Will Left Populists Embrace Patriotism?

American politics is stuck in a maddening holding pattern. In the last twenty years, economic conditions would seem to have favored a mass political movement reflecting the basic tenets of left-wing populism. Aggressively curbing monopolies and the political power of the rich, strengthening workers’ rights, stimulating economic development and widespread housing construction, and implementing policies that better protect against the vicissitudes of age, health, and family tragedy—all these stances would seem to coalesce downtrodden voters across demographic and regional lines.

But that has repeatedly failed to happen. Instead, Republicans have become hegemonic in several former swing states without the GOP committing to a single major policy idea that directly and measurably benefits the working class. The regressive tax rates and cuts to Medicaid and SNAP contained in the congressional GOP’s budget reconciliation bill, signed by Donald Trump this weekend, are proof that gestures to Republicans’ blue-collar base are as infinitesimal as they are fleeting. Besides sectoral tariffs, whose true impact on fixed investment is hard to predict, Trump’s base has otherwise been asked to swallow the GOP’s usual magical thinking that tax breaks for the wealthy encourage widespread growth.

The opening to frame this bill as unreflective of the public interest, as downright unpatriotic, is no small opportunity. But Democrats, for the better part of the extended Trump era, have only halfheartedly reclaimed their past identity as the anti-monopoly party. While a few rising stars in the House have taken a page from former FTC chair Lina Khan, it is still second nature for the party establishment to cater to the upscale urban professional classes, who tend to benefit disproportionately from globalization and can stomach expensive housing. A vacuum exists where one would expect political entrepreneurs on the left to rejuvenate the big tent strategy that yielded Barack Obama’s decisive 2008 coalition.

Indeed, the American electoral left as understood today is irrelevant to and disconnected from the places and people critical to building democratic power in the economy. Despite routine paeans in progressive media to the lessons of New Deal liberalism and the various grassroots movements that laid the groundwork for the realignment of the 1930s, few progressives are heeding the advice of former Senator Sherrod Brown and other “red state” Democrats who have witnessed the collapse of their party in the towns and small cities that once powered the New Deal coalition.

The typical rejoinder from the grassroots left is to deflect from this strategic failure and argue that Democrats simply haven’t shown enough backbone when it comes to confronting economic elites. While true, this isn’t the whole story. At this point, it’s safe to assume plenty of disaffected voters are familiar with progressives’ fusillades against the one percent. Blue-collar workers know what ostentatious and obscene displays of wealth look like. They aren’t ignorant about the consequences of rising inequality and economic concentration, either. Many know firsthand the social costs of disinvestment, stagnant wages, decaying infrastructure, failing schools, exorbitant medical fees, and the affordable housing shortage. Many have seen families destroyed by plant closures, unstable employment, and drug addiction. The hardship is monumental—not relative and secluded—and they feel helpless to stop it.

What left-behind Americans have not yet heard is a concrete, persuasive, and consistent message about national redevelopment and restoring the American dream. They are intermittently offered doses of economic populism tied, usually, to bold yet viable proposals concerning market predation, public investment, and social insurance. But a positive story from either the left or the Democratic establishment about America’s past and future is patently missing. Sectarian influences continue to permeate the larger progressive ecosystem, making it extremely unfashionable, if not verboten, to embrace patriotism and celebrate the achievements of past generations. Progressives point to ideas and policies that are meant to benefit the majority, but their overwhelming focus on (sometimes distressingly essentialist) identity politics and condemning much of American history has greatly undermined the traditional social-democratic project of advancing universal public goods and shared prosperity.

That weakness, notably, is not offset by the strength of other, less ideological voices in the Democratic coalition. In fact, establishment Democrats seem oblivious (or indifferent) to the fact that the politics of inclusion and opportunity extend far beyond who gets admitted to elite universities, the makeup of corporate boardrooms, or how Hollywood depicts modern society. For a party purportedly obsessed with deferring to the “lived experience” of the less privileged, Democrats remain strangely aloof about the degradation quietly endured by many of their fellow Americans.

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The challenges facing Democrats and those who would engineer a populist makeover for the party amount to more than these blind spots and “unforced errors.” Both the progressive base and the establishment’s gatekeepers are reluctant to affirm the endogenous patriotism of those who don’t have much left to lose but have few feasible new paths to take. Too many Americans are stuck, spiritually and materially, because the greener pastures are prohibitively expensive; as with a new business struggling to penetrate monopoly control over a given market, it’s not so easy for the de-skilled, underemployed, and dispossessed to abandon their roots for a more dynamic region and compete with others who are more credentialed and better-connected.

In theory, the democratic left’s historical purpose ought to compel it to confront this stark material inequality, just as it would any other. Yet progressives’ geographic isolation from distressed areas has bred a fear of, and even disdain for, working-class counties that have turned from purple to deep red. They recognize neither the yearning nor the pride of perseverance that accompanies working-class patriotism. And because these demographics have doubled down on voting for the “wrong values,” they are, in the progressive mind, beyond persuasion or redemption.

The left’s evident discomfort over patriotism, however, cannot be waved away as reflecting a principled aversion to jingoism or repressive social norms. It evinces a class position tied incontrovertibly to what philosopher Michael Sandel has called a prejudice against the less educated. For the cultural elites who predominate progressive circles, the archetypal blue-collar worker’s sentiment toward their country is invariably a source of suspicion, regardless of whether it is positive or negative. If one is emphatic in their love of country, it must reflect an authoritarian or hypermasculine disposition (or submission to the latter). If one is pessimistic about the country’s trajectory, it automatically must indicate bigotry or opposition to every cultural change since the 1960s. Perhaps more vexing for the Brahmin left is that working-class patriotism can persist in spite of a lot of personal misfortune, and that it is impervious to the kind of radical sanctimony that treats patriotism in every instance as foolish and retrograde.

What is frustrating about all this from the standpoint of sheer political calculus is that it shouldn’t really cost the left anything to champion the people whose success our democracy depends on. America’s future is contingent on whether the left behind—rural and urban, white and nonwhite—have the economic foundations to strengthen our civic fabric. It depends on whether politics in hard-bitten places is more than a quadrennial opportunity to stick it to (one head of) the Hydra-establishment. Good governance, inclusive development, and sound reforms are not perfect antidotes to anomie or bias, but they can do much to relieve hyperpolarization and sociocultural strife. Rather than policing ideological fidelity, the left could promote a vision of national well-being—one that smothers the zero-sum group competition that metastasizes whenever underdevelopment is allowed to fester.

It is no tribute to academia and the professional-managerial class that a minefield of sensitivities surrounds the role of patriotism in the left’s approach to public life. This wasn’t always the case. Historically, economic populism and social-democratic priorities have strongly appealed to patriotic aspirations and the importance of national belonging. Although “left nationalism” is now widely regarded as transgressive or oxymoronic, the democratic left has only succeeded at length when it has promised to conserve what is admirable about a nation while realizing its greater potential.

This has been true the world over. In Sweden and Scandinavia more broadly, the folkhemmet, or concept of a people’s home, was central to building a universal welfare state in the mid-twentieth century. In Latin American countries such as Uruguay and, more recently, Mexico under Morena, reforms have been instituted because the left, through thick and thin, nurtured the traditions of social republicanism. Possibly the best testament to the left’s past embrace of patriotism is the United States itself. Patriotism was integral to the Union’s victory over the Confederacy and the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments; the push for Progressive Era reforms; the country’s ability to survive the Great Depression and have faith in Franklin Roosevelt’s far-reaching policies; and even the breakthroughs of the civil rights and antiwar movements. When the horizon for equal rights and equal opportunity has expanded, it is because the left steadfastly favored the common good over the sectarian path.

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As the bottom sixty percent begins to feel the consequences of Trump’s fiscal policies, DOGE, and a host of other reckless actions, progressives must make a fundamental choice. They can write off all who voted for Trump or stayed home last November and scrounge, presumably, for more votes among those who already share their worldview. Or they can curb their vanity, remind themselves of all that seemed impossible in the age of Roosevelt or Lincoln, and channel the anger—and wounded patriotism—of the downtrodden toward a project of national renewal.

There will, assuredly, be daunting moments on the road ahead. But if the rest of this decade and the one to follow are to be different from the recent past, the democratic left cannot retreat from the country as it is. Nor can it recoil from the patriotism that, in its best expressions, has kept neglected communities from falling apart. In his July 4th address of 1936, Franklin Roosevelt said:

Emergencies and decisions in our individual, community, and national lives are the stuff out of which national character is made. Preparation of the mind and preparation of the spirit of our people for such emergencies and for such decisions is the best available insurance for the security and development of our democratic institutions.

More than ever, the modern left must recognize, free of judgment, the character wrought from the fortitude of people and places whose own emergencies went unnoticed for too long. Perhaps then the great task of restoring our common bonds and common purpose may begin anew.