Popularism: The Loser's Crown Jewel
Want the right wing to craft reality? Then you're going to love popularism.
Hello to the good and decent Bad Faith Times readers. Today's newsletter incudes some thoughts on so-called popularism and why it represents a one-way ticket to eternal political hell for the American left.
I've also included an update on Tim Walz, who might just be a BFT reader. Hours after I published Friday's piece about Walz being too damn nice to emerge as a leading anti-authoritarian voice, the Minnesota governor delivered a goddamn zinger targeting Elon Musk and immediately proved me wrong. Nevertheless, I persist.
For BFT supporters, I made a video about Walz's takedown of Musk and talked about what could have been on the 2024 campaign trail. But first, popularism:
Popularism And Rejecting Pundit Brain Bullshit
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 the art of repeating things – and with its total control of the media landscape, the American right is all too happy to shape how the public perceives anything from transgender rights to the humanization of migrants to the perception of supposed allies like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
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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 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 in all their learned helplessness, 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 fucking nothing to the American voter – Republicans 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-curate, algorithmically-driven worldview.
Democrats are largely committed to so-called popularism: Studying polls and shaping an agenda around already-existing feelings. Republicans don't give a shit about how anyone feels about anything. Fuck your feelings and so forth. 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 and low-information voters who experience the world via 12-second TikTok videos.
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 that the left can hammer kitchen table issues and stop talking about 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.
Denny Carter
Popularism, to put it kindly, is a fucking loser's mindset. A commitment to popularism allows Republicans to shape public sentiment, 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 Gavin Newsom then study the Republican-made public sentiment and decide to chase these shifting views, as Newsom did with trans athletes in sports. Popularism means changing one's political platform to match that of the dominant party and their reality-creating machine.
Newsom's strategic abandonment of trans folks has predictably been an unmitigated disaster for the one-time 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.
Social pressure can be useful here. Coming out strong and saying in no uncertain terms that you are a bad person if you don't support transgender rights is a way to generate the kind of pro-social incentive to which people respond. Imagine for a moment if Newsom – one of the only elected Democrats who can be nasty in public – came out swinging on his podcast and told his listeners that only vile people 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?
But no, Democrats have embraced the maddening Kleinian idea of allowing conservatives to shape public discourse and move the nation ever more rightward. In this arrangement, they decide what is popular. It's why popularism guarantees failure.
Tim Walz: BFT Subscriber?
Become a Bad Faith Times supporter and check out today's BFT video on Tim Walz's takedown of Elon Musk.
