The prospects for left-wing populism
"Consider for a moment the volume of commentary that has been dedicated to the subject of inequality – the number of articles documenting the growing chasm separating the wealth of the 1% from the rest; the number of academic papers uncovering “disparities” along every conceivable axis of human difference; the number of scholarly books written condemning global inequality, or trends in income inequality. Now compare that to the number of words that have been written on the subject of inflation – the number of academic conferences that have been held denouncing the scourge of price inflation; the number of scholarly books that have documented its impact on the lives of ordinary people; the number of angry tracts demanding an end to fiat currency.
Even contemplating the comparison provides a useful window into the agonies of the modern left. As we all know, the average progressive intellectual cares a great deal about inequality and not at all about inflation. Seeing this makes it easier to understand why the left has been feeling frustrated. Consider the ill-fated Biden administration in the U.S. At least since the heyday of the Occupy Movement in 2011, there has been a concerted effort to get Americans riled up about wealth inequality, with the obvious expectation that some of this anger could be channeled into support for the Democratic Party. The fruits of this effort, at least on the electoral front, have been pretty much non-existent. Americans, we were told, have been tricked into caring only about cultural issues, not economics. And then suddenly, at the tail end of the Biden years, the entire world gets hit with a bout of inflation, and Americans become consumed by incandescent rage over economic issues, which they proceed to channel into support for the Republican party, which then rewards them by passing a gigantic tax cut for the wealthy.
It’s not hard to see why many people find this situation completely mindboggling. How could Americans get so upset about their economic situation, and yet fail to draw the obvious connection to the actual causes of their distress? How could they get so angry at immigrants and not at billionaires? Surely, surely, there must be some way for the left to channel this anger, to achieve some increase in support. In the past, there have been left-wing populists, and populist left-wing movements. Why is it so difficult to get anything going today?
This is the background against which the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City must be understood. While Democratic Socialist luminaries like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are sometimes described as “populist,” their recently-completed “Fighting Oligarchy” tour didn’t really set off any brushfires, much less erode support for Trump... Mamdani, on the other hand, was able to craft a populist message and platform that caught on with voters, catapulting him from a candidate who started with less than 1% in the primary polls to winning more than 50% of the general election. Lots of people would like to know how to bottle that lightning.
The difference between Mamdani’s pitch and the Bernie/AOC line is easy to see, if one has the correct understanding of populism. In fact, the comparison provides a good example of how widespread misunderstanding of populism handicaps left-wing strategy. The crucial thing to understand about populism, and populist anger, is that it is a revolt directed against cognitive elites, not economic elites. Its centerpiece is the affirmation of “common sense” against the sort of “fancy theories” defended by intellectuals and their lackeys. Common sense is the product of intuition, not ratiocination, and so a convenient way to understand populism is to see it as a political strategy that privileges System 1 over System 2 cognition.
While each style of cognition has its particular strengths and weaknesses, an important difference between them is that intuitions are elicited through interaction with the world, and are therefore focused on highly concrete, “primary” representations, whereas the analytical system is capable of performing operations on “decoupled” representations, which permits reasoning about abstract, hypothetical, and even counterfactual states. As Keith Stanovich has argued, this decoupling requires effort, in large part because it requires sustained attention...
An easy way to distinguish a populist appeal from a technocratic one is that the populist message will restrict itself entirely to primary representations. For example, the “cost of living” is not a primary representation, it is an abstract concept. The price of groceries, on the other hand, is a primary representation – everyone can easily summon up an image of the price, on the supermarket shelf, the last time they bought orange juice or bread. This is, of course, something that Trump spent a great deal of time talking about (“groceries, such a simple word”), and that the Brahmin left in America spent a great deal of time making fun of him for (e.g. here). In so doing, they exhibited a sort of higher-order stupidity. As Stanovich observes, the thing about primary representations is that they have a “special salience” that abstract concepts will never possess.
Mamdani was apparently one of the few to draw the more obvious conclusion from Trump’s remarks, which was that instead of making fun of him for talking about groceries (in a tone of often insufferable superiority), maybe the left should also be talking about groceries. So he made it one of the major promises in his campaign – a pledge to lower the price of groceries in New York by creating publicly-owned, city-run grocery stores. Of course, like most educated people, he probably knows that profiteering by grocery stores is not actually the cause of high food prices. It’s not difficult to find data showing that grocery stores in New York operate with pretty slim margins, and that the major costs occur further up the supply chain. The problem is that a “supply chain” is an entirely abstract concept, which means that for most people it might as well not exist. Obviously, if one wanted to develop a plausible plan for lowering the price of food, it would make sense to think about agricultural subsidies, or transportation costs, or retail overhead, but you’re not going to get the average person excited by talking this way. People who are mad about the cost of living are going to focus their ire on the last link of the chain, the consumer-facing organization, and that means the grocery store.
One can see a clear parallel between the Mamdani grocery store proposal and the anger directed against health insurance companies in the U.S. The targeted shooting of a UnitedHealthcare executive in the streets of New York, one may recall, also ignited a populist brushfire, leading to widespread veneration of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of the killing. Again, the wonks came out of the woodwork, pointing out that health insurance companies 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 (e.g. “moral hazard”) that are simply not available to intuition. Like grocery stores, health insurance companies are the consumer-facing part of the health care supply chain. Furthermore, insurance itself is an esoteric product, which very few people understand (most Americans believe that these companies create no value, but rather make their money by denying claims). And so for people who are angry – which presumably includes the 1/3 of Americans who are currently carrying medical debt – health insurance companies naturally get the blame.
From this analysis, one can see also why the Bernie/AOC “billionaires are bad” pitch is not genuine populism. The problem with criticizing inequality is that inequality is another abstraction, one that only intellectuals care about per se. There’s lots of research showing that most people have no idea what the distribution of income and wealth is in their society, in part because they don’t really care. What they do care about, first and foremost, is their own financial situation. To the extent that they are bothered by what others have, their attitudes are based on comparison to a specific reference group. They pick out an individual or group who is thought to be comparably situated to themselves (e.g. neighbours, high-school classmates, siblings, etc.), who then serve as a source of primary representations. They judge their own level of success and material comfort based on how well their situation compares to that of these people. (Hence the kernel of truth at the heart of H. L. Mencken’s observation that a truly wealthy man is one who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband.)
The problem with complaining about Jeff Bezos’s yacht, or Elon Musk’s effective tax rate, as a political strategy, is that these people are completely outside the reference class of all but a small handful of Americans. As a result, their financial situation is completely incommensurable with that of the average person. It is very difficult to cultivate resentment, or any other strong feeling, by inviting people to contemplate an abstraction.
In order to do populism effectively, politicians must not only focus on problems that the public cares about, they must also by-and-large 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, it is extremely difficult to find issues on which left-wing politicians can be authentically populist. For example, many of the problems that the left would like to resolve, such as climate change, or mass transit, or even spiraling health care costs, are collective action problems. Collective action problems, unfortunately, are extremely unintuitive. (I can easily spend an hour with a blackboard explaining the basic structure to my students, and still many of them get it wrong.) It’s one thing to focus on grocery stores during a campaign, but if you actually want to succeed in lowering food prices, you’re going to have to do a bit of a bait-and-switch, or order to focus on points in the supply chain where government intervention can make a greater difference.
There are, of course, genuine left-wing populists out there, but they don’t have a very good track record of success when it comes to achieving progressive policy objectives. Many of Canada’s left-wing luminaries, like Naomi Klein and Linda McQuaig, were burned by their support for Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. The problem with Chávez was that he was an authentic populist, in the sense that he wasn’t just playing dumb, he really did reject the fancy theories of intellectuals. His response to inflation in the Venezuelan economy, and in particular to rising food prices, was to impose a set of price controls on basic commodities. In the process, he basically made entire sectors of the economy illegal. In particular, he made it impossible to sell food at anything other than a loss. People reacted by withdrawing their goods from sale, and in particular, many farmers switched to subsistence farming and stopped planting commercial crops. Millions of Venezuelans were pushed to the brink of starvation and the economy collapsed almost entirely. Approximately 25% of the population has since fled the country, making it one of the largest self-inflicted economic catastrophes of the modern era.
The problem, it seems to me, is not so much 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. If one is willing to follow a more abstruse line of reasoning, one can see that appearances are misleading in this regard, and that inflation is actually just a decline in the value of money. Those who are willing to follow this abstract line of reasoning can usually be persuaded that the correct policy response lies in the realm of monetary policy (e.g. increasing interest rates, contracting money supply, etc.), in order to halt this decline. This is the exact opposite of the populist response. (Has any populist, anywhere in the world, ever wanted to do anything but lower interest rates?) 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 been consuming the left in recent years. It’s not so difficult to craft effective populist slogans, condemning various aspects of the modern world. (Although it is perhaps worth noting that telling voters to support a particular political party, in order to alleviate some injustice suffered by some other person, or by some group that the voter does not belong to, is not ever a populist appeal.) The problem is that the left has very few policies that actually correspond to these slogans. One could see the awkward position that put people in during the “defund the police” mania of 2020, which was also a populist brushfire, but where no one could agree on what the slogan actually meant or entailed. At one point, it seemed as though the only thing that movement intellectuals could agree on was that it did not mean what the ordinary English-language sense of those terms would imply. (Similarly, many people who bought Alex Vitale’s book, The End of Policing, were presumably disappointed to discover that the title was a play on words, and that he did not actually want to end policing. The book is about the objective of policing.)
Again, this sort of bait-and-switch is practically inevitable in left-wing populism, which is presumably what discourages many people from making that pitch. Mamdani is obviously an incredibly talented campaigner, and even seems to be a successful Trump-whisperer. The question is whether he will be able to implement the technocratic policies that are actually needed to improve life for New Yorkers, without dousing the populist flame that got him into office."
