Episode 209: Popularism and the ‘Poll-Driven Democrat’ as Cover for Conservative Policy Preferences
Citations Needed | October 2, 2024 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Nima: “Calls for Transforming Police Run Into Realities of Governing in Minnesota,” cautioned the New York Times in 2020. “Democrats Face Pressure on Crime From a New Front: Their Base,” claimed the paper of record again, in 2022. “How Biden’s recent actions on immigration could address a major issue voters have with him,” announced PBS NewsHour, republishing the Associated Press in 2024.
Adam: There’s an increasingly common ethos in democratic politics: do what is popular. In recent years, a certain class of political pundits and consultants have been championing the idea of popularism: the principle that political candidates should emphasize issues that poll well and everything from health care to labor, policing to foreign policy and de-emphasize or sometimes outright ignore that which doesn’t.
Nima: It certainly seems reasonable and democratic for elected officials to pay close attention to the will of the public, and in many cases, it is. But it’s not always that simple. Far too often, the leading proponents of popularism — chief among them, people like Matt Yglesias and David Shor — only apply the concept when it suits their conservative agenda, ignoring, for example, that 84% of Americans support adding dental, vision, and hearing coverage to Medicare. Or that 74% of American voters support increasing funding for child care. The list goes on and on.
Adam: More often than not, left-wing agenda items that poll well are simply just not mentioned at all, and that which polls well or sort of polls well and aligns with the interests of Wall Street and other moneyed interests we are told should be of utmost urgent priority for Democrats.
Nima: It’s a phenomenon we’re calling on the show “selective popularism,” the selective use of polling and generic notions of popularity to push already existing right-wing and centrist agendas without needing to do the messy work of ideologically defending them.
Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll explore how this convenient political pseudo-analysis launders the advocacy and enactment of reactionary policy as a mere reflection of what the people are demanding.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by journalist Daniel Denvir, host of The Dig on Jacobin Radio and author of the book, All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It published by Verso in 2020.
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Daniel Denvir: Popularism just fundamentally misunderstands how public opinion is made. Popularists treat public opinion as though it’s this free-floating given transcendent reality. Like, that’s not true. Consent is manufactured in significant part by political, social, and economic power. And the aim of that consent manufacturing is to reproduce existing systems and relations of power. So, the very same people who are legitimating their policy preferences by pointing to popularism, they have a systematic function of reproducing existing ideologies. So, this is Gramsci 101. Common sense is made rather than given. So, it’s interesting that the people who make the common sense want to argue that it’s given.
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Adam: So, this is a spiritual sequel to a few episodes. This falls well within our kind of anti-politics series. I think specifically, this two-parter is an outgrowth of Episode 87: Nate Silver and the Crisis of Pundit Brain where we discuss similar themes. The power of polling, the power of polling knows all, and the power of polling has no ideology whatsoever, and we are simply following the needs of the people, which exist in a vacuum, separate from any other consideration. So, if you haven’t checked that one out, it may edify you a little bit.
We’re gonna start with the general idea of popularism as a mode of politics. Doing that which is popular as opposed to that which is seen as, gasp, ideological is an idea that, of course, goes back centuries, but in its current iteration, we’ll start the clock in the 1970s.
In 1972, the liberal-leaning senator and democratic presidential candidate George McGovern lost the election to Richard Nixon in a landslide. Centrist Democrats framed this loss as a sign that McGovern’s policy platform, which included reduced defense spending and more progressive taxes was simply unpopular and thus unviable as an electoral strategy. They thereby seized the opportunity to shift the party to the right, which coincidentally dovetailed with the interest of corporate America and campaign donors.
Nima: A few years later, Jimmy Carter, a Democrat and critic of McGovern but from the right, began his largely centrist campaign for the presidency. During his campaign, Carter devoted a good deal of funding to polling with seemingly popularist intentions.
A July 1976 critical essay by William Safire in the New York Times argued that Carter’s candidacy viewed unpopular positions as “divisive” and saw popularism, or this early version of it, as “the path to victory.” Now, prior to the publication of the Safire essay, Carter had already stated in a speech, “What we learned we gave back to [voters] in a political program that reflected what they wanted, not what we wanted for them.” And it didn’t take long for the anti-political nature of popularism to become clear.
A few months later, in an October 1976 essay, Safire would again note that Carter had not “taken a position on a major issue that his pollsters told him would be unpopular with the majority of voters.”
Additionally, Carter’s pollster, Patrick Caddell, was involved in political polling as head of the firm, Cambridge Survey Research and also in commercial polling as the head of the firm Cambridge Reports Inc. As of August 1976, this is during Carter’s presidential campaign, Caddell sold reports to major corporations and to the government of Saudi Arabia, raising concerns about conflicts of interests in his polling. And according to the New York Times, Caddell also advised a nuclear energy company in the spring of 1976 to “fight fear with fear by using ‘emotional levers’ such as fear of unemployment and economic stagnation to discredit campaigns to limit nuclear power generation — while at the same time conducting a poll for an environmentalist organization.”
Adam: Multiple polls from the late 1970s conducted by Cambridge Reports and commissioned by corporations conveniently showed public approval for pro-business policies that were published in myriad news media. One from 1978 found that “the largest single ‘reform’ desired by the most respondents was a reduction of labor union power.” The second-largest was “controls on strikes.” This was not really reflective of public opinion. A Gallup poll from the same year 1978 showed that 59% of Americans surveyed approved of labor unions.
But they were asking the questions in a way that got the answers they wanted. This was an early form of polling as a form of consent manufacturing. Cambridge published another poll in 1979 that found “69% of the public would favor tax cuts if business said that some of the money saved would be used to buy new equipment and create additional jobs.” And “79% thought government regulation of energy affected America’s rate of economic growth. And by a margin of two to one, Americans believe that when government makes regulations for business, too little consideration is given to the effect on economic growth.” These polls were not necessarily cited by the Carter administration or other high-ranking Democrats at the time. Again, the polls were conducted by Caddell’s commercial polling firm, not his political one.
But Carter’s trust in corporate pollsters like Caddell would be a sign of an embrace of neoliberal policies within the Carter administration and Democrats at the time, more generally. As Joshua Malin wrote for The New Republic in 2016:
Carter signed into law a huge capital gains cut that gave 90 percent of its benefits to the top 10 percent of taxpayers. To this, Carter added a bevy of additional initiatives — including deregulation, fiscal austerity, and monetary restraint — that amounted to ‘slouching toward the supply-side,’ as historian Bruce Schulman put it.
Nima: So, this idea of leaning into what the people want is then going to be shaped by how the polling comes back to you, which then relies on how the pollsters are framing and asking questions, how they’re analyzing the conclusions, and then filtering that back to candidates who then say, well, I have the evidence to back up all of these popular demands when, in reality, maybe only certain demands are deemed popular whereas others are sidelined.
Let’s now go to the 1990s. President Bill Clinton would similarly rely heavily on pollster consultants, including people like Mark Penn who specifically encouraged Clinton to promote a center-right platform. Penn also polled for corporations as well as a number of other politicians, including Tony Blair in the UK. Penn’s recommendations to Clinton would include adopting Republican positions on issues like “balancing the budget,” putting tens of thousands of more police on the streets, and extending the death penalty. As Times Magazine reported in November 1996 after Bill Clinton’s re-election:
Penn mapped out the electorate and posited two distinct groups of swing voters. Swing I voters (29%) were moderate, Democratic-leaning independents who could vote for Clinton but at the moment were not so inclined. Swing II voters (25%) were Republican-leaning independents. Swing II voters shared many of the concerns of the Swing I group on health care, crime and Medicare but took a harder line on fiscal issues and taxes, and when it came to welfare, they wanted a cutoff after two years. Says Penn: ‘The President had to prove his fiscal responsibility and toughness on crime and welfare before they’d give him the benefit of the doubt on anything else.’
Wooing both Swing I and Swing II would require a hybrid message. ‘You don’t win by being either tough on everything (like Dole) or soft on everything (the old Democratic cliche),’ he says. ‘You need a synthesis.’ If ever there was a Zen candidate, a man who could hit two pockets on the ideological pool table at the same time by combining toughness and compassion, it was Bill Clinton.
Adam: Now, Penn, like many popularists urged Clinton to embrace the center-right positions that polled well and, of course, effectively ignored those that didn’t, no matter who suffered. In an interview with Politico in January of 2024, Penn said this of Democrats in office:
The politics are: Make a deal, pretend that you’re dragged kicking and screaming, and do your best to take the issue off the table. You try to move your issues forward: climate change, racial equality, abortion rights. You move those forward, and when you’re playing defense on the Republican issues, you have to take them off the table.
Interviewer Ryan Lizza replied:
This was essentially the 1996 reelection strategy for Bill Clinton with welfare reform.
And Penn responded:
Well, yes. But I would say that I deployed that strategy probably 20 times back in the day. It was the same strategy I had with Tony Blair: The conservatives had immigration, and we had to take it off the table. Once we got it off the table, then we’d win on all the other issues.
Now, never mind, of course, the tremendous human cost of welfare reform in 1996 that led to untold amounts of poverty and criminalization of the poor and communities of color. Mark Penn doesn’t really seem concerned with this at all. It seems like it’s not an issue to him. What it means whether it’s immigration, mass incarceration, whatever kind of right-wing thing, Democrats cleverly co-op, he doesn’t seem to take any stock or inventory into the moral harms that are caused by these policies.
And of course, the person who invented the concept of triangulation, who coined the term, Dick Morris, who also worked for Clinton and Mark Penn at the time, like Mark Penn, just kind of went on to become a conservative, went on to become a Republican, stopped associating with the Democratic Party. Mark Penn went to go work for Tories in a black box of corporate consulting firms, and Dick Morris himself became a huge Romney fan and Trump fan, which raises the question: were these people actually committed to this meta Jiu Jitsu, take it off the table so we can pass progressive policy approach because they were clever and wanted to advance liberal policy goals? Or are they just kind of conservative and know that that’s who butters their bread and that’s where the money is?
Cut to the mid-90s. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out after the fall of, you know, mass political movements of socialism, of the protest of the 70s, of the Soviet Union, that there’s really only one game in town and that you can go as far right as you really need to go, and it’s not like there’s any left to counter you so why not? And also, of course, that’s where the pigs go to the trough. I mean, that’s where all the money is, right? You’re not really gonna make any money appealing to progressive ideals. There’s no lobby for poor black people, there’s no lobby for immigrants, there’s no lobby for welfare recipients. And so, they knew that, and they took the path of least resistance because they viewed politics as a means of personal wealth accumulation, not something that’s supposed to actually change the world for the better.
Nima: Right. Because it has everything to do with promoting the public policies that they prefer, sidelining the inconvenient ones that they actually don’t like because they’re not progressive as people or they’re certainly not in favor of leftist policy. And so, those get sidelined. You kind of ignore those polls. You promote the polls that back your vision, and then you say, hey, we’re just following where the people are. And couching that position as somehow the rational, popular, and more successful way to engage in politics whereas we might argue, Adam, a more successful way is to look at what the people want across the board, not just the most conservative ideologies. And if you lean into that kind of popularism, that might be a different way to engage in politics that the proponents of so-called populism these days really have no interest in.
Adam: Yeah, because the argument is not that the public doesn’t sometimes want conservative policy. I mean, of course, it does, and we’ll get into that more with our guest. The issue is that it’s all over the place. And of course, it’s malleable and gets shaped by political or partisan polarization, right? If the Democrats support something, the numbers that support it among liberals will skyrocket and inverse. If they oppose it, they’ll go the other way, right? We know this is a fact of politics.
Nima: Popular opinion is not just like a fact of nature, and it’s not immovable. It has everything to do with policy and political speech and media as we cover on the show. That creates public perception.
Adam: And the issue that we’re arguing is that, in addition to that, it is a function of selectivity. We only get the pro-corporate, pro-Wall Street version of what is popular or some sort of tortured polling version of it, not anything that is remotely subversive or undermines the interests of the wealthy or those who traffic in the same cocktail parties and political milieu of the wealthy.
So, let’s cut to the 2000s and 2010s and 2020s. The foundations for popularist tendencies were long laid by its antecedents like Mark Penn and Dick Morris. Now, we’re going to add a new name to the mix. During the 2012 reelection campaign for Barack Obama, the campaign hired data scientist David Shor. Some years later, Shor would become much more visible as a leading proponent of popularism. In May 2020, three days after George Floyd was killed, Shor posted a study on Twitter that effectively blamed the uprisings after the assassination of Martin Luther King for the Democratic presidential loss in 1968. Shor was subsequently fired from his job at an analytics company or as Ezra Klein put it in his October 2021 puff piece of Shor, he was “freed from a job that didn’t let him speak his mind.”
But luckily for Shor, this was not a detriment to his career, but in fact, was a boon to it. He quickly became a media darling, characterized by glossy profiles in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Politico, and others painting him as a brilliant iconoclast whose philosophy is a perfect solution to an out-of-touch party filled with coastal elite lawyers and corporate managers who didn’t simply know what the public wanted. And David Shor was going to find out what the public wanted. And he, living in a huge loft in Manhattan, knew what the people wanted. And he was going to tell politicians what they didn’t want to hear. And he was the anti-ideology, the dreaded “i” word because again, in this formulation, the Democratic Party is not run by soulless corporate lawyers and media strivers and corporate consultants. It is, in fact, run by ideologues who are just super into racial justice and criminal justice reform.
Nima: And had blinders on to what the real Americans wanted from their policies.
Adam: One of the main things Shor argued was that means testing was popular and thus ought to be encouraged in policymaking: “In polling the more you means-test a program the more popular it gets” because “Fundamentally sympathy for the poor is pretty politically powerful and the public is not on board with social democracy.” Again, the idea, though, is that politics is fixed. This is just what the people want. I’m just telling you what they want. I have no agenda of my own.
Nima: But even in this notion of fixed polling, the polls didn’t show what he said they showed. For instance, public polling showed more opposition to the idea that social programs should be more means-tested rather than being expanded or even made universal. For instance, a July 2024 poll by Bernie Sanders’ office and Data For Progress in swing states including Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin show overwhelming support for progressive policies.
84% of those polled support expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing.
84% support cutting the cost of prescription drugs in half.
82% support making the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share of taxes.
77% support expanding Social Security benefits by making the wealthy pay the same tax rate as the working class.
75% support instituting a cap on rent increases.
71% support reestablishing the Child Tax Credit.
70% support building at least 2 million more units of affordable housing.
70% also support raising the minimum wage to $17 an hour.
The list goes on and on. This is what is actually deemed to be popular by recent polling.
Adam: Right. So, this contradicts Shor’s claim that people like means testing because it very, very, very much depends on how you phrase the question. If I phrase the question in a certain way to support my corporate funders and my ideological priors, then of course, I can kind of get some of these answers. But if you frame broadly popular economic left-wing policies — higher wages, more union participation, more expansive Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — people generally like them. They’re actually very popular. And this is not even including the partisan polarization of these issues because, again, these things are very malleable. They can change overnight pretty much. And these are the limitations of this idea of popularism and show the bad faith of popularism. Because David Shor has never argued for expanding Medicare in swing states. He’s never argued for $17 minimum wage. Mysteriously, these things that are overwhelmingly popular — lowering the age of social security — don’t seem very urgent for Democrats.
Nima: Nor is the overwhelmingly popular position of not only establishing a ceasefire in Gaza but also cutting off military aid to Israel. That polls overwhelmingly positive so that is deemed incredibly popular yet that is not informing current Democratic policies.
Adam: Yeah, mysteriously not the most urgent thing. The New York Times has mastered selective popularism with its own unique, patronizing racial lens, particularly on the issue of policing and Black support for policing. In 2021 and 2022, amid racial justice uprisings and calls for reform of the police system, The New York Times published half a dozen reports, depending on how you define it, maybe even more about black voters demanding more police for their neighborhoods from Democrats and that Democrats were responding organically to this organic Black desire for more policing as people saw crime rise in certain urban areas. And they implied and even sometimes said that murder was up in a lot of cities. It’s now down precipitously, but it was up during the height of the pandemic for a variety of reasons. And the implication was that police reform was driven by largely white Soros-funded nonprofit types rather than representing the organic desire of the black electeds and that Democrats were responding to this organic demand.
Now, even if one accepts this premise, which I think is somewhat contestable and far more nuanced than the New York Times would let on, that Blacks were crying out for longer prison sentences and harsher DAs and more police on the streets, African American voters, at the same time, disproportionately and overwhelmingly support more unionization, a higher minimum wage, reparations, free health care, free college, affordable housing, and much more money for schools.
But mysteriously, I did a survey of the New York Times around that same time period, 2021, 2022, The New York Times never ran any stories about how Democrats are being pressured by Black people for more money for schools, affordable housing, free college, reparations, higher minimum wage and more unionization. Mysteriously, these organic Black populist demands were nowhere to be found. The New York Times never reported on them. Mysteriously, only more police that which aligned with the New York Times’ white, wealthy readership and conservative disposition happens to be the thing for which they suddenly care and their heart suddenly bleeds for Black voters.
Nima: Because then all the hand-wringing that white liberal readers were doing would then just be part of their support for what the Black community wanted. So, it’s like, hey, it’s not that we’re freaked out by calls to defund the police. It’s really just, you know, I could go either way. I could go either way on this, but Black communities are saying that they want more police, and so therefore, that’s actually what is more popular. We should listen to that. Something we’ve talked about on the show for years, the idea that when police are made synonymous with the idea of public safety and that no other way of safety can be considered, it’s police or nothing, right? When you’re drowning and someone hands you a piece of barbed wire, well, you have to grab it because it’s your only option, right? It would be better to throw a rope or maybe make sure that person isn’t drowning in the first place. But those things are not considered so the only option is police.
So therefore, if that is deemed popular, then therefore that becomes the popular position to support while simultaneously and deliberately ignoring the overwhelming popularity of actual progressive social programs and changes in policy that would cause material benefits in the lives of millions and millions of people in this country, those are deemed unworthy of wall to wall newspaper and cable news coverage because they don’t align with the hand wringing needs of what the audience wants, which is to hear that what they think already is actually what other people think too.
Adam: Yeah, it’s one of the oldest modes of manufacturing public approval of something, which is you limit the options. You say, well, this is the only option. It’s either chaos and crime or more of the same incarceration state stuff you had before. And again, if those are your two options, you got to do something, right? And that is how you give the impression that these things are organic. Because The New York Times can’t go around telling its white, squishy liberal readers that they’re pro more police. They have to launder it through this ostensibly organic Black uprising against Democratic electeds.
So, this selective popularism has been uniquely harmful on the issue of immigration policy. Another thing that Shor emphasizes and Matt Yglesias, another major proponent of selective popularism has emphasized is the notion of an American public that overwhelmingly opposes humane immigration policy. He wrote for his blog Slow Boring in August of 2021: “Even though American culture and American society are more immigrant-friendly than what you see in most places, it’s still not the case that there is a huge mass constituency in favor of immigration.” He would go on to add:
People would like strict enforcement of the immigration rules, and we ought to give it to them and use that to create space for constructive changes to the rules…The post-2014 approach of saying ‘we don’t love these rules, so we’re going to be a bit iffy about enforcement’ hasn’t delivered security for the people it’s intended to help and seems to have only pushed the larger politics of immigration backward.
The Associated Press echoed Matt Yglesias in June 2024 when Biden was still running for re-election. The news agency claimed that Biden’s “significant restrictions on immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. while also offering potential citizenship to hundreds of thousands of people without legal status already living in the country” would give Biden “a chance to address one of the biggest vulnerabilities for his reelection campaign.” The AP would go on to cite its own poll, which found that only 3 in 10 Americans approve of Biden’s handling of immigration, and a smaller share approved of his handling of “border security.”
The AP added that “the election-year policy changes offer something both for voters who think border enforcement is too lenient and for those who support helping immigrants who live in the U.S. illegally.” Curiously missing from this is any moral imperative to be more humane to those coming to the US, fleeing from their home countries. The implication, of course, is that Biden needs to go to the right on the issue of immigration because Americans are inextricably and intractably cruel and racist towards immigrants.
Nima: Exactly. The hostility is popular so therefore, the policy has to follow that hostility. Also, this notion of people polled being dissatisfied with Biden’s “handling” of immigration could go either way, right? I mean, you could also respond that you are unhappy with the Biden administration’s handling of immigration because you think it is too cruel. And yet, when it’s framed by the AP as being disapproval ratings, the implication, as you just said, Adam, is always that the policy has to shift toward the right, never, of course, to the left. This only ever goes one way.
Adam: Again, there’s this idea that politicians and Biden specifically and any president somehow exist outside of political opinion formulation, that they only respond, they cannot curate. As I wrote for In These Times on this very issue, during the Trump years, the hostility towards immigrants, despite the fact that there was a surge in immigration relative to 2015, 2016, became more humane, more in favor of more humane border policy. A decrease of five to seven points for tougher border security, depending on how you phrase the question, according to a Pew poll that’s done every year on immigration.
I think, on the issue of immigration, it is quite possible that people generally in America have more conservative, inhumane beliefs about the border. I think a lot of it has to do with how the media sanitizes the violence of the border by using these euphemisms like border security and tough on the border and that kind of stuff. But as our guest Dan Denvir will lay out, this is not something that emerged entirely organically. This is part of a bipartisan effort to demonize immigrants. And that’s kind of the point.
The point is that politics exists downstream from media narratives and political preferences of elites. It is not something that simply emerges a priori among people. There’s 320 million Americans sitting around and they’re in the little matrix bubble, and they kind of just form political opinions out of nothing. It’s like, well, obviously people in charge have a huge role and outsized role in telling people effectively what they should care about and why they should care about it.
So, this idea that politicians must do these reactionary conservative and violent things because, well, they have no choice otherwise the other guy is going to win, is a really, really great way of avoiding the central thing that almost all Democrats and certainly all liberals wish to avoid, which is discussing ideology, which is defending the bad thing or the reactionary thing as such on its own terms. And the avoidance of that conversation is where this selective popularism comes in because it offsets responsibility from the people making decisions onto this nebulous public which is constantly demanding these really shitty, conservative, violent policies.
Nima: To discuss this more, we’re now going to be joined by journalist Daniel Denvir, host of The Dig on Jacobin Radio and author of the book, All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It published by Verso in 2020. Dan will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
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Nima: We are joined now by journalist Daniel Denvir. Dan, it’s been a little while. Welcome back to Citations Needed.
Daniel Denvir: Always a pleasure, one of my favorite podcasts to listen to.
Adam: Thank you. This is a very meta episode. Someone who’s been in the weeds of the shenanigans and trickery of the discourse for as long as you have, I think, is familiar with this particular mode of politics or what we call anti-politics, which is the idea that Democrats have to go right-wing on issue X, pretty much every issue because if they don’t, they’ll lose the election. The electorate is axiomatically conservative, and we have to pander to the drooling idiots. Even though you and I are erudite liberals who know better, we sort of have no choice, right? It’s the Jack Bauer, I have no choice, I have to torture someone.
Now, what we argue is that this is a bit of a conservative stalking horse for a couple of reasons. Number one, it’s very selectively applied. Sometimes left-wing things are popular, sometimes centrist things are popular. It’s actually quite random, and it varies based on the election cycle often. And it certainly varies on how you even phrase the question. But things that are universal: Pre-K, child care, free education, more parks, more unions, better jobs, higher wages, higher taxes on the rich, these things that are indexed as left-wing somehow mysteriously never get this “we have no choice because the people want it” treatment. Only things on the right get this in what we call selective popularism. And the second problem is that it assumes that the electorate is static, that it is a permanent state of conservative and politicians have no real sway or candidates have no real sway on public opinion, there’s no bully pulpit.
I want to start by talking about the first critique of this mode of politics, which is this idea that lefty things that are popular just get not talked about. They get thrown into a well and never mentioned again. So, I want to start by talking about this double standard, how this is kind of a convenient skeleton key for whatever conservative stalking horse one wants to push, then how it kind of turns the average person into a pundit. You see this a lot, both with people you talk to in real life or even on social media, everyone starts to kind of game it out like, well, we have to do this because it’s popular. You know, if they do this thing that’s left-wing, they’ll lose votes so we have no choice. Can you sort of talk about how this rots the discourse and makes us all into Nate Silver?
Daniel Denvir: [Chuckles] Yeah, how unfortunate that we’ve all been rendered into little Nate Silvers.
Adam: We have, we have.
Daniel Denvir: [Laughs] Yeah, the discourse really is rotten. I mean, it’s revealing that the political powers that be within the Democratic Party typically revert to this notion that we can’t do the good thing because the good thing isn’t popular when in fact, many of the good things that progressives, that the left, that the labor movement have long pushed for and demanded are, as you noted, very popular. And so, the fact that Democratic leadership dresses up what it can and can’t do in the guise of popularity is because there’s not a moral case to be made that every child doesn’t deserve pre-care or that Palestinians should continue to be subjected to a genocide in Gaza. And it’s a way to selectively use data to dress up Democratic conventional wisdom. And that conventional wisdom is that it’s actually the really smart move. It’s the really serious move to punch the progressive base in the face.
And this is, again, not new. Under Bill Clinton, it was called triangulation. And the idea that it’s such a genius move, I think, is really undermined by the fact that the very people, the imaginary voter that Democrats are trying to appeal to with these centrist or conservative policies is often this kind of mythic white working-class voter. Well, why did Bill Clinton preside over the loss of so many white working-class votes? David Shor praises Obama as the exemplar of the popularist approach. Why did Obama preside over this just cataclysmic realignment of white working-class voters against the Democratic Party? And I have some theories as to why. I think they have everything entirely wrong. I mean, David Shor points to Obama as the exemplar of the popularist strategy when in fact, Obama presided over this historic loss of white working-class votes. I mean, just look at states like Iowa or Indiana that Obama won in 2008, it’s kind of incomprehensible to imagine them voting for a Democrat again. Look at the historic number during the Tea Party wave of state legislative seats that were lost across the country that it’s hard to imagine being gained back anytime soon. Well, what happened?
What happened was the economic crisis, and the economic crisis was also a profound political crisis that loosened political allegiances and identities in a way that was not possible during ordinary times. It was an extraordinary moment of political and economic crisis where people’s political allegiances and identities were up for grabs. What did Obama do? He bailed out the banks and presided over a really insubstantial recovery package, letting millions of people lose their homes. Unemployment spike hit depression levels amongst Black Americans, etc. A really profound economic crisis that was a political and policy choice made by the Obama administration. And the right, by contrast, seized this opportunity of people being in this political economic crisis and their identities and allegiances being up for grabs. They seized that opportunity and defined the nature of the crisis. Instead of Wall Street banks, the blame was put on immigrants and moocher welfare recipient types, and they did that effectively, and Obama didn’t even contest it. Popularism just fundamentally misunderstands how public opinion is made. Popularists treat public opinion as though it’s this free-floating given transcendent reality. Like, that’s not true. Consent is manufactured in significant part by political, social, and economic power. And the aim of that consent manufacturing is to reproduce existing systems and relations of power. So, the very same people who are legitimating their policy preferences by pointing to popularism, they have a systematic function of reproducing existing ideologies. So, this is Gramsci 101. Common sense is made rather than given. So, it’s interesting that the people who make the common sense want to argue that it’s given.
Adam: Yeah, and we discussed at the top of the show how volatile these things are. But just a few examples we mentioned are that support among Republicans for electing a felon tripled literally overnight when Trump became a felon, right? Trust in the FBI and the CIA completely inverted along partisan lines after and during Russiagate, right? And indeed, support for pro-immigrant, non-carceral policies, especially for liberals and Democrats, spiked during the Trump administration when it became a partisan, polarized issue and then reverted back when Biden came in office. We have plenty of evidence that partisanship and partisan leaders can meaningfully redirect public opinion, that they are not actually subject to public opinion. To some extent, they are, of course. But in many ways, they can direct it if the circumstance calls for it. And of course, there’s a very sophisticated media apparatus designed to perpetuate that polarization. But that polarization, of course, seems to only be for ill and never for anything positive.
Daniel Denvir: Yeah. I mean on immigration, George Lakoff, that kind of left-liberal linguist wrote this short, pithy book called Don’t Think of an Elephant! probably 20 years ago or something. And its insights are pretty straightforward. If Democrats accept Republicans’ basic premises and try to say we’re better at them, what voters are left with is the affirmation of that Republican premise. And that happens constantly whether we’re talking about crime, whether we’re talking about terrorism and the war on terrorism, or whether we’re talking about immigration.
And what we’ve seen on immigration in particular is particularly since the Clinton administration, a constant effort to be like, “oh no!” from the Democrats, Democrats perceiving themselves as vulnerable on immigration and then attempting to turn the tables on Republicans by saying, yes, Republicans are right that there’s an illegal immigrant invasion and the border is insecure and being overrun, but we’re the ones to secure it.
And there was a brief break in this which was under Trump when, as you pointed out, there was this intense partisan polarization on immigration, which was a welcome polarization. Suddenly, Democrats thought it was useful to say it’s barbaric to put kids in cages and no, we don’t need a border wall. But unfortunately, under Biden, we’ve seen a total reaffirmation of Republican talking points once again. And this twelve-dimensional chess that Biden, Schumer, and others and the New York Times reporters chronicling this all seem to think is one key to success in November, which is this bizarre thing they did earlier this year. Harris talked about it recently, Biden’s talked about it a ton, which was they put this extremely draconian border security bill together and tied it to military aid to Ukraine and Israel and then basically dared Republicans to vote against it. And obviously Donald Trump was like, vote against it. And they did. And then Biden and now Harris are running around being like, oh, look, Republicans are just playing games on the border. Joe Biden took executive action that gutted asylum. Vote Democrat. I mean Harris, very well, I think is, you know, in a good position to win for a variety of reasons, but the idea that affirming Trump’s position on border security is going to help is delusional.
Adam: What we argue at the top of the show is there’s a conventional wisdom that Democrats go right because they think it’s politically expedient. And I think that’s part of it. I think that it’s a path of least resistance, right? Like you’re not going to get angry calls or lack of donations from poor immigrants starving in the desert, right? It’s an easy punching bag, you know, many marginalized groups are easy punching bags. You know, substance users, trans people, whatever it is that you want to throw that you want to throw under the bus that week, right?
Nima:
Especially because they’re not the donor classes.
Adam: Right, exactly. But I also think there is something more at play here, and I want to get your thoughts on this. What we argue at the top of the show is that in many ways, the right-wing turn is not an electoral strategy, but is, in fact, in many ways and oftentimes, actually a moral cover. They actually just have conservative ideological commitments, and specifically on the border, they have national security commitments that many, many security analysts and people at the State Department and Pentagon have run the numbers on climate chaos and understand that a very militarized border will be essential to do this Fort Apache approach to climate chaos, which appears to be what everyone’s settling on, which is to not do anything about it and just basically make sure that America is kind of a Trojan of men fortress. And the electoral angling is pretextual. And that’s what selective popularism does. It avoids the ideological discussion.
Rather than Democrats saying, man, we really want to punish immigrants, and we really want to take a conservative position, and here’s why that’s good because climate chaos is going to happen, and we need to, you know, smash their heads with a baton to send a lesson to the Global South that the borders closed, you know, don’t come. They go, ah, we have no choice. And it’s brilliant. It’s sort of like with Israel, right? Oh, you know, we can’t stop them. It’s a process thing. Electorally, it’ll damage us. We don’t have the power. There’s always some process criticism. And the example I use is that when I have a toddler, right? And whenever he says, I want a popsicle, rather than getting into the ideological weeds with him about why he can’t have a popsicle, I just say we’re out of popsicles because it’s easier. And it’s a similar dynamic, right? Like, we have no choice but to be conservative. The voters demand it. We have no choice. And that way, it’s easy because you’re not having an ideological conversation. It’s a process thing.
Nima: Well, right because you’re basically laundering ideology through pragmatism.
Adam: Exactly, and it’s actually the inverse. And the example I use is Dick Morris with Clinton, as you know, who invented the term “triangulation” later went on to become a partisan Republican and a huge Trump supporter. That should tell you something about the kind of ideological underpinnings of this so-called strategy, that in many ways, it is just that they’re conservative.
Daniel Denvir: It’s that amazing tweet that someone re-upped yesterday from earlier this year that says something like, you’re doing it wrong, says the guy who doesn’t agree with you or wants the same outcomes as you. Or something along those lines. Yeah, it’s friendly advice from your political opponents.
Adam: It’s Episode 69: The Inexplicable Republican Best Friend who’s suddenly giving you advice.
Daniel Denvir: Yeah, no. I mean, I’ve gotten “advice” from people who say that the uncommitted movement is doing it wrong because we’re putting too much pressure on Harris even though we’re the people going to the DNC. And that rather than protesting in the streets, circulating a letter, respectfully requesting an arms embargo while tens of thousands of people in the streets will be out there yelling something much louder. And it’s like, this comes from people who I have not seen make public statements around the ongoing genocide in Gaza. So, I take that advice, you know, with a large grain of salt —
Nima: A glacier of salt.
Daniel Denvir: A glacier of salt. But, Adam, your argument is really interesting. And I think both things are going on. I do think, you know, looking at immigration, that there is an ideological superstructure taking on a bit of a life of its own, relative life of its own where there has been just like a discursive, ideological arms race on securing the border, cracking down on immigrants. The Secure Fence Act was passed and signed into law by Bush. Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama voted for it. It led to hundreds of miles of border fencing, which is really indistinguishable from a wall, in many cases, being built. We go from a few thousand Border Patrol agents to roughly 20,000 from the early 90s to today. The ante gets upped and upped and up that the only thing left for Trump to do is to be like, we’re actually hermetically sealing the entire border with an impermeable wall. So, there is this kind of discursive, ideological dynamic at work. But then again, I just talked about an actual wall being built. There’s a material underpinning to that.
Nima: Which is then said to be synonymous with open borders so that you can attack your opponents even though it’s actually hundreds of miles of a wall.
Daniel Denvir: Quite the opposite. And part of the material underpinning there is the national security state, the new national security state that emerged with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. And to your point, Adam, there is certainly a more technocratic national security logic to this whole development. And I do agree that a lot of it is looking forward to a future where wealthy industrialized states feel like they need to legitimate dealing incredibly harshly with larger and larger numbers of surplus populations, people who are pushed from their homes by war and climate change, to normalize mass death in the Mediterranean, to normalize what’s going on in Gaza right now. That’s why I think it was incredibly prescient and brilliant when Colombian President Gustavo Petro basically said that Gaza is a laboratory for our future. I think he’s exactly right.
Nima: I want to take us to a slightly different topic. Obviously, these are all very closely related, but you mentioned these kinds of racial elements, and I want to take us to how selective popularism shows up in much more racialized contexts domestically, oftentimes, again, to launder liberal racism as political pragmatism. So, the New York Times has really mastered this mode of journalism, namely in the years following the George Floyd uprisings from 2021, 2023, doing so much work during the defund movement days to highlight Black elected leaders and Black communities, as seen through very tortured polling, to really tell The New York Times reading public that actually, Black officials, Black politicians and entire lack communities were demanding more policing, demanding that the Democrats that they voted for should not cut funding to police but actually up funding for police. We need more police.
And The Times, obviously, at the same time, did not write several articles about how those same communities of Black voters also wanted, say, more unionization or a higher minimum wage, reparations, free health care, free college, affordable housing, more monies for schools. And you know, public systems, as most communities want, did not get the same kind of constant reporting, the same opinion pieces published again and again. So, what they choose to frame as being really important, you know, as you mentioned, George Lakoff, that idea of framing and how far that goes to really define our entire narrative and political discourse.
So, Dan, I’d love for you to talk about this dynamic. This taking one or two data points that even tortured polling is saying that minority populations agree with wealthy white counterparts. Wow, we all agree now that we need more policing. But of course, omitting what is actually also popular, you know, getting into this idea of what is allowed in the conversation and what is not allowed in the conversation.
Daniel Denvir: Yeah, I find this to be one of the most annoying discourses. And, I mean, I guess to concede one point to that side before I go on to critique it, it’s true that there can be a sense and that portions of the left in discourse can portray an inaccurate, maybe romantic idea of Black politics as sort of like homogeneously left-wing and revolutionary when obviously it’s internally extremely contentious and contradictory like any community’s politics.
But the idea of using Black public opinion as a cover for law and order politics is really cynical. James Forman Jr. wrote a great book called Locking Up Our Own, and it’s about how the Black political class came to be complicit in legislation and policies abetting the rise of mass incarceration. But what he really clearly lays out is that Black organizations, Black leaders in this period, following the political victories of the Black Civil Rights Movement, of the Black Freedom Struggle, simultaneously confronted the rise of neoliberalism, the deindustrialization of American cities. I think Forman speaks very clearly to this history where Black leaders, Black organizations coming on the heels of the victories of the Black Civil Rights movement, the Black Freedom Struggle were also confronting a really intensely negative emerging political economic reality, entrenched a kind of new generation of hyper-segregation of poor black people, the de-industrialization of northeastern and midwestern cities. And as a result of this economic crisis, a huge social crisis that did include a really serious increase in crime and social disorder that hit Black people and particularly, poor Black people, first and foremost.
But what Black leaders said was, we want this taken care of, but they, by and large, had a social democratic agenda. Did they believe police played a role? Did they want police to take care of the person on their corner who was mugging people in the neighborhood on their way home from work? For sure, but they also wanted a Social Democratic agenda to rebuild their communities, to create good-paying union jobs, to have schools that were excellent rather than separate and unequal. Black communities in America, James Forman Jr. shows, got none of that. They just got cops and mass incarceration.
So to use that history, that reality of neoliberalism, hyper segregation, separate and unequal apartheid school system, to say that the reality of social disorder, that these economic crises imposed on Black communities are thus a justification for mass incarceration, is incredibly cynical, and again, a selective use of polls. Because if we go to polls, we can see that Black Americans are much more critical of mass incarceration and police abuses than white Americans. That holds very, very true.
Adam: And that’s what makes this selective popularism so deeply cynical and effective. Again, I think the way it’s used on so-called Black communities is really the quintessence of how it can be exploited. Because, like you said, everything else they care about, jobs, unionization, reparations, you know, environmental harms, none of that fucking goes anywhere. And I looked when I wrote my original article on this a couple of years ago, I looked, and The New York Times never reports on Black demands for those things ever. They certainly don’t do a drum beat every other day to pressure Democrats which they were doing around the issue of crime. And so, it is a skeleton key. You can use it to push whatever pre-existing conservative agenda you have.
I want to talk a bit about what we mentioned earlier as the discourse rot where everybody becomes Nate Silver. Now, I argue that referencing public opinion is useful as a defensive tactic because I don’t think it’s a good idea to just concede that centrist things are inherently popular or unpopular. In pretty much all media, reporters can casually say politician X has to move to the center for electoral reasons, and they don’t need to provide any evidence. You’re seeing a New York Times article, CNN, it’s just an axiom that these midwits in Washington and the press take for granted. It’s like gravity or the tides. Naturally, the center is more electorally advantageous. It’s just taken for granted, right? And you don’t ever need to prove it or show any evidence for it. So, I think it’s fine if, in response to that, the left says, actually, this is popular, that’s unpopular, right? Like, the ways in which people say, well, Harris can’t support a ceasefire because it’ll cost her in November. But then you say, well, actually, polls show arms embargoes in Israel are actually quite popular. And in fact, a lot of voters are more likely to vote Democrat if you support that, and very few are less likely to vote as just one example. So, I think it’s okay to cite polls as a defense because otherwise you sort of just concede these conservative premises.
But ultimately, everybody seems to be Nate Silver in many ways. And much political discourse, much punditry is people laundering ideological preferences through alleged voter demands. And you know, the left does this as well, I think offensively, in a way they probably shouldn’t do because the whole point of being left is it doesn’t really matter if what you’re doing is popular. We’re in the soul-converting business. Our job is to convince people. It’s not necessarily to say, well, we’re just going to put our finger to the wind. And I want to talk about this Nate Silverification of politics where everybody even like random normies will internalize why they have to do things that are bad or evil or suboptimal because they just have no choice. They’re forced by electoral politics in this kind of pundit brain trap. It avoids what I think are, of course, the far more interesting issues, which is just having normative debates. Like John Chait can’t just say I’m a conservative. I support a conservative politician. He’s physiologically incapable of doing this so he’s got to say Harris has to be conservative because that’s what the people want. It’s like, just fucking say you support that.
Daniel Denvir: I mean, this is a hypothesis, but my theory as to how pundit brain became so normalized, and it would be great for someone to actually try to pick this apart as a history and do a kind of a historical discourse analysis of media coverage of politics to see how this has changed over time. But my sense, my theory is that the absence and decline of the organized institutions that represent and bind ordinary people to politics, namely labor unions, these are mediating institutions, and we have these isolated, atomized individuals relating to politics when they’re not entirely alienated from politics. In the cases that they are still relating to politics, they are relating to it vis-a-vis the media. And so, those Americans who are still paying attention, and many, many, many are not. Many are so alienated. Those Americans who are still paying attention are connected as individuals to the media, to the pundits, thus spreading pundit brain. That’s my theory.
Nima: Dan, this has been so great, but before we let you go, can you tell our listeners what you are up to, what they can look forward to, maybe on The Dig coming up? What do you have going on?
Daniel Denvir: I’ve been up to a lot. I just finished a sixteen-part history of 20th century Arab politics called Thawra out on The Dig podcast. If you’re trying to understand what is going on today in terms of Arab and Middle Eastern politics and the role of US and Western imperialism and what sort of political strategies and ideologies Arab leaders, organizations, masses developed to fight back, I highly recommend it as a good use of 30 something hours of your time. And then, in terms of this discussion about popularism, I recently published an essay at n+1 Magazine called “Do Border” on the issue as it’s emerged with the Biden-Harris approach to immigration, trying to beat Trump at his border security game, which I argue is total folly.
Nima: Well, everyone should check all of that out. The deep digs that you do on your podcast are always incredible. So, just thank you again. We have been speaking with journalist Dan Denver, author of the book All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It, and of course, the host of The Dig on Jacobin radio, which everyone should check out, Dan, thank you again for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Daniel Denvir: Thank you very much. Really enjoyed it.
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Adam: Yeah, I think what the faux-popularism framework is, is it’s part of a broader regime which we’ve talked about quite a bit, which is that nobody wants to really talk about ideology. People run from ideology like it’s a hitchhiker with pets. Nobody wants to sort of make arguments from first principles, because that gets messy. It pisses people off. So there’s a kind of buyer’s market for systems or electoral logics that absolve one of moral responsibility and moral burden, whether it’s kind of process stuff around, you know, we see this with Gaza, where it’s like, well, you know, wouldn’t matter if we stopped sending them bombs anyway, or–
Nima: Right. The politics of like the faux-possible based on popular polling.
Adam: Yeah, it’s a way of avoiding the issue of like, well, why should we have more racist and extreme border enforcement? Defend that on its merits, rather than saying, I’m sorry, but the yokels in this country just want tighter border security.
Nima: Right. It’s not what I would choose. But, you know, I’m beholden to the people.
Adam: Which, again, is a very convenient out. It’s something that gets everyone off the hook. And anytime there’s a cottage industry for conflict avoidance or ideology avoidance, you’re going to get increasingly savvy and sophisticated ways of avoiding those issues. The popularism argument really is a skeleton key. You can use it for pretty much anything you want to avoid, or any right-wing policy you wish to advance. You can simply say, Well, you know, 51% of people want it. Well, what am I going to do? Like, throw the election? There’s other more important things.
Nima: Well, right. Because, like you said, it’s not coming down to arguing for things that you actually truly believe in and believe are important, and so therefore you’re kind of carrying the mantle that way, or you’re building a platform that way. Or if you are just fundamentally a racist person and a bigoted person, you’re also not necessarily going to be like, I think these people are subhuman. I mean, some people do. We’ve also seen those kind of popularists, you know, Well, you know, immigrants are doing XYZ, when really it’s just like a mask for being super racist. But again, using the kind of popularist argument, obviously, I would say the Right is, I think, far more comfortable in their racist ideology, whereas I think liberals and even more progressive, let’s say, Democratic Party folks do that kind of popularism-masking, where they launder their kind of bad ideas through the shoulder shrug of popular opinion.
Adam: Yeah, and of course, it gets everyone off the hook. So why not? I mean, it’s the conversation stopper. You can’t really go anywhere from, Well, that’s just what people want. So that’s it. End of conversation. It’s like, you know, Oh, the media is bad because it’s all about the clicks. And it’s like, well, great, I guess we’re done here, because you’ve created this kind of quasi-libertarian moral burden shift, away from the person doing the thing, making the editorial choices, or an elected or a candidate making the political choices, onto this nebulous public so therefore no one’s responsible.
Nima: Right. Exactly. Put your hands up. Back away. Nothing to see here, nothing you can do about it.
That will do it for this episode of Citations Needed.Thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com/citationsneededpodcast. We are 100% listener-funded, so all your support is so greatly appreciated.
I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Newsletter by Marco Cartolano. Transcriptions are by Mahnoor Imran. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, October 2, 2024.
Transcription by Mahnoor Imran.
