Some things matter more than winning.
U.S. polls on Election Day (Credit: IDEA)
In the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential Election—in which the Republican party achieved the coveted trifecta—a somber Democratic party engaged in post-mortem after post-mortem, searching for what went wrong. Beyond winning in the Electoral College by a decisive margin, President-elect Trump earned over 77 million votes, compared to Vice President Harris’s roughly 75 million votes, marking only the second time in the past 32 years that a Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote.
While Democrats have circulated various explanations for the crushing defeat, it is clear that the party’s messaging that Trump was a threat to democracy fell on deaf ears. One prevalent view—advanced by Senator Bernie Sanders and recently defended in The Forum by Evan Sevaly—is that Democrats lost because they failed to embrace a left-wing populist agenda.
Yet even if it would win them elections (a disputed proposition), Sevaly’s suggestion that Democrats ought to adopt a left populism agenda is misguided—as it leads the party and the country down a dangerous road to democratic backsliding, political polarization, and economic decay.
As a student of international relations and comparative politics, case studies from around the world have taught me that populists—left or right—despise institutions. In 2020, political scientists from Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies published a report from their Project on Global Populisms, finding that populist leaders from the left and right tended to undermine formal institutions, such as courts, the legislature, and regulatory agencies.
These institutions, which often provide a check against the pure majoritarianism that populism espouses, are maligned by populists as breeding grounds for corrupt elites. Left-wing populist politicians in the United States, for example, have accused the Supreme Court of being extremist, corrupt, and corporate-owned, while calling for plans to either pack the Court or rotate justices off of it.
For evidence of how dangerous these threats can be, we need look no further than our neighbor—Mexico—and its recent experiment with left-wing populism. In 2018, the country elected Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), a progressive populist who had run for the office twice before (and denied the legitimacy of the results when he lost in 2006). In office, AMLO consistently attacked journalists and the press, defunded public agencies such as the National Electoral Institute, and weaponized the judicial branch to threaten critics with prosecution on specious charges. Over the course of his tenure, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index demoted Mexico from a “flawed democracy” to a “hybrid regime.” Indeed, when AMLO left office earlier this year, Ernesto Zedillo, the former President of Mexico widely credited with ushering in Mexico’s democratic era, wrote that AMLO “left Mexico on the verge of authoritarianism.”
While Mexico is a current example of the ills of left-wing populism, the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1930s Germany also serves as a cautionary tale. In “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic,” Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard College, offers a compelling explanation of how the Nazis hijacked popular associations during their rise to power. She provides the example of Stahlhelm, a WWI veterans organization, composed of members across the political spectrum. During the interwar period, its membership reached half a million and played a key role in Hindenburg’s election. But due to disillusionment with traditional party politics and frustration with the national government, members began to abandon the center-right and mainstream parties they once supported (sound familiar?), instead opting for a communitarian populist ethic.
To be sure, the Nazis were a right-wing party. Nevertheless, a closer look at Weimar Germany reveals that the Nazis’ rise occurred simultaneously with the weakening of the SPD (Social Democratic Party), the moderate leftist party at the time. The SPD was the dominant party in the 1920s, and in the 1930 federal elections, they won the most seats again. Nevertheless, their performance was weaker than in previous elections, attributable to a sharp increase in seats won by the KPD (Communist Party), representing the more populist, radical left-wing. After the election, the SPD tried to build a coalition with the KPD, but the latter’s leader rejected it, stating: “Hitler must come to power first, [so that] the requirements for a revolutionary crisis [will] arrive more quickly.” The rest is history: the rise of populism (both left and right), decline of moderate parties, and increase in polarization created the perfect storm for the Nazi’s rise to power.
Even when institutions aren’t threatened, populism has damaging effects on the economy and society. Populists need only prioritize policies that are good on paper, rather than thinking about what will best facilitate growth in the long run. Consider the issue of free trade. Bernie Sanders and other left-wing populists in the U.S. often tout protectionism as a way to protect working class jobs. In doing so, they sound closer to Trump than seasoned economists and academics (who they usually write off as part of the neoliberal elite). Nevertheless, study after study confirms that free trade improves consumer welfare through lower prices and more variety, increases firm efficiency, and creates jobs in export-oriented industries. If populism propels the Democrats into power, it will come at the cost of well-reasoned policies. The result will be economic decay and ultimately a betrayal of voters that elected them to fix their problems.
When faced with a Republican party beholden to populist urges under Trump, it is all too easy for Democrats to flirt with the forbidden fruit of populism. But even if that approach proves politically successful, such an experiment would likely be a fatal blow to the political center in America and the institutions that underpin our liberal democracy. Instead, the Democrats should prioritize ways to better market their economic success compared to Republicans, win back racial minorities that voted for Trump in 2024, and continue to focus on what actually matters: delivering better outcomes—not soundbites—for the American people.
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