When the electorate is seething, a triumphant political party becomes a vessel for discontent. But in the elections that have followed Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, Democrats have been confused about which groundswell of anti-establishment ire they should channel: the spirit of Occupy Wall Street or that of Black Lives Matter?
Each protest movement suggested a different electoral strategy for countering Trump. By railing against plutocracy, Democrats hoped to win back the working-class white voters in the industrial Midwest, who’d migrated to Trump. By decrying white supremacy and mass deportation, they hoped to harvest the nation’s growing diversity and appeal to college-educated professionals, which my colleague Ronald Brownstein dubbed the “coalition of the ascendant.”
That question—should the Democrats lead with class or identity?—became the subject of tedious books and ugly social-media spats among the party’s intelligentsia, and it has continued at a low boil into the present. Only now Kamala Harris’s campaign has unexpectedly and unceremoniously resolved it.
The conventional view is that Harris’s late arrival into the presidential race has allowed her to run a vacuous campaign, eliding hard strategic choices and inconvenient policy disputes. But that description, which contains elements of truth, obscures an undeniable fact: Her rhetoric, and the rhetoric encasing her campaign, is far more economically populist than that of any other Democratic nominee in recent history.
In part, this is a matter of necessity. The public’s biggest gripe is inflation. As a matter of policy, once inflation is unleashed, a president can’t do much to squash it. In our system, for better or worse, that’s the ambit of the central bank. But the paucity of prescriptions isn’t a useful fact to invoke on the trail, so Harris has blamed high prices on corporate price gouging. She’s offered a portrait of firms and landlords exploiting the coronavirus pandemic, and the resulting price shocks, to fatten their profits at the expense of the consumer. This is a line of argument that surely induces apoplexy in Larry Summers—and it’s a far more combative description of corporations than ever emerged from the mouth of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, or Joe Biden.
Embracing economic populism is an obvious way for Biden’s heir to leverage Biden’s legacy. His Justice Department aggressively busted trusts, and proposed new rules limiting mergers. He walked a picket line and helped restore the prestige of the American labor movement. He beat the pharmaceutical lobby, winning the power to negotiate drug costs for Medicare.
That record lends itself to a story about taming Big Business. But that’s not the type of story that Biden likes to tell. Aside from the animus he exhibits toward Trump, Biden temperamentally recoils from adversarial politics. He never described the villains he battled as villains. Based on the initial evidence, Harris better understands the political necessity of populating her economic narratives with bad guys.
This understanding has been on display at the convention. Her surrogates have portrayed her as the implacable enemy of corporate greed. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described her as a “woman who fights every single day to lift working people out from under the boots of greed trampling on our way of life.” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, a figure associated with the economic center, promised that a Harris administration would continue to break up monopolies.
Whereas Clinton and Obama seemed to choke when paying obligatory obeisance to the labor movement, Harris’s convention has felt like a union hall. In prime time, United Auto Worker President Shawn Fain strutted across the dais in a Trump is a Scab T-shirt. Fist raised in the air, he bellowed, “Which side are you on?” Fain wasn’t an outlier. As Harold Meyerson wrote in The American Prospect, “I’ve been going to Democratic conventions for more than 50 years now, and I’ve never heard anywhere near the number of references (all laudatory) to unions as I heard on Monday night.”
That Raimondo and AOC are in sync isn’t just a matter of disciplined messaging on national television. Economic consensus has shifted in the direction of populism, in response to rising inequality, China’s abusive trade practices, and the lessons of the pandemic. The New York Times’ David Leonhardt has memorably described populism as a “new form of American centrism.” Populism no longer carries the whiff of crankery.
But the emphasis on populism is also a response to the failure of the emerging Democratic majority to, well, emerge. Despite the party’s embrace of criminal-justice reform and its opposition to mass deportation, its share of the Black and Latino vote has diminished. That is, non-college-educated men of all races have converged on a similar set of political instincts, and on a shared loathing for elites. A strategy for winning back working-class Black and Latino men shouldn’t be so different from one tailored to recapture working-class white voters who have strayed from the fold.
There are good reasons to view the Democratic embrace of populism as mere rhetoric, just expedient electioneering. Progressives worry that Harris would fire Lina Khan, the crusading head of the Federal Trade Commission, a figure despised in Sun Valley and the Hamptons for bringing cases against Big Tech. Those concerns track with the swell of Silicon Valley execs, veterans of the Obama administration, descending on her campaign to serve as strategists. In some sense, social-media execs and venture capitalists are her tribe, a group that helped nurture her career in San Francisco.
Then again, the very definition of populism, in both its economic and more pernicious cultural manifestations, is to describe politics as a battle between the interests and the people. The vice president’s campaign slogan has long been the words she used to introduce herself as a prosecutor in court: “Kamala Harris, for the People.” Sometimes, a slogan is destiny.
