The Populist Mantle Is Harris’s for the Taking. The Atlantic - Politics by Tyler Austin Harper

Aug 19, 2024 at 10:22 PM//keep unread//hide

In the weeks since Kamala Harris became the de facto Democratic nominee for president, she has run a deft campaign: confident, upbeat, and social-media-savvy. An often toothless Democratic Party has found its incisors. The policy rollout, however, has been slow. Some polls earlier this year suggested that a “generic Democrat” could beat Donald Trump, and more than a few critics and supporters feel like the Harris campaign has taken this too literally.

On Friday, she announced a set of economic plans with populist flair, a sign that she is beginning to define her policy commitments more clearly. As she continues to do this, she faces a conundrum. Harris is made from the mold of perhaps the most beloved Democrat in America: Like former President Barack Obama, she is a multiracial-child-of-immigrants technocrat. But even as Obama remains a deeply popular celebrity figure in this country, the political and economic worldview he stood for—a continuation of Clinton-era corporate-friendly governance—has fallen into disrepute. In 2016, both the Sanders surge and the Trump ascendancy were in no small part a rebuke of Obama and his smartest-guy-in-the-room sheen, and when a Democrat regained the White House in 2020, Obama’s own vice president largely cast off Obamanomics.

Therein lies the rub: Harris’s politics, style, and coterie of confidants seem to align with Obama’s. But as Joe Biden’s VP, she was second-in-command in an administration that aspired to shepherd the country toward a post-neoliberal consensus defined by trust busting, innovative industrial policy, and a reinvigorated labor movement. And with Tim Walz at her side, she can mount a serious attempt to create a multiracial, cross-class coalition that could expand the left-liberal tent, claw back the rightward list of non-college-educated voters, and usher in a fairer economy for American workers. This is the kind of hope Obama traded on in 2008, and the kind of change he failed to deliver over his two terms. The populist mantle is hers for the taking, if she wants it. The puzzle is: Does she? Or will Harris and her campaign follow Obama and double down on corporate technocracy?

Centrists have predictably encouraged Harris to eschew the populist impulses of the current commander in chief and to moderate: New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait insists that a return to “Obamaism” can “save” the Democrats and help deliver Harris to the White House. But this advice ignores the fact that the public, on both sides of the aisle, has spent nearly 10 years pushing for a populist remake of American politics. If voters have become annoyed with the excesses of left-wing cultural politics, they have continued to embrace a left-wing economic posture. Bernie Sanders may have lost his battles for the Democratic nomination, but in some sense he won the broader ideological war. Even the right now pays lip service to fighting corporations and economic “elites.”

Whether Harris will attempt to counter the emergent pseudo-populism on the right with the genuine article remains to be seen; so far, the signals are mixed. On the one hand, reports suggest that the move from Biden to Harris was greeted with enthusiasm by the Wall Street set, who see the vice president as both more malleable and more corporate-friendly than Biden. Indeed, she is already under significant pressure from donors to axe Lina Khan, Biden’s 35-years-young chair of the Federal Trade Commission who has made a name for herself by bringing monopolists to heel. Harris also has substantial connections to the Silicon Valley donor class, raising concerns that she might be a little too cozy with Big Tech, not unlike Obama.

On the other hand, the recently concluded veepstakes suggest that perhaps Harris does intend to embrace the populist route. Although the choice between Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was often framed by commentators as a battle between the moderate and leftward factions of the Democratic Party, this was largely a mirage. Both candidates are left of center: Shapiro has a record of challenging corporate power as an attorney general, while Walz has a long list of progressive policy wins as governor, including free school lunches for kids and new taxes on multinational companies. And although Harris has dithered, taking her time to outline her governing agenda, on Friday she announced that during her first 100 days in office she intends to focus on big tax credits for new parents, tackling grocery price-gouging and keeping insulin affordable, and providing significant down-payment help for first-time homebuyers.

Harris should seize the opportunity to fully embrace left-wing populism because—despite all the punditry’s moaning about the need to “moderate”—populist policies are actually popular: 65 percent of Americans (including 40 percent of Republicans) say the federal government has a responsibility to make sure that all Americans have health care, 63 percent say that attending public colleges should be free, and another 63 percent (including 51 percent of Republicans) say that banks need to be more heavily regulated. In a country defined by spiraling cultural polarization, these are views—views that would have once been tarred as “far left”—that many of us can agree on.

And despite the feel-good vibes that have enlivened the Democratic base for the past month, the party is still beset by a long-term problem: A meaningful segment of working-class Black and Latino Americans seem to be inching toward the GOP, on top of the well-documented rightward drift of the white working class. Between 2012, when Obama ran for his second term, and the election of Joe Biden in 2020, Democrats lost nearly 20 points in support from the nonwhite working class. For the past year, polling has suggested that Trump stands to gain a heartier share of the Black vote this election—driven largely, but not exclusively, by working-class Black men—while Hispanic and Latino voters have begun outright flocking to the GOP. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early July, before Biden dropped off the ticket, the current and former president were drawing dead even: 36 percent of Latino voters supported Trump, 36 percent supported Biden, and a startling 24 percent said they would support Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

These working-class defectors from the Democratic Party seem to be motivated, at least in part, by concern about immigration, which itself seems to be a proxy for more general economic anxieties, particularly among non-college-educated workers who feel that they are competing with new arrivals for jobs. The Democrats’ problem with the working class is exacerbated by a union vote that becomes more Republican by the year. The appearance of the Teamsters president at the Republican National Convention was something of a shot across the bow, spurring both anger and panic that unions may start openly courting the GOP. Although the economic “populism” on offer by the Trump-Vance ticket mostly oscillates between symbolic and shambolic, and although conservative policies remain far friendlier for Big Business than for workers, the GOP is making a deliberate and straightforward case, at least rhetorically, that it is the true home of the working class. Democrats can argue that all this Republican railing against “the elites” is disingenuous, and they’d mostly be right, but for now, a significant and multicultural share of the working class seems to be taking the GOP at its word.

Over the next three months, as Harris campaigns in earnest, the path she has chosen will become clearer: to follow Obama or Biden, to embrace nostalgia for the dreamy bubble of a multiracial technocracy—burst by Trump’s election—or set down the new road laid out by the current administration.

Since the 2016 election, Democrats and liberal pundits have favored a just-so story about the GOP’s far-right makeover: Donald Trump rode the wave of a racially motivated recoil against the first Black president. In this account, the white working class grew disgusted by the success of minorities who are taking over “their” country, symbolized by Obama. But this theory fails to offer a convincing explanation of why the white working class voted overwhelmingly for Trump after Obama made significant inroads with this demographic in 2008, or why minority working-class voters also began moving away from the Democratic Party.

The idea that these voters spontaneously developed racism, and were primarily driven by “whitelash” against a president many of them cast a ballot for, has always been preposterous. Obama bailed out the banks, did little to challenge the massive expansion of tech monopolies that occurred during his eight years in office, and failed to address the opioid epidemic while a drug peddled by Big Pharma burned through the deindustrialized parts of America—the same places that had already been kicked in the teeth thanks to the catastrophic trade policies of the previous Democratic president. It is a testament to Obama’s singular political talent that he remains a popular cultural figure. Perhaps what his working-class voters ultimately rejected was not the multiracial America he represented, but the corporate managerialism he ended up embodying.

Already, it appears that Harris has a chance to bring some of the lost voters back into the fold: Recent polling found that she has gained 11 points among non-college-educated white voters in key swing states—outperforming “Scranton Joe” with those voters—and gained an identical 11 points among Black voters. If she wants to shore up these gains among the non-college-educated, Harris will need to rekindle the populist promise that Obama once parlayed into an electoral victory, and pursue the populist policies that Biden has put into action. If she does, she could not just win an election, but also begin the long process of winning back the American working class.