Here Comes Democrats’ Phony Populist Posturing
Like clockwork, when Democrats get desperate, they trot out disingenuous populist rhetoric to try to save themselves.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer speaking to the press in Washington, DC, on January 14, 2025. (Allison Robbert / AFP via Getty Images)
“House Republicans want to pass massive tax breaks for billionaires and wealthy corporations to benefit the wealthy, the well-off, and the well-connected and to stick the bill with working-class Americans,” House Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries warned NBC News the day before Donald Trump’s inauguration. “One day into his presidency,” Senate Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer told the Senate the day after, “it’s clear Donald Trump’s golden age is not for the working and middle class. His golden age, rather, is for the special interests, for the wealthy elite, and the corporate insiders he promised to take on as president.”
This is all a bit rich. Schumer earned his moniker “D-Wall Street” years ago because of his loyal service to the US financial industry, which has repaid his devotion many times over by showering donations on him and the party he is now the de facto leader of. And Jeffries is also very much a creature of the corporate donor class.
And we’ve been here before. Dusting off the party’s “populist” playbook has been the default move for the Democratic Party in moments of crisis and uncertainty. Take the following quotes.
From 1992:
For more than a decade our government has been rigged in favor of the rich and special interests. While the very wealthiest Americans get richer, middle-class Americans work harder for lower incomes and pay higher taxes to a government that fails to produce what we need: good jobs in a growing economy, world-class education, affordable health care, and safe streets and neighborhoods.
From 2000:
They’re for the powerful. We’re for the people. . . . I know one thing about the job of the president: It is the only job in the Constitution that is charged with the responsibility of fighting for all the people . . . not just the wealthy or the powerful, all the people; especially those who need a voice, those who need a champion, those who need to be lifted up, so they are never left behind. . . [I]f you entrust me with the presidency, I will fight for you.
And from 2013:
Since 1979 . . . our productivity is up by more than 90 percent, but the income of the typical family has increased by less than 8 percent. Since 1979, our economy has more than doubled in size, but most of that growth has flowed to a fortunate few. . . . The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe. . . . And finally, rising inequality and declining mobility are bad for our democracy. Ordinary folks can’t write massive campaign checks or hire high-priced lobbyists and lawyers to secure policies that tilt the playing field in their favor at everyone else’s expense.
These are not lifted from the speeches of Bernie Sanders. These are statements by, respectively, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Barack Obama. Each time Democrats’ backs have been up against the wall, they’ve turned to populism — in words only, naturally — for salvation. Trailing behind both George H. W. Bush and Ross Perot early in the summer of 1992, Clinton unveiled his populist “putting people first” agenda. The key to the campaign was “the economy, stupid” and Clinton, donning his hard hat, was ready to be America’s working-class hero.
When polls showed Gore losing to Bush by as much as 10 percentage points in 2000, the Gore campaign lurched leftward in rhetoric (much to the concern of his party’s conservative wing, who accused him of embracing class warfare). Fearful of what the 2014 midterm elections would bring and with sinking approval ratings, the Obama administration tried to right the ship with a new populist message, declaring income inequality the “defining challenge of our times.”
Of course, the records of all three party leaders contradicted the rhetoric. But they didn’t let that get in the way.
Two-Faced Populism
Occasionally, Democrats have actually been caught trotting out populist rhetoric in public while at the same time assuring investors and politicians that it’s all just fodder for the plebs.
In the 2008 primary election, for example, Obama campaigned against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But the stump speeches against NAFTA and for fundamentally changing trade policy were a poorly disguised sleight of hand. One of Obama’s top economic advisers, Austan Goolsbee, privately reassured concerned Canadian officials that the candidate was an enthusiastic supporter of free trade. In a memo that was quickly leaked, a Canadian official summed up Goolsbee’s reassurances. Obama’s NAFTA rhetoric “should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.” Criticisms of free trade were a campaign tactic to improve the candidate’s standing in the Midwest especially and “to court the economic populist vote.”
After this news broke, Obama’s 2008 primary rival, Hillary Clinton, denounced him for giving Canadians “the old wink-wink.” Clinton, her campaign insisted, was committed to a wholesale reworking of NAFTA. Several days later, however, it was revealed that the Clinton campaign may have offered similar private reassurances to the Canadians, campaign rhetoric notwithstanding.
Obama and Clinton’s double-dealing on free trade had at least one precedent. In 1984, Walter Mondale secured the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination by campaigning for new protectionist policies. Concerned European business leaders and politicians objected. Mondale’s top advisor and former Democratic National Committee chairman Robert Strauss then explicitly assured a European business audience that Mondale was posturing on protectionism “for the purpose of getting the nomination of our party.”
This kind of opportunistic populism is par for the course in the Democratic Party. But for the labor left, it is also potentially destructive. By periodically employing such rhetoric with no intention of governing along populist lines, Democrats sow a deep-seated cynicism about left-populist politics. At best, it contributes to pessimism: “It sounds good on paper, but it will never happen.” But at worst it associates class politics with duplicity.
For those of us who hope to see an actual left-populist movement rise up and break us out of our Second Gilded Age, unmasking this kind of fake populism is an urgent task. Going along with it — or worse, naively thinking “maybe this time they really mean it” — lets Democrats salt the earth for actual left-wing, pro-worker politics in the future.
There’s every reason to think that Jeffries, Schumer, and other Democratic Party leaders are going to be cribbing heavily from the populist playbook this year. No one should confuse it for the real deal. As the Labor Institute’s Les Leopold rightly put it: “Get ready for more faux populism from Democratic Party elites while Wall Street feasts on the riches Trump showers upon them.” What a time to be alive.