Sanders himself has been given the credit for pushing the culture and politics in a more populist direction. So let me just define what populism is and let me say a little bit about how I think it relates to Sanders. It’s one of those words that everyone says is hard to define but yet always orbits around the same use.

The typical definition of populism, which I think is fine, is that it’s a politics that’s centered around a very simple distinction, as academics like to say, a binary, with the two ends of a pole. It thinks of politics as a fight between a narrow elite on the one hand and some kind of organic community on the other, which is called the masses or the people or, in today’s parlance, the 99 percent or something.

That has a lot in common with traditional socialism because socialism always was about the working class against the ruling class. But where it departs from socialism is that socialism understood the population to be stratified into classes which were heterogeneous, which had distinct interests — and not just interests that divided the capitalists or the landlords from peasants and workers, but they were interests dividing the laboring classes as well or the nonruling classes. So the middle class had different interests from the working class, the peasantry had different interests from the middle class and the working class. And the idea was how to put together a political and economic program that would hold these different interests together.

Now, what populism does is when it gets to the general masses is it kind of glides over all the different interests among them and looks at them as one distinct entity.

I think it’s having a moment for two reasons. One is that it does reflect something quite extraordinary and new over the past twenty years, which is a level of economic inequality that we had not seen in about two to three generations. And that inequality is one where the real gains have occurred in such a tiny section — not just of what we call the “elites” but a tiny section of the capitalist class itself.

If you look at the rise in inequality, it’s not like “the 1 percent” has gotten richer than the 99 percent. It’s really that the 0.1 percent has gotten richer than everyone else. So it is really, really concentrated at the top.

Conversely, the bottom 60 to 70 percent has witnessed almost no gains in almost two generations. Now, when you have that as an actual fact about the world, where one-half of 1 percent is taking all the money and the bottom 60 percent is basically standing still or getting worse, the organic political vocabulary for an expression of that will be a populist one, where everyone’s suffering and the tiny, tiny elite is gaining.

But there’s another reason, which is that if you look at it from a socialist standpoint, it’s straightforward class warfare. When you say that the 0.1 percent or the 0.5 percent is where all the money’s gone, you’re really just talking about the capitalist class. And when you say the bottom 50 to 60 percent has been standing still, you’re really just talking about the working class. So this is about as naked an expression of class warfare as you could ever get.

So the question is, why isn’t this being described in class terms, and why is it instead giving rise to a populist vocabulary? Before I answer that, let me say, you cannot indict Sanders for falling into the populist category, even though he’s credited with launching our culture into this populist era.

You will never find Sanders saying, like [Jeremy] Corbyn says, it’s the few versus the many. He’s always said working people, working class. Now it’s true that he says the billionaire class. He says it because, I guess, he’s of a generation where, because of the Cold War, you don’t say capitalist class. But there’s no such thing as a small shopkeeper who’s a billionaire. When you’re talking about billionaires, it’s a code for capitalists.

When he talks about the masses, he talks about workers, working people, the working class. So whatever I’m about to say does not really apply to him. But having said that, back to your question: Why is the political discourse today, the political ideology, all expressed in populist discourse?

It’s because it is a fact of capitalism that the only time you find politics being described in overtly class terms is when you have an organized working class or a socialist or communist party that has enough influence that it can shape the political discourse. Adam Przeworski, one of the great political scientists of the last few decades, once wrote that the only time you find the language of class in capitalism is when the labor movement inserts it into the system. And the reason is that people who are on the top — whether it’s conservative parties or establishment parties — have no reason to invoke class ever, because their whole job is to pretend that class warfare, class struggle, class politics don’t exist.

So their natural vocabulary is to move away from class and instead promote the language of nation, of people, of ethnicity, of race, and things like that. So what we are dealing with now in the United States is a country in which there has never been a mass socialist party. The communist party was always tiny. They had some influence, but it was in very small sections. So there’s never been a vehicle to promote the language of class. And over the past forty years, it’s been especially bad.

We’re coming out of an era from the 1960s and ’70s when you briefly saw some language of class. But then by the 1980s, it disappears. And now for half a century, we have dealt with a systematic and profound depoliticization of the culture, including on the Left. Today’s left has no vocabulary. Its entire vocabulary is of identity, ethnicity, race, and gender. And in a culture like this, when people are trying to express and describe and respond to these extraordinary inequalities that have emerged, there is no vehicle in that society to organize that language, that political debate around class.

So there are two reasons why the populist imagery and discourse have become so common now. One is, it’s real. There are real inequalities. And the second is, there’s no political presence to insert the language of class into it. It’s a profoundly depoliticized, apolitical culture, including that of left commentators and left journalists.

There’s been a very profound and rapid period of learning on the electoral left, the groupings around Bernie Sanders. Just in the past ten years, there have been profound changes.

Sanders himself was the first candidate in thirty or forty years to have an electoral, political campaign centered fundamentally around class issues. Class issues are the economic issues of affordability, prices, housing, medical care, things like that. He was the only one in the Democratic Party who was doing this in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Others were skirting around the edges, but he was the only one.

And after 2020, when Sanders kind of took a backseat and retreated from the political scene, you saw the Sanders left or the American left sinking back into its politics of the 1990s and 2000s, where it just became warring identities, gender, race, sexuality, this and that, and the historic kind of middle-class suspiciousness of any mention of economics always being trotted out. Whenever Sanders brought up Medicare for All, they’d be like, “Yeah, well, what about race? What about sexuality? What about gender?” It was all a way of pushing back on these economic demands because the Left is utterly and totally dominated and hegemonized by the middle class.

One thing that’s happened just in the past couple of years is you’ve seen, I think, a real maturation on the left wing of the Democratic Party and even people outside the Democratic Party finally shedding their inhibition toward and their skepticism of the core of a populist agenda, which is an economic agenda.

So I think right now, today, one of the services that the populist left is doing for the socialist movement is that it’s helping the sections of the middle class that are coming to the Left — and it’s still mostly the middle class — overcome their inhibitions and their doubts about pressing economic demands. Without that, we’ll get nowhere.

Now, this is still the kindergarten stage. We just had the stage of coming to where the European and the American left was in, say, 1870, right? Where you’re finally just making economic demands.

But at least now, you can start having a conversation of how to succeed with those demands rather than these ridiculous conversations on whether economic demands necessarily mean you’re throwing other people under the bus and you’re not going to be able to deal with race and gender and things like that. It’s a very positive step in that sense.

It’s a very good point. If you had to look at the American and even the European political scene right now, more of the populist energy is on the Right than on the Left. That’s especially true in Europe.

Why is that? It’s because a weird thing happened over the 1970s and ’80s, which is that the socialist and left-wing parties that had fought for and advanced social democracy over the course of the twentieth century had represented working-class people, had fought for not just labor rights but for rights around family, parental leave, and ethnic and racial rights . . . all of them transmuted into being management parties, into being parties of authority — parties that instead of trying to disrupt the system and change it were now managing it.

And they were managing it during a period of austerity, what’s called the neoliberal era, where it’s the left-wing parties and the socialist parties that are cutting programs, cutting social welfare, and scaling back employment efforts.

On the one hand, they’re losing their credibility as parties of the working masses, and they’re looking like elite parties. At the same time, their voting base became more educated, became centered in universities and colleges — what’s called the cultural elites.

So weirdly, by the 1990s and 2000s, you had this situation where left-wing parties, parties that have left-wing names like the socialist party, the labor party, are not only defending a brutal system that is taking away people’s benefits, commodifying everything, and bringing back the market but also are really engaging in a kind of culture war, which has very elite connotations to it. So they end up looking like elite parties, and the people who back them are called elites.

That’s true in Europe as well. So what does that do? It opens the door for other parties, other political programs to come in and say to working people, you’re being screwed over not just by the conservative parties but by the entire political spectrum, because you’ve got conservative parties and labor parties, socialist parties, deploying the same programs.

So the far right can come in and say, “Hey, look, we’re the real representatives of anti-system, of resistance, of response, and we’re going to fight for you.” And they not only can point to the conservative parties as people who are driving working people into the ground, they can also point to left parties and that college-educated, culturally elite support base and its magazines, its TV shows, its discourse, which constantly denigrates the unwashed masses as being racist and misogynist and this and that. That opens the door for a right-wing populist agenda in which the masses are now held up against the elite. But now inside the elite, you also include the college-educated crowd and their supposedly left-wing parties as part of the problem.

It’s found a lot of traction because it’s true. Both parts of it are true. The left-wing parties really have been imposing austerity, and their college-educated base, in fact, really does constantly denigrate and demean the unwashed masses, working people, and makes them feel that they aren’t worthy of the gifts and the benefits of democratic society.

Why is that more politically successful than the Left? Because the left space has been totally taken over by these establishment social democratic parties, and the anti–social democratic left, the Left that’s outside of it, has not been able to get outside of college campuses, study groups, and the NGO sector.

In prior episodes, we’ve talked a bit about how labor parties, including the Democrats, became managerial parties, because once they got power, their basic drive — and this isn’t a selling-out process, this is part of the pressures in a capitalist economy that any party has to deal with — but once you’re running the economy, and you have promises that you have to keep, you need to, as your first order of priority, make sure that economic growth is continuing in a capitalist economy. If economic growth tanks, you can’t fulfill any of the promises that you made to your own constituency.

And now, keeping economic growth going means basically keeping investors happy, because economic growth comes from private investment. And so they have to turn their attention to what investors want, what’s making them happy, and over time, this had an effect on the party’s political orientation, and all these left-wing parties became more and more and more attuned to the demands and the preferences of the investor class rather than the working class.

Two things were distinct. One was that all those policies came in two very punctuated moments. One was the mid-1930s in the second New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the second was the Great Society with Lyndon B. Johnson.

Those are different moments. In Roosevelt’s time, you had a huge, massive explosion of labor activism and strike waves, which kind of brought businesses to heel, where they felt they had to give labor something. And you had a party with the Democrats that was sympathetic.

Roosevelt was somebody who tried to actually take some degree of advantage of the power that the labor movement gave him, and turned it to the best use that he could. In Johnson’s time, there wasn’t anything like that kind of strike activity. But labor had an institutionalized power within the Democratic Party where it was kind of expected on the part of the party to give them something, to have programs that would actually enable them to have better lives for themselves.

So in that era from, say, 1935 to 1970, if you had to encapsulate what’s different about it, it’s the institutionalized presence of a labor movement that’s able to press its demands on the Democratic Party, and through the party, on the state. Now, what happens after that, really, is that you have a very long period of really steady decline in union membership and union density in the country. So that by 1980, you’re down to about 20 percent, from about 36 or 37 percent of the labor force being in unions. There’s a steady trickle outside the labor movement, whereby unions are much weaker by 1980. And after 1980, they become almost nonexistent.

Once the institutionalized power of labor is gone, the only organized power in society is capital. And both parties are brought to heel by capital, rather than the parties bringing capital to heel. All right, so the party becomes something different from what it was in the heyday of liberalism.

A similar process is taking place in Europe, though much slower, because union density was much higher to begin with. But even in Europe, there’s been a process of deinstitutionalization of labor — except for the Nordic countries, where it’s still quite high. All the power now comes to rest in capital, with no institutional or organized opposition to it. And all the political parties now bear the stamp of the economic and political, and thereby also the cultural, hegemony of capital. It’s not therefore surprising that the people who have entrée as radicals in this system are people who are outside of the mainstream. And the mainstream includes the left parties now.

So unless the contemporary left finds a way of going back to its roots, discovering the language of class, of fighting alongside, with, and for working people, and showing them the respect that they deserve, what you’re going to get is a populist moment, but where the right-wing populists have all the energy behind them, and the left-wing populists are this rump — kind of like us — who have some podcasts and TV shows and magazines but no real mass base.

In principle, yes. There are two options right now available to us. One is, you just scrap the whole thing, and you build new parties, and you start all over again.

That’s been the calling card of the far left for a long time, which is to say, “The whole system sucks; we need a new party.” But it is really, really hard to start up new parties. If it were easy, it would have been done hundreds of times by now. It is very hard.

The model of party building for the Left is ten people get inside a room and say, “We are now a new party. Let’s wait for the masses to come to us.”

It’s very hard to start a new party from top down. It’s much easier to do it from the bottom up.

So that being said, the other option is to take the existing parties and try to reform them, because they still have very serious connections, institutional connections, to labor, to the population. They have some kind of machinery. And if you could just reform them . . .

Think of unions. It’s much better for the Left to try to reform the existing unions than to invent new ones, because the landscape is just so hostile to coming up with new unions. You start by reforming the unions that exist and then you move outward. I think similarly with parties. But the challenge is real in that these are no longer the parties that you had in the 1940s and ’50s.

So it’s not just a question of taking the steering wheel and just turning the party in a new direction. Because back then, we’re talking about the era from the 1920s into the ’60s, these parties came out of an organic connection to working-class communities and to workplaces. So that if you could take a hold of these parties, you could steer the entire section of that population into a new political direction. You had the means of mobilizing workers. You could actually organize strikes. You could actually bring them out to vote.

What’s happened over the past forty years or so, not just in the United States with the Democrats but also in Europe, is that these parties have become institutionally and organizationally hollow.

There are two reasons. One is they became managerial parties, and they ceased to mobilize their base. So they lost the vertical connections to that base, because they didn’t feel they needed them anymore.

The second reason was that base itself became disillusioned with them. Once they saw the parties weren’t doing anything for them, they became much less active, didn’t come to meetings, didn’t pay attention, didn’t seek to join the parties in the same way. And then finally, the parties changed their electoral identity from being parties of the working class to essentially being vote aggregators.

This is important. Once the parties no longer saw themselves as mobilizers of the working class and saw themselves primarily as in the business of winning elections — if all you see yourself doing is needing to win elections, you’re in the numbers game, and you’re just trying to maximize the people coming to you at the hustings. You’re not going to do it by saying “class, class, class.” You’re going to want to be what’s called the people’s party or a mass party, some kind of party that’s now taking on a populist hue.

These parties, because of that, have lost connection with workers. The workers no longer trust them. They don’t see them as their parties. The parties are not involved in the lives of the working class. They do not have the institutions and the machinery of democratic decision-making, of democratic elections, any of that stuff. They really are just managerial parties.

So if you were to take them over, if you were to try to turn them around . . . I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it. What I’m saying you should be prepared for is you’re going to have to do the work of reenergizing that base, of creating the machinery of mobilization and democratic decision-making again, and creating, or I should say enlivening, the confidence of that base that you’re actually going to fight for them — that they actually can trust you and therefore they should stick with you through thick and thin. It’s not easy to do.

I think it’s easier to do it with the existing parties than to come up with a new one. And I think maybe some in the future will talk about the new Corbyn initiative in England. It’s going to be very challenging over there.

It’s a hard question to answer. I think you’re right that if you look at voter turnout in the last three election cycles in the United States, it’s gone up. It’s gone up to levels we haven’t seen probably since the 1960s.

But I would not interpret that as signaling a more politically engaged population. Because there are many dimensions to being politically engaged. One, of course, is taking part in elections. But in many ways, that’s one of the less important ones.

What you really want is a population to be participating in what’s going on in between elections. Because what you want to happen is for the parties, when they run their campaigns, to have programs that reflect yearslong conversations with their constituency. And the constituency should have an active role in shaping those programs.

What you have right now is — it’s like going into a restaurant, they’re presented with a menu that they had no role in shaping. And then they’re expected to come out and go yay or nay.

I think the reason they’re turning out is because the media and social media is making people so crazed with hatred or with passion or something that they come out to express their feelings. But that’s different from saying that they’re being politicized.

To my mind, what’s happening is politics is becoming a spectacle. And people come out to engage in the spectacle in a very routinized and a very formulaic way. But parties are absolutely committed to not letting them participate in any meaningful way. Because now, if we’re just talking about the United States, these parties are 100 percent captured by elites. And I’m using “elite” in the technical sense now, which is not just capitalists, but the next 15 percent of the population.

Both parties are parties of capital. But the way I put it is the American political system gives people a choice between a gangster capitalist party, which is the Republicans, and a party of genteel oligarchs, a multiracial genteel oligarchic party, which is what the Democrats are.

It’s going to take a very significant shift in how political figures and political parties engage with the masses. And I think we’re at that moment. People around the Sanders milieu are starting to see that finger-wagging, scolding, telling people they have to do better, they have to line up behind a historic opportunity to vote for a woman, or somebody who’s gay, or somebody who’s a person of color — “Here’s your chance, you could now show history that you are deserving of democracy” . . . that stuff is just not going to work. What you have to do instead is show them what you are willing to fight on their side. And we’re coming to that, I think.

Because both things are true. What’s happened is as part of this spectacle that politics has become, the parties have worked very hard to gin up hysteria and excitement around a very narrow range of issues but not to have meaningful debate on the stuff that really matters to people.

Look at what’s happening inside the Democratic Party right now. In New York, the Democratic primary was won by Mamdani. And the party still refuses to endorse him.

The party’s essentially saying, really, we’re fine with Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams winning. We would rather have that happen than have someone like Mamdani win, which is another way of saying the issues that he’s raising are not to be allowed on the table. What we will allow on the table is Cuomo and how many women he’s groped, Eric Adams and his corruption, Donald Trump and fascism. But we will simply not tell you what we’re going to fight for in any substantive way.

So this is the intense competition around symbolic, cultural, moral, personalistic issues. And what it does is it gins up lots of hatred, lots of distrust. But in the end, people are passionate about political figures. They’re utterly cynical about politics, utterly cynical about politics. And this is what a meaningful populism from the Left has to try to reverse.

The first challenge for the Left is to try to get working people to feel that politics is worth their time.

Yeah — that wasn’t on the menu. We don’t do off-menu things. The menu says, groping, corruption, and fascism. What are you doing with this extra stuff? That’s not part of it.

I think it’s such a positive development. Mamdani is the first candidate since Sanders to absolutely show what the fighting spirit of populism can be. He’s not as explicitly class-based, but he doesn’t have to be. Where we are right now, like I said, is at the kindergarten stage of politics. We just need to see candidates who are honest, who tell the populace what they stand for.

The fact that Mamdani said he will, in fact, continue to support the Palestinian cause; the fact that he’s saying, “I will fight for affordability”; the fact that he didn’t back down against Trump — People want to see that. They want to see somebody who actually stands for something. What he stands for is majoritarian demands. He’s not choosing the marginal group of the month to say that he’s going to uphold them. He’s saying, I want to fight for all of you, and I’m going to fight in a way that actually improves your lives.

The Democrats are now finding “abundance,” which is the neoliberal version of delivering things to people. But Mamdani is actually promising to deliver real things to people.

This is where we are. This is what it’s come to. Not just politics — we’re on the Left saying, “Hey, the Left should be promising to improve people’s lives, rather than giving them new pronouns or new adjectives or something.” This is where we are.

It’s a very positive development. There are going to be real challenges. I don’t mean just challenges in terms of how in New York, the financier class and the donor class are going to line up against him. There will be real challenges of governance, real challenges of managing a city. But those are the experiences. Those are the challenges that a maturing Left needs to face so that it can direct its attention to the right things.

We don’t know, and we should be open. The Left has never been in the situation that it’s in today. It’s a different capitalism than a hundred years ago when socialist parties blossomed in the world. We’ve never been in a situation where unions have been so weak. And we’ve never been in a situation where there is literally no left-wing organized presence in the political sphere in advanced capitalism. There just isn’t.

So we are now looking for a spark. We’re looking for things that can work. And because everything is so new, you have to be open to the possibility that you might have been too pessimistic. Maybe this populism can go further than what our current theory is predicting.

I think it would be very arrogant to lay out a kind of a blueprint for what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. Who in their right minds thought Mamdani could even win the primary four months ago?

I’ve said before, the defining characteristic of this moment is that things are so fluid. Things are moving very rapidly in this or that direction from one political settlement to another. Because it’s so fluid, we need to be open to the possibility that it could move rapidly in a direction favorable to us.

One thing we know, whenever this populist moment has worked for us has been when the candidates single-mindedly go to people with an economic program. They don’t pit one section of the working class against another. They don’t virtue signal. They don’t wag their finger. They don’t act as if the voters are beholden to them to prove themselves. They show the voters they will fight alongside and for them.

Now, if Mamdani continues to do that, if other figures emerge in or outside the Democratic Party who do that, you might be able to turn this populist moment in a direction that’s favorable to the next challenge that we’re going to face, which is actually organizing the working class. One thing we know historically is, at some point, you have to start organizing your constituency. You have to identify them and you have to start organizing them, and then you have to come up with a program that’ll draw other people to that constituency.

I think you have to go back to what the Left at one point saw as its political strategy, which is, you recognize an actual heterogeneity of differences of interest between people, and then you try to reconcile those interests instead of pretending that the differences don’t exist. We’re going to have to do that at some point. We need to get there. Right now, God has given us this populist moment.

The reason why voters are moving to right-wing populism is that they believe, for whatever reason, these populists will fight for them. Our challenge is to find candidates and organizers and militants who will have a credible case that they can make to working people, to the unemployed, to — everyone’s favorite word — the marginal, that they will also fight for them. Then if that works, we can start building something. So have the conviction and the courage to find demands that attract huge numbers of people and understand that those demands must be centered around an economic program.

If you can do that, you’ll be a Left worthy of the name. If you cannot do that, you’ll be stuck in your little study groups and your subcultures, which is what’s been the last forty years.