Populists succeed by appealing to voters’ deep-seated sensibilities, by connecting to people’s identities (and perceived threats to those identities), and by understanding better than liberals the tribal nature of contemporary politics. This all calls for serious thinking by progressives, not knee-jerk calls to abandon neoliberalism.
LONDON – Faced with Donald Trump’s frightening victory, many progressives have reacted in one of two ways. It is hard to decide which one is worse.
The first is pure spite. The day after the election, I met with a liberal American friend, unshaven and bleary-eyed. “This election proves Americans are not very nice people,” he said.
The second is denial. Consider a recent commentary by the Nobel Laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz. Democrats must abandon neoliberalism, he proclaims, as if Joe Biden and team had not spent the last four years trying to do exactly that.
Both responses tread on empirically shaky ground. Worse, they are sure to be politically self-defeating.
Telling voters they are stupid or heartless is seldom a good idea. Hillary Clinton tried it in 2016, famously calling Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables,” and it may have cost her the election. Biden did not help Kamala Harris’s prospects when he appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage.”
Doubling down on a failed electoral strategy is no good, either. After losing an election, the Pavlovian reaction of both right- and left-wing parties is to argue that if they had been “truer to their principles,” “credibly conservative,” or “properly progressive,” they would have surely won. In 2015, after Labour’s Ed Miliband was drubbed by Tory David Cameron, Britain’s Labour Party turned to the far-left haranguer Jeremy Corbyn, who in 2019 led the party to its biggest electoral defeat since the Great Depression. It wasn’t until Britain’s progressives turned to the moderate Keir Starmer that they could beat the Tories and return to power.
At a time of escalating global turmoil, there is an urgent need for incisive, informed analysis of the issues and questions driving the news – just what PS has always provided.
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For over a decade, the rise of authoritarian right-wing populists like Trump, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, or Narendra Modi in India has been explained away more or less like this: so-called neoliberal economic policies destroyed industrial jobs, worsened income distribution, and hollowed out the middle class, causing voters who felt left behind to turn to demagogues peddling easy prosperity and cheap nationalism. The political corollary is supposed to be crystal-clear: protect domestic industry behind tariff barriers, increase government spending on social services and green infrastructure (and thereby create good jobs), transfer cash to poor households, and watch as voters soon return to the fold of progressive parties.
Well, Biden tried that. It didn’t work.
Biden kept in place the tariffs Trump had levied on China. He signed into law a humungous $1.9 trillion fiscal stimulus, consisting precisely of health expenditures to fight the pandemic, checks to households in need, and transfers to state and local governments. And he then enacted the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which provided even more of the same, plus massive green subsidies, funds to lower the price of prescription drugs and strengthen the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), and “build back better” infrastructure projects.
Workers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania pocketed the subsidies, took the jobs (US unemployment was a very low 4.1% at the time of the election), and then voted for Trump.
The problem with the Biden package was not its economics. Yes, the 2021 fiscal stimulus, coming as it did on the heels of a very large Trump stimulus, caused inflation. And no amount of tariff-raising will restore Midwestern factory jobs to their former glory, because the share of industrial employment has been falling everywhere in the developed world, including in manufacturing powerhouse Germany. But the health and infrastructure expenditures and the subsidies to accelerate the green transition were much needed and swiftly applied.
The problem lay elsewhere: in the political diagnosis. The theory that support for populists reflected only pocketbook issues proved completely wrong. And the technocratic fantasy that you could beat the Trumps and Bolsonaros of this world with a subsidy here and a tariff there turned out to be exactly that: a fantasy.
This is not a crisis of incomes, but a crisis of identity and respect. New York Times columnist David Brooks put it well the day after the election: “That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect.” There are voters who feel disrespected by elites of all kinds, including both left-leaning and right-leaning political elites. That is why they turn on incumbents, regardless of the incumbents’ political preferences. Disrespected voters turned on progressive Kamala Harris, and they are likely to turn against progressive Justin Trudeau in Canada. But in opinion polls or elections, they also decisively rejected conservatives Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom and Sebastián Piñera in Chile, as well as Xóchitl Gálvez in Mexico, who was not an incumbent but was perceived to represent traditional elites.
Don’t take me wrong: this is not about “wokeness.” An obsession with pronouns and political correctness may well have driven more than a few voters away from the Democrats in more than a few states. The same phenomenon pushed Evangelical voters into the arms of Bolsonaro in Brazil. But the backlash against traditional political elites has also happened in places like Turkey and India, where the question of whether one should say he, she, or they is not a hot-button issue.
Liberalism – the idea, expressed via political democracy and reasonably open markets, that people are born equal and have the right to equal dignity and respect – has built the freest, happiest, and most prosperous societies in human history. Yet voters in today’s liberal democracies (both new and long-established) are wondering not only whether liberal institutions can deliver for them, but whether liberal values still represent who they are and how they feel, and whether liberal politicians truly “have their back.”
Populists like Trump succeed not simply by promising to defend local industry and local jobs. They appeal to voters’ deep-seated values and sensibilities by connecting to people’s identities (and the perceived threats to those identities), and by understanding much better than liberals the tribal nature of contemporary politics.
This all calls for serious thinking by liberals and progressives – far more serious than a Pavlovian call to “abandon neoliberalism” can ever accomplish.
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Is Caesarism – a term invented in the nineteenth century to describe Napoleon’s particular form of rule – a good analogy for understanding Donald Trump and his political project? Despite some striking parallels, the illusion that America’s president has created lacks any basis in genuine achievements.
considers whether there is anything to lean from analogizing Donald Trump to Napoleon.
If we truly want to strengthen Europe, the first step is not to rearm. It is to forge the democratic union without which stagnation will continue to erode Europe’s capacities, rendering it unable to rebuild what is left of Ukraine once Vladimir Putin is finished with it.
argues that Europe's security depends above all on forging the democratic union that true strength requires.
LONDON – Faced with Donald Trump’s frightening victory, many progressives have reacted in one of two ways. It is hard to decide which one is worse.
The first is pure spite. The day after the election, I met with a liberal American friend, unshaven and bleary-eyed. “This election proves Americans are not very nice people,” he said.
The second is denial. Consider a recent commentary by the Nobel Laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz. Democrats must abandon neoliberalism, he proclaims, as if Joe Biden and team had not spent the last four years trying to do exactly that.
Both responses tread on empirically shaky ground. Worse, they are sure to be politically self-defeating.
Telling voters they are stupid or heartless is seldom a good idea. Hillary Clinton tried it in 2016, famously calling Trump’s supporters “a basket of deplorables,” and it may have cost her the election. Biden did not help Kamala Harris’s prospects when he appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage.”
Doubling down on a failed electoral strategy is no good, either. After losing an election, the Pavlovian reaction of both right- and left-wing parties is to argue that if they had been “truer to their principles,” “credibly conservative,” or “properly progressive,” they would have surely won. In 2015, after Labour’s Ed Miliband was drubbed by Tory David Cameron, Britain’s Labour Party turned to the far-left haranguer Jeremy Corbyn, who in 2019 led the party to its biggest electoral defeat since the Great Depression. It wasn’t until Britain’s progressives turned to the moderate Keir Starmer that they could beat the Tories and return to power.
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At a time of escalating global turmoil, there is an urgent need for incisive, informed analysis of the issues and questions driving the news – just what PS has always provided.
Subscribe to Digital or Digital Plus now to secure your discount.
Subscribe Now
For over a decade, the rise of authoritarian right-wing populists like Trump, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, or Narendra Modi in India has been explained away more or less like this: so-called neoliberal economic policies destroyed industrial jobs, worsened income distribution, and hollowed out the middle class, causing voters who felt left behind to turn to demagogues peddling easy prosperity and cheap nationalism. The political corollary is supposed to be crystal-clear: protect domestic industry behind tariff barriers, increase government spending on social services and green infrastructure (and thereby create good jobs), transfer cash to poor households, and watch as voters soon return to the fold of progressive parties.
Well, Biden tried that. It didn’t work.
Biden kept in place the tariffs Trump had levied on China. He signed into law a humungous $1.9 trillion fiscal stimulus, consisting precisely of health expenditures to fight the pandemic, checks to households in need, and transfers to state and local governments. And he then enacted the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which provided even more of the same, plus massive green subsidies, funds to lower the price of prescription drugs and strengthen the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), and “build back better” infrastructure projects.
Workers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania pocketed the subsidies, took the jobs (US unemployment was a very low 4.1% at the time of the election), and then voted for Trump.
The problem with the Biden package was not its economics. Yes, the 2021 fiscal stimulus, coming as it did on the heels of a very large Trump stimulus, caused inflation. And no amount of tariff-raising will restore Midwestern factory jobs to their former glory, because the share of industrial employment has been falling everywhere in the developed world, including in manufacturing powerhouse Germany. But the health and infrastructure expenditures and the subsidies to accelerate the green transition were much needed and swiftly applied.
The problem lay elsewhere: in the political diagnosis. The theory that support for populists reflected only pocketbook issues proved completely wrong. And the technocratic fantasy that you could beat the Trumps and Bolsonaros of this world with a subsidy here and a tariff there turned out to be exactly that: a fantasy.
This is not a crisis of incomes, but a crisis of identity and respect. New York Times columnist David Brooks put it well the day after the election: “That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect.” There are voters who feel disrespected by elites of all kinds, including both left-leaning and right-leaning political elites. That is why they turn on incumbents, regardless of the incumbents’ political preferences. Disrespected voters turned on progressive Kamala Harris, and they are likely to turn against progressive Justin Trudeau in Canada. But in opinion polls or elections, they also decisively rejected conservatives Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom and Sebastián Piñera in Chile, as well as Xóchitl Gálvez in Mexico, who was not an incumbent but was perceived to represent traditional elites.
Don’t take me wrong: this is not about “wokeness.” An obsession with pronouns and political correctness may well have driven more than a few voters away from the Democrats in more than a few states. The same phenomenon pushed Evangelical voters into the arms of Bolsonaro in Brazil. But the backlash against traditional political elites has also happened in places like Turkey and India, where the question of whether one should say he, she, or they is not a hot-button issue.
Liberalism – the idea, expressed via political democracy and reasonably open markets, that people are born equal and have the right to equal dignity and respect – has built the freest, happiest, and most prosperous societies in human history. Yet voters in today’s liberal democracies (both new and long-established) are wondering not only whether liberal institutions can deliver for them, but whether liberal values still represent who they are and how they feel, and whether liberal politicians truly “have their back.”
Populists like Trump succeed not simply by promising to defend local industry and local jobs. They appeal to voters’ deep-seated values and sensibilities by connecting to people’s identities (and the perceived threats to those identities), and by understanding much better than liberals the tribal nature of contemporary politics.
This all calls for serious thinking by liberals and progressives – far more serious than a Pavlovian call to “abandon neoliberalism” can ever accomplish.