One of the great mysteries about the rise of populism, in both the United States and Europe, is why it has benefited the political right so much more than the left. For years, American progressives have been trying to get people worked up over rising rates of economic inequality, with the expectation that this anger could fuel greater support for the Democratic Party. Yet the electoral fruits of this effort have been pretty much nonexistent. The recently concluded “Fighting Oligarchy” tour by the democratic-socialist luminaries Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez barely registered in public opinion.
Progressives might well be wondering: How could Americans be so upset about their economic situation and yet fail to make the obvious connection to the actual causes of their distress? How could they get so angry at immigrants and not at billionaires? In the past, left-wing populists, and populist left-wing movements, have scored political successes. Why do their counterparts today have so much difficulty getting anything going?
The problem stems from a failure to grasp the psychology underlying populism. Broadly speaking, populism today is a revolt against cognitive elites, not economic elites. Its centerpiece is the affirmation of common sense over the fancy theories favored by intellectuals. By invoking inequality and oligarchy, would-be populists on the left are complaining about abstractions—an approach more likely to alienate than engage the average voter.
Populism is popular because it speaks to voters in concrete terms and tells them that their first instincts—about economics and more—are correct. This year, at least one person solved the puzzle of creating a successful left-wing populist message: New York Mayor–Elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who rose from 1 percent in early primary polls to more than 50 percent of the general-election vote, explicitly promised to make groceries cheaper and freeze rents. Many Democrats would love to know how to bottle the Mamdani lightning.
[Idrees Kahloon: Political parties have disconnected from the public]
As Stephen Colbert explained long ago, common sense comes from thinking “from the gut, not the brain.” Psychologists have a more sophisticated way of articulating this distinction. As readers of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow or Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink know, the human mind exhibits two different systems of cognition. The first is rapid and concrete, focusing on primary representations of things you can see, hear, and touch. The second is slower and more laborious, but capable of abstraction and logical reasoning. In some cases, the two systems produce different verdicts. This can create persistent disagreement between common sense and expert opinion.
The distinctive feature of a populist message is a reliance on rapid cognition. Populist politicians focus on primary representations of the world, such as the price of groceries, rather than abstract concepts, such as affordability. Everyone can picture the price of orange juice or bread on the supermarket shelf. During his presidential campaign last year, President Donald Trump spent a great deal of time summoning such mental images. “Groceries, such a simple word,” he has repeatedly said by way of explaining his victory. Many liberals made fun of his rhetoric.
Mamdani was apparently one of the few to draw the obvious conclusion from Trump’s remarks, which was that instead of mocking him, perhaps the left should also be talking about groceries. So one of the major promises Mamdani made was to lower the price of groceries in New York by creating publicly owned, city-run grocery stores. Experts objected that grocery stores typically operate on slim margins and that the major costs occur further up the supply chain. Like most educated people, Mamdani probably knows this. The problem is that a supply chain is an entirely abstract concept, and so might as well not exist for the average person. Nobody gets worked up about a supply chain.
Obviously, a plausible plan for lowering the price of food would require dealing with issues such as agricultural subsidies, transportation costs, and retail overhead, but a political candidate is not going to get the average person excited by talking this way. People who are angry about the cost of living are going to focus on the last link in the chain, the consumer-facing organization, and that means the grocery store.
Mamdani’s grocery-store proposal has a clear parallel with the anger frequently directed toward health-insurance companies. Last December, the targeted shooting of a UnitedHealthcare executive on a Manhattan street ignited a populist brushfire, leading to widespread veneration of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of the killing. In that case too, wonks tried to correct the record, pointing out that health-insurance companies also have relatively slim profit margins, and are not really responsible for much of the excess cost of the U.S. health-care system. This analysis, however, relies on a series of abstract concepts that have no intuitive appeal. For people who are angry—which presumably includes the one-third of American households carrying medical debt—health-insurance companies naturally get the blame.
Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and their allies don’t just decry oligarchy and inequality in the abstract, of course. They also pin blame on billionaires—who one might assume would make obvious targets for public outrage. Yet the problem with complaining about Jeff Bezos’s yacht or tax cuts for Elon Musk is that these people are completely outside the reference class of all but a small handful of Americans. To the extent that people are bothered by what others have, their attitudes are based on comparison with a specific reference group. They pick out someone with roughly the same background as themselves, then judge their own level of success and material comfort by how well their situation compares. This is why high-school reunions are fraught. The ultra-wealthy, meanwhile, might as well be living on another planet, as far as social comparisons are concerned. Rather than feeling anger and resentment toward them, many Americans simply admire their success. The long-running television show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was not communist agitation; it was a celebration of American capitalism.
Ultimately, demonizing billionaires only achieves so much. Perhaps that’s why Mamdani’s proposal to increase taxes on the wealthy was accompanied by more concrete promises, such as making bus rides free and lowering prices at halal carts. Skeptics have downplayed the national relevance of his campaign, on the grounds that New York is famously soft on socialism, but the real lesson has less to do with Mamdani’s ideology than with his specificity.
To do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about; by and large, they must also accept the public’s framing of those problems. This creates a dilemma for the left, because that framing, in a complex modern society, will usually be incorrect. As a result, left-wing politicians struggle to find issues on which they can be authentically populist. Many of the problems that they hope to resolve, such as climate change, housing scarcity, and surging health-care costs, are complicated. This means that the policies needed to fix them are also complicated, and cannot be explained without ascending to the realm of abstraction. Slogans that resonate with the public seldom translate literally into successful policy.
[Read: What Chris Murphy learned from the new right]
There have, of course, been genuine left-wing populists, but they have a poor record of achieving progressive policy objectives. Consider the case of Hugo Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013. Chávez was an authentic populist, in the sense that he really did reject the fancy theories of intellectuals. His response to inflation in the Venezuelan economy, and particularly to rising food prices, was to impose a set of price controls on basic commodities. In the process, he crushed entire sectors of the economy—for instance, by making it impossible to sell some foods at anything other than a loss. People reacted by withdrawing their goods from the market. After Chávez died, his successor continued his policies. Millions of Venezuelans were pushed into hunger, and the economy collapsed almost entirely—one of the largest self-inflicted economic catastrophes of the modern era.
The problem is not that Chávez was a socialist but that he was a populist. If one restricts oneself to primary representations of the world, what inflation looks like is a general increase in the price of goods. Appearances, however, are misleading. Inflation is actually just a decline in the value of money. Politicians who are willing to follow their head rather than their gut on this question can usually be convinced that halting the decline requires tighter monetary policy. This is the exact opposite of the populist response. What Chávez did was what anyone reasoning in a concrete manner would be inclined to do: He ordered the people who had been raising prices to stop doing it. And when he didn’t like how they responded, he sent the National Guard out to seize their goods.
One can see here the problem with the populism-envy that has consumed the left in recent years. Thinking up effective populist slogans that condemn various aspects of the modern world is not so difficult. The problem is figuring out what to do if you win. Because the slogans generally don’t correspond to actionable policies, making life better for people requires some sort of bait and switch.
Mamdani is obviously a talented campaigner, and even seems to be a successful Trump-whisperer. He’s also shown some ideological flexibility: Having already jettisoned his past rhetoric about defunding the police, he now plans to keep in place the city’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. And yet his biggest challenge now is figuring out how to break the populist promises that got him elected, so he can focus on implementing the technocratic policies that are actually needed to improve his constituents’ life.
This article was adapted from a post on Joseph Heath’s Substack, In Due Course.
The post What the Left Fails to Understand About Populism appeared first on The Atlantic.
