The most recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast was interesting, in that it presented a number of ideas I would have whole-heartedly endorsed a couple years ago—and which I therefore wanted at first to leap to my feet to applaud; but which I find a bit hard to square with more recent political experience.
Headlined "Can Economic Populism Save the Democratic Party?"—the episode sounds at first like it's going to be another warmed-over version of the stock Bernie Bro critique of the Democratic establishment. But Klein's guest ultimately makes a more sophisticated point.
The standard left-populist critique of Democrats is of course that they lost their edge with working class voters because they abandoned their focus on pro-worker economic policies; leaving this terrain free for the right-populist wing of MAGA to seize.
This argument would have made more sense back in 2016. Hillary Clinton could plausibly be viewed as a member of the technocratic centrist branch of the party. And Trump—as a political neophyte with a blustering, unclear, but vaguely "populist" economic message—was enough of an unknown quantity that people could project whatever they wanted onto his candidacy—recasting him (implausibly even then) as an Archie Bunkerish voice for the common man.
But to rehearse this same argument ten years later is less convincing. After all—as Klein points out in the show—we had a whole Democratic presidency in the meantime—Biden's—that was marked by robust infrastructure spending to create new manufacturing jobs, an effort to save New Deal programs from Republican spending cuts, support for pro-labor legislation strengthening collective bargaining rights, antitrust regulation—in short, a heavily populist agenda.
Trump, meanwhile, was no longer a dark horse in 2024. He had had his own presidency in the meantime—during which he had operated as a typical plutocratic Republican, albeit with even more overt racism, misogyny, and autocratic power grabs. He had cut taxes for the rich, tried to repeal Obamacare, etc. And now, in his second term, he has already enacted a budget in his first months in office that slashed social programs for the poor and working class, while extending those earlier tax cuts for the wealthy.
And when the two parties were matched up head-to-head in the next election: the Democrats had somehow shed even more of their working class support than they had in the previous election.
The overt endorsement of a pro-labor platform did not seem to have done the Democrats any favors. If anything, they seemed to be even more unpopular with working class voters than they were before embracing these policies.
Klein points all of this out to his guest. And here, his interlocutor makes a point that at least carries his argument a stage further than the usual Bernie Bro analysis. He points out, in essence, that we are wrong to lump all progressive economic policies together under the same "populist" heading. There is a difference, he says, between "pre-distributive" and "redistributive" policies.
In recent decades—he goes on—the Democratic brand has been heavily associated with mostly redistributive policies: increased spending on social welfare programs, universal basic income, publicly-funded health care, etc. Many technocratic Democratic elites have framed these policies, meanwhile, as compensation for the inevitable technological displacement that comes from the neoliberal growth policies they favor.
We will "grow the pie" overall by pursuing rapid economic growth and technological innovation—the Obama era Democratic argument went—and this level of growth in turn would generate enough surplus that we could then redistribute some of it in compensation for the laid-off steel workers, say, who had lost their jobs at the hands of automation.
Klein's guest describes this as a "Compensate the Losers" framework. It portrays large parts of the Rust Belt working class as doomed by inevitable historic forces—but promises them that they will be allowed to survive, after they lose their jobs, on the generous largesse of the welfare state.
Don't worry—the argument seems to go—you will lose all value and bargaining power on the labor market; you will have no skills that anyone wants to buy; you will be displaced and pauperized like an eighteenth century peasant from Goldsmith's "Deserted Village"—but you will be compensated for the loss; you will get a free check from the government every month; you will get disability payments; you can get a state-funded trip to the hospital when you overdose from the psychic trauma of being deemed redundant and otiose as a member of your community.
Needless to say—this is not a compelling vision for people who are doomed to be the cast-off refuse under this model. They want something more than a mere promise of daily rations at the hands of the state (a promise that could simply be withdrawn, by the way, the next time a conservative government takes control; and which has never proved very trustworthy in the past). They want the dignity, self-respect, and security that comes from actually being valued, contributing members of their communities.
For this reason—Klein's guest argues—Democrats need to focus more on pre-distributive policies: things that don't just "compensate the losers"—but that prevent them from becoming losers in the first place—maybe even that make them winners. Things like: enhancing workers' collective bargaining rights in the workplace; passing something like Elizabeth Warren's "Accountable Capitalism Act," to try to ensure that employees have a say in the corporate decisions that affect their futures and communities, etc.
What this sounds like to me is the distinction that would have been described in the first half of the twentieth century as that between socialism and "distributism." And I've always found the "distributist" vision—here dubbed a focus on "pre-distribution"—the more compelling of the two.
I also think it is more compatible with the history of the American Left-liberal tradition.
I was reading Alasdair Gray's short novel McGrotty and Ludmilla earlier this week. The novella—about a Scotsman's use of blackmail to rise to power in Thatcher's Britain (by threatening to unmask a conspiracy involving blood-consumption and eternal youth that reads like a version of the "Q Anon" alternative universe avant la lettre)—comes equipped with an acknowledgments page in which Gray expounds his political philosophy.
Mostly, Gray describes with nostalgia the Britain of the mid–twentieth century welfare state that he knew as a child. Back then—he says—the government owned just about everything important, and managed it for the good of all. Now, under Thatcher—he writes—all of that common wealth is being sold off for parts to the highest bidder.
I obviously agree with Gray about the evils of Thatcherism. But at the same time—I can't quite share his unblemished nostalgia for the period of mid-century socialism and collectivism. I don't think any American could.
It makes sense that the British Left would lament the passing of the welfare state. That was their historic achievement; and it was in many ways good. But I can't see in it a model for this country. (Nor, to be honest, can I quite see how Gray himself can reconcile his regret for it—for an era, that is, in which the government ran everything—with his obvious (and justified) skepticism toward the British state—and toward the closed-guarded Oxford- and Cambridge-educated Establishment that controls it.)
The highest aspiration of the American Left-liberal tradition—by contrast—has always been too suspicious of centralized power to be wholly and unproblematically committed to the aspiration of a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Indeed, the primary theme of that tradition, from Jefferson on to the present, has been to oppose all concentrations of power—whether in the state or the marketplace.
A Distributist (or, here, "pre-distributive") form of populism—therefore—which tries to make it easier for all people to achieve economic independence, through widely distributing economic power and breaking up concentrations of economic might (through policies like antitrust, support for small businesses and producers, labor union rights, etc.)—has always seemed like a better fit for this country than any statist socialism or collectivism on the European model.
This is why, among Democratic progressives, I have always been drawn more to the Elizabeth Warren branch (with her more "pre-distributive" ideas) than to the Bernie Sanders wing (with his focus on "redistributive" policies like universal health care, to the exclusion of most others.)
It's also why I've always found it a bit frustrating that people tend to lump these figures together as all representing some form of shared economic populism. Klein's guest was the first person I've heard to draw a definitional contrast between their policy programs—and I applaud him for it.
The distributist, pre-distributive policy platform that he endorses seems worthy to me on its own terms. I think we should pursue it simply because I think it is the better policy—more consistent with people's dignity and humanity; the universal aspiration to stand on one's own feet instead of being dependent on the whim of a centralized government.
But what I'm not sure it is—and here I part ways with Klein's guest—is a strategic solution for the electoral woes of the Democratic Party.
After all—the last few elections don't really seem to lend any support to the hypothesis that if Democrats embraced more pre-distributive polices they would perform any better.
Biden, after all, didn't just focus on welfare payments. He also backed a number of "pre-distributive" policies as well: strengthening workers' collective bargaining rights, creating manufacturing jobs, more aggressively enforcing antitrust regulations, etc.
None of this seems to have won him or his party any additional working class support. (In fact, they lost even more of it.)
Meanwhile—we've also run the experiment already of putting Elizabeth Warren's version of distributism on the national stage. She couldn't even win a primary in her home state!
I don't really have much hope—then—that if people in the Rust Belt just heard about her "Accountable Capitalism Act," that they would line up in support.
Klein confronts his guest with some of these uncomfortable truths—as well as with the fact that the class alignment of modern times—in which working class voters increasingly back right-wing candidates, and the professional managerial classes vote for left-wing ones—is a global phenomenon at this point. It is happening even in places like Germany, where left-leaning politicians that have done a much better job of protecting their blue collar workforce than they have in the United States.
Forced to confront these dissonant facts—Klein and his interlocutor fall back on "stylistic" explanations. People simply identify more with Trump and with reactionary politicians in other countries. They like the way they talk.
To my mind, this means—in translation—that Trump's vile demagoguery is actually working. People like and respond well to the awful and baseless things he says about women, minorities, immigrants, etc.
But this would imply that the people who are voting for him are doing something reprehensible; and this is a sin in democratic discourse, as H.L. Mencken long ago lamented. We are not supposed to entertain the possibility that the majority could ever be wrong. We believe that there must be something serious and important that people are trying to tell us by casting their ballots for a vapid demagogue and would-be strongman.
But if there is some secret message behind the votes cast for Trump—some serious political signal other than actual support for his abhorrent policies and worldview—then what is it? It can't be that people want economic populism—in either its pre-distributive or redistributive forms—since we've already put that to the test at the ballot box. Democrats already made their populist pivot; and it only seems to have hurt them more.
Klein and his guest suggest—at this stage of the conversation—that Democrats perhaps simply aren't able to summon the inchoate "anti-system" energy of certain far-right firebrands. They may in fact endorse and promote more economic populist policies. But they still come across as people wedded to the status quo—people who simply embody the technocratic managerial Establishment; even as they purport to critique it.
But it could be that our cultural despair and disillusionment has reached such an extreme—at this point—in certain segments of the electorate—that the level of "anti-system" vitriol that would be required to reach them is simply incompatible with liberal values. (We've had a sadly educative experience with this in the past week, in the case of Graham Platner—the Maine senatorial candidate who ran as an "anti-establishment" Democrat who could supposedly harness the rage of disaffected men—and who was quickly revealed to have a history of misogynistic remarks online and a Nazi tattoo on his chest.)
Democrats and liberals surely aren't doomed to defend "the system" as such. But—in order to remain liberals worthy of the name—they have to retain some basic level of commitment to values that are incompatible with complete nihilism and cynicism. They have to believe in things like the possibility for collective action and solidarity to address shared challenges; in universal human rights; in the possibility of distinguishing truth from falsehood, and justice from injustice, through procedural mechanisms before a neutral arbiter, etc.
Liberals don't have to be "pro-system", then—but they do have to be pro-social. And it's possible that the level of rage and vitriol you have to perform in order to read as "anti-system" to certain voters, in this day and age, is just not compatible with pro-social values.
This is why we will never have a "left-wing Trump." You just can't be that full of hate and bile and still convincingly argue for things like human rights, solidarity, due process, racial justice, etc. When people try to combine the two—something uglier always ends up rearing its head (viz., again, Platner.)
Klein asks his guest, at one point, for examples of how Democrats could shift their messaging. His guest says that they certainly shouldn't just mimic Trump's demagogy or throw immigrants or other vulnerable groups under the bus for the sake of winning elections.
He offers, as an example of the kinds of alternative message that Democrats could present on immigration—which would walk the line between merely echoing Trump and defaulting to extreme progressivism—the following: "People who are playing by the rules — who have been here in the United States and contributing to our economy, and they’re a meaningful part of our society — if they’re not criminals, they should have a pathway to citizenship."
But—isn't that essentially what Democrats have been saying for decades at this point? How is it different from the way Democratic Party elites are already messaging about this issue?
For my part, I think this messaging is pretty sound for its own sake; as are the "pre-distributive" policies Klein's guest endorsed. I back his proposed platform simply because I think it's good policy.
But I don't know that embracing it would solve what ails our politics—which seems to be going through a darker and more mysterious would-wide pathology than his analysis allows.
I don't have my own proposed explanation of it—other than that bizarre ideological contagions of this sort sometimes affect societies (viz. the last time the cancer of fascism spread through so many advanced democracies, in the 1930s).
The solution is to not worry so much about or guess at what the majority already believes or is ready to hear. Chances are that the Trump-voting majority believes nothing; at least nothing "worth any man's pride," to borrow a phrase from Hugh MacDiarmid.
The only course of action that can avail us is to do what you believe to be true and right, regardless of what the majority thinks—and trust that the majority will catch up given the fulness of time.
No one was ever wholly powerless who stood on a matter of principle; and no majority was ever so powerful that it could indefinitely prevail against the force of truth. As Emerson once put it: "why have the minority no influence? because they have not a real minority of one."
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