When I made an observation to someone about popularism yesterday, I managed to channel this @jbouie column without even realizing it. nytimes.com/2021/10/09/opi…
What I realized yesterday: my skepticism of popularism hinges on how ideology plays out, in practice, as a scan of a screenshot of a picture — downsampled and stripped of most of its nuance.
In other words: ideology is written in poetry, and executed in prose.
Conservatism has always offered high-minded ideals about rugged individualism and the genius of free markets, for instance. In practice, though — in the hands of post-1994 Gingrich acolytes …
Conservatism has always offered high-minded ideals about rugged individualism and the genius of free markets, for instance. In practice, though — in the hands of post-1994 Gingrich acolytes …
… who by that time were executing a copy of a copy of whatever Goldwater or Hayek or such figures once believed — it kept boiling down to “let’s cut taxes on ‘job creators.’”
Popularism has some wisdom to offer on the importance of, y’know, doing popular stuff. As a middle-aged guy, though, who was a Clintonite college student-turned-White House-intern in the early ’90s, I have suspicions about how Democratic pols would carry such a program out.
Bouie managed to capture my suspicions perfectly with this quote from a book by historian Thomas Sugrue: “The ‘lesson’ …was clear: so long as the Democrats were captive to “special interests” (namely, minorities), they would never be a majority party on the presidential level.” 
In short: I worry about popularism playing out in prose as “talk/do less about race,” or “signal regressiveness on race” — with the recommendation that Dems also implement slam-dunk policies getting short shrift.
Nate Cohn of the NYT identified the same concern, in a tweet this morning — indicating via comparison, without spelling out, the degree of repositioning necessary for Dems to win back racially conservative white working class voters.
https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1447208538493890568
Why does the extent of repositioning demanded of Democrats by popularism matter? Because, again: 4K ideology plays out as 8-bit policy. Here’s Bouie recalling what that meant under Clinton, after his rebukes of Black public figures: nytimes.com/2021/10/09/opi…
If ‘popularism’ prescribes a distancing of Dems from activists & inherently high-salience topics of race, a discussion of what that means seems worthwhile.
But like Bouie says here, we should be clear about what’s being proposed.
But like Bouie says here, we should be clear about what’s being proposed.
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