Democrats and Populism

Usually it's the conservative columnists at the NYT that have me shaking my head inside the first paragraph or two... but there are rare occasions where it happens with the liberal ones as well. And this piece about what the Democrats should focus on to win in 2020 is one of them.

The short version is that I don't like populists, and I don't want the Democrats to focus as much on populism as this editorial calls for.

To be fair, there's a version of populism that I can support, and the graphs in that article about who earns more support as the defender of the working class illustrate why. A lot of these policies are popular because they legitimately do support the working class and are things we should be doing. To that extent, I definitely do want the Democrats to focus on their support for such things and make them a central part of the message.

However, I also think there's a version of populism that focuses too much on economic anxiety and ignores social issues - this was the major problem I had with Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries. I can understand that not everyone cares about the latter, but given that the Democrats are going to get blasted by the other side for their social views regardless of how extreme they are, I don't think it's worth compromising on those views in order to avoid distractions.

That isn't the worst of it, though, because there's also the sort of populism that amounts to telling people what they want to hear regardless of its practicality. In particular, there probably are some moderate swing voters out there that want both lower taxes and more government benefits; we've seen that phenomenon before in the Republican, rural sections of the country voting for candidates that promise to cut taxes even as they're voting for Medicare expansions and other liberal policies. The problem is that any sort of promise we make telling them they can have both is almost certainly false - in the Democrats' case, it'd be because we'd feel that we had to raise taxes to support programs (as opposed to the Republicans cutting programs to support their tax cuts whether or not they said they were going to keep the programs), but that would still be the sort of lie that is all too common in politics.