The Populist Frame
Note: The executive committee for Jonathan’s Newsletter has decreed that this week will be Frame week.
Yesterday, Peter Beinart devoted his newsletter to a discussion of “populism.” His basic argument was that while the American right has run hard against snobby, effete, educated coastal cultural elitists - consistent with one understanding of what it means to be populist - it has also been firmly on the side of oligarchic business interests. This is true, for example, in Brookwood, Alabama, where unionized coal miners have been on strike for over 500 days. Coal miners are supposed to exemplify exactly who the allegedly pro-working-class right says it’s fighting for - predominantly white, blue collar laborers in a legacy American industry far from the country’s cultural and financial centers. In fact, though, all of the state’s major Republican leaders have sided with the bosses.
There’s nothing terribly surprising here. Some GOP leaders, like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, occasionally make noise about challenging the stranglehold of big tech or high finance on our economy. Typically, though, those complaints have more to do with anti-woke grievances than any sustained critique of monopoly capital’s adverse impact on the well-being of ordinary Americans. As a practical matter, virtually every policy the GOP pursues has the effect, if not the intent, of helping the wealthy at the expense of almost everyone else. These include a four decade crusade to slash taxes for the rich, generally dogged opposition to making health care more affordable, including a years-long effort to kill Obamacare, unwavering opposition to increasing the minimum wage which, at the federal level, has been stuck at the astonishing rate of $7.25 an hour since 2009, unrelenting resistance to regulation that would constrain the behavior of big corporations and so much more.
As I’ve mentioned previously, there has been noise in our political discourse in recent years about the increasing migration of so-called working class voters to the Republican Party. But like the term populism itself, “working class” is an imprecise term. In fact, as Beinart pointed out, Donald Trump beat Joe Biden by over ten points in 2020 among voters making $100,000 a year or more and Biden won by a similar margin among those making less. The puzzle in this, to some extent, is that better educated voters have increasingly flocked to the Democratic Party in recent years. This has both reinforced the cultural/worldview divide that characterizes our politics, and muddied our understanding of voting demographics. Many of those voters making over $100,000 a year are, for example, successful businesspeople who did not complete a college degree. It’s also true that there was an uptick in support for Trump in 2020 among non-white voters, especially Hispanics. This picture has led certain pundits to make the very silly claim that it’s the Republican Party that is now a multi-racial working class party. In fact, the GOP still draws its support primarily from white voters and better off Americans.1 But because it’s a party of older voters, it also skews less educated, as educational attainment has been increasing significantly among younger Americans over the past generation. And those older voters are, on average, less likely to be comfortable with the many social transformations the United States has undergone in recent decades. These trends have allowed Republicans to double down on their pro-oligarchic preferences while donning the anti-elitist mantle.
These trends have also obscured just how distinctive the GOP is among conservative parties in wealthy countries:
In 2016, as Trump was honing his messaging, he made noises about tethering cultural grievances to real economic relief for American workers, an attempted fusion of a xenophobic rightwing populism - the fashion of 21st century leaders from Brazil, to France, to Germany and beyond - with a more traditional economic populism. He said he opposed certain trade deals which he argued allowed “globalist” elites to press their feet on the necks of American workers. He promised to strengthen social security and deliver a terrific health care plan that would put Obamacare to shame. He claimed to want to reverse certain tax advantages for the super wealthy. Insofar as Democratic elites themselves have, especially since the 1990s, accommodated themselves to the prerogatives of global capital, they helped open up a space that Trump could exploit, especially in 2016, as an economic populist defending the everyman.2
Anyone with half a brain knew that the economic populism was just for show. Once in office, he would quite predictably default to the standard Republican playbook, pursuing policies that continued to ensure the upward shift of wealth in the United States, already among the most unequal wealthy countries in the world. Here’s what one such half-wit wrote about Trump in August 20163:
Once in office, Trump would be a mortal lock to make life even better for the crony capitalists he claims to oppose. And everyone else will be holding the bag. Calling this man a populist is a sick joke. He's an oligarch in temperament, outlook and practice.
And he'll do his best to run America like one.
All of which is to say that while populism as a belligerent and demagogic style might be a useful way to describe Trumpism, the frame obscures more than it illuminates about the basic realities of the GOP policy agenda.
Insofar as both parties include tens of millions of voters, both are broad coalitions of lots of constituencies. But one party is way more multi-racial than the other. It’s the one in with which way more non-white voters identify.
Perhaps the best known scholar of populism today is the Dutch Political Scientist, Cas Mudde. Mudde, whose primary focus has been on Western Europe, argues that populism is a fundamental antagonism between two groups - the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite.” Mudde contends that populism emerged as a significant political force over the past twenty years as a response to what he deems the failures of contemporary Liberal Democracy. In particular, according to Mudde, too many ordinary folks have been left behind by globalization, resulting in a growing concentration of wealth and power in fewer hands. As that has happened, the political system has become unresponsive - the major political parties have all accepted, to one degree or another, the basic market-driven premises that have allowed for such wealth concentration. The collusion of the mainstream political parties in these arrangements has opened space on the political spectrum for insurgent parties willing to challenge those arrangements. These dynamics arguably also allowed a more traditional economic populist, Bernie Sanders, to attract a substantial national following and helped nudge the Democratic Party to the left on economic policy, to some extent.
For those who didn’t click through the link, I’m the halfwit in question.