Popularism Is for Weak Cowards Who Don’t Understand Politics
Photo by Governor Tom Wolf, CC BY 2.0
“Just do what’s popular!” is a common refrain you hear from the center-left Democratic establishment in the wake of their loss to Donald Trump. Bloggers read by the White House like Matt Yglesias have long written about the supposed inherent wisdom of just simply running on popular policy positions and reaping the electoral rewards, and John Fetterman’s Chief-of-Staff Adam Jentleson wrote a New York Times op-ed that has made waves in the Democratic Party in its attempt to rebrand punching left as opposing “groups” who do not support popularism and “supermajority thinking.”
You know that this isn’t an earnest attempt to try to advance the Democratic Party forward and is just another braindead “the left is costing us elections” take that the Democrats use as a crutch to avoid acknowledging their deep unpopularity, because Jentleson doesn’t mention the pro-business “groups” who convinced Kamala Harris to shed Joe Biden’s popular attacks on billionaires and instead make Mark Cuban one of her chief surrogates. AIPAC also does not show up in this article as a “group” that supposedly hurts the Democrats. Fetterman’s PR agent only wants to focus on how “groups” like the ACLU supposedly blew the election by asking Kamala Harris questions about her support for transgender people. None of these people like Jentleson in the Democratic Party have proven themselves capable of even the slightest bit of introspection or humility, and then they wonder why everyone outside their shrinking cable news-viewing base doesn’t respect them as Trump proves them to be history’s biggest group of losers.
While there is obviously some very straightforward logic behind the notion that you should run on policies that are popular, using this idea as your entire animating political principle completely misses the point of political messaging and further brands the Democrats as a bunch of weak-kneed ninnies who don’t believe in anything and will say anything they can to try to get elected. They are the avatar of the craven, corrupt politician in many voters’ minds and popularism would only exacerbate that problem centered around a fundamental lack of trust in the party.
Popularism isn’t a policy agenda, it’s a capitulation to the incoherent whims of the electorate through a naive belief in the reliability of issue polling. Look at polling on “mass deportation of undocumented immigrants” as one example of how this just doesn’t work the way its adherents think it does. A simple question of whether Americans support this policy has repeatedly yielded majorities in favor of it. Under the broken ideology of popularism, adopting parts of Trump’s racist agenda should lead to winning more elections. However, when you ask Americans if they support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants “if it means separating families,” support drops to just 38 percent.
This is a simple example of the endless complexities inherent in issue polling. How you ask the question has a great deal of impact in how someone answers it. The idea that you can just construct a policy agenda entirely based off of opinion polling is absurd, and if the Democrats had practiced this notion of popularism in the 1960s, they never would have passed the Civil Rights Act.
democrats and @podsaveamerica.bsky.social bros who think you only support things when the polls say you should support them would have ended up on the side opposed to civil rights, and that is not acceptable.
— Oliver Willis (@owillis.bsky.social) November 19, 2024 at 10:24 AM
Not to mention that those of us on the left have lived through the failure of this wrongheaded belief that policy approval translates directly to votes. We thought that the widespread support for Medicare for All meant we were winning the debate in the Democratic Party, only to watch a significant majority of people who supported Medicare for All in 2020 vote for the guy who explicitly said he did not support it. I have endless amounts of writing from the 2016-2020 Paste years highlighting the popularity of lefty policy and naively assuming that the left was going to reap electoral rewards from it. If Democrats think they can avoid this pratfall, they truly did learn nothing from the 2020 primary that helped cost them the 2024 election.
The Democrats don’t have a real agenda. There is no longstanding policy platform of fighting for American workers, just lip service to that notion they actually backed up when they were a real political party in the early and mid-20th century, before devolving into the social club for fundraisers and consultants they are today. Democrats have been practicing a form of popularism since the Tea Party wave of 2010 scared the living daylights out of them, where they lurch from election to election, altering their policy platform to supposedly meet the whims of the moment. Meanwhile, the Republicans have been consistently campaigning on wildly unpopular policies for a half-century like overturning Roe v. Wade, and they faced no real political consequences outside of some extra congressional losses in 2022 for actually imposing their unpopular vision on America.
There’s a lesson to be learned from the GOP’s electoral success. Americans have long said they do not agree with their policy agenda, and per the logic of popularism, the Republican Party should not have won any elections this century. And yet, they have won four presidential elections to the Democrats’ three. One of the common refrains you hear in these post-election articles interviewing Trump voters is how they see him as a fighter. There are so many quotes like “he may be an evil, irredeemable person, but he focuses on the economy, and he believes in things, whereas I don’t know what the Democrats were offering me.”
The Democrats should campaign on policy that is popular with the American public, but first they need to come up with an overall policy platform that expresses their values and proves to Americans they will fight for them, and then add popular agenda items to buttress this vision. This knee-jerk instinct in the party to abandon its stated ideals the minute the party experiences electoral headwinds is the defining policy platform of the Democrats this century, and Jentleson is continuing that tradition in this op-ed that’s animated his consultant class who is never ever at fault for anything ever.
People feel like they are getting a raw deal in America, and they want someone who fights for them. If you are constantly putting your finger in the wind to see where it’s blowing and pretend that’s where your principles are aligned, people will see right through you and think you’re full of shit. That the Democrats have blown two elections to Donald freaking Trump and still do not understand how they lost proves that they do not understand politics, further confirmed by this rising idiotic notion among party elites that issue polling is simple to interpret and easy to run on. Donald Trump couldn’t ask for a better set of allies.