Real Popularism Has Already Been Tried

(It didn't work)

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

For the first time this century, the Democratic Party is truly in the wilderness. Although it has lost presidential elections before in recent years, those defeats—usually narrow and in spite of the popular vote—did not fundamentally change the party. They still ran the same kinds of candidates, kept the same network of people in charge, and stuck to their same worldviews after each of their losses. This is not guaranteed to happen now. Unlike the narrow defeat the party faced in 2016, Trump’s victory this year has left little room for interpretation. It was remarkably complete and thorough, at least by the standards of modern elections. He won the popular vote, carried the decisive swing states relatively handily, and made massive gains among groups and states at the heart of the Democratic coalition. The verdict from voters, including many who voted for Democrats down ballot, was clear: they are deeply unsatisfied with the Democratic Party as represented by the Biden administration to such an extent that they are willing to take a major risk with an alternative that they also broadly dislike.

In light of this, something obviously needs to change, at least at some level. Even those closely in line with the party establishment have been able to recognize this, and, indeed, some of them have used this moment to re-examine their priors. In the immediate aftermath of the results, no less than David Brooks admitted that Kamala Harris’ campaign was centrist, that it failed, and that perhaps “the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption…that will make people like me feel uncomfortable” in order to win. But a great many more have used this moment to push the narrative that this result primarily represents a repudiation of the left. As this story goes, Kamala Harris and the party at large were doomed from the start due to a destruction of the Democratic brand at the hands of what they refer to as “The Groups”—a constellation of left-liberal think tanks and pressure groups that supposedly exerted an undue leftward influence on the party during the 2020 presidential primaries. Had it not been for them, it is argued, there never would have been that “Kamala is for they/them” ad, no Democratic candidate would be associated with defunding the police, and America’s working class would have never run towards the right. If the party is to have a path forward, it is said, it must repudiate this nexus and re-center itself around inoffensive, right-of-center platitudes that stand no chance of alienating anybody, ever.

If this sounds familiar to you, it’s for good reason. It’s not just that the main idea behind this argument is identical to what the party’s centrists have said, and implemented, for decades on end. It’s that the same exact figures making this argument now have been making it for years, and they won. Their proposals carried the day among Democratic elites years ago and formed the heart of the party’s strategy during much of the Biden era. What’s more, many of the same exact people now play-acting as Cassandras had nothing but praise for these efforts back when it looked as if the party would win. They got the exact campaign they wanted, knew that they were getting the exact campaign that they wanted, said it was great when it was happening, and sometimes played major roles in the campaign itself. But now that it hasn’t worked out, they’re acting as if their wing was ignored the entire time.

They’re banking on you not knowing what they’ve been up to for the past four years, and they shouldn’t get away with it. Here’s the history of Biden-era centrist politics that America’s popularists don’t want you to know: how they won their battles, got exactly what they wanted, and left us all worse off for it.