Was populism worth it?

U.S. Americans' Pokemon go to the polls today, and this year, many of the attention-grabbing candidates are identifying or being identified as populists. Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat, is running a competitive race for governor in Texas. Populism is about economic power. Sam Forstag, running for Congress as a Dem in Montana. I'm running as a populist because populism is what the Democratic Party is supposed to be about. It's what democracy is supposed to be about. Josh Turek, a Democrat running for Congress in Ohio. We want to once again have a common-sense prairie populist that is fighting for the people. Dan Osborne, running for Senate as an independent in Nebraska, didn't use the word populist, but. My life sucks, too. Costs are too high. The last 10 years in the U.S. have been defined by Trump-style populism. This year, candidates from across the political spectrum are embracing the populist mantle. Today on Today Explained from Vox, what has 10 years of populism gotten us, and are we ever going back? Support for Today Explained comes from Anthropic, the team behind Clawed. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation founded on a hard question. That question is, how do we make sure AI goes well for people? They're working on it, publishing what they find, even when it's uncomfortable. There's hope in hard questions. Ask your hard question at clawed.ai slash today explained. That's C-L-A-U-D-E dot A-I slash today explained. Support for the show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. If you have a dog or cat, here's something you need to know. According to Forbes, one in three pets will need emergency treatment this year. And every six seconds, a pet parent gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Vet bills don't have to hit that hard. Fetch is pet insurance that covers accidents, illnesses, and emergency visits, and pays back up to 90% of eligible vet bills. No wonder pet parents give Fetch an excellent, rating on Trustpilot. Get a free quote in minutes at FetchPet.com slash save. That's FetchPet.com slash save. Populism. Yeah, yeah. Populism. Yeah, yeah. Populism. Yeah, yeah. This is the angel. Today explained. Jonathan Cheat writes for The New York Times. Jonathan, we're talking about populism today, and it is notable that a lot of the big names in politics right now are self-styled populists. You've got Abdel El-Sayed, Vice President Vance, Josh Hawley, Zoran Mamdani. What does populism mean right now? I think populism is a style of politics that posits that political problems are zero-sum conflicts to which there is a single, clear, easy solution that would benefit the people or at least the people that you consider legitimate if you're a certain kind of populist and is being thwarted by a self-interested elite. Let's focus for a moment on right-wing populism because President Trump has been an avatar of that who is so remarkably successful at it that we'll be talking about him certainly until you and I are long dead. What was so compelling? What has been so compelling about President Trump's populist message? And take us back to the beginning here. Well, in some ways, there was an ideological, ideological component to it. The ideological component was that the Republican Party elite was focused on projects that were disconnected from the desires of its base. And I'm actually disappointed with a lot of the Republican politicians. The Republican Party elite really loved cutting taxes for the rich. What we're saying is lower tax rates 20 percent, start with the wealthy. Really wanted to cut retirement programs. We're going to have to recognize that Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable. And was eager to. start wars in the Middle East. I would send American ground forces in larger numbers to Iraq, a couple aviation battalions. Then the hard one is Syria. Trump positioned himself as someone who had totally different priorities than that. His main priority was restricting immigration. Did not want to cut Social Security and Medicare, at least that's what he said. It's not fair to the people that have been paying in for years and now all of a sudden they want to be cut. He at times said he didn't want to cut Social Security and Medicare, at least that's what he said. Do you believe in raising taxes on the wealthy? I do. I do, including myself. And he also said he didn't want to start wars in the Middle East. With our victory in November, the years of war, weakness and chaos will be over. I don't have wars. Now that presentation has turned out not to be completely accurate, but it certainly helped him gain a foothold within the Republican Party and. discredit that party's establishment. One thing that is true about populism, then and now, is that it seems to always have someone in its crosshairs. Someone is to blame for the way things are now. A decade ago, who was President Trump blaming? Well, he blamed the Obama administration. He blamed the globalist elite. The Washington establishment and the financial and media corporations that fund it exist for only one reason: To build and enrich itself. But yeah, his populist message now is really failing to gain traction, because it's hard to maintain your populism when you are powerful. And especially when you are trying to broadcast your power. I think it was actually a little bit easier his first term. His first term, he was constantly frustrated in his desires, and he would blame the deep state and the Republican Party, RINOs. For thwarting him, and to an extent, the courts and the law, and these forces that were holding him back. So that allowed him to have this populist message that sort of explained why he was being blocked. The media and the deep state are desperate to stop us, and it's not me, it's us, it's all of us, it's 63 million, but it's much more than that. But he's been very determined not to repeat that experience in his second time around, and in his second time around, he's been much more successful in overcoming opposition. But the flip side of that success is that he can't really posture as the victim of these shadowy forces, when the message he wants to send every day is, "I am in total control of everything that happens." On the question of kind of knocking the elites off their peg, how did he do? Well, he certainly knocked the Republican elites off their peg. Yeah, I mean, the Bushes are in exile, a lot of the people who were influential within the Republican Party in 2016 are no longer. There's a new elite within the Republican Party. The business elite, he's mostly just co-opted, right? He's mostly kind of built a sort of Putin-esque deal with them, where they have to be aligned with the ruling party's political agenda, in which case they will receive favorable regulations and favorable policies, but they have to kick up some money to the governing party and not step out of line. So he hasn't displaced the economic elite whatsoever. In fact, he's entrenched the economic elite. Now, right-wingers tend to also define the elites in their populist division of the society in social terms, right? So they would define the elites as being people who are in favor of progressive social policies, progressive social trends. And they've certainly taken away some of the power of those elites to influence social policy. When Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2012— In 2020, you've written that Biden rejected Trump's policies, but he embraced a kind of Biden populism. What did that look like? Trump runs against free trade agreements and attacks them in classically populist terms. This is a global elite that made these free trade agreements, that sold out the American worker for their own benefit and screwed you. But our workers' loyalty was repaid, you know it better than anybody. This is total betrayal. There were always people on the left who opposed free trade agreements, and so we saw Trump basically stealing their message for themselves. And they were eager for the Democratic Party to steal it back. And then Joe Biden did that. He kept in place the Trump tariffs, although he didn't really try to make a Trumpian message about the evil elites in the free trade agreements. He just kind of kept it in place and didn't do much with it. So we're going to protect the American autoworkers, we're going to protect American steel and American aluminum. But the problem that Biden ran into was inflation. That became the economic challenge. And populists don't really have a lot of policies that are an answer to inflation. In fact, a lot of populist policies make inflation worse. Tariffs are a key example of this. So Biden really was slow to recognize that inflation was the economic challenge. His presidency faced and just couldn't come up with policies to try to roll it back quickly enough to get his administration on stable footing. So here we sit in 2026. I've been out in the country reporting past couple of months and everyone is furious. There are very few Americans who are happy with the way things are going right now. And one could argue, if one were so inclined, that maybe 10 years of populism. were not a great idea. method by which to achieve durable change. Do you think that we will soon in the near future, in the far future, do you think we will see the end of this populist moment? Ooh, that's such a good question. I think we will eventually see the end of this populist moment, but the question is when and how, and I can't be totally confident. There can be a way in which populist policies can just entrench themselves and make unwinding them impossible. But there's been less policy movement on these populist actions, and the tariffs, I think, are a pretty strong counterpoint to that. The tariffs are probably Donald Trump's most broad-ranging populist policy measure, and he never passed those through Congress. He never really even tried to pass them through Congress. He did them all through executive action, and most Democrats just say they want to reverse them in office. So I think when people see that this populist agenda does not benefit them, it makes it easy for the opposing party to come in and reverse it. And that seems to be like the course that we're on right now, but of course, we don't know. That's The Atlantic's Jonathan Chait. When we return, is populism, the media's fault? Our man in New York has a theory. Stay turned. We'll be right back. See the full history and respond fast. 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The whole process takes about 15 minutes. You can answer a few questions. Their agents shop the carriers for you and you get your quote tailored to your specific situation. Even if you've got something like high blood pressure or diabetes, you can find coverage with select quote. According to their data, select quote can help you save an average of 30%. So let's do the math. If a policy costs $150, $50 per month, 30% off is $45 a month back in your pocket over a 20 year term. That's more than $10,000. 12,000 reviews on Trustpilot rates select quote as excellent. You can get your free quote at select quote.com slash explain that select quote.com slash explain select quote.com slash explained. They shop you save. My name is Eric Levitz and I'm a senior correspondent for Vox where I cover politics and policy. In the first half of the show, Eric, we took a look back at about a decade of populism in the U.S. You have this very interesting theory about why populism rises and falls that has less to do with politicians and their promises and more to do with media, especially mass media. Tell us your theory. Yeah, so there are many causes of populism, obviously, economic recessions, immigration policies that alter the demographics of countries. But I think one neglected factor is the structure of the media environment. So there are some media technologies that really concentrate power and attention in a way that allows elites to filter and curate the public conversation, often in a more pro-institutional direction. And then there are other types of media that expand the number of voices that can reach the public and make it harder for elites to control the conversation. And so in these more open and competitive media environments, there tends to be more opportunities for anti-establishment movements to flourish. You traced a span of years as you were writing this piece for Vox. Tell me where you think this starts. Yeah, so I think one way in is to think about the differences between the age of radio and that of broadcast television. In the early 20th century, radio proliferated and became the dominant form of mass communication. Standing beside me is a man who is perhaps the world's most famous writer of sports. If I only had a five cent piece, enough to buy a cup of coffee. Don't imagine that one laxative is as good as another, that they're all alike. They're not. And this was a really radically and novelly, intimate and accessible medium. You know, at this time, there are millions of illiterate Americans and many more who can read, but, you know, aren't going to enjoy it enough to really keep up with the political conversation. But with radio, now politicians and broadcasters can speak directly to people in their living rooms, becoming a presence in their family homes. And this intimacy, I think, made. it easier for candidates and commentators to sell themselves as voices of the people. One prominent example in the U.S. on the left is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR's fireside chats built this powerful connection between his White House and the American people. My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking. And in these broadcasts, he often portrayed himself as a representative of the ordinary man, and, you know, an enemy of the economic royalists who were trying to hoard America's wealth. I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few. Okay, yes, FDR was indeed on the left. Who was the version of FDR on the right? There's Hitler. The Nazis were very good at radio. But for our purposes, I think the more illuminating example might be Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest turned broadcaster from Michigan. Father Coughlin will address you this afternoon on the subject of unjust aggressors. Coughlin was among America's first great radio demagogues, sort of laying the blueprint that Rush Limbaugh and other talkers would emulate. And his politics were distinctly populist. He was speaking for the people against a narrow elite that was betraying them. If America goes to war, all propaganda will advertise that we are virtuous in helping to save democracy. But the truth is that we are helping to perpetuate the power of the international bankers. Now, the telling point for the broader argument here is that, you know, these extreme anti-institutionalist views led CBS to drop Coughlin from their networks in 1931. But because the nature of radio allowed for a lot more independent stations than there would later be with television, Coughlin was able to bypass the mainstream media's gatekeepers and buy airtime directly from independent radio stations. Okay, so that's radio. By the time we hit the 1950s, as you know, Americans are moving more and more toward television. And you will also be aware that one of the critiques of TV, even Even way back in the day, it was like TV is a place for rabid emotion, antagonistic relationships, very attractive people. These are things that I think today we definitely associate with populism, but I don't think of the 50s as being particularly populist. What did TV mean for all of this in the early days? For one thing, just there are the objective conditions. America is experiencing a time of relative political consensus. There's less ideological distance between the major parties. And you also just have really strong economic growth that is relatively widely shared. About housing, housing administrator Raymond Foley says it's quite possible that credit controls may be relaxed on new houses costing above $12,000. So that's a decent situation for cultivating trust in institutions. But independent of that, television. In the early days, was a really oligopolistic technology. It was very expensive to build out and maintain a national broadcast television network in the mid-20th century. You really had to have a lot of capital at your disposal to do that. And so for this reason, there are really only three major networks in the entire industry. ABC. This is ABC, television network. CBS. This is CBS. The Columbia Broadcasting System. And NBC. And that gave a relatively small group of journalistic, business, cultural and political elites a lot of power to shape the national conversation. So TV stays around for a while. It's still around today, arguably. How did we. How did we go from TV as gatekeeper, a handful of networks as gatekeepers, to today where, you know, populism has become one of the defining forces, if not the defining force in American politics? How did this evolve? So throughout the last quarter of the 20th century, barriers to entry in television were eroding. Cable broke the stranglehold of the major networks and dramatically expanded the number of available channels. Prime News on CBS. CNN. Fox News Channel. What people want. What sets us apart. What makes the difference. Fair and balanced. This had many effects. One of them was that news outlets now had to compete much more aggressively with other news sources and with just entertainment in general, which created stronger incentives for provocative, emotionally engaging and culture war driven political content, which is sort of often populist in character. But I think the real revolution. comes more recently with the digital media and social media, specifically. Digital media brings us into this climate where not only any cable network, but any human being who has a sufficiently engaging message that they can convey with a short form video can instantly, or, you know, close to it, reach an audience of millions without any producer, editor, or network executive approving of their remarks. I am scared of James Tallarico. He's a fake Christian, he's a demon, and he's a mouthpiece of Satan and pastors need to wake up. You guys really have to know that when you look up the sky and the clouds, they're not even frickin' real, bro. Like, real shit, the sky is not even real, man. The competitive pressure, I think, has also led to a lot of influencers and podcasters to discover that one really effective way to stand out in this media environment. is to portray yourself as a source of secret, forbidden knowledge that you can't get anywhere else. The info that the powers that be don't want you to know. I pretty much stayed up all night to do research on the jet that crashed in West Palm, so let's talk about it. We have more evidence that the all-woman space flight was actually faked or a hoax. CNN tries to pull off another hoax. If social media is what propelled us into. the populist era, or helped propel us, social media, Eric, does not appear to be going away. Do you think there's reason to believe that we won't just keep doing populism for the next, I don't know, man, 50, 100 years? Yeah, so there are a lot of variables. Media is only one. But I do think that, arguably, in some ways, artificial intelligence might actually push. a little bit against these trends we've been talking about. AI? AI is what's going to save us? Well, no, it might kill us all. But before then, it is possible that, in some respects, the technology, at least in the way that consumers experience it, might push a little bit against populism. On social media, people with different political views often get. most of their information from entirely different sources. With AI, people across the ideological spectrum are increasingly turning to the same, you know, three models, basically, to understand the world. So that creates the possibility of a more shared information environment in the same way that the existence of just three broadcast television networks back in the day did so. And that information environment is one that's. arguably, indirectly, algorithmically, curated by established authorities. So there's evidence that AI models track reality, at least as understood by traditional intellectual authorities and, like, mainstream scientists and journalists. I have queried the entire internet and the whole history of human knowledge, and clouds are real. I'm sorry, Miles. There's no way around it. And actually, this is even true of Grok, much to Elon Musk's consternation, in trying to build kind of an anti-woke chatbot. Even Grok tends to give similar answers to Cloud and ChatGPT. But I do think that, in the end, if artificial intelligence, you know, wipes out 50% of white-collar jobs, if we have mass unemployment, like, the fact that people are getting relatively similar answers from ChatGPT and Cloud, I don't think it's going to. be the thing that stops a populist uprising against the, you know, emerging tech oligarchy. So, you know, we'll just have to wait and see. That was Vox's Eric Levitz. Today's team, Miles Bryan, Jolie Myers, Gabriel Donatov, David Tadishor, Bridger Dunagan, and me, I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Today's team, Miles Bryan, Jolie Myers, Gabriel Dunagan, and me, I'm Noelle King. No wonder pet parents give Fetch an excellent rating on Trustpilot. Assign them work directly or connect your agents through MCP. Spend less time hunting for context. Less time asking, wait, what did we decide? And more time actually shipping with JIRA. Learn more at JIRA.com. 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