Minorities in denial

Further to last week’s post on the Michigan primary and “socialists” in the Democratic Party, don’t miss an opinion piece by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times, aptly titled “The Populist Left Has a Theory. We’re All About to Test It.”*

Goldberg explains that the Democrats’ insurgent left, many (but not all) of whom call themselves “socialists”, do not admit that their positions will be an electoral handicap in places like Michigan. On the contrary, they advance a theory that their views are what voters at large are looking for and that therefore they will be better placed to win elections than their more moderate rivals.

This hooks into a number of related claims, such as that Bernie Sanders would have beaten Donald Trump in 2016 – “would have won in a landslide,” as one of Abdul El-Sayed’s backers puts it. They deny that centrist policies have any substantial constituency; rather, voters are set on populist policies and the task is to attract them to those of the left rather than the right. In Goldberg’s words, “El-Sayed seems to assume that there’s a hidden reservoir of voters hungry for progressive populist policies, if only they can be reached and mobilized.”

Her task is more to explain this point of view than to criticise it, but along the way she gives a number of reasons for scepticism, some of which would be familiar to readers of this blog. We’ve encountered this populist mindset before, but more commonly on the right rather than the left. It’s the view of, for example, the Sky News cohort in the Australian Liberal Party, for whom (as I put it a few months ago) “Whatever the problem, the answer is always to move further to the right.”

So the counterpart of the view that Sanders would have beaten Trump is the notion that Tony Abbott would have won big in 2016 if he hadn’t been deposed by Malcolm Turnbull. And there even tends to be a degree of convergence between the two sides: left and right populists are both hostile to trade and markets, and both harbor occasional colonies of Putinists and antisemites.

It should be conceded up front that there’s an element of truth in the populist argument. People are sick of middle-of-the-road opportunist politicians who stand for nothing, ignore what voters want and sell out to vested interests. The key thing attracting voters to the current wave of progressive candidates like El-Sayed or New York’s Zohran Mamdani is not any particular policy but the perception of integrity – they are seen as having principles and being willing to stick to them. On the other side, Trump evokes a similar response: even though he is patently out for himself, he gives an impression of authenticity. What you see is what you get.

But you don’t need to be on the extreme to have principles. What doomed Turnbull, for example, was not that his principles were moderate ones, but that he was afraid to stand up for them. And when Mamdani (twice) crushed Andrew Cuomo it wasn’t because voters disapproved of Cuomo’s moderation, but because he was a recycled sex pest. The fact that people are discontented with the system doesn’t mean they want to burn it down and start again.

Goldberg assumes that the left populists are sincere in their theory, that they really do think that theirs is a winning strategy. No doubt some do, but I’d be cautious about taking that for granted. Last year I said this about Australia’s Sky News crowd:

The hard right … aren’t just out for power; some of them are also true believers. For them, to win elections with moderate policies has no appeal: it would be a sort of apostasy. So winning and keeping control of the party is the priority. Elections can to some extent be left to look after themselves – with the party in their hands, they will be confident that one day Labor will screw up badly enough to lose office, regardless of what its opponents are doing. After all, that’s pretty much what happened in 2013.

I suspect that also matches the thinking of some of America’s “socialists”. The prize is control of the Democratic Party; a worse electoral performance overall is an acceptable price to pay for that. As it happens, that’s exactly what they accuse their moderate opponents of believing. In their framing, the Democrat establishment knows that the populists would do better electorally but is determined to keep them out regardless. A psychologist might will describe this as “projection”.

In a sense, though, sincerity is not the point. Whether or not the populists really believe their theory, the question is whether it’s true. And as Goldberg says, the current round of elections, particularly Michigan, will provide a very clear test. The stakes are high, but not as high as they will be in 2028 with the presidency on the line: if it’s possible to convince people at all, best to convince them now.

(Note also that there’s a similar debate within the Greens, both here and in Britain, but the issue plays out a bit differently in a minor party. I’ll try to get to that in a subsequent post, but these articles by Isabel Loubser and by Lisbeth Latham will put you in the picture.)

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* Thanks to Larry Stillman for drawing it to my attention.