Theresa May, Britain’s prime minister, has joined a long line of politicians who have gambled that they understood the populist wave overtaking Western politics and lost. Thursday’s election capped a year in which the latest theory of politics in the populist era perpetually seemed to prove incorrect, as did many […] Read more »
The Democratic Party Is in Worse Shape Than You Thought
Sifting through the wreckage of the 2016 election, Democratic pollsters, strategists and sympathetic academics have reached some unnerving conclusions. What the autopsy reveals is that Democratic losses among working class voters were not limited to whites; that crucial constituencies within the party see its leaders as alien; and that unity […] Read more »
The Price of Resentment Politics Is Policy Failure
… The realities of partisan politics will compel most Republicans to defend Trump in public even as they complain about him to reporters on background. But it’s never too early to reflect on how a candidate like Trump was able to win the Republican nomination and sufficiently unify the party […] Read more »
A Tale of Two Populisms
… Trump’s populism surely played a role in the surge of white working-class voters to the GOP ticket in 2016. But Trump’s brand of populism—and more importantly, that of working-class whites—differs in important ways from the populism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I don’t mean only that Trump’s populism […] Read more »
Absent a More Progressive Economics, the Democrats Will Lose
The challenge Democrats face today—uniting a broad coalition of working class Americans that spans racial, regional, gender, and generational lines—is far from new, but it has not always been this daunting. … Where working people of all races once helped deliver Democratic victories under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, winning a […] Read more »
What right-wing populism? Polls reveal that it’s liberalism that’s surging.
For liberals, one of most disturbing things about the 2016 election was that it seemed to indicate a massive lurch to the right in a country they thought was getting more, not less, liberal. Many contemplated with varying degrees of seriousness whether they should simply leave a country which had […] Read more »