The Great Retreat

2021-2024: How centrists, hawks and hacks retook control of American liberalism and sent it tumbling into the abyss.

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

Continued from Real Popularism Has Already Been Tried, covering the origins of popularism in 2020 and 2021.

From the moment the Biden administration began in 2021, the Democratic Party was in a state of internal crisis. Major polling errors in Trump’s favor the year prior had dashed once-high hopes of a permanent victory over Trumpism and discredited the electoral strategies of both the establishment and progressive wings of the party, creating a major intellectual power vacuum at the heart of American liberalism. This vacuum would be slowly filled by a new worldview known as “popularism,” a form of neo-centrism that painted a deeply pessimistic picture of American politics. Presenting ideology as the most important factor in elections, the popularists argued that the leftward swings made by Democrats during the Trump era as the defining cause of political shifts that they had tilted the structure of American politics towards Republicans. If major changes towards the center were not made, the popularists was said, the party was set to face complete electoral annihilation.

On its face, one would think that this argument would have little appeal among Democratic elites, but it would. Even though the following years would deal severe blows to central tenets of the popularist philosophy, their influence would only increase with time. By the time that 2024 election finally began, national Democrats would spend the entire cycle following the popularist playbook to the letter, surrendering where they were told to surrender and moderating where they were told to moderate. Popularist leaders themselves were put in leading positions in top PACs that gave them control over nearly a billion dollars in spending. And the end result, as we all know, would be nothing less than the party’s worst result at the national level in two decades.

It is a disaster that the popularists need to take ownership of, even if not for the exact reasons many have given over the past few weeks. It is true that they held incredibly high positions within the party throughout the Biden era. It is also true that their critiques were incredibly selective, ferociously targeting the left over its supposed excesses while carrying water for the establishment’s own electorally poisonous initiatives. But their main impact over the past four years was how they acted as enablers of a hideously out-of-touch and childish elite. As the Biden administration became undeniably toxic, the popularist perspective would prove to be incredibly liberating to the party establishment, who would use it as a means to avoid making tough decisions and acknowledging uncomfortable realities at every turn. The result was a full-scale withdrawal by American liberals away from all the groups they promised to protect and the causes they said they held dear—one that gained them no new votes and left their party a defeated husk. Here’s 7000 words on the Democratic Party’s Great Retreat: how it happened, why it failed so dramatically, and, most importantly, what we can learn from it.