which is dead to all except, at most, five percent of the population. Selfishness and narcissism is as real for Democrats as Republicans.
Ive said since it happened that by not immediately forming his own party after the Dems made it clear he’d never win the nomination he showed he’s not really any better than any other politician who talks big. That was as good of an opportunity as there will ever be to form a true left-of-center party IMO
Yep, that’s why he didn’t lift a finger to oppose Hillary when she and the DNC stole his votes. In his heart he knows he’s a sheep dog. There is NO, and I mean ZERO, working class populist representation in DC. Yeah, a few members throw out a few crumbs from time to time but none are solid lefties as in anti war, pro worker, anti billionaire, pro single payer, anti fracking, anti genocide, all rolled into one. And that is 100% by design, why take heat from donors and close wide open corporate doors to cushy PMC jobs after the DC stint? It would be a shame to leave millions of dollars on the table over some pathetic community college drop outs, working-with-their-hands poors in rural PA who are probably racist as Trump’s great grandpa thus expendable. AI robots will make them all obsolete in 5 years anyway, better to be on the get rich at any cost PMC side of innovation, disruption, and greed. Greed has been good since the glorious Regan Revolution after all.
I think the problem for Democrats right now is not only the issues of voter perceptions, but also that the core of their party professionals as well as their PMC base as contempt for the actual working class. One of the things that I remember from four years ago was reading suburban college-educated voters making the statement “they didn’t lose their jobs because of trade, they lost it because of automation.” The voters bought the Wall Street Democrat line hook, line, and sinker. I don’t think they have ever seen, let alone experienced the impact of either one of those. In my experience, workers know when their jobs are replaced because of automation rather than immigration. I’m not working class, but I have seen automation projects implemented that results in layoffs. And if I can see it, then the people actually working in the factories should know even better.
I think the blind belief in the Democratic party is one of the biggest problems for the leadership of such organizations, and they need to learn to work through other avenues in order to achieve their desired end goals. Do James Carville, Ezra Klein, or Kamala Harris really care about a worker in an auto parts plant in Ohio or Alabama, or a retail clerk at a department store in the Philadelphia suburbs?
Thanks for sharing this. A part of me (one of the more questionable parts tbh) still wants to reclaim the Democratic party for socialism-friendly small ‘d’ populist democrats. The parties may be realigning but I still don’t feel very Republican. I just want my party back from the neoliberal frauds who decided they should be permanently in charge but never to blame.
I’m an old leftist who has also worked in government and is also familiar with political operatives on the D and R side. The reality is that the Fed government is not and cannot be the answer for helping the working class or even those of us who are falling out of the middle-class. Why? Because the feds are systemically corrupt or, as we used to say, “no good deed goes unpunished.” The DP is so dependent on several types of bribery as to be useless politically for the real left.
I read the Carville piece in the NYTimes. I was repulsed by Carville’s cynical focus on “messaging” and hollow performative gestures without acknowledging the deep corruption at the rotten core of his gang of carpetbaggers.
At the very least since it was bankrupted by Obama’s Pritzker-and-Golden Sacks-funded 2008 insurgency, the DNC is no longer a “party” but has become a private club run for the personal gain of a tiny cabal. They nihilistically view elections as random lotteries that change nothing for the Military-Financial complex that throws them crumbs while it voraciously loots the planet. As Jim Zogby pointed out in yesterday’s video, this cabal “wins” no matter what, because they only exist to enrich themselves.
This is unfortunate, because congress and state legislatures have strangled ballot access by political movements other than those controlled by the DNC and the RNC. This is a totalitarian system of oppression. History demonstrates again and again that it will require a societal collapse to change such a system. I’m too old to survive that…
Where else would Carville make an attempt to point back at and appear prescient than the genocide-loving New York Times.
I had a similar takeaway from Carville’s NYT opinion. He gave the impression throughout the piece that now is the time to work on messaging and throwing the voters a bone, because the Dems no longer have control of he government, so there’s no danger of actual success.
Love the line “no danger of actual success” Brian, yes
Neither the Clintons nor Emanuel, nor Obama–for that matter–think they are wrong. They are much too cynical, in the first place, to HAVE (simply) “been wrong,” which supposes some good will on the front hand. They believe in their own phony meritocratic superiority, and know damned well they work for both their corporate masters and for a larger American imperial project, fully accept that lies and misdirection must accompany it. (See Obama’s instructions to the CIA to unseat Assad.) Anyone with ANY remaining doubts should read Horace Campbell’s horrifying, magisterial Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya (review:
to understand the depths of H. Clinton’s quite–flatly–evil willingness to perform on the part of that larger neocon project. (She bragged that she had set new records for arms sales as Statesec, and took tens of milioins in donations to her foundation with most of such sales!)
Another simple example: These people DO NOT LIKE unions. They tolerate them as a bequest of a New Deal which they have forsworn. I did a stint as a consultant for a mid west firm that, as it turned out, was helping Exxon fight a unionization attempt by pilots after the Valdez incident; the firm’s founder was close to the Washington establishment. Told me flatly that the D hierarchy was opposed to unions because “they don’t foster unity.
We struggle to accept–but need to accept–the degree of cynicism that predominates at top levels of the D party. Reforming the party has been the project of every cadre of disillusioned activists arising since the Reagan election debacle in ’80; I was part of THAT wave, several that followed, myself. It’s not possible.
Have struggled with the link function several times recently; is there a fix? Tried three times, separated remaining text from link, cut and re-pasted to no avail. Apologies.
Would just add that the fact the many of us, convinced lefties though we may be, as strongly committed toward a multipolar world view, STILL cling, however sentimentally, to ideas of D party reform. . . feeble. I include myself. We should have got started on the long hard uncertain work of creating an alternative long ago. I have quit the D party here in Florida. . . which I maintained to at least vote in primaries. I feel that renouncing membership is more important at this stage.
Remember to close the Linked ‘URL’. Then add the text that will be highlighted; I’ve botched links myself.
There is a glaring contradiction here. Democrats adopting a pro-working class agenda is equivalent to Netanyahu supporting Palestinian nationhood. It is a given that the rulers of the DP have sold their souls to billionaire devils. Asking them to change their stripes at this point amounts to asking them to fire the bosses who write their fat paychecks. An election-based strategy that involves the transformation of the DP into a working class oriented political party is a blind alley.
Federal level politics (and elections) in the US are irredeemably corrupt. Political power on the federal level is an expensive commodity you cannot afford. A better strategy would focus on direct action; such as strikes that involve worker occupation of workplaces. That would require the acquisistion of the revolutionary consciousness that the game is rigged.
What’s important to realize is that your local Congress person will sincerely commiserate with the locals but the Democrat Party controls access to election season money. That Congress person will not stray far from that election trough and will vote national party line in D.C. See AOC.
I am anti-capitalist, follow your reasoning, but am still with people like Chantal Mouffe who advocate a left populism and the push for a coalition national party. No, it won’t be immediately availing, but Bernie–who some of us on the left had been critiquing for decades–proved that there is a hunger for serious change. To fail to speak to that hunger in national (and therefore international) terms–as genocidal activity continues in the Middle East/West Asia–also means failing to advocate against US foreign policy, and for the rest of the world, already invisible enough for most liberals, the submerged half of the US economy on which the whole ugly edifice is propounded.
Where I live, to give some idea of the difficulties in a solely local effort, purported lefties from the D party–people with ZERO political economic critique or acumen who, like many liberals, think that they are left because they are anti-racist–are swamping early efforts to talk about a new local party. Some are so naive (though they may be sweet people) that they may not know whether they are there to undermine, to be eyes for the local D party or not. A national working people’s entity would give something larger to work for. (And yes I know it’s a hard thing to conjure; I was in on a lot of organizing tele-meetings for the Movement for a People’s Party after the last Bernie debacle, saw for myself the egos, the near-coups by idiots, etc.) The Working People’s Party, meantime (as I understand it) accepted a lot of Soros money and then tucked tail and supported reformist Dems at several key junctures, including this past election. I had earnest old lefty friends (out of Philadelphia, for ex.) insisting to me that I needed to join them with Harris; several are admitting that they blew it–sacrificing a lot of credibility–now.
Absolutely a conversation that lots of people are having now, though.
Yep, I’m going to join the Mafia and reform it from inside……..
The Dems lost the 2024 presidential election on purpose. The could care less about the American working class, or Americans in general, much less the vast number of dead in Ukraine or Gaza. But they do care very much about the Israel Lobby’s money. The Israelis wanted Trump.
Populism is another fantasy. Bernie’s only role at this point is to head off a 3rd party candidate.
The Dems main priority is to keep the money rolling in. As long as that happens, losing is easier, since it relieves them of the conflict between pleasing their sponsors and actually supporting popular policies.
Populism’s not a fantasy. It’s a long time-honored midwest (here) tradition that brought lots of great legislation and change in places like Minnesota in the 1890s. Rife in the Republican Party on the right, among independents and left Dems. See Chantal Mouffe’s ‘Toward A Left Populism’ for great ideas about how to take advantage of populist sentiment–feelings are real, members of the intelligentsia forget (notion she assays with real conviction). They chose Walz, who has a tidy history of actual populist legislation behind him, and then put him on ice down the stretch of the campaign. There are absolutely four or five issues on which most working people agree that wealthy interests in Congress thwart progress on; hay could be made with them at the national level.
The billionaires who support the Democrats would rather the Democrats remain the party of the bourgeois class and lose than become the party of the working class and win.
I think you just described the USA’s essential character. It is a criminal enterprise. Smedley Butler described his time in the army as being a muscleman for Big business. Look at the history. The country was founded by people more or less “on the make”. They wanted riches, land and to emulate the feudal overlords they had experienced in Europe. (The ocasional quasi-religious fanatic thrown in). The inauguration day photo of Scranton Joe and his thuggish son in their black overcoats, black gloves and aviator sunglasses said It all. The new mafia don had arrived. US foreign police is a combination of protection racket and Smash and grab. Domestically the made men enjoy the impunity to crush the plebes untill there is no more blood to extract. To get back to the theme of the post, people don’t vote for the Ds because they lie. No amount of messaging Will change that. When someone shows you Who they are, believe them.
I remember well during the last spring of 2016 I was driving back to my home in Washington State from Violet, Louisiana, where I had been posted on a commercial ship as a sailor for the Sailor’s Union of the pacific, and I had driven to the ship five months earlier so now had to drive back, and I have the distinct and vivid memory of stopping many times along I-80 (I first went north to Chicago to see old friends and then headed west from there) for coffee or meals and seeing, always, pickups and men in stetson hats with their wives or girlfriends, or alone, emerging from trucks with Sanders stickers on them. I remember thinking, wow, there is a huge thing happening here. But then, as we all know, Sanders was aced put of the running and I am betting 99 percent of those rural and flyover voters turned to Trump. Sanders in 2016 was the Democrats last best hope to reach the working class, and I am not altogether sure he would have beaten Trump, nor how he would have done as President, but I think in the 8 years since then the die has been firmly cast, and now MAGA has the working class, or much of it, simply because the Democrats abandoned them. I see nobody on the D side willing or able to pick up the standard, all the supposed candidates are too firmly in the maw of big money.
Even if Sanders had defeated Trump in 2016 (which is arguable), he would have never been allowed to govern.
Trump, whose issues with the permanent government are mostly cosmetic, was heavily interfered with; Sanders would have been immediately kneecapped.
The Dems don’t want to be populists. They want to steal the trappings of populists and guarantee nothing will fundamentally change. Hence all the kvetching about “messaging”.
They don’t even want to do that; for the most part, they want to broadcast their moral vanity.
They have all the populist instincts and political commitment of a “In This House We Believe (We’re Morally Superior) lawn sign.
In any case, from now on, the ironically named “Democratic Party” is the party of Russiagate, Ukraine and genocide in Gaza. I don’t see how they can ever disavow themselves from that. Best that they just go away and let an actual people’s party grow.
Not much chance of that though. Instead, they’ll have some of their DP elites talk about populist things to give cover all the while absolutely nothing of substance will change. In particular, to be truly and effectively populist, the DP would actually have to work for the benefit of the public which will invariably put them at odds with their elite donors. This cannot happen so long as the current party elites remain. Better odds that they will circle the wagons, again, and focus even more exclusively on their elite donor class.
If the DP base had any respect for itself, it would just walk away and not look back.
Their crimes are legion. You’re just remembering a few recent ones, I’m afraid. Which could disprove your assertion.
The “two-party” system is the problem– burn it to the ground.
There are certainly elements of elected or democratic representation in the world that we can borrow from, when it’s time to rebuild.
On thing is certain: reform is not going to happen via “either” party or by following the rules that they have set in place.