Denny Carter: Democrats Need to Say Goodbye to Popularism
By Denny Carter
The central difference between Republicans and Democrats in the modern age – besides the whole fascism thing – is that one party seeks to bend the public’s will to their advantage and the other happily pretends that they cannot in any way sway public sentiment.
Through relentless, disciplined messaging – for politics is nothing but the art of repeating things – and with its control of the media landscape, the American far-right is all too happy to shape how the public perceives anything from transgender rights to the humanization of migrants to economic policy to the perception of supposed allies like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
What you saw last month when you watched Trump and JD Vance do their Real Housewives-style ambush of Zelensky at the White House was a pair of major party leaders telling their base exactly what to think about Russia’s savage war against Ukraine.
The message was received: Republican sentiment around Ukraine as a democracy in its existential battle for survival went from something similar to overall public sentiment to outright hostility. Trump and Vance had successfully altered the way their people viewed the conflict. Mission accomplished. Putin smiles.
Republicans, unlike Democrats, don’t look at polling data, shrug, and decide all they can do is follow the public’s feelings on this or that issue. While Democratic elected officials make painstaking efforts to engage in a deliberative process of laying out the Best Possible Case – backed by data and objective reality, which mean absolutely nothing to the American voter – Republican officials turn on the opinion-shaping machine and change the contours of a political issue. The right understands well that people will believe what they are told to believe as long as the information is presented to them in ways that reinforce their carefully curated, algorithmically driven worldview.
Democrats are uniquely susceptible to so-called popularism: Studying polls and shaping an agenda around already-existing feelings. Through sheer force of will and mind-bending propaganda campaigns that reach into every part of modern life, the right will decide what the public thinks – or at least a large swath of the public. Their voters, especially their low-information voters, are mostly unengaged but for the weeks and months immediately before a presidential election.
And an important thing to note: popularism, despite its phonetic similarity, is not necessarily the same thing as populism, although Democrats do tend to try to ascribe to both.
The New York Times’ Ezra Klein wrote at the start of the Biden administration that Democrats should go all in on popularism. Biden and congressional Dems, Klein said, “should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” Please see a doctor if you, like Klein, dismiss basic rights and critical institutions of a free society as “unpopular stuff”: You may be suffering from onset Pundit Brain.
Klein’s theory supposes elected Democrats can hammer kitchen table issues with Trump in power and stop talking about more politically volatile issues like transgender people’s right to exist in American society. This assumes Republicans will also shut up about the volatile stuff. We know they won’t. They’ll keep talking, keep demonizing, and they’ll have the field all to themselves. Klein’s approach is a total concession to the right wing.
Popularism, to put it kindly, is a loser’s game. Democrats’ commitment to popularism allows Republicans to shape public sentiment on any range of issues, giving up the entire playing field to a movement that is all too glad to take it (and keep it). Democrats are poring over polls and trying to figure out what they stand for as their opponents craft reality itself for most of the country.
On trans rights, popularism has brought us this current hellscape: Republicans have convinced Americans of all political stripes that transgender people do not deserve fair treatment, and may in fact be a danger to their children. Democrats like California Governor Gavin Newsom then study the Republican-made public sentiment and decide to chase these shifting views, as Newsom did recently with trans athletes in sports. Popularism means changing one’s political platform to match that of the dominant party and their reality-creating machine. It does not mean appealing to political appetites that exist in a state of nature. Republicans know those appetites are easily changed with enough effective messaging; Democrats like to imagine those appetites are immutable. This might be the most naive belief in politics.
Newsom’s strategic abandonment of trans folks has predictably been an unmitigated disaster for the presidential hopeful. His favorability among liberals who responded to a recent poll has fallen from 46 percent to 30 percent; conservative respondents overwhelmingly called Newsom’s turn on trans rights “fake”; and his net favorability tanked into the negative. Those who liked Newsom were let down, and those who detest the California governor were not swayed by his agreements with far-right activist Charlie Kirk.
It was Kirk and his ilk, after all, that had laid the groundwork for Newsom to climb aboard the bandwagon of politicians who oppose trans women participating in women’s sports.
Imagine for a moment if Newsom – who, by virtue of his current elected position, is one of the only elected Democrats who can be as confrontational and forceful as a Republican – came out swinging on his podcast and told his listeners that it is not OK under any circumstances to oppose transgender rights. Maybe couch it in jingoistic terms: If you hate trans Americans, you hate America. You aren’t an America hater, are you? Imagine if Newsom has not assumed right wing views on trans people in the US are permanent, but sought to shift those views. It’s what a Republican would do if the tables were turned.
But no, many Democrats have embraced the maddening Kleinian idea of allowing conservatives to shape public discourse and move the nation ever more rightward. In this arrangement, the right decides what is popular – and, much more than not, people in this country suffer for it. It’s why popularism guarantees failure for Democrats.
Denny Carter is a writer and podcaster, a YouTube host, and the author of Bad Faith Times.
