Right-Wing Economic Populism Isn’t Going Away. What’s the Left’s Answer?
By: Joel Nihlean
Tags: Socialism, Politics, Economics, Society, Democracy

Right-Wing Economic Populism Isn’t Going Away. What’s the Left’s Answer?

Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash

The neoliberal order has had a bumpy go in the last two decades. As a totalizing system for which it was once declared “there is no alternative,” there sure are a lot of attempts to find an alternative.

From the financial collapse that rippled into the 2010s to a Trump administration that failed to deliver on anything beyond garden-variety conservative policies and an often cruel and unnerving (though admittedly sometimes hilarious) spectacle of the performative presidency, it at least feels as if there’s an opening and appetite for something new. But nobody has quite articulated what yet.

President-elect Joe Biden’s recent promise that “life is going to return to normal,” holds a seductive appeal, but there’s no going home from here — not after the pandemic, and not after four years of Donald Trump.

The Left and Right flanks are rushing to fill the perceived vacuum with things like National Conservatism and Democratic Socialism. And the winner won’t be the group with the best policies. Whoever tells the best story about economic freedom wins.

Expanding economic democracy increases freedom

In Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an insurgent Left is making a case against bland Democratic centrism and for an expanded welfare state. But right now, the populist Right still seems better suited to speak to the inequality, anger, and resentment that neoliberalism has produced in the last 20 years.

The Left needs to clarify their narrative of opposition to economic exploitation and “free-market” institutions to deliver any lasting victories electorally or ideologically.

Being a Leftist is about more than just redistributive outcomes that level the economic playing field. There’s a strong sense of justice for everyone, and an equal voice — and that’s best achieved through expanding democracy beyond the traditional political realm. Economic democracy could break the populist fever.

Economic democracy shifts the ownership of and the decision-making power over resources and businesses from the small group of owners and shareholders to a broader group of stakeholders. Both workers and customers would have a say, but so would suppliers, neighbors and the community.

The Left needs to talk about economic democracy as a principle for empowering people — for providing real freedom.

Millions of us spend most of our waking hours working. The best years of our lives are sold well below their value to a company that will make someone else unfathomably wealthy. That’s why expanding democracy into workplaces is long overdue. Expanding democratic values beyond even workplaces, to our whole economic life, is the kind of revolution that can appeal broadly.

The Left needs to talk about economic democracy as a principle for empowering people — for providing real freedom. People know how to make good choices for themselves, their families, and their communities. They’re capable of deciding what it is that they need and want.

What we have now is a system that artificially limits those choices to the ones that benefit the current slate of winners in this economic arrangement. In some cases, the options only range from bad to worse. For example, we tell kids that college is the only option if they want any level of economic security, so they take out massive student loans that are nearly impossible to pay back — and then we pin the inevitable fallout on them as a personal responsibility and the result of poor decision making.

When you give people more control and power over their economic lives — genuine, democratic, economic power, not in some bullshit neoliberal sense of having a choice in who you sell your labor to for a wage to survive — people make good choices. They make decisions that are good for them, for their families if they choose to have one, and for the good of their community. Because democracy is so deeply infused into life and work in a system like this, the bonds of community grow stronger.

The populist Right’s working class GOP

The interesting thing is, on the Right right now is you have these populists like the junior Republican senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, taking up what at first blush sounds like anti-capitalist rhetoric with a conservative spin. He doesn’t really believe in an alternative to capitalism, and he doesn’t want to expand freedom — at least not in a meaningful way. But he talks a good game.

Hawley made headlines this year with his call to have the federal government pay 80 percent of workers’ wages at any U.S. company during the coronavirus shutdown, his push to block federal relief funds to universities like Harvard and Stanford that have multi-billion dollar endowments, and his fair criticism that Biden’s cabinet nominations are “a bunch of corporate liberals and warmongers.”

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

You’d almost mistake Hawley’s vision as one of a GOP Workers Party.

But agreeing with Hawley on some policies or criticisms doesn’t make him a new, better breed of conservative. While the Left might have some means in common, the ends diverge wildly. Hawley, an Ivy League son of a banker, doesn’t really want to give people more power over their own economic lives.

Hawley’s working class conservative vision for America isn’t entirely different from the neoliberal bootstrapping responsibilization that exists now. Systemic failures will still be pinned on people as personal failings in many cases. They do promise certain economic changes — bringing back coal jobs, opening factories up again, or whatever — but the promises are aimed at this narrow conception of the Real American.

The bumbling-but-earnest (and deadly serious) attempts to overturn the election are shot through with this Real American conservative rhetoric: your vote only matters if you voted for Trump. The desires of Real America supersede democratic rule.

The populist Right vision for America as embodied by Josh Hawley is more theocratic and authoritarian than he lets on.

And the illiberal pitch doesn’t ring hollow at all to the audience it’s aimed at. Conservative politicians across the board are trying on this sort of modified pantomime of Trumpism in an attempt to realign that 2016 coalition to their ends. Most of it is terrible cringe.

Those like Hawley, hewing closest to the formula of promising people certain economic goodies packaged in an American Golden Age veneer, catch the most traction. The end goal is not so much to lift this segment of the population up or empower them as it is to create a vehicle to deliver socially conservative outcomes.

Hawley’s critiques of the neoliberal order are more of a pre-capitalist hostility to neoliberal economics and culture based in right-wing Christian outlook. The populist Right vision for America as embodied by Hawley is more theocratic and authoritarian than he lets on

Right-wing populism isn’t all that populist

Hawley wants a more robust family policy. Great. Let’s do it. He wants an industrial policy that brings back factory work, too. Meaningful, hands-on work can be a great thing — better than a lot of the menial labor out there — especially if you’re making a product that is helping your community.

But the problem here is that it’s a one-size-fits-all solution imposed in a top-down way. What if you’re a working-class person who doesn’t want to have a family? What if you can’t work in a factory? What if you’re ill, disabled, or elderly? What if this deindustrialized Midwest community doesn’t want a factory anymore? What if what they need is a nursing home for their aging, factory-work broken Boomer population?

Even when there were strong union protections, factory work is dangerous work. The message of the Right is still ‘we’ll give you help to meet your economic wellbeing better, but you have to do it in these circumscribed ways which will not help all people.

What if this West Virginia town doesn’t want a new coal mine? Coal jobs we’re terrible fucking jobs, and maybe what this community wants to do something less dangerous and ecologically devastating than ripping the tops off mountains for coal. Maybe they think they need a nursing home, too, and a drug rehab facility. Communities deserve more say in the labor options available in their community. This is economic democracy.

The economic populism of the Right has a limited imagination and a narrow vision of a particular kind of society. And that’s not really populism. It’s not democratic either. It’s a top-down arrangement that uses a mix of economic carrots and sticks to force people to align with a very particular concept of moral good, and keep them under the thumb of the capitalist class.

The Left can reclaim the narrative of freedom, community, and responsibility. It’s about leveling power and trusting that people know how to organize their lives in ways that are good for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Economic democracy means providing people a world where they know they’ll always be able to feed their family, they’ll have quality time they can spend with the ones they love, and work will be in safe conditions where they have a real say. This is the future the Left wants.