Modern populism is what happens when neoliberalism concentrates power and calls it freedom. From the mid 1970’s and into the 2000’s, the neoliberal order worked by taking the most important questions of our lives—namely how the economy is run, who we let into our borders, and what we build—and handing them over to a small group of oligarchic elites. A rising populist movement was the inevitable outcome of the resultant vacuum in which the public had no real say. Much like the founding of the populist movement, the debate begins with the people. Specifically, a debate between US editor of UnHerd Sohrab Ahmari, also the founder of Compact magazine, and the socialist philosopher Ben Burgis, in the basement of a dingy New York bar a few weeks ago on a tiny stage already set for the next day’s lineup of underground grunge music.
Ahmari and Burgis are both reacting to the failure of a system that has left ordinary people feeling dispossessed. The question is whether populism can turn that frustration into actual power, or whether it merely gives elites a new vocabulary with which to flatter the public.
At the center of the debate was a basic disagreement over what populism means. Ahmari borrows a definition from Chantal Mouffe, describing populism as drawing a “frontier between the people versus the elite or between the many versus the few.” It’s supposed to be a “politics of mass participation”—a way to drag the issues buried by technocrats back into the light. But Ahmari admits that the right-wing version of this— particularly in its Trumpist form—has been an “important failure.” It broke the old rules, but it couldn’t figure out who the actual enemy was. In a strange twist, right-wing populism ended up treating billionaires like Elon Musk as “subaltern revolutionary figures” while calling an adjunct professor the “elite.” As Ahmari put it, “You’ve still got the rule of the likes of Elon Musk… [Right-wing populism] was its limitation… it was worth trying it, but on the whole we are now reaching its limitations”.
Or, like Burgis, you don’t need to buy that the right was ever truly populist to begin with. He points back to the original People’s Party of the 19th century, which consisted of farmers and workers fighting for the free silver movement, as the real yardstick. From his perspective, the modern GOP is still fundamentally “pro-business, anti-labor”. Being “For the people” means being in favor of redistributing wealth from the oligarchs back to the “great mass of the population”. The GOP’s historic investment in the “supply side” economic theory, in his telling, makes it inherently anti-populist. His words echo those of William Jennings Bryan, founder of the populist movement, who believed that “if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up.” While Burgis pushed against GOP policy, he admitted the Democratic coalition is still filled with old-guard neoliberal legislators. Despite their massive differences, both men agree on one thing: The United States is currently surrounded by “pseudo populism”—neither side has fully committed to the call of its citizens.
The real split in either side’s populist values lies in economic policy. Ahmari wants a “conservative project” that manages capitalism to make it less crushing. He points to the mid-century “Treaty of Detroit,” where labor and capital actually had a balance. In this post-World War 2 era, the federal government mediated conflict between corporations and workers to keep production lines running while ensuring workers could make a living. He’s pushing for “predistribution”, which essentially means giving workers enough power to win higher wages upfront, so they don’t have to rely on the government to hand them back tax money later. Burgis, on the other hand, wants the “maximum program”. He’s not interested in just making “workplace tyranny” softer; he wants to move past the capitalist system entirely because, as he sees it, the “people” are divided between those who work and those who own the work of others.
At the forefront of the modern economic and Social division lies immigration. Ahmari calls it the “electoral Achilles heel” of the left. He argues that unrestricted immigration is a tool for the neoliberal system to keep wages low, and that a stable society needs some level of reasonable restriction. Historically, the populist movement of the late 1890’s was vehemently anti-immigration because immigrants were often used as a substitute for striking workers. Burgis doesn’t deny that competition can hurt wages in some sectors, but he thinks mass deportation is both “morally off the table” and “impractical.” His solution is to bring people out of the shadows and give them citizenship so they can “take their employers to court when they violate labor laws” and join unions without being afraid of the state. He warns that the right’s current path will result in an “American kafala” system, where there is a permanent class of workers who have no rights at all.
What both positions share is a desire to restore democratic order to economic life. Ahmari wants the economy to be under “rational deliberation and control” so life isn’t so chaotic and atomized, and Burgis wants the “rationality” of a world where workers decide their own fate. They’re both sick of the libertarian “anything goes” attitude that has ruled our culture and our markets for forty years. Burgis went as far as to admit that the “increasingly deranged” politics of the last few years have made him realize he’s more attached to “existing American institutions” than he thought. And both sides rely on a strategy of failure. Burgis says we have to “measure degrees of failure” and stick with what has failed the least, like the success of Democratic Socialists winning local elections in New York. Ahmari is looking for a “militant left” to finally break the “libertarian heaven” that billionaires are building for themselves. He thinks that if the right keeps destroying labor protections, the left should respond with “wildcat strikes”—reminiscent of the postwar strategy that saw a period of relative labor peace in the 1950’s.
America is being sold a populist aesthetic in place of populist power. Whether both sides undergo a real realignment or just more “crazy behavior” depends on whether either can actually provide material security for the many. The right-wing populist experiment failed to take on the Musks of the world. Now, the left has a “strategic opening,” but only if it can move past its own libertarian impulses and offer a vision of “better government” instead of just “less government.” In the end, if the only ‘mass participation’ left is a collective shrug at the automated abyss, then we’ve really just measured our way to the bottom.
