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Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville published a piece in the New York Times on Thursday about why he thinks Kamala Harris lost the presidential election and what Democrats should do next. His take: In order to win back voters who are dissatisfied with the status quo, the party needs to get more “populist” on economics.
“We must be on the offensive with a wildly popular and populist economic agenda,” the country’s leading liberal Cajun writes. “This year the Democratic Party leadership must convene and publish a creative, popular and bold economic agenda and proactively take back our economic turf. Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress.”
Carville’s analysis lines up with that of former White House chief of staff and mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel, who wrote last month in the Washington Post that the Dems have squandered years of opportunities to leverage “populist anger” and convey to voters that the party was on their side vis-à-vis “elites” from, for instance, Wall Street.
A handful of years later, “liar loans” and unchecked greed led to the collapse of the global financial system, with homes and small businesses lost and livelihoods destroyed. Not only was no one held accountable, but the same bankers who engineered the crisis were aggrieved at the suggestion of diminished bonuses and government intervention. It was a mistake not to apply Old Testament justice to the bankers during the Obama administration, as some called for at the time.
Emanuel also specifically highlights “the online cheerleading for the killer of a health-care insurance CEO in New York City” as more evidence of the “populist” anger that Democrats have been blind to. “Talk about missing the moment,” he writes.
Centrist columnist David Brooks wrote something similar in the New York Times the week of the election, arguing that “maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption—something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.”
So why did Democrats nominate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in succession instead of going in a more populist direction? Brooks, Carville, and Emanuel—in these pieces and in other forums—tend to put the blame on woke, self-obsessed elites in “universities,” “affluent suburbs,” and “hipster urban cores,” to use Brooks’ words. These people were so wrapped up in their trans pronouns and their Latinx language policing, the argument goes, that they failed to register the raw anger about economic inequality that was growing out there in real America.
Which is interesting, because there was an economic populist in the past two competitive Democratic presidential primaries. Brooks even names him: Bernie Sanders. Another inequality-obsessed Wall Street critic, Elizabeth Warren, ran in 2020 as well. So were David Brooks, James Carville, and Rahm Emanuel, at the time, putting in work to boost Sanders and Warren—and economic populism in general?
Well, none of them were on Sanders’ side in 2016, but that’s not entirely surprising, because at the time he was a relatively unknown long-shot candidate. But how about in 2020, after he’d spent four years building a national base of support behind his attacks on [Bernie Sanders accent] “millionaires and billionaires” and a populist economic program of universal access to health care and education?
Well, David Brooks wrote a column in February 2020 called “No, Not Sanders, Not Ever.” It described Sanders’ “populism” as a program of “rage” and “bitter and relentless polarization” that would destroy the Democratic Party and possibly the entire national project of the United States. To his credit, Brooks’ post–2024 election column makes clear that Sanders’ style of politics doesn’t appeal to him personally. To listen to Carville’s present-day advocacy of populism, though, you wouldn’t have any idea that in 2020 he called Sanders “an ideologue” and “a communist,” denounced his plan for making postsecondary education free, and said that nominating him for president would be a disaster for the party’s chances downballot.
During his time in the White House, meanwhile, Emanuel worked to convince Barack Obama to nominate someone besides Warren to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In 2020, he conducted a press tour to try to undermine Sanders, denouncing the Vermont senator and his supporters for “making pledges that will never, ever be realized in people’s lives.” In the course of doing this, Emanuel repeatedly attacked the idea of replacing private health insurance with a “Medicare for All” system, calling it a “pipe dream” and writing, “I’m mystified as to why, at a moment when 90 percent of Americans already have insurance, our presidential debates are focused so exclusively on expanding coverage rather than containing costs.” Later, after his term as mayor in Chicago ended—he was historically unpopular, by the way, arguably because he focused more on bringing investment into already affluent parts of the city than helping voters who were struggling economically—Emanuel took a job with the Wall Street advisory firm Centerview Partners, from which he eventually earned $16 million.
Huh. Who exactly missed the moment, here?
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