Fake Populism vs. Real Populism

Will voters see through the phony kind and give true economic populists a hearing?

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In two neighboring industrial states, we are about to get a test of the proposition that economic populism is the key to a Democratic resurgence. We are also going to find out just how much havoc Donald Trump is wreaking on his own party.

In Ohio, a genuine pocketbook populist, Tim Ryan, is in a campaign for an open Senate seat against the ultimate faux populist, J.D. Vance, who went from hillbilly to hedge fund executive. Vance won his primary thanks largely to Trump’s endorsement.

This is a Republican-trending state where one of the Senate’s most effective economic populists, Democrat Sherrod Brown, keeps getting elected and re-elected while other Democrats don’t win statewide. Maybe Brown and Ryan are onto something.

In Pennsylvania, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is favored to win the Democratic primary today for another open Senate seat against the more centrist Conor Lamb (assuming that Fetterman’s recovery from a stroke is on track). The Republican side is too close to call and features a tight three-way race between candidates who epitomize the widening schisms in the GOP.

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Until a few weeks ago, a traditional Wall Street Republican, David McCormick, was the front-runner. He worked at McKinsey and got rich as CEO of a software company called FreeMarkets. He then joined the George W. Bush administration as undersecretary of the Treasury for international affairs. He left to work for a hedge fund, Bridgewater, becoming its CEO in 2017. You couldn’t invent a better antithesis of a populist.

After flirting with a McCormick endorsement, Trump endorsed Dr. Mehmet Oz. In case you’ve been living on Jupiter, Oz is a TV doctor (with actual medical credentials) who has been accused over the years of promoting one fake cure after another.

Oz is Trump’s kind of guy. He and Trump have been on each other’s TV shows. Trump prizes Oz’s celebrity.

Oz doesn’t actually live in Pennsylvania; he registered at his in-laws’ Pennsylvania address in 2020. (The Oz campaign says the doctor grew up in “Greater Philadelphia,” aka New Jersey.)

But Oz is being threatened from the pseudo-populist right by an even coarser right-wing celebrity, Fox News commentator Kathy Barnette. The Oz camp has frantically been running ads about “Crazy Kathy,” and Trump has warned that she could not win the general election.

So both Ohio and Pennsylvania display Trump’s continuing gift for wreaking havoc on his own party as one fake conservative populist vies with another.

It’s worth pausing to ask, what is populism?

Though the word is often sloppily used to describe both a left and a right version, populism definitely comes in two distinct forms. The only thing that connects them is disaffection and disgust on the part of common people with ruling elites and a call for radical reform. But the analysis and set of remedies are entirely different.

Right-wing populism is on the spectrum with fascism. It tends to be nationalist, nativist, drawn to autocrats, and scapegoats racial and ethnic minorities. Examples would be Viktor Orban, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Donald Trump.

Though the word is often sloppily used to describe both a left and a right version, populism definitely comes in two distinct forms.

Left populism draws on economic grievances, but looks to radical economic reforms and expanded democracy. FDR was the quintessential progressive. He rallied the people against the moneyed interests, and with good reason.

Bernie Sanders is a left populist. He could have been the Democratic nominee in 2016, and a far better counter to Trump than Hillary Clinton, who was the antithesis of a populist.

Here’s the insidious part. You can count on centrist commentators, nervous about angry masses on the march, to warn against the perils of populism generally, and to tar the progressive variant with the sins of its right-wing namesake.

Our friend John Judis makes this useful distinction. Left-wing populism rallies the bottom and middle against the top. Right-wing populists champion the people against an elite that they accuse of coddling a third group, such as immigrants, Islamists, or African Americans.

As the past several decades show, if we don’t have effective progressive populism, right-wing populism fills the vacuum. And right-wing populists, like Trump or Mussolini, are very deft at marrying the symbols of popular grievances to the reality of serving corporate interests.

This explains two paradoxes: why corporate execs who found Trump’s coarseness and sheer grifting distasteful were nonetheless willing to be part of his governing coalition; and why working-class Americans, who sort of knew that Trump was really a corporate shill, were willing to put that knowledge aside because he was so satisfyingly blunt at articulating their grievances against Blacks or feminists or enviros or PC liberals in general.

With half the Democratic Party in bed with Wall Street, there was no progressive economic populism to offset the right-wing cultural populism. Much the same thing happened in Europe, where right-wing populist nationalists gained ground as the EU became ever more neoliberal and living standards for ordinary people stagnated. As hated outsiders, immigrants played a key role in this inversion.

Now, thanks to Trump himself, the Republican Party is deconstructing the contradictory elements of the Trump package. It worked just well enough to win the 2016 election when all of the parts were combined with the persona of a charismatically outrageous entertainer. But what happens when one element of the Trump appeal is personified by Mehmet Oz, a second by David McCormick, and a third by Kathy Barnette?

Only one of these can win the Pennsylvania GOP primary. Will angry supporters of the also-rans vote for that nominee? Will Trump urge them to? Same story with Ohio, and the other states where Trump is widening the fissures in his party with his narcissistic meddling in primaries.

Conversely, left populism has been eclipsed since FDR’s era. And the blue-collar white working class is a lot smaller now than in the heyday of FDR and Truman, though there are far more downwardly mobile Americans today than in the glory era of the New Deal coalition. Will voters once gulled by Trump give the Fettermans and the Ryans a hearing?

On these questions, the future of democracy turns.

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