The Limits of Culturally Radical Economic Populism

It won’t get much beyond New York City.

Progressive Democrats have been dreaming for years of a way they could be both economically populist and culturally radical—and succeed. The original name for this was “inclusive populism.” The idea was that Democrats may indeed be bleeding working-class voters but the solution does not lie in any way with moving to the center on culturally-inflected issues like crime, immigration, race, gender, and schooling. That would not be “inclusive.”

Instead, as recounted in a 2022 New York Times article on their initial gathering, the inclusive populists argued for turning it up to 11 on economic populism since “[Democrats] don’t fight hard enough for working-class people, and…aren’t tough enough on big, greedy corporations.” As the article noted:

The unmistakable tone of the event was a rebuke of the Democrats who have failed to squeeze more progressive policy wins out of their congressional majority over the last 18 months—and essentially, in the left’s telling, let their most conservative member, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, dictate the terms of their governing agenda.

The 2024 election results delivered a big blow to the inclusive populist theory of the case. Perhaps economic populism and cultural radicalism did not go together like soup and sandwich. But inclusive populism devotees did not give up; they hoped that the tide would turn in their favor. Now they believe it has with the capture of the Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City (and, therefore, likely general election winner) by Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who enthusiastically backs every culturally radical cause under the sun and ran on an economically populist program long on bashing evil landlords and price-gougers but short on policy plausibility and any conceivable way to pay for it.

Mamdani was an exceptionally good candidate running against an exceptionally bad opponent in a Democratic primary in a exceptionally left-leaning city (Harris carried New York City by 38 points in the 2024 election). That would appear to limit its generalizability to other areas of the country, particularly in general elections. But don’t tell that to culturally radical economic populists—they are ecstatic. From an NBC News article by Ben Kamisar:

Maya Rupert, a Democratic strategist who managed the 2021 mayoral campaign of Democrat Maya Wiley, told NBC News that Mamdani’s “decisive victory” is a signal to the left that its candidates can run unapologetically authentic campaigns that take tough issues head-on with progressive solutions.

“These issues aren’t unpopular; we just need a way to communicate them across geography, across a multiracial coalition, across partisan divides. He was able to do that, and more than that, show other people across the country how it can be done,” she said.

“We’ve heard this so much since the election: Democrats have gone too far afield, the vilification of talking about social justice, talking about racial justice, that you can’t do that stuff and also win. You can, and if it’s where your politics are, you can’t do it any other way, I really believe that. So I hope there are more people that are going to take this moment and decide to run like this because it really does seem to be our path forward,” she said.

This is lamentably, if predictably, dumb. It certainly makes sense that in our current populist era, Democrats need to be responsive to that populist mood. But it makes much less sense that an aggressive economic populism by itself is a sort of get-out-of-jail free card for a party whose brand among working-class voters has been profoundly damaged, especially by its cultural radicalism. In fact, it’s completely ridiculous, a comforting myth for Democrats like Rupert, Mamdani and the party’s legions of inclusive populists who don’t want to make hard choices.

In particular, it’s preposterous that economic populism, by itself, can solve Democrats’ cultural radicalism problem. In a post-election YouGov survey of working-class (non-college) voters for the Progressive Policy Institute, 68 percent of these voters said Democrats have moved too far left, compared to just 47 percent who thought Republicans have moved too far right. It’s a fair surmise that working-class sentiment about the Democrats’ leftism is heavily driven by the party’s embrace of cultural leftist positions across a wide range of issues (immigration, crime, race, gender, etc.) given how unpopular these positions are among those voters.

And in a widely-noted finding from a post-election survey by the Blueprint strategy group, the third most potent reason—after too much inflation and too much illegal immigration—for voters to choose Trump over Harris in a pairwise comparison test was, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class”. And among swing voters, this concern about cultural focus was the most powerful reason.

In the same poll, overwhelming majorities (67 to 77 percent) of swing voters who chose Trump thought the following characterizations of Democrats were extremely or very accurate: not tough enough on the border crisis; support immigrants more than American citizens; want to take money from hard-working Americans and give it to immigrants; want to promote transgender ideology; don’t care about securing the border; have extreme ideas about immigration; aren’t doing enough to address crime; and are too focused on identity politics.

It’s really is magical thinking to believe that simply changing the subject to economics will evaporate these cultural liabilities. Culture matters—a lot—and the issues to which they are connected matter. They are a hugely important part of how voters, especially outside of deep blue areas like New York City, assess who is on their side and who is not; whose philosophy they can identify with and whose they can’t.

Instead, for working-class voters in most areas of the country to seriously consider their economic pitch, Democrats need to convince them that they are not looked down on, that their concerns are taken seriously, and that their views on culturally-freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened. That’s the threshold test for many of the working-class voters Democrats need to reach and Democrats have flunked it over and over.

That’s why changing the subject to economic populism doesn’t work and won’t work outside of special cases like New York City—any more than talking incessantly about MAGA extremism/fascism did in the last election. Working-class voters aren’t stupid and they can tell when you’re just changing the subject and have not really changed the underlying cultural outlook they detest. Convincing voters of the latter is much harder and more uncomfortable for Democrats. But it has to be done, whether inclusive populists like it or not.

It should also be noted that economic populism in whatever form has little to do with making Democratic governance of states and, especially, cities any better. Democratic governance is not, to say the least, synonymous with public order, low crime, and effective and efficient administration of public services. Quite the contrary. Progressive domination of deep blue cities instead has become synonymous with poor governance across the board. Josh Barro:

I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them…Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system…even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don’t do much about it…The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets…[S]chools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under state court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything—and it’s really expensive to travel here, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council literally made it illegal to build new hotels. And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population—we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy.

To anyone who thinks a Mamdani administration is going to solve the problems enumerated by Barro: I’ve got a bridge to sell you (and it’s conveniently located in New York City!)

Finally, as should be screamingly obvious to anyone who has lived this country for the last ten years, economic populism is inadequate as populism. We are certainly in a populist era and, as noted, it makes sense to respond to that mood. But it does not necessarily follow that Democrats can effectively speak to that mood simply by bashing the rich (“the billionaire class”), insisting they pay their fair share, and advocating for programs aimed at middle- and working-class voters, rather than corporate priorities. Many voters, including swing voters, are certainly sympathetic to such a pitch. But what this approach leaves out is that the populist sentiments of voters go much deeper than that.

To put it bluntly, voters, particularly working-class voters, harbor deep resentment toward elites who they feel are telling them how to live their lives, even what to think and say, and incidentally are living a great deal more comfortably than they are. This is not the rich as conventionally defined by economic populism but rather the professionals-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power. By and large, these are Democrats in Democratic-dominated institutions. Looked at in this context, truly populist Democrats might want to say, with Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This is a bitter pill for most Democrats to swallow. In today’s America, they are the Establishment even if in their imaginations they are sticking it to the Man and fighting nobly for social justice. Think of Michael Lange’s professionals-dominated “Commie Corridor” in Western Queens and North Brooklyn, stretching from Astoria to Sunset Park, where Mamdani ran up his biggest margins. The failure to understand that they themselves are central targets of populist anger leads inclusive populists to overestimate the efficacy of economic populism and interpret populism on the right as driven solely by racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. That’s more comfortable than realizing millions of populist voters hate you. But they do.

Coming to terms with this reality—while unpleasant—would help Democrats win outside of New York City and similar areas. And I say to inclusive populists: let me know when you elect, say, a Democratic Senator from Ohio with these politics. Then I’ll take you more seriously.