The Left Loves Populism Now

It wasn’t that long ago that Democrats and their allies in the media would expectorate the word “populist” with unbridled contempt. But that was when “populism” was a right-wing phenomenon. By insisting that his policy preferences had no tradeoffs and the only obstacle to their implementation was the idiots Americans had been electing to high office, Donald Trump cracked populism’s exceedingly simple code. The rogue!

The dirtiest secret of Trump’s populism was that it was mostly rhetorical. The policies he pursued were, by and large, those that were favored by the establishmentarian Republicans the neophyte president tapped to help him navigate the federal government. That’s what voters wanted back in 2024. But by then, the president despised the architects of the soundest policies Trump pursued in his first term, and the feeling was mutual. He was free to pursue the “populism” preferred by the loudest members of his base — a populism that was decidedly unpopular among all but his biggest fans and courtiers.

Democrats have since picked up Trump’s populist baton. All of a sudden, it’s not a dirty word anymore.

The New Yorker’s Peter Slevin recently zoomed in on Iowa, where a populist revolt is underway. But its contours favor Democrats, so this manifestation of popular outrage is getting the apple-polishing treatment.

Take Democratic senatorial candidate Josh Turek. He describes himself as a “prairie populist,” Slevin noted. The term “recalls the populists of the late nineteenth century, who believed that government should help farmers and the working class stand up to the wealthy and the well-connected.” Turek’s populism mirrors that of Tom Harkin, a giant of Iowa’s Democratic political history who himself “studied the early populists.”

Turek isn’t alone. The statewide Democratic candidates this year, from the party’s gubernatorial nominee down to the office of state agricultural commissioner, have all struck “populist” notes. They rail against the abuses of corporate America, the corrupt bond between the moneyed and political classes, and Washington’s failure to focus on domestic affairs to the prohibitive exclusion of geopolitics.

This phenomenon is not exclusive to the left. In June, Iowa Republicans backed outsider businessman Zach Lahn over Trump’s pick, longtime Republican Representative Randy Feenstra, for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Lahn’s narrow win has been attributed to his own paranoid populism. His win was due, at least in part, to his pledge to “break up” the “monopolies” run by “big ag cartels” by embracing the kind of antitrust policies endorsed by the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Lina Khan.

It’s not hard to see why the “populism” on the march in Iowa appeals to the political left.

And yet, when the populist appeals that drew them were a slightly different flavor, Iowans’ left-wing admirers were unsparing in their assessment of Hawkeye State voters’ character flaws.

“Research on Iowa counties that swung from Obama to Trump indicates that GOP success was driven far more by sexism and racism than by economic anxiety,” read the lead sentence in Tom Jacobs’s analysis for the Pacific Standard.

Economic distress was “not a significant factor” for the Iowans who flipped the state from blue to red in 2016, according to the experts. Nor does the election income “signify” a backlash “among working-class voters left behind by globalization.” Rather, Iowans were clearly racists. Or, at least, they were persuaded by “the nativist narrative about ‘taking back America’ and anti-immigrant sentiment became stronger forces than economic issues.”

Maybe Iowans managed to move on from their brief dalliance with nativist bigotry. Or perhaps the attacks on Iowans were a reflexive response to anyone who even briefly departs from the progressive path.

Well, Iowans are back in the fold now. All is forgiven. It remains to be seen whether Iowa’s voters are in a similarly charitable mood.