Some Democrats Think the Disease is the Cure

Should we re-run the plan that just failed?

Above: A doctor holds leeches, because metaphor. (Photo from Arun Sankar, via Getty)

Working class voters are moving towards the GOP. Democrats are the Frasier Crane party, and Republicans are the party of Homer Simpson. This is bad for Democrats because Frasier Crane-types are small in number, and also because Frasier is a hit character because “life kicks pompous windbag in the nuts” is a classic comedy bit. We’re in our fifth decade of laughing at Frasier Crane’s version of that bit, so Democrats shouldn’t assume that people will tire of seeing uppity blowhards get their comeuppance anytime soon.

How can Democrats appeal to working class voters? There are two schools of thought. The first is that the problem is that Democrats are culturally out-of-step, and we’ll do better if and when we stop acting like America’s HR department — I’m firmly in this camp. The second is that Democrats have abandoned the economic interests of the working class; this view has been expressed by folks like Bernie Sanders and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who just had a tweet thread on this topic go viral. I have to say: The economic argument is moving. It’s a heart-wrenching tale of honest folks done wrong — it’s basically a Bruce Springsteen song come to life. And the only quibble I have is that it is completely and demonstrably false.

The Murphy thread is a succinct expression of this viewpoint — here’s his thesis statement:

Again: This story is emotionally compelling and galvanizing. But is true? Well, — as they say — it is true that it is a story.

Economist Chris Frieman posted this in response to Murphy’s thread, especially the phrase “the wreckage of fifty years of neoliberalism” — behold, the wreckage!

There are a lot of garbage economic statistics floating around, so I’d like to emphasize that this is an excellent measure of ordinary Americans’ economic well-being. First, the number is median income, not mean — a few uber-wealthy people could skew mean income, but not median. Second, it’s personal income, not household — changes in household composition can throw household income numbers out of whack. Third, it’s real income, which means that it’s adjusted for inflation. And fourth, the data come from the Federal Reserve, not some PhD candidate at Still Accredited In Three States Online University.

And if you’re thinking “working poor means bottom quintile, not median” — the bottom quintile have been doing very well, too. The left-wing version of Trump’s “American carnage” narrative is every bit as much bullshit as the right-wing version, and I don’t think Chris Murphy should try to beat Trump by joining him.

The problem with the Murphy/Sanders narrative isn’t just that it’s a blatant falsehood — it’s also that as a theory of how to win over the working class, Murphy’s premise has just been falsified. It was falsified in the election we had last Tuesday — remember that? For Murphy to react to Harris’ loss by saying “Democrats can win over the working class with populist economics” is like the architects rebuilding Notre Dame saying “the solution here is more bone-dry timber and hundred year-old wiring.”

Joe Biden embraced populist economics more than any Democratic president since FDR.¹ He mostly left Trump’s tariffs in place, including those that were protectionist, not strategic. He appointed a far-left FCC chair, backed “buy America” provisions, supported anti-competition measures like the Jones Act, and was more pro-union than Frank Sabotka on The Wire. He also signed bills like the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act — both of which Murphy voted for — which must be the policies that Murphy is denouncing as “neoliberal”, because those are the only economic policies left. The theory was that Biden would win working class votes by being an FDR-style “transformational” president, which we know because Biden and his progressive allies screamed this theory at the top of their lungs all day every day for the entire four years.

Where did that get us? It got us to Failure Town, USA. We could debate how much Biden’s economic policies caused last Tuesday, but they objectively didn’t prevent last Tuesday. And I would argue that the populist stuff contributed to Biden’s defeat: Tariffs and buy America provisions drive up prices, and we learned that voters feel the same way about high prices that Frankenstein feels about fire. I don’t want to overstate the impact of Biden’s populist measures on inflation, because I think it was marginal, but I cannot overstate my dismay at the fact that Sanders and Murphy are promoting the exact strategy that was just tried and failed.

Also: Consider Sherrod Brown, arguably the most populist Democrat in the Senate (Sanders and Warren are his only rivals). In his 32 years representing Ohio, Brown earned a reputation as an aggressively anti-trade, pro-union Democrat. He lost on Tuesday to Bernie Moreno, whose “sixteen priorities” include “allow free markets to work”, “massively reduce anti-growth regulations”, and “end Socialism in America”. I don’t mean to portray this as a pure test of populism versus whatever “neoliberalism” is — truth be told, Moreno’s priorities are a Trumpian mismash of retarded nonsense (one is “Beat Communist China” — hey, great idea!). But if anyone could claim to have stuck by the working man by backing populist economics, it was Sherrod Brown, and that appears to have meant jack shit when voters went to the polls.

Murphy argues that Democrats didn’t pursue a populist strategy (even though they did) because of — you guessed it — those dastardly “elites”.

Personally, I have never denounced Bernie Sanders as a dangerous populist: I have always (and often!) denounced him as a total idiot. He’s a dinosaur with bad ideas that don’t change no matter how much contrary evidence accrues. Recall that the Sanders/Warren wing of the party was recently saying “deficits don’t matter” and playing footsie with Modern Monetary Theory, both things that would do for inflation what Burning Man does for herpes. But since we’re playing the question-people’s-motivations game: Does Chris Murphy not realize that people oppose economic populism because it has a long track record of disastrous results because he’s just a midwit hack? 😬

Economic populism is bad policy that doesn’t work. One week ago, the “doesn’t work” in that sentence meant “doesn’t work as policy”, but now, it also means “doesn’t work as politics.” Because Biden included a potent dose of populism in his economic agenda and, well…here we are. What’s killing the Democratic Party isn’t a lack of concern for the working man — it’s adherence to coture ideologies that toss around faux-intellectual buzzwords like “neoliberalism”. Those ideologies stubbornly refuse to change in the face of contrary evidence — they never fail, they only are failed. It’s objectively true that Democrats are losing touch with working class voters, but it’s equally true that recent events suggest that economic populism isn’t a solution to that problem.

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1. It’s debatable which president most promoted “populist economics” due to the fuzziness of that term, but I think that FDR is the right landing point. I’m defining “populist economics” as pre-market interventions like tariffs, laws requiring or prohibiting certain economic activities, and command-and-control regulation. Obama and Clinton are obviously out — they’re the presidents people are denouncing when they gripe about “neoliberalism”. Carter, Johnson, and Kennedy all cut tariffs and pursued trade agreements, and Johnson’s “Great Society” was funded with post-market taxes of the type used by Clinton and Obama. Truman was also pro-trade and unwound some of the mandates Roosevelt imposed during the war, which leaves FDR as our most populist Democratic president before Biden.