Dystopian Populism: An icon for bullies, creeps, and criminals of all stripes
musician Michael Jochum elucidates why trump has a cult that voted for him and - even now (despite everything) - still supports him:
I’ve been watching an absolutely heroic amount of pearl-clutching lately from people who insist that J.D. Vance would somehow be “worse” than Trump once Trump’s inevitable political and biological expiration arrives.
Let’s get something straight: it has never been about Trump, not for one second.
Trump is just the mascot. The real story is the people who finally saw themselves in him and felt validated by what they saw.
I actually believe most of them will drift away when the cult collapses, like embarrassed fans of a one-hit wonder. Many of them will swear they were never really into him at all. The MAGA amnesia is going to be epic.
I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016 and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic, morally vacant, and psychologically mangled he is.
I don’t wonder anymore.
I think he won for that exact reason.
He wasn’t a candidate. He was a mirror.
If you were a racist, you found your guy.
If you were a misogynist, you found your guy.
If money was your only religion, you found your guy.
If your heart was armored shut, you found your guy.
If you mocked disabled people, you found your guy.
If you hated intelligent people, you found your guy.
If you were a rapist, you found your guy.
If you enjoyed golden showers with Russian sex workers, you found your guy.
If you’d done absolutely nothing to confront your emotional wreckage, you found your guy.
If you were a serial cheater, you found your guy.
If you were a perpetual bankrupt, you found your guy.
If you stiffed honest workers, you found your guy.
If you were a conman, you found your guy.
If you mocked people’s appearances, you found your guy.
If you longed for a toxic Daddy, you found your guy.
If you were dissociated and disembodied, you found your guy.
If you were unconscionable in every economic dealing, you found your guy.
If you lied as naturally as breathing, you found your guy.
If you’d never eaten a green vegetable, you found your guy.
If you were a white supremacist, you found your guy.
If your ego contained a hole so large not even the presidency could fill it, you found your guy.
If you were a sociopath who cared not one molecule about other humans, you found your guy.
If he had only two of these traits, he never would have won. He won because he had hundreds of them, and millions of people recognized themselves in at least one.
This has never been about Trump. It has always been about the people who finally had their worst instincts validated.
Trump didn’t create the cruelty, he licensed it. He handed out permission slips for hate.
He is merely a symptom of a far deeper disease: collective toxicity.
If there is one sentence that explains Trump’s power, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.”
That’s the part that should chill the spine.
Who knew that tens of millions of Americans were thinking such unconscionable things about their fellow citizens? Who knew how many white men felt so threatened by women and challenged by minorities that they were ready to torch democracy to feel big again? Who knew that after decades of apparent progress on race and gender, so many people were living in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to legitimize their worst selves and convert their bitterness into political power?
Perhaps we were living in a fool’s paradise.
We aren’t anymore."
- Michael Jochum
"Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition"
In Authentocrats: Culture, Politics and the New Seriousness (2018), Kennedy defines authentocracy as ‘a laundered, centrist populism that seeks to wield power with reference to an authenticity that is always “just over there”’. It fetishises an imagined provincial English working class that is socially conservative, poorly educated, allergic to Bohemian lifestyles, and far too preoccupied by the grind of work to concern itself with anything that smacks of metropolitan liberalism. ‘Imputation’, Kennedy continues, ‘is central to [authentocracy’s] workings: it’s rarely the commentator themselves that wants less immigration, or, let’s face it, more racism, but someone more allegedly authentic who is, we’re told, not being given the opportunity to speak for themselves.’ The practitioner of authentocratic imputation will claim to be acting as a conduit through which the silent majority can finally speak, but in practice this amounts to the laundering of ideas, a way to frame one’s unsavoury beliefs as those of authentic others, who are a population of innocent ordinaries that is thought to be beyond serious scrutiny.
Rebecca Jane Morgan, Gender Heretics: Evangelicals, Feminists, and the Alliance against Trans Liberation
The Secret School (Το κρυφό σκολειό), painted by Nikolaos Gyzis around 1885-1886, oil on canvas.
The painting depicts a supposed "secret school" during the Ottoman occupation of Greece. A priest in a dimly lit room is secretly teaching children to read and write Greek during the suppression of education by the Ottomans while an armed man in the background appears to act as a lookout. There is scant evidence for such schools having truly existed, but the idea and especially this painting immediately evokes the concept of Romiosyni; of the Orthodox Church serving as the ultimate defender and preserver of Greek culture and identity in the face of imperial oppression, and of the common people's struggle.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The GOP says it's the "party of the working class" and indeed, they have promoted numerous policies that attack select groups within the American ruling class. But just because the party of unlimited power for billionaires is attacking a few of their own, it doesn't make them friends to the working people.
The best way to understand the GOP's relationship to worker is through "boss politics" – that's where one group of elites consolidates its power by crushing rival elites. All elites are bad for working people, so any attack on any elite is, in some narrow sense, "pro-worker." What's more, all elites cheat the system, so any attack on any elite is, again, "pro-fairness."
In other words, if you want to prosecute a company for hurting workers, customers, neighbors and the environment, you have a target-rich environment. But just because you crush a corrupt enterprise that's hurting workers, it doesn't mean you did it for the workers, and – most importantly – it doesn't mean that you will take workers' side next time.
Autocrats do this all the time. Xi Jinping engaged in a massive purge of corrupt officials, who were indeed corrupt – but he only targeted the corrupt officials that made up his rivals' power-base. His own corrupt officials were unscathed:
Putin did this, too. Russia's oligarchs are, to a one, monsters. When Putin defenestrates a rival – confiscates their fortune and sends them to prison – he acts against a genuinely corrupt criminal and brings some small measure of justice to that criminal's victims. But he only does this to the criminals who don't support him:
The Trump camp – notably JD Vance and Josh Hawley – have vowed to keep up the work of the FTC under Lina Khan, the generationally brilliant FTC Chair who accomplished more in four years than her predecessors have in 40. Trump just announced that he would replace Khan with Andrew Ferguson, who sounds like an LLM's bad approximation of Khan, promising to deal with "woke Big Tech" but also to end the FTC's "war on mergers." Ferguson may well plow ahead with the giant, important tech antitrust cases that Khan brought, but he'll do so because this is good grievance politics for Trump's base, and not because Trump or Ferguson are committed to protecting the American people from corporate predation itself:
Writing in his newsletter today, Hamilton Nolan describes all the ways that the GOP plans to destroy workers' lives while claiming to be a workers' party, and also all the ways the Dems failed to protect workers and so allowed the GOP to outlandishly claim to be for workers:
For example, if Ferguson limits his merger enforcement to "woke Big Tech" companies while ending the "war on mergers," he won't stop the next Albertson's/Kroger merger, a giant supermarket consolidation that just collapsed because Khan's FTC fought it. The Albertson's/Kroger merger had two goals: raising food prices and slashing workers' wages, primarily by eliminating union jobs. Fighting "woke Big Tech" while waving through mergers between giant companies seeking to price-gouge and screw workers does not make you the party of the little guy, even if smashing Big Tech is the right thing to do.
Trump's hatred of Big Tech is highly selective. He's not proposing to do anything about Elon Musk, of course, except to make Musk even richer. Musk's net worth has hit $447b because the market is buying stock in his companies, which stand to make billions from cozy, no-bid federal contracts. Musk is a billionaire welfare queen who hates workers and unions and has a long rap-sheet of cheating, maiming and tormenting his workforce. A pro-worker Trump administration could add labor conditions to every federal contract, disqualifying businesses that cheat workers and union-bust from getting government contracts.
Instead, Trump is getting set to blow up the NLRB, an agency that Reagan put into a coma 40 years ago, until the Sanders/Warren wing of the party forced Biden to install some genuinely excellent people, like general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who – like Khan – did more for workers in four years than her predecessors did in 40. Abruzzo and her colleagues could have remained in office for years to come, if Democratic Senators had been able to confirm board member Lauren McFerran (or if two of those "pro-labor" Republican Senators had voted for her). Instead, Joe Manchin and Kirsten Synema rushed to the Senate chamber at the last minute in order to vote McFerran down and give Trump total control over the NLRB:
This latest installment in the Manchin Synematic Universe is a reminder that the GOP's ability to rebrand as the party of workers is largely the fault of Democrats, whose corporate wing has been at war with workers since the Clinton years (NAFTA, welfare reform, etc). Today, that same corporate wing claims that the reason Dems were wiped out in the 2024 election is that they were too left, insisting that the path to victory in the midterms and 2028 is to fuck workers even worse and suck up to big business even more.
We have to take the party back from billionaires. No Dem presidential candidate should ever again have "proxies" who campaign to fire anti-corporate watchdogs like Lina Khan. The path to a successful Democratic Party runs through worker power, and the only reliable path to worker power runs through unions.
Nolan's written frequently about how bad many union leaders are today. It's not just that union leaders are sitting on historically unprecedented piles of cash while doing less organizing than ever, at a moment when unions are more popular than they've been in a century with workers clamoring to join unions, even as union membership declines. It's also that union leaders have actually endorsed Trump – even as the rank and file get ready to strike:
The GOP is going to do everything it can to help a tiny number of billionaires defeat hundreds of millions of workers in the class war. A future Democratic Party victory will come from taking a side in that class war – the workers' side. As Nolan writes:
If billionaires are destroying our country in order to serve their own self-interest, the reasonable thing to do is not to try to quibble over a 15% or a 21% corporate tax rate. The reasonable thing to do is to eradicate the existence of billionaires. If everyone knows our health care system is a broken monstrosity, the reasonable thing to do is not to tinker around the edges. The reasonable thing to do is to advocate Medicare for All. If there is a class war—and there is—and one party is being run completely by the upper class, the reasonable thing is for the other party to operate in the interests of the other, much larger, much needier class. That is quite rational and ethical and obvious in addition to being politically wise.
Nolan's remedy for the Democratic Party is simple and straightforward, if not easy:
The answer is spend every last dollar we have to organize and organize and strike and strike. Women are workers. Immigrants are workers. The poor are workers. A party that is banning abortion and violently deporting immigrants and economically assaulting the poor is not a friend to the labor movement, ever. (An opposition party that cannot rouse itself to participate on the correct side of the ongoing class war is not our friend, either—the difference is that the fascists will always try to actively destroy unions, while the Democrats will just not do enough to help us, a distinction that is important to understand.)
Is this new breed of moderate economic populists the future of the Democratic Party?
Todd Beeton at The Big Picture:
Last year, against all odds, Zohran Mamdani rode a wave of economic populism to win the New York City mayor’s race. In so doing, he laid the foundation for what has become a central theme of Democratic campaigns, both in last year’s off-year elections and now heading into the midterms this November.
Mamdani launched his campaign in October of 2024 laser-focused on the issue of affordability. Days after the 2024 election, he went to areas of Queens and the Bronx that flipped the hardest toward Trump, and he asked residents why they supported the then president-elect. The consensus was simple: It was the economy, stupid.
As one New Yorker after another told Mamdani what it would take to get them to vote for Democrats again moving forward, they responded:
[“Being able to pay attention to regular Americans and their economic needs.”
“They should make economics the forefront of their campaign.”
“The people were not really feeling it in their pocket.”]
Over the following year, Mamdani ran a campaign that fulfilled those demands, taking it all the way to Gracie Mansion. But it wasn’t just his famous campaign pledges of “fast and free buses,” “freeze the rent” and “childcare for all” that drove his populist campaign message. It was also an indictment of the status quo, which saw both parties as far too beholden to the interests of millionaires and billionaires.
Throughout his campaign, Mamdani pledged to pay for his ambitious plans with a 2% wealth tax on those making $1 million or more; and just days after winning the primary against Cuomo, whom he persistently and ruthlessly slammed as being backed by billionaires—including the president, he told Kristen Welker of Meet The Press, “I don’t think we should have billionaires.”
But Mamdani wasn’t simply laying out his own campaign theme, he was also offering a blueprint to other Democratic campaigns across the country. As Mamdani said in his victory speech on election night,
[“We are a model for the Democratic Party! A party where we fight for working people with no apology.”]
Mamdani’s message was so unapologetically progressive, so unapologetically populist, that many political pundits questioned whether it would turn off more moderate voters in redder areas of the country. Would it resonate outside of New York City? He was, after all, a Democratic Socialist, just like his backer and mentor Senator Bernie Sanders, whose campaign themes Mamdani echoed throughout his winning campaign.
But just as Sanders’ Fighting the Oligarchy tour—which he launched with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last year—filled arenas throughout Trump country, from Louisiana to Iowa to Texas, we’re seeing more moderate candidates across the country begin to adopt an explicitly economic populist message. And now new polling confirms, in this time of unprecedented economic inequality and consolidation of wealth, that message is not just for the left anymore; it resonates with moderate voters in red and swing districts and is precisely what they are craving from the Democratic Party.
The 2025 Populist Wave
For Mamdani doubters questioning the salience of his economic populism outside of blue New York City, it didn’t take long for us to get an answer. And as I urged in my piece last June, Democrats were clearly taking notes.
The same night Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected Mayor of New York City, center-left “normie” Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill were elected overwhelmingly to the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, respectively. And the consensus for why they were able to win so decisively emerged quickly.
In each state, that message looked a little different. In Virginia, Spanberger railed against Trump’s federal worker layoffs and health care affordability. In New Jersey, Sherrill focused on skyrocketing energy costs, promising to declare “a state of emergency on utility costs and freeze utility rates on ‘Day One as New Jersey’s next governor.’” And unlike Trump with his affordability promises, that’s precisely what she did.
[...]
“Patriotic Populism”
In recent years, Democratic candidates have fared worse and worse in red states, particularly at the statewide level. It wasn’t so long ago that Democratic Senators represented such Republican strongholds as Montana, Arkansas, Ohio and West Virginia. But over the past decade, as political polarization spiked and Donald Trump and Fox News weaponized negative partisanship and hot-button cultural issues, Republicans have largely won back those seats. And in the absence of a compelling message from the Democratic side, that same playbook deployed in 2024 sent Trump back to the White House and gave Republicans a trifecta in Washington, D.C.
[...]
The Rise Of The “Moderate Populist”
For years, two competing theories for how Democrats can win elections have been in tension. The conservative scolds at such groups as Third Way urge a centrist path, piping up with an unhelpful “told ya so!” every time a Democrat loses the presidency. The “run to the left” strategy, on the other hand, urges bold progressive messaging, particularly on economic issues, to win over voters who are struggling to make ends meet.
Recent polling suggests that these two theories are not in as much tension as conventional wisdom would suggest. That’s because, as the “populist moderates” have observed and even embodied themselves, what defines a “moderate Democrat” is changing.
And contrary to the message we got from the right and the media broadly after the 2024 election, that shift is NOT to the right.
Love this piece in The Big Picture. Economic populist pitches are no longer just confined to the left end of the Democratic Party.
See Also:
TNR: Finally, Democrats—of All Stripes—Are Coming After the Wealthy’s Money
