Will The Real Populists Please Stand Up

Yesterday I performed an experiment. I searched “Donald Trump populist” and then “Joe Biden populist” on Google to see which garnered more responses. It wasn’t close. Google returned almost three times as many articles about Trump’s populism than Biden’s. Then I tried the reverse. I searched “Donald Trump elitist” and “Joe Biden elitist.” The results were even more lopsided, in the opposite direction. Biden’s elitism elicited almost thirty times more references.

I haven’t read all the articles Google found, obviously. Maybe some of them explain why Donald Trump isn’t really a populist and Joe Biden isn’t really an elitist. But overall, the numbers confirm what I suspected: The media more often depicts Trump as a man of the people and Biden as the opposite.

So here’s a quiz: Which president candidate did the richest Americans vote for in 2020?

I’ll answer after a word about this Friday’s zoom call. Our guest will be Graciela Mochkovsky, an extremely accomplished journalist who also happens to be the new dean of the Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY, where I teach. Graciela has just published a fascinating book entitled, The Prophet of the Andes: An Unlikely Journey to the Promised Land, translated into English by Lisa Dillman. It tells the story of a rural Peruvian minister who converts his flock to Orthodox Judaism and then moves with them to the West Bank. As always, paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video next week.

There will be no newsletter and no Zoom call next week.

You’ve probably guessed the answer to my quiz. The richest Americans voted for Trump, overwhelmingly. According to exit polls, Trump won voters making over $100,000 by 12 points. By contrast, Biden won voters who make under $50,000 by 11 points and voters who make between $50,000 and $100,000 by 15 points.

To be sure, “populism” and “elitism” don’t merely refer to the amount of money someone makes. Another important marker of class is education. And here the numbers skew differently: Biden won voters with a college degree by 12 points while Trump won voters without one by two points.

Biden voters are poorer but better educated. Trump voters are the reverse.

So who’s the populist and who’s the elitist? It depends on how you define the terms. If by populism and elitism you mean cultural attitudes that correspond to education levels—for instance, on immigration, where Americans with college degrees tend to want more immigration and Americans without college degrees tend to want less—then Trump’s the populist and Biden’s the elitist. But if you mean economic solidarity with the poor and working class, then it’s the reverse. Americans who live paycheck to paycheck voted overwhelmingly for Biden. And for good reason: His economic policies disproportionately benefit them while Trump’s policies disproportionately benefited the rich. 

The problem, as the Google search suggests, is that the media often lumps these two meanings together. They call Trump and other Republicans populists and anti-elitists because they oppose gender-neutral bathrooms and thus create the impression that the GOP opposes tax breaks for hedge fund managers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Earlier this month, Senate Democrats tried to eliminate the infamous carried interest loophole, which allows billionaire financiers to pay a lower tax rate than many nurses and truckers. But the effort failed because virtually every Senate Republican joined one renegade Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema, to torpedo the change.

All of which brings me to Brookwood, Alabama, where coal miners have been on strike for more than five hundred days. On Monday, the New York Times podcast, The Daily, told the story in impressive detail. Politically, what makes the Brookwood strike fascinating is that it pits the left’s economic populism against the right’s cultural populism. The Brookwood strikers are union members taking on their corporate bosses. But they’re also coal miners, a profession that conservatives lionize because it evokes the tough-guy America of yesteryear and progressives disdain because it contributes to environmental apocalypse. When a reporter from the socialist publication, Left Voice, travelled to central Alabama last fall to cover the strike he found Trump signs everywhere.

The Brookwood strike tests what the two parties value most. If the core of the Trump-era Republican Party is cultural populism, its politicians should support culturally conservative coal miners against the globalist corporation denying them decent working conditions and a living wage. If the core of the Biden-era Democratic Party is cultural liberalism, it should scorn the coal miners because they’re not on board with the greening of America.

The answer is revealing. In Alabama, a bright-red state where Trump is king, Republican politician after Republican politician—from Governor Kay Ivey to Senator Tommy Tuberville to the local Republican judge who issued injunction after injunction restricting the miners’ ability to strike—sided with the coal company. Fox News, which portrays itself as the tribune of the lunch bucket Americans in fly-over country, has ignored the strikers almost entirely.

To be fair, mainstream Democrats haven’t made them a cause celebre either. The Times notes that the coal strike hasn’t received nearly as much attention from Democratic politicians as a strike at an Amazon warehouse nearby. But one faction of Democrats have embraced the coal miners, the same faction that is most often depicted as hostile to Americans with conservative values: Democratic socialists. Which national publications have covered the coal strike? The Nation, The Guardian and Jacobin. Which member of the Senate has publicly expressed his support? Bernie Sanders. Which activist organization has come to the strikers’ aid? Democratic Socialists of America, that supposed hotbed of pierced trust fund hipsters. “They support workers,” a coal miner named Braxton Wright told the Times. “It doesn’t matter the industry. To them, we’re still a worker.” 

Left-wing Democrats may be culturally progressive. But they care about the economic survival of Americans who are not. For all of its supposed populism, that’s not true of the Trump-era Republican Party. When it comes to conservatives in the American working class, the GOP’s unspoken motto is: Let them eat culture war. Too bad the coal miners in Brookwood are battling corporate robber barons. If they were battling drag queens they’d be on Fox News every night.

Other Stuff:

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), a review of a new book about the Holocaust’s strange afterlife in Latvia.

I talked last week about the US withdrawal from Afghanistan with Symone Sanders on MSNBC.

In his excellent newsletter, Bob Wright explains why the man who stabbed Salman Rushdie has more in common with violent Americans than many in the United States like to admit.

Is the Tower of Babel a parable about the evils of imperialism?

See you Friday,

Peter