On January 5th, Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their critically important races as populists. Within 24 hours, the recently defeated president, whom mainstream scribblers had also carelessly once labeled a “populist,” was inciting his followers to storm Congress in a bid to hold onto power as an unelected ruler.
It was a stunning split screen. Less than a full day after Georgians elected only the second Black Southerner to the Senate since the Civil War, along with a young Jewish investigative journalist, Trump loyalists were smashing their way into the Capitol Building, draped in the flag of a vanquished slave empire. And though we’ve spent four years designating Trumpism as the epitome of a 21st-century populist movement, when you look at both of these events in tandem—the arguments made, the villains cast, and the vision laid out for the future—it’s clear who the torchbearers of populism are.
Take a look at Ossoff and Warnock’s closing arguments. They weren’t ballads to restoring civility or returning to the chummy, backslapping days when Republicans and Democrats would come together to destroy welfare or pursue horrific wars of aggression. “Want a $2,000 check? Vote Warnock” was actual ad copy from the Warnock campaign, a raw appeal to people’s material concerns. It linked up nicely with Ossoff’s jugular attacks, casting Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue (both former CEOs) as a pair of self-serving elites, feasting lavishly at a time when millions face starvation. “We’re running against the Bonnie and Clyde of corruption in American politics,” Ossoff hammered. “Who, when they learned about the pandemic that was bearing down on our shores, their first call was to their stockbrokers.”
One side of the screen shows us what can happen when a multiracial movement fights to widen political possibility and improve the lives of ordinary people, forming a new Southern Populism that echoes the original. The other has climaxed in a white supremacist explosion on behalf of a wealthy scam artist turned authoritarian who faithfully serves the rich and built his political fortunes on a very old divide-and-conquer blueprint that was first laid out by populism’s enemies.
As Thomas Frank writes in The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, “Populism was the first of America’s great economic uprisings, a roar of outrage from people in the lower half of the country’s social order” against “an inequitable system [of] elite failure.” This was Ossoff and Warnock’s closing argument in a nutshell. More importantly, it describes the network of independent progressive groups that powered them to victory, and which show no signs of simply relying on the goodwill of powerful figures, even friendly ones, to deliver the progressive agenda they’ve called for.
Even Joe Biden, who often mimicked the pointless rage of budget warriors as a senator and vice president, felt the populist currents coursing through Georgia. “If you send Jon and the Reverend to Washington,” he said at an election eve rally, “those $2,000 checks will go out the door.” History will show this to be important for more reasons than anyone can count. First and most critically, these victories and the populist currents that carried them have big implications for what Democrats can do, now that they control all three branches of government. Second and more subtly, it answers a question that has ricocheted across more than a century of Southern politics: whether a message that links racial unity with progressive economic policy can win in the South.
To state the obvious, Democrats must now actually wield the power they have. It’s true that the phrase “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell” is a tune so sweet you have to play it back a few times. But if Democrats want it to last, they can’t repeat the mistakes that got them wiped out in the 2010 midterm elections. Namely, they must implement measures that improve people’s lives. There is no excuse, including the very abolishable filibuster, for failing to do this. Democrats have the ability to enact an aggressive economic agenda as millions face mass poverty, starvation, and eviction; to address our rapidly frying planet; to protect and expand workers’ bargaining power; and to install a robust voting rights regime. If Congress won’t budge, President Biden can accomplish at least some of these advances by his own authority. And blue states can take it even further.
But like any populism worth its salt, progressives can’t depend on the goodwill of powerful people. It will likely take constant shoves from the party’s left-wing grassroots to achieve anything of lasting significance. After all, their majority was secured on these expectations.
Organizing and populist messaging turned out liberal voters, despite the lack of a Trump bogeyman on the ticket.
IT WAS A POPULIST VISION of economic relief and a greater say in democracy that inspired organizers and everyday people to sweep across Georgia to rally the troops for the January 5th runoff elections. I hung out with a few of them while reporting there. Shauna “Coco” Swearington of Marietta, Georgia, for instance, knocked doors “every day, six days a week, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” she tells me. She let me tag along one afternoon, in one of Atlanta’s working-class Black neighborhoods. Coco was one of nearly 1,000 UNITE HERE canvassers who barely rested between the general election and the Senate runoff races. She told me that when COVID-19 hit, she “was displaced” from her job of 25 years as a server at the Westin hotel in Atlanta. “So now I’m out of health insurance,” she explained. “I’ve got diabetes and heart disease. I need my medications. So it was very important for me to get on this campaign.”
By winning the Senate, Coco hoped to see worker-friendly policies that provide job security for those who have been laid off, increase the minimum wage, and make it easier for workplaces to unionize. She also recognized that working people are uniquely positioned to tag each other into the fight.
“We’re the common people, we’re the people out there in the trenches doing the work,” she said. “So who better to tell you, ‘This is my story, and this is why you need to go out and vote because this could be your story too.’” Her point is simple: Working people are the most convincing messengers on working-class concerns. And it’s even better if they’re empowered by political campaigns to talk to people about bread-and-butter ideas like getting cold hard cash into working people’s hands. In Georgia, where 48 percent of people are reportedly poor or low-income, that turned out to be a winning message.
Biden’s historic victory in the Peach State was different. He eked out a win in Georgia thanks to a one-two punch: Stacey Abrams’s strategy of increasing turnout by tapping into an army of unregistered young people and people of color, and more importantly, suburban nausea with Trump, which gave big margins in the metro Atlanta suburbs to the Biden-Harris ticket. Despite the suburban reversal, Trump still came within inches of victory, and improved his numbers with voters of color. As Jamelle Bouie writes in The New York Times, that likely had something to do with Republicans being “in power when the government put a lot of money into the hands of a lot of people who didn’t have it before,” and, on the flip side, Democrats’ failure to put forward a compelling economic vision. Indeed, Biden promised during the campaign that “nothing would fundamentally change.”
With Trump on the sidelines, many pundits thought Georgia might be at the mercy of big money and Republican entreaties to “stop socialism.” What they largely missed was that an electorally powerful fusion dance had taken place. On one side, organizers did an extraordinary job keeping the state’s diverse electorate engaged. Turnout rates were almost at presidential levels, unheard of in these typically sleepy runoffs. And Black voters, Democrats’ most reliable and most neglected voting bloc, came out at even more impressive rates, decidedly fueling the runoff victories. This should humble anyone who thinks that no amount of organizing will change the reality that only the most obsessive voters show up to off-cycle elections.
On the other side, Ossoff and Warnock started arguing that the government has a duty to ensure everyone’s basic survival, calling for a $15 minimum wage, $2,000 emergency checks, and reopening closed hospitals, because “health care is a human right, not just a privilege for those who can afford it or live in the right ZIP code.” As Anat Shenker-Osorio, a leading researcher and voice on progressive messaging, puts it, “In the waning days they did an incredible job of providing an affirmative narrative: This is what we stand for, this is what we believe in, this is the kind of Georgia and country that we can have … [it was] obviously incredibly effective.”
The combination of organizing and populist messaging turned out liberal voters, Black and white, despite the lack of a Trump bogeyman on the ticket. The Biden win is what can happen when you have a historically unpopular opponent riling up the base. The Ossoff and Warnock wins are more sustainable, less reliant on the opponent. And they signal a winning formula for a new Southern populism, one that braids together the region’s rich diversity with a wildly popular economic message. Until now, Democrats had barely wrapped their hands around the first. But after years of unsuccessfully chasing white moderates across the South, the Georgia runoffs uncorked a model for competing.
It’s one that has been there all along.
Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
Ossoff (left) and Warnock (right) started arguing that the government has a duty to ensure everyone’s basic survival.
GEORGIA’S POPULIST STORY, like the country’s, is nearly 150 years old, and unfolds across a vast ecosystem of independent, grassroots organizing. The message to working people has always been straightforward: The business and political class are concentrating greater and greater amounts of wealth and power. They are numerically tiny and see our unity as a threat to be eliminated. But by recognizing our shared fates, and pooling our enormous numbers, we can whip the “money power” and rearrange our institutions to satisfy the public good.
When Georgia’s first populist wave touched down in the late 1800s, King Cotton had only recently been dethroned. The Civil War had just liberated four million kidnapped humans from unpaid labor, representing an epic expropriation of private property paved with 750,000 dead soldiers. Almost immediately, some of these newly freed people pointed out that their wage labor looked an awful lot like forced labor.
In an 1883 speech, Frederick Douglass argued that “The man who has it in his power to say to a man you must work the land for me, for such wages as I choose to give, has a power of slavery over him as real, if not as complete, as he who compels toil under the lash.”
Douglass was teeing up his main argument. Since every worker was at the mercy of the boss, unity between Black and white workers was the key to overcoming the petty tyrants who ordered them around. Just as importantly, he warned, “it is a great mistake for any class of laborers to isolate itself.” Instead, there should be a strong “bond of brotherhood between those” who shoulder the “hardships of labor.” With unity comes strength, in other words, and if white workers could overcome the myth that they were members of a special “skin aristocracy,” then working people might finally be able “to organize and combine for [their] own protection.” Otherwise, there would be no end in sight to “the sharp contrast of wealth and poverty” in which “the landowner is becoming richer and the laborer poorer.” The Populist Party wouldn’t have its launch party for another decade, but Douglass already had the battle lines clearly drawn.
For a brief and bright moment, there were signs that white laborers wanted in. When the Populist Party formed in 1892, Georgia was one of its most powerful outposts. Emerging from the ashes of the old Farmers’ Alliance, their assessment was simple: The country’s economic and political systems loyally served the rich at the expense of everyone else. Outraged by the Gilded Age’s runaway inequality, the populists called for an egalitarian alternative, including aid for struggling farmers, expanded voting rights, and public ownership of key industries like railroads.
The connection to Douglass’s argument was clear. And though we don’t have any uplifting multiracial team chants to show for it, many white farmers saw the obvious strategic importance of linking arms with their Black peers in the fight for a fairer world. (Black farmers, who wanted to join the Alliance but were pushed into separate, second-string groups, did not need to be convinced of the importance of working-class unity.) But it would all be pitifully short-lived.
Just because attacks appealing to racial disunity are predictable does not make their success inevitable.
A monument to Tom Watson, a giant of Georgia populism, sits across the street from the state Capitol in Atlanta. In an 1892 essay titled “The Negro Question in the South,” Watson argued that a union of Black and white workers would have “flung the money power into the dust” years ago. The “crushing burdens which now oppress both races in the South,” he added, will force them to “become political allies” and “on these broad lines of mutual interest … the present will be made the stepping-stone to future peace and prosperity.”
But like its counterparts across the country, Georgia’s populist vessel was partly devoured from the inside. Watson would eventually win a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1920, long after the Populist Party’s official demise and only after swapping out pleas for “interracial cooperation” with “brutal political and social repression of Black Americans,” writes James Cobb, one of Georgia’s leading historians. Where he had once courted Black workers, Watson was now calling for their total disenfranchisement. Where he had once “urged that lynching be made ‘odious’ to whites,” he now argued “lynch law is a good sign … that a sense of justice yet lives among the people.”
Reading it now, it’s almost as if the 1892 essay was a warning letter to his future self. The earlier Watson saw clearly that all workers had a “similarity of cause and a similarity of remedy,” and that “you are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of … financial despotism which enslaves you both.” Future Watson said to hell with all that. By his own standards, racist tirades obviously undermined the actual goals of populism. But they had narrow perks for an ambitious Georgian at the turn of the 20th century.
I want to be careful here. The Populist Party had many powerful archenemies, including the “economic royalists” Franklin Roosevelt would eventually battle. There’s plenty of blame to go around for its demise. That includes the Tom Watsons of the world, who sat on the inside of this promising vehicle for working-class power and started shooting out the tires before it could really take off.
It’s important to note, however, that Watson betrayed populism’s core principles. What made populism distinct was its diagnosis of what caused economic suffering in the country, and the target of its fury. Racism poisons every corner of American political life, and the populists were no exception. But, Frank writes, “populists were not the great villains of the era’s racist system. That dishonor went to the movement’s archenemies in the southern Democratic Party, leaders who were absolutely clear about their commitment to white supremacy.” Populism, with its emphasis on broad working-class unity, “was an attack on these doctrines” and the elites who depended on them. If you undermined that unity, then you undermined the populist mission itself.
Watson’s story is so bizarre. It plays out like a twisted Shakespearian plot twist, except Watson does the double-crossing himself. By his own assessment, he ended up strengthening the hand of the exact group of wealthy landowners the populists furiously opposed, who stood to gain enormously from driving white and Black workers apart. But Watson’s ambition got in the way of his stated goals.
OTHERS WOULD FOLLOW. Episodes like the Savannah longshoremen strike of 1891 signaled the staying power of divide-and-conquer politics. That fall, nearly 2,500 Black workers walked off their jobs at the docks, demanding higher wages, overtime pay, and union recognition. According to Temple University’s massive archival “Black Worker” series, “a committee of the Savannah commercial leaders organized” to break the strikers’ will. Since Black workers refused to cross the strike line, “company officials decided to hire white replacements.” What could have been a remarkable example of Black and white workers winning concrete gains only confirmed that “race could be used to divide the working class.”
Just because attacks appealing to racial disunity are predictable does not make their success inevitable. As Nsé Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, one of the many organizing groups working to activate voters of color, says, “There is a long history of radical resistance all across the state of Georgia.” Popular movements like the abolitionist, women’s, civil rights, and labor movements successfully dragged the United States to greater levels of human decency, and all have deep roots in the American South. Labor unions, for example, were arguably at their most dangerous when they teamed up with the civil rights movement, combining calls for racial and workplace justice based on the belief that “economic security and anti-discrimination were joined at the hip,” as Thomas Sugrue, professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University, says.
Georgia’s own Dr. King spoke frequently before labor unions and their federations. In a letter to the Amalgamated Laundry Workers in 1962, King wrote: “The coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the Negro and the forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined.” King’s final mission before his death was in support of striking Black sanitation workers in Memphis.
King also constantly warned of the dangers of failing to directly address the deadly power of racism to wipe out working-class unity. In his 1965 remarks concluding the Selma-to-Montgomery march, King described a “southern aristocracy” shaken to its core by the “threat” of poor Black and white people coming “together as equals.” To prevent this, “the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow,” which “he ate” when “his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide.” This, he said, perhaps with Tom Watson in mind, “eventually destroyed the Populist Movement.” As Thomas Frank writes, “King was suggesting that the movement of the 1890s had an obvious modern counterpart. Working people of both races could come together once more to build a nation of justice and plenty.”
But the opposition, determined to keep workers segregated by race, in proximity and in consciousness, had modern counterparts too. Before civil rights legislation and working-class solidarity could even get off the ground, they were dusting off the predictable playbook: Flood the zone with enough racist garbage to split the coalition.
Curtis Compton/AP Photo
Georgia’s blue turn is unimaginable without Stacey Abrams’s years-long project to juice turnout among people of color.
You have likely heard of its most infamous update: the Republican Party’s Southern strategy. Launched by Richard Nixon and echoed by fanatical champions across the country, including Georgians like Lester Maddox and Newt Gingrich, conservatives began serving up white resentment like hotcakes, gobbling up the Southern political map in the process. This came to be known as the cultural leg of the Republicans’ “three-legged stool.” The other two were nonstop fist-pumping for war and worship of free markets. But those either don’t reliably move people to vote, in the case of endless war, or actually repulse them, in the case of wildly unpopular conservative ideas like cuts to the social safety net and tax breaks for the rich. The economic and military legs of the stool get you corporate campaign donations; they do not get you votes.
Long before Trump, conservative stars like Nixon, Gingrich, and Ronald Reagan would hammer “elites” for looking down their nose at everyday people. These seeds would eventually blossom into the Tea Party and the Trump campaign, long before being rebranded as “right-wing populism.” All the while, the GOP’s actual agenda has remained slavishly devoted to the country’s increasingly powerful business class. Trump’s signature legislation, remember, was a $1.9 trillion tax cut for the wealthy.
Until recently, the Southern strategy was treated as nearly irreversible. The best Democrats could do was hold onto a few seats and prevent the rest of the country from being swallowed by a sea of red. But the math is changing.
Before Biden’s surprise victory, Democrats had not won a presidential race in Georgia since 1992. For years, they told themselves that winning statewide office required at least 30 percent of the white electorate. This meant becoming a bootleg Republican Party: worshiping markets, dedicating themselves to world domination, and repeating right-wing bullshit about the moral decline of Black and poor people. It was designed to cleave off enough of a slice of the white vote to earn a victory. The typical messenger was a nondescript white man: John Barrow, Roy Barnes, Max Cleland, Zell Miller, Jimmy Carter’s grandson Jason.
Georgia Democrats rarely pushed that boulder uphill. The last Democratic gubernatorial victory was in 1998. By 2006, just three Democrats—Black officeholders Thurbert Baker (attorney general) and Mike Thurmond (labor commissioner), and 42-year agriculture commissioner Tommy Irvin—managed to win statewide. By 2010, the entire suite of statewide officers were Republican, and it stayed that way for a decade.
Stacey Abrams offered an alternative to this losing scenario. After entering the Georgia House of Representatives in 2007, she proposed that the party instead focus on mobilizing young people and people of color, who voice their disgust with politics by finding better things to do with their time.
Though Abrams didn’t win the governor’s seat in 2018, she came within 55,000 votes, closer than any Democrat in recent history. She only won 25 percent of the white vote, supposedly a disqualifying condition. But Abrams put up unparalleled numbers with Black, Latino, and Asian American voters, bringing her within a few disenfranchised votes of victory. As FiveThirtyEight reported, Georgia’s blue turn is unimaginable without Abrams’s years-long project to juice turnout among people of color, even if the greater factor in the Biden victory was genuine suburban horror at Trump’s rotten personality.
With the victories by Ossoff and Warnock, Georgia’s political math has been recalculated. Neither candidate hit 30 percent of the white vote, though they came close. A new and more liberal electorate attracted to the fast-growing Atlanta metro area has made those numbers more reachable. And the runoffs spotlighted the overwhelming power of voters of color, including in Black rural areas, which saw presidential-level turnout. These Democratic voters came to the polls in enough numbers to win because Ossoff and Warnock actually offered them something; populist messaging and multiracial organizing went hand in hand. The old wisdom about what it takes to win in Georgia has been shaken like an Etch A Sketch.
The failed strategy of Kelly Loeffler’s loss reveals a conservative movement that has nothing to offer and knows it.
THE QUESTION NOW IS how to make sure it lasts. True to the populist tradition, every Georgia organizer I spoke with stressed the importance of building an independent progressive movement that “haunts the dreams” of politicians across the country to ensure they actually deliver for working people. Not a single organizer talked about how excited they were to go home and hope for the best, now that Democrats have a Senate majority. They see this as a time to apply relentless pressure to ensure a positive progressive agenda is carried out.
“The issues that are paramount to Black women’s lives just don’t get the air they deserve. Black women don’t get asked, ‘What’s important to you? What do you need?’” says Malika Redmond, the co-founder and executive director of Women Engaged, an Atlanta-based organization that fights “for social change through voter engagement and reproductive justice advocacy.” Redmond’s organization knows that they cannot rely on mainstream institutions or parties to seriously address their priorities without constant activism. Women Engaged works to generate “something that we can hold the powerful accountable for,” Redmond says.
Each organizer was clear about the difficult battles ahead. “Elections are a snapshot of a moment in time,” says Gwen Mills, the secretary-treasurer of UNITE HERE. They tell us “how much organized power there is” and “who you can get elected at a particular time.” After “a short breather,” Mills says, it’s back to organizing in the streets and workplaces. You have to keep the grassroots fire burning, Mills says, because “the power and the money behind the corporate lobby is just staggering.” In other words, elections may clarify where things stand or even modestly improve the battle terrain, but they have very limited firepower beyond that.
Building a strong working-class army requires addressing the weak spots that the opposition exploits and, as we’ve seen, has always exploited. People of color make up about half of Georgia’s population (though still 39 percent of the vote, even in the Senate runoffs). And since racism is also a weapon used to loot the country’s most vulnerable—think housing segregation, income and wealth inequality—working-class issues are Black and brown issues.
“One thing we know is that if we’re not talking to our members, somebody else is,” says Marlene Patrick-Cooper, president of UNITE HERE Local 23, which covers a large swath of the South. “All over the country, there has always been an employer goal to divide the workers.” This is a lesson from the School of Hard Knocks. For decades, divide-and-conquer tactics have eroded unions, weakening their defenses against demolition efforts like “right to work.” As a result, union membership was pushed off a cliff in recent decades, falling from one-third of workers in the 1950s to barely 10 percent today. That fall tied weights to the ankles of wages, and they haven’t gone anywhere meaningful since.
Instead of running from the problem, UNITE HERE is tackling “the racial history of right to work” head-on, Patrick-Cooper says. The union has established a two-day training session, where members learn how racism created cracks wide enough to ram policies like right to work through countless statehouses. “You cannot be successful as a union if you don’t have solidarity on the shop floor, if workers don’t all stand together,” Mills adds.
This is the kind of key defensive tactic that makes an offense possible. If solidarity isn’t built between elections, and if unions and other independent sources of power cannot secure concrete gains for working people between elections, then their coalitions will be repeatedly torn to pieces and forced to scramble frantically once election season rolls around. After all, it was the combination of long-term anti-racist work and Southern progressives’ positive vision for the future that made Georgia competitive in the first place.
John Bazemore/AP Photo
Black Voters Matter, whose co-founder LaTosha Brown is seen here in 2018, is one of many groups engaged in long-term organizing in Georgia.
Consider the split screen again. The conservative movement not only has a wildly unpopular agenda, but cultural resentment, warmongering, and free-market cultism just don’t pack the same electoral punch they once did. As Brooklyn College professor and author of The Reactionary Mind Corey Robin puts it, the reason Republicans under Trump have been turning up the volume on white rage isn’t because its powers are growing. They hope that the noise will compensate for the fact “that conservatism is actually weaker than it has ever been.” White identity pays out thinner and thinner dividends to an increasingly miserable base.
As Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton show, “deaths of despair” already had life expectancy for middle-aged white people declining before COVID-19. The same population who fueled the right-wing march that started 40 years ago is poorer than they were at the beginning, and they are arriving at death’s door ahead of schedule. During that time, the right’s agenda has dominated everywhere: privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and destruction of the country’s already pitiful social welfare state, not to mention violent opposition to civil rights gains like desegregation. Everybody hates this agenda, with the possible exception of overthrowing the gains of the civil rights movement, a truly American pastime beloved by liberals and conservatives alike.
The point is, bigotry is all that’s left for the right. Kelly Loeffler, for instance, spent the runoff election blowing 150-year-old dog whistles in a losing campaign as grotesquely racist as any fire-breathing segregationist’s. She routinely painted her opponent, a Black pastor who preaches where Dr. King once stood, as a “radical liberal” hell-bent on bringing “socialism and Marxism” upon these delicate shores. “Loeffler and Perdue can’t run as themselves. They can’t run promising anything,” Shenker-Osorio tells me. “Because they don’t stand for anything that most people want. So the only thing left to them, and the Republican Party more broadly, is to try to scare people about the other side and to try to trade on and kind of exacerbate people’s feelings of resentment.”
Warnock counterprogrammed with campaign ads of him with puppies, offering a cuddly portrait. But more important, he countered with policy, populist progressive policy, meant to improve people’s lives and fortunes. Loeffler’s flailing race-based appeal fell short.
Her satisfying defeat, of course, does not mean that the right has been defanged. The last decade has provided explosive evidence for Robin’s warning that “weak movements can be dangerous movements,” leading right up to a clumsy but still highly organized insurrection. But the failed and tired strategy of her loss does reveal a movement that has nothing to offer and knows it.
They are now in survival mode. Everyone from Donald Trump to Mike Lee to Lindsey Graham admits that the Republican Party must either snuff out democracy itself or be snuffed out themselves. Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman has been carefully chronicling the entire landscape of modern-day poll taxes and booby traps they’ve laid out to mutilate voting rights for Black and brown and poor people. So here’s what we have: an agenda that deposits larger and larger shares of the nation’s wealth into the bank accounts of a tiny few while basically telling everyone else, “Good luck and God bless,” as they face avoidable crises like poverty, starvation, medical bankruptcy, and homelessness. And at the same time, they are working furiously to get the eligible voting pool back down to its 18th-century size because they cannot survive otherwise.
This is the phony populism of the right. The original populist uprising, of course, had its share of hideous blemishes. But in terms of actual principles, today’s conservative movement is basically populism’s evil twin. It may dress itself up in populist clothing sometimes, but when you compare their deeper worldviews and aspirations, they clash furiously.
On the other screen, progressive and left-wing grassroots organizations are trying to fling the doors of democracy open wider to enact a sweeping progressive agenda. Georgia is absolutely bursting with them. The immigrant rights organization Mijente apparently contacted every Latino voter in the state during the runoff election. According to a press release, the New Georgia Project “reached out to Georgians through more than 10 million calls, texts and door knocks.” People’s Action, a network of state and local grassroots organizations, called 1.2 million low-propensity voters: students, Asian Americans, and voters in rural areas. They held over 23,000 in-depth “deep canvass” conversations and got well over half of those voters to turn out for Ossoff and Warnock. Black Voters Matter spent the runoff zigzagging through often-neglected Black corners of the state. And UNITE HERE also passed the one-million-door threshold.
For many observers, the runoffs were a referendum on whether Georgia’s “multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, progressive majority,” as Nsé Ufot put it in a recent Intercept story, was sustainable. Could a genuine populist movement, one built on working-class solidarity across difficult fault lines, have enough punching power to whoop the far right in the Deep South? January 5th provided an answer, though the work goes on.
