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Landry Ayres: Welcome back to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I’m Landry Ayres.
Today, our senior editor Berny Belvedere is joined by Shikha Dalmia, editor-in-chief of The UnPopulist, and columnist Andy Craig, as they dive into the causes, reactions, and dynamics of a pivotal election. Following Trump’s decisive comeback, they confront the profound societal and electoral shifts that made it possible, exploring everything from the anti-incumbent sentiment driving voter behavior to the challenges the Democratic Party faces in effectively messaging to a skeptical electorate.h
Together, they dissect how populism, economic grievances, and cultural divides intersect to influence American politics today. They question whether recent results signify genuine support for Trump or are simply a symptom of frustration with the status quo.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Berny Belvedere: Welcome to Zooming In with The UnPopulist. I’m joined today by editor-in-chief of The UnPopulist, Shikha Dalmia, and Andy Craig, a columnist for The UnPopulist. So, guys, pretty important week we just went through. How are we feeling?
Shikha Dalmia: To me, it was a gut punch. Obviously we all knew going in that it was 50-50. But I was hoping it wouldn’t be Trump. And it was. So I spent the first day completely in shock. And if I could have my way I would curl into a fetal position and wake up in four years. But there’s work to be done, a country to be saved, our republic’s fate is on the line—so here I am.
Andy Craig: Yeah, I share a lot of that. Not necessarily shock as in surprise, but shock as in, “Wow, this is really happening.” We’d still had the hope that it wouldn’t. I think a lot of people are still, understandably, taking the time to emotionally process it. I think it’s not wrong that people are feeling it as a gut punch. I mean, it is. I did.
Belvedere: The gut punch, for me, is that there was no shortage of coverage about Trump’s manifold barbarisms. And yet Americans saw all of that, processed it, and in the end said, “This is the guy we want.”
You would think something like January 6 would be independently disqualifiable. But that wasn’t enough. You would think that delegitimizing the elections, ruining a centuries-long tradition of the peaceful transition of power would be by itself disqualifiable. I’m not even mentioning the impeachments, the degradation of various people and groups. And yet Americans said, “This is the guy we want.” So, the gut punch for me is knowing that this country has so many people who look on at a candidate who has done all these things and still endorses him, and is even enthusiastic about him.
It’s another thing to be Trump-reluctant—you hold your nose and you vote for him because you hate the opposition. But we’ve now entered an era of Trump enthusiasm. 2016 was a lot of Trump reluctance; 2024 is Trump enthusiasm. People coming out with posts about, “I was never going to be a Trump voter, but now I’ve taken the plunge and I’m all in.” That speaks to me of a consolidation. It’s been normalized and accepted and embraced and even loved. That’s where the gun punch is for me.
Dalmia: So, we’ll get into whether there is actual enthusiasm for Trump or not. I’m not sure about that. But one obvious question is: Why did he get elected? There are multiple causes that have been put forward. I’m interested in hearing what we think the main cause is. The standard explanation floating around is it was the economy, high inflation, the fact that people just felt worse under four years of Biden than they did the pre-Covid Trump. So they were voting with their pocketbooks. I think there is something to that. But what do you guys think?
Craig: One of the things we saw, that a lot of people in our anti-authoritarian camp in the age of Trump are going to have to check some premises on, was the very real racial depolarization and how that was no small part of what put him over the top. That goes to a lot of our theories about the nature of illiberal populism and particularly Trump’s illiberal populism and its appeal. It’s not entirely, though it’s still in large part, about in-group/out-group tribalism, which has been the dominant explanation and I think still has a lot of truth to it.
But there was something to the economic dissatisfaction. This looks in a lot of ways like a normal repudiating-the-incumbent kind of election. People were pissed for many reasons that are not irrational about the record of the Biden administration and the broader status quo of the American economy. I mean, it’s true we have low unemployment. Inflation had come back down. The stock market is up. By most conventional metrics, the economy is not doing poorly. And yet people felt, in ways that are going on beneath those measures, that they were not better off, that they were facing real problems. Inflation was part of that. That was the first bout of inflation we had in most Americans’ adult lifetimes. You gotta go all way back to the ’70s to find something comparable. And that affects everyone. You can make all the arguments about, “It wasn’t really that bad,” and “They brought it under control,” and “It was not really Biden’s fault—it was the post-Covid effects” ... all that’s more or less true. But that’s not how voters think about it. They think: “I’m worse off. I’m going to punish the incumbents.” So that happened.
One of the geographic trends that I find most stark and I think provides a big, important insight going forward is that the places Democrats lost the most were deep blue cities and safe blue states. This was not polarization as we’re used to thinking about it where red gets redder and blue gets bluer. People who live in the areas Democrats govern were fleeing them in big numbers. New York was the biggest, but it was a pretty consistent trend everywhere. That is related to inflation and particularly the housing part of it, the housing shortage. I think there is a big correlation there and it’s not because people are consciously voting on land-use policy or because they’re YIMBYs who are thinking about the housing shortage. But they feel it—that housing has gotten insanely expensive and the shortage is real and it’s hurting people, even if incomes and productivity and all these other measures are going up. The sharp increase in housing costs over the last few years has been hitting a lot of people hard. There’s a lot of resentment.
Democrats still run these states and cities that have the vast majority of the policy-making power over housing where it’s needed the most. That’s something we have to look at going forward.
Dalmia: Let me push back on that a little bit, Andy. I mean, I agree with you inflation was definitely part of it and generated this anti-incumbent wave—and not just in the United States. There’s a general anti-incumbent wave post-Covid because every country on the planet is suffering from inflation. Our inflation is actually lower than literally every other country, and yet it hurts people’s pocketbooks very directly in a way that perhaps even unemployment doesn’t because inflation hurts everybody; it is across the board. So, not to discount that, but on the other hand, if you look at the facts, because of the poor economic performance, Biden’s approval rating was 41%. And Kamala Harris eventually earned 48 point something percent of the vote. She outperformed Biden’s popularity by six or seven points. That, to me, is meaningful.
“What would have really made a difference, given these strong anti-incumbency headwinds that the Democratic Party was facing, was if Biden had actually honored his pledge and announced a year ago that he was not going to run and allow a competitive primary to go through. Harris was a good candidate. She was not a great candidate—partly because of her personality and partly because of the baggage she brought. What the primary would have done is allow the Democrats to not just field test different candidates and allow a better candidate to emerge, like Jared Polis, who has established a record of very successful governance in his state, but also field test different messages.” — Shikha Dalmia
Historically, there have been very few instances when a president with this kind of approval rating has been reelected. So, in retrospect, given the structural forces out there, she was not going to get elected. I allowed myself to believe, just because the alternative was so uniquely awful for all the reasons that Berny stated, that she could beat this anti-incumbent sentiment. But the structural reasons were just against it. And she paid the price for it and yet came pretty close to winning. So maybe people are pissed off, but it is momentary, episodic. And we shouldn’t draw very big conclusions from what just happened.
Craig: I think that to the degree we can pin this result on anti-incumbency, well, that’s off the table now. That’s what happens when you lose.
There is a general sentiment, and it’s right, that this was Biden’s fault more than Harris’s fault. The way he imploded and dragged it out and how disastrous the debate was, on top of the fact that he was already unpopular incumbent to begin with. Once he stepped aside, Harris ran a strong campaign. She made up ground—the swing states where the campaign was targeted ran about three points better than the national shift. The national popular vote shifted out six points, and the swing states was within three. Who knows? Maybe if she’d had another month to do it, that could have made the difference. But at the same time, it’s true that this was such a not-close outcome that it’s possible there’s nothing she could have done. It could just be there was a throw-the-bums-out mood and for the all the terrible things about our primary system and our two-party system and about how that works, a dedicated 60% or so of the GOP stuck with them, which is itself a pretty small chunk of the country but enough to win them the toss-up chance of being the one choice on the table that was repudiating the incumbent party and administration.
So, I do think that’s some cause for hope in that the strong anti-incumbent, cyclical, thermostatic, throw-the-bums-out mood is likely to continue through the midterms and now they’re going to be on the losing end of it. It’s likely to continue through to 2028. That was the current we were swimming upstream against: As weird as it was since he was just in office four years ago and was already president, he got to be the change candidate. Harris tried, but it was an impossible task to run as the change candidate when you’re the incumbent vice president.
Belvedere: It could be that we’re in an anti-incumbent era right now. Trump’s ran three electoral cycles and the two that he has won are precisely the ones where he was the challenger to the incumbent party. Maybe after a stretch of two-term presidencies, and then before, where you had Ronald Reagan and then his vice president in a 12-year dominant stretch, we’re now in an era where the media environment is such where you can pretty compellingly tell a story about how the sitting government is just not doing it for you and you need to get a challenger in there. So it could be that this term is a continuation of a trend that we’ve been seeing and will continue to see. In that case, I think a mark of political excellence might be creating a durable administration, one where you govern so well that voters grant you the keys to another term, which again, we haven’t seen the last three terms.
Craig: As much as we all share a horror at Trump and what his party has become, I don’t think any of us would give high marks to democratic governance or the Democratic Party as we know it. So that’s not an entirely difficult sentiment to understand. American elections are deliberately structured largely as a referendum on the incumbent. You know, “Change the course or stay the course?” And staying the course was not a terribly appealing option in a lot of ways and that’s something the Democratic Party is going to have to go through in its turmoil going forward. There’s going to be lot of hard questions about why the Obama-Clinton-Biden-Harris Democratic Party was not able to convince people they were even better than that guy.
Belvedere: I want to pick up on something that you said. I’ll put it the way that
did on X: “Why was the slippage from 2020 so much lower in swing states where both Harris and Trump campaigned heavily?” says that that’s evidence that the Harris campaign was effective in ways that you wouldn’t detect by simply looking at who won those swing states. He writes:The main thing I would say about the specifics of the 2024 outcome is that if you look at the 2020 to 2024 shift, Harris’s support held up much better in the seven swing states than it did on average nationally. To me, that’s pretty decent evidence that ‘the Harris campaign’ which is defined as a set of political operatives who stage rallies and make advertisements, performed pretty well. What performed poorly was the strategic positioning of the Democratic Party as background and the strategic positioning of Kamala Harris relative to that background.
Any thoughts on why, in swing states, she outperformed her support in less competitive parts of the country?
Craig: I think that’s basically right. The Harris campaign ran a good ground game. Once she became the nominee, Democrats were fired up. She had the fundraising coming in, the volunteers—the canvassing they were doing in the swing states was on a massive scale. The number of doors they were knocking on because they had volunteers pouring in—all of that only started when Harris became the nominee and after Biden dropped out. If Biden had gotten out sooner, Harris was trending in the right direction. There just was not enough time to make up the ground.
It does speak to how deep a hole she was having to dig out of that was obfuscated by the polls missing in the direction they did. The polls were, as we now know, pretty consistently overstating where she was at by at least a couple of points. Biden was probably in an even deeper hole than we realized at the time when that argument was being had. Most of us probably thought that after the debate, he was pretty well cooked. But it could be that if he stuck in, it could have been a loss by five points instead of instead of two.
Dalmia: To add just a little to that: I think Harris—in the time that she was given and the kind of candidate she was, with all the baggage she brought to the ticket—did just about as well as she could have. I actually think a month may have made a difference.
But what would have really made a difference, given these strong anti-incumbency headwinds that the Democratic Party was facing, was if Biden had actually honored his pledge and announced a year ago that he was not going to run and allow a competitive primary to go through. Harris was a good candidate. She was not a great candidate—partly because of her personality and partly because of the baggage she brought. What the primary would have done is allow the Democrats to not just field test different candidates and allow a better candidate to emerge, like Jared Polis, who has established a record of very successful governance in his state, but also field test different messages. Different Democratic candidates would have had a slightly different cut on which issues to focus and how to market themselves. That would have allowed a better messaging strategy to emerge that had been field tested rather than one that was just handed to you by the strategists in the Democratic Party who have their various constituencies that they are trying to appeal to within the party without looking at the electorate as a whole. I think that was a huge problem.
Which is why I see this, as both of you do, as essentially an anti-incumbent election and not really a mandate for Trump. I mean, he did win the Electoral College vote. He won the popular vote. But he did not win in a landslide. I mean, Reagan won by what, 18 points?
Craig: He won 49 states, so, yeah.
Dalmia: There we go. So, Berny, just to push back on your original comments, I think it would be a mistake to see this as any kind of enthusiasm for Trump.
Craig: I think if there had been a normal primary, if Biden had said he wasn’t running from the get-go, it would have helped. And I think Harris almost certainly would have won that still. As the incumbent VP, she had a strong enough position in the lane, but she would have come out of it better and more tested and had the chance to see what worked and what didn’t.
“One of the problems we as liberals have had is being seen as a defense of the status quo and that we don’t have our big reforms and our big ideas and our big changes we’re fighting for that people can rally around. And that’s why we don’t have a message that can land with that kind of audience. That kind of audience doesn’t want, “Well, things are not that bad.” There’s a place for that. There is a place for correcting factually wrong information. But I do think we need to take a deeper look at identifying what are the big problems other than just Trump that we see as things we want to change. It’s not necessarily going to be abrasively negative in the same way as this kind of Rush legacy landscape is but it is going to have a little fire in the belly that the perception of a stale liberal establishment could not muster.” — Andy Craig
You mentioned Jared Polis. I am, you know, in the certified Jared Polis fan club. When we’re looking forward and asking, What does the future of liberalism look like? and What does the future of a better Democratic Party look like?, it really jumped out at me from the data that Colorado had one of the smallest red shifts, where about half the counties in Colorado actually shifted blue. Washington was the other one. Those are the two that really bucked the national trend. I think that’s something to look at. As we gear up towards 2028, I do hope to see more from him going forward as the Democratic Party has that argument trying to figure out what they stand for. And hopefully it looks more like a Polis than Bernie Sanders.
Belvedere: Shikha, I totally agree with you—I don’t think this election presented a mandate for Trump. You heard adjectives like “resounding,” “decisive,” a “rout” in different write-ups of the election, and I think that’s overstated. What is frustrating to me is that you feel it all around you that Trumpism has become more durable than it was initially, when it could have been an aberration or a blip or a mistake. After all that he’s done, he’s getting stronger. Even if 2024 is less of a decisive victory than some people are claiming, even if it’s not the wipeout that people are claiming, he is still making appreciable gains from one election to the next. He should be getting less support, fewer voters, and yet it’s going in the opposite direction. That’s what’s so disconcerting to me.
But I want to talk about Kamala’s performance. I agree that she ran a good campaign, but it’s undeniable that if Biden had stepped aside—maybe after the midterms or even a year ago—a primary process would have absolutely helped Kamala Harris. Just to pick one moment where she gave a gift to the opposition: a sympathetic voice on the show, The View, asked her, “What would you have done differently than Joe Biden in these last four years?” and she said, “There’s not a thing that comes to mind.” The Trump campaign, a New York Times write-up has revealed, were high-fiving each other when they heard that. They started spreading that clip like wildfire. They couldn’t believe it.
So, if Biden had stepped aside four, six, seven months prior to that, and you give Kamala Harris a chance, she would have had a hundred fundraisers, a hundred barbecues, in the words of one particular pundit, to workshop what her answer to that would be. It might have made the difference. With more of a runway, Kamala Harris could have won—if you had better messaging.
When we talked about slippage being lower in swing states, the Harris campaign produced a whole lot of messaging that those voters were exposed to. Maybe that worked. So, national opinion about the current administration is that it has not steered the economy right. Inflation is a huge problem. We have this ambient political background—what some people call “vibes,” and those permeate our collective political consciousness. The idea is that the Biden administration had not been properly managing the economy. But here is counter-messaging precisely along economic lines; she messaged on economic matters in swing states. And she was able to push back on the narrative that the economy had been so bad. It wasn’t ultimately strong enough to sweep her into victory. But messaging seemed to work. Where are liberals not doing as well as they could in terms of setting the national narrative, you think?
Dalmia: So, Berny, to your point about the enthusiasm for Trump, I think you’re absolutely right. Between 2016 and now, when people voted for him last time, they were a little bit embarrassed. The stigma of voting Trump has been completely removed. After the attempted insurrection, and after 200 Republicans repudiated him, and his own generals said he has fascist tendencies, you would think that stigma would come back. And it didn’t come back. People who voted for him are quite open about it.
In terms of Harris’s messaging, she had a fair amount of baggage to overcome. Not only did she not give a good answer to what would she have done differently on The View, but also, the clip about her providing gender reassignment surgeries to undocumented immigrants that was put on a loop and played ad nauseam ... she didn’t really have a good answer to that either. That said, the people who were accurately informed about the economy voted far more for Harris than people who did not. And they tended to be Democrats. I actually have that chart up somewhere and it was across the board. People were asked a bunch of questions. Violent crime rates are at an all-time high in most major American cities. False. 65% of Democrats got the correct answer, and only 26% of Republicans did. Same on inflation. 53% Democrats knew that inflation had come down, and only 19% of Republicans knew. Stock market, there it’s a little bit mixed. Then on the percentage of unauthorized crossings, only 17% of Republicans knew that they had come down in the last few months, and in fact, were at their lowest level ever.
So, these low information voters, voting based on what their media ecosystem is telling them rather than what the truth is, it bothers me that all of us, including the Kamala Harris operatives, just kind of gave up on informing those voters and trying to at least win some of them over, or at least take the edge off their cynicism of the establishment. If we keep giving up on those voters, that’s just going to deepen. Elections are a great moment to educate voters—at least the informative function that it serves is highly important to keep both sides somewhat in line.
Andy, you are right that this was a depolarizing election, but in another way it wasn’t because neither side tried to reach out to the other and tell them their version of the story.
Craig: That’s absolutely one big thing about this. I have my gripes, and a lot of people have very good complaints about how legacy media handled Trump going back eight years now and for the next four. But it’s the case that things have changed. The New York Times is not setting the agenda for a lot of these people.
That goes to part of Trump’s appeal. He is genuinely funny. He is an entertaining character. And that has always been what distracts to a large degree from all these much more serious things about how malicious he is and how much harm and damage he’s done and will continue to do now. But if all you’re seeing is clips of him being kind of funny, that gets through to people. So many of us have this reaction of, How can you be anything other than repulsed by this man? There’s a lot of talk, too, about how he’s a creature of the social media age. I think that’s what’s happened to voters—but it’s also: he is a TV character. I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that the people who grew up on the golden age of Hollywood elected a movie actor as president and the people who grew up on the peak years of cable TV ended up electing a game show host.
I don’t know how you counter that. I mean, the silver lining is it does speak to him being one of a kind, a very unique figure that’s not replicable. But that also means it’s not replicable on the other side. I don’t think it would land the same if you had Oprah or somebody like that. Or, I’ve seen people float Mark Cuban as a possibility as our anti-Trump. And I just don’t think that will work. Trump carved out a niche for himself with this over-the-top persona that people aren’t necessarily as repulsed by as the rest of us are. If we went back to 2015, 2016, laughing along with him was the normal reaction for most of us before we realized, “Crap—he could win.”
Belvedere: His SNL appearance proves that.
Craig: Right, right. And he’s got, I mean, I hate to call that talent because it’s pure lizard brain id. There’s no method to this madness. This is just who he is. But it is charisma.
Dalmia: But Andy, here’s the issue. So, he’s got people who are getting information from him and who are entertained by him. Then you have this whole ecosystem of right-wing media influencers who amplify his charisma and his messaging at the same time that the Democratic Party has now just decided that they can’t reach out to these people and aren’t counter-messaging, telling them, “Hey, the economy is not so bad. We understand you’re hurting, but look, inflation is coming down. Crime is coming down. The Elon Musks of the world who are painting America as this hellscape of crime are wrong. Have you noticed any crime in your lives? Have you really noticed any increase?” If the parties are not going to reach out to these other voters and they are stuck in their media ecosystem and you have Trump and his whole band of influencers who are constantly amplifying what he’s saying, what do you do? How do you get past that?
Belvedere: I think you’re absolutely right. But the answer is that liberals have been at a kind of structural disadvantage in terms of the way they approach media for years, if not decades. So, I think back to someone like Rush Limbaugh, who was running a kind of insurgent, incendiary media commentary operation. He was up against an empire of liberal leaning institutions. And he was a firebrand, hyper-partisan, opinionated. When the digital tools became available to scale that up into an entire right-wing information ecosystem, conservatives were ready to scale that up. It was the very way they had approached media for so long, which is, relentlessly criticize institutions and the establishment and liberals. All they had to do now was do more of what they had been doing under Rush and under other shock jock types.
Liberals had never approached the media that way. You had left wing media sources—they were on the fringes. But liberals had this media asymmetry where they could rely on the New York Times, but the Times with its buttoned-up approach—"Let’s make sure that we’re objective and if we’re left-leaning, let’s make it a little more subtle”—doesn’t compare to the way that Rush would approach any topic.
Look at the way that the two sides do things now. For every podcast that’s a little bit more opinionated, more of an in-your-face liberalism, like Pod Saves America, there’s 20 Ben Shapiro Shows out there to go up against that. We’re just overwhelmed on the digital platforms by a very Rush-like approach to media. Liberals have not gotten it together to do anything like that.
“I think the layer of populism that is here to stay is there’s going to continue to be from the right a challenge to elite management of social issues. They’re going to be able to continue to point out elite or establishment mismanagement, and they’re going to run on that. So the solution is for us to get it right, for liberals to govern well. So, when problems come up, let’s say, God forbid, something on the level of Covid or even smaller issues than that, it’s going to require coordination, national policies, buy-in from the public. And if liberals can get those moments and those crises right, it’s going to de-fang the challenges that say, “Look at these elites only after their own interests. They’re badly screwing this up.” I think that populism will continue to be activatable, but it can be de-fanged by good governance.” — Berny Belvedere
Jenna Ellis, one of Trump’s officials, had said: “I would have loved to hear Rush Limbaugh’s commentary about all this. I miss him.” And my response at the time was: This is a really weird sentiment to have, that you miss Rush. I mean, his thoughts are all around us, in the sense that today’s right-wing media landscape has proudly become a flawless continuation of the Rush approach to commentary and relentless like lib-bashing. So, hop over to Daily Wire, The Blaze or any of the other zillion hotbeds of lib-roasting and you see Rush there—exactly the way that he did his thing. Liberals have nothing like that.
Dalmia: You’re 100% right, Berny. Actually, when I think about this, Trump may be a very unique character, but I don’t see him as sui generis. I don’t think he emerged out of nowhere. I think the Rush Limbaughs of the world prepared the terrain for him. If there had been no Rush, there probably would not have been Trump.
But what you could have seen is a left-wing populism. Liberalism, you are absolutely right, is at a structural disadvantage because liberals are on principle opposed to populism. Populism is us versus them, it is anti-elitist in an unhelpful way. It is not just throw the bums out but bring the bums who are going to help the majority population in. Liberalism is against all of that. So liberalism can’t be, by definition, populist. But you could have seen a left-wing populism. And you haven’t seen that emerge in this country. Bernie Sanders was popular, but you know, he was a unique character. There wasn’t a movement behind him because there wasn’t this media universe propping up these personalities.
So I think this imbalance in the media universe that one side has it completely cornered on the social digital media space, the influencer space, is a huge problem. And the left may have an answer to that. I’m not sure liberals have an answer to that.
Craig: That does go to not just that aspect of, we have this sclerotic mainstream liberal media that both occupied the lane and was not an effective alternative, but also goes to the substance of the message. I do want to push back a little bit on, “We just needed to get people to understand the economy was fine.” I don’t think that works. I think they did push a lot of that and it did reach a lot of people. It maybe helped, but people do have real complaints. And one of the problems we as liberals have had is being seen as a defense of the status quo and that we don’t have our big reforms and our big ideas and our big changes we’re fighting for that people can rally around. And that’s why we don’t have a message that can land with that kind of audience. That kind of audience doesn’t want, “Well, things are not that bad.” There’s a place for that. There is a place for correcting factually wrong information. But I do think we need to take a deeper look at identifying what are the big problems other than just Trump that we see as things we want to change. It’s not necessarily going to be abrasively negative in the same way as this kind of Rush legacy landscape is but it is going to have a little fire in the belly that the perception of a stale liberal establishment could not muster.
Belvedere: On that particular point, I found this post funny. This was a post contrasting liberals after losing an election versus conservatives. So here’s liberals after losing an election: “According to an analysis of cross-national data, it appears that this year’s incumbents globally have a structural disadvantage.” I mean, that’s correct, right? But then here’s conservatives after losing an election: “DEMONcrats rigged the machines with help from Venezuela. I’ll die for Trump.” And the takeaway was: “These are not the same.” So, I think what you’re speaking to, Andy, is correct. There’s a kind of incompatible, irreconcilable temperament that each side can muster up, can activate. We’re never going to be Rush types. But there’s got to be a way to have the same muscularity of presentation of our victories and of what we can offer, rather than just give it up to more modest, more mainstream institutions to tell that story for us.
Dalmia: Berny has written this wonderful piece, which is: We don’t want to be Charlie Kirks, but we do need some kind of an analogous presence in the social media influencer universe that we’ve currently forfeited to the populist forces.
But is populism here to stay?
Craig: What exactly do we mean by populism? In a broad, generic sense, what we speak of as populism is kind of inherent to democratic politics. There will always be, “We’re rallying for change. We’re pushing against the status quo, against the established elites.” And that can often be healthy in a lot of important ways.
We are living in the Trump era. The establishment is Trump and the people he’s bringing now. The establishment is not Hillary Clinton anymore. The establishment is not Barack Obama and Joe Biden. This ties back to the media environment point. What there was in a prior generation was Jon Stewart. It was in that kind of space and Colbert and the ones that spun off of him. And it doesn’t land anymore. The format doesn’t work anymore. Stewart tried to come back and I don’t think it was terribly impressive or anything.
Dalmia: I still love him.
Craig: Well, I don’t dislike Jon Stewart. I do like him and he still gets a lot of a lot of things. But it’s not like when it was don’t-miss TV. There hasn’t been anything filling that space on the left since the media landscape has evolved.
Belvedere: He's not the cultural phenomenon he was.
Craig: You can’t satirize cable news anymore by being ridiculous when it’s indistinguishable from the real thing. And also, cable news isn’t the touchstone that it was as the target of satire. I mean, the people who watch TV, cable TV news is the hyper-partisan base, but it’s not the mass audience people sometimes imagine it as. It’s blown away by somebody like Rogan and all the imitators in that space. So when we’re looking to, What does populism staying power look like?, it’s going to depend a lot on finding that footing and regaining the ability to have a more strongly oppositional, go-on-the-offensive mindset that can land with people.
I mean, I don’t expect I’m gonna be the next Joe Rogan or Jon Stewart. I don’t have any delusions about that. But there are people out there who have that potential and it’s gonna be important to find and cultivate and figure out what works and get that out there.
Belvedere: I don’t know. You’re a mini influencer on Bluesky already.
Dalmia: And I have my money on Landry. If you haven’t seen his very cool YouTube videos, you should. He does a mean Trump impression too, by the way.
Craig: Yeah, Landry’s videos have been great. I’m not much of a YouTube watcher, but the short video clip media format has surpassed, particularly among the youngest generation, what was even the Twitter model of micro-blogging. You talk about Bluesky, I promise you I’m one of the youngest people on Bluesky. So, penetrating that media space and reaching those audiences is going to be crucial.
Dalmia: So, my answer to, Is populism here to stay? ... I should actually rephrase that question. Populism is one species of illiberalism, right? So, the question is: Is some other populism-adjacent species of illberalism here to stay?
I think that is a genuine danger right now because I don’t see the Republican Party getting better anytime soon, especially not after this outcome. One reason I was hoping that Kamala Harris would win is I think it would have been important for Republicans in their current shape to be defeated decisively in elections so that they would rethink their current goals. That is not going to happen now. Trump has opened the door to this kind of illiberal politics, a pretty heady opening for a whole bunch of different political entrepreneurs who will have their own version of it. You have people like Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton who have a religious nationalist or an ethno-nationalist version of it. You have JD Vance with some weird combination of social conservatism and blood-and-soil nationalism. And I think this is here to stay. So then the question is: Can liberals prevail against that?
And there I actually do see hope because much as there is talk about this great realignment that this election had because of the sorting out of the working class voters of various ethnicities on the Republican side, it’s a fluid electorate. Trump managed to win them this time, partly because the economy was bad and Democrats ultimately played a pretty bad hand. But I think that’s a fluid mix. And if you can just excise it from the MAGA or Trumpist base, you can align them with the liberal side—which is to your point, Andy, that liberal governing success stories like Jared Polis, who offer people a better value proposition on the issues that they care about. Bread and butter issues. Certain cultural identification issues. I think those people are winnable and that’s going to be our task to try and win them over and build back the liberal coalition.
Belvedere: I echo that completely. Liberalism can prove itself to be an answer to this kind of politics. I think the layer of populism that is here to stay is there’s going to continue to be from the right a challenge to elite management of social issues. They’re going to be able to continue to point out elite or establishment mismanagement, and they’re going to run on that. So the solution is for us to get it right, for liberals to govern well.
So, when problems come up, let’s say, God forbid, something on the level of Covid or even smaller issues than that, it’s going to require coordination, national policies, buy-in from the public. And if liberals can get those moments and those crises right, it’s going to de-fang the challenges that say, “Look at these elites only after their own interests. They’re badly screwing this up.” Andy mentioned this earlier in our conversation: If liberals are pointing to the way that they manage cities and the places that they’re governing as, “Here is what you can look forward to if you vote us into office nationally,” that right now seems like a losing message because it doesn’t seem to be going so well in those places. So, if we do that stuff well, that can disarm that criticism, that populist strain that says, “The elites are getting things wrong as usual and they’re only in it for themselves and look how badly they’re botching everything.” So, I think that populism will continue to be activatable, but it can be de-fanged by good governance.
Shifting gears for a sec because I definitely wanted to get to this. So, after the election, Bari Weiss went on TV and said: “It turns out running on these extraordinarily niche issues like gender fluidity or defunding the police don’t actually matter, or frankly, feel profoundly out of touch to ordinary Americans.” Is she right?
Craig: I don’t recall Kamala Harris running on defunding the police. A lot of that does get to be kind of strawman-ish. I think that kind of anti-woke stuff is very much her thing. We’ll need to suss out a lot of the data. The evidence is not good that that was what did it here. I mean, that isn’t to say they aren’t real conversations to be had about the liberal approach to some of those things and some of the more genuinely difficult questions that come up in that context. But in general, this whole backlash to woke thing, we hear it from them constantly that it motivates Trump’s base. But I think it’s important to distinguish what the median Republican MAGA-headed Trump supporter cares about as opposed to that five percent of the electorate in the middle that made the difference. And I think that has a lot more to do with the reasons we were talking about earlier about the anti-incumbent swing.
Dalmia: I couldn’t agree with you more, Andy. For these right-wing influencers who consider themselves heterodox types, anti-wokeness has just become the global catch-all explanation for every political thing that is going wrong in our current moment.
They’ve been at it since 2016 when Trump got elected. Remember the pieces then that this is all a backlash to political correctness. Now that has actually expanded. It’s not just political correctness. It’s amazing how little that term is actually even used anymore, because wokeism has become an even bigger category. So there is no phenomenon that will not be explained by Bari Weiss by referring to wokeism. It’s not just Weiss—there are a whole bunch of commentators on the center left even for whom this is their fallback explanation. And, like you said, it is a motivating factor for the MAGAites.
I think if you go and ask your average Hispanic: “Hey, are you so upset by being called Latinx that you are going to vote for Trump?” I don’t think that’s it. I really don’t think that that’s it. There are many more complex factors going on and this has become a rallying cry. Anti-wokeism is a rallying cry on the right. I don’t think it has as widespread appeal as Bari Weiss & Co. seem to think.
Craig: The somewhat more nuanced, but I think maybe has some more explanatory merit to it, is kind of what Josh Barro and others have called the groups and the structure of the Democratic Party. There is a degree to which this hyper-activated, farthest out there, kooky, call it woke or whatever you want to call it, stuff permeates into the Democratic Party strategy and messaging and what its institutions are able to do in ways that make them less effective. Not because it’s necessarily the issue itself, not because swing voters are deciding on how they feel about pronouns in email signatures or stuff like that. But there is a problem on the Democratic side of the aisle with this degree of capture of its institutions and the mainstream liberal institutions that are dealing with all their interns and entry level employees coming up and are revolting over things that sometimes have some merit to their complaints but a lot of times it’s just nuts. I mean, The Nation endorsed Harris and then ran a column by the by their interns about why they shouldn’t have endorsed Harris.
Dalmia: But, you know, that kind of mishegas always exists in politics. But it never before became such a political motivator as it has right now to rally the troops on the right, and which puts concomitant pressure on the left to try and respond to these accusations all the time. Sohrab Ahmari’s entire anti-Frenchism movement started with one drag queen story hour in a library. So much of it is just built on isolated outrage stories that expecting Democrats to constantly take that into account is, you know ...
Craig: I think that’s right. You can’t police the entire left of center of American politics to the degree that you won’t be able to do that kind of ... we used to call it nut picking. That I don’t think you can solve. I think you can have a little bit of a buckled down, “We’ve got to be serious and grow up” in some of the organizational cultures out there. And I think that’s worth doing.
We agreed with Matt Yglesias earlier, but one thing I disagree with is that there’s this misconception that the Democratic Party, as it’s often referred to, or just American politics writ large, can do that kind of policing itself that nobody’s ever gonna go say something that can be called out and over-represented as something that’s normal and common.
Dalmia: Right. And we are expecting the left to guard against this very fine-tuned nut picking, as you called it. And here is a giant nut on the other side who is a twice-impeached insurrectionist who violates every code of decency who’s just been reelected by the right. So, there’s just no comparison.
Ayres: Thank you for listening to Zooming In, a project of The UnPopulist. For more like this, make sure to subscribe for free at theunpopulist.net. Until next time.
© The UnPopulist, 2024
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