Inside the Left's Response to Trump-Era Populism
From Elizabeth Warren’s research to AOC’s activism, these are the leaders pushing the Democrats toward a working-class populist revival.
In the political books we’ve covered, we’ve tended to cover the Republican Party and its ideological history. We haven’t done a good roundup of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Joshua Green chronicled the rise of the modern progressives beginning with Elizabeth Warren during the 2008 financial crisis and culminating in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election. The Rebels paints a picture of a few key figures trying to reorient the Democratic Party toward working-class priorities instead of issues that predominantly affect wealthy, educated elites.
It’s also the story of how Donald Trump captured the working-class rage that fueled politicians like AOC. The Rebels is a must-read for anyone hoping to understand this small faction of the Democratic Party.
Elizabeth Warren’s Origins
Warren was an academic researcher before her political career took off. She and her co-authors published As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America, a study of consumer bankruptcy, in 1989:
“In addition to showing the triggers of financial failure, the trio included a remorseless dissection of the financial industry’s culpability in the rising wave of bankruptcies. ‘Credit card issuers were willing to give out the fifth, sixth, or seventh bank card and to approve charges after debtors already owed short-term debt so large that they could not possibly pay the interest, much less the principal,’ the authors wrote.”
Warren’s proposed solutions would sharpen as her research into the middle class’ struggles continued. In a 2000 book called The Fragile Middle Class, Warren and her co-authors wrote:
“Without universal health insurance to protect every family from the financial ravages of illness and without higher levels of unemployment compensation to cushion the effect of a layoff, each day, in good times and in bad, some families will fall over the financial edge…”
When she was tapped to serve on a panel examining where TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] funds went, her political views were largely formed. Clips from the hearings where she dressed bankers down made her a populist star. However, another politician would become the leader of America’s populist left.
Warren Moves Out, Sanders Moves In
In 2015, the Democrats had to decide what their party would look like after the Obama era. Warren was encouraged to make a presidential run, but she opted not to, worrying that “losing would diminish her influence” and Hillary Clinton already seemed to have the nomination locked up.
But for about three decades, Bernie Sanders had been sounding some of the same notes as Warren. The continued outrage from the financial crisis made many voters more receptive to a populist message.
Sanders didn’t win the Democratic nomination. Instead, Clinton, whose economic policies were more reminiscent of the Wall Street-centric policies that helped banks recover from the financial crisis but left families to fend for themselves, got the nomination.
Trump not only won the Republican Party’s nomination, but also captured the populist rage at people who many Americans perceived to be ripping them off. It would take a new generation of leftist agitators to capture and organize working and middle-class rage.
AOC and the Democratic Party’s Future
On June 26, 2018, a bartender from the Bronx beat Democratic Caucus Chair Joe Crowley in a massive upset. AOC grew up during the financial crisis and saw firsthand the struggles that friends and family underwent to make ends meet. She saw how difficult it was to make ends meet even with a college degree that supposedly promised a ticket to the middle class.
She became a media star and a member of “the Squad,” a small group of high-profile female progressives elected to Congress at the same time as each other. She held public communication classes with older lawmakers to teach them to communicate more effectively on social media.
Her influence was felt in the Biden administration, as Green recounts:
“Traditionally, when a Democrat locks up his party’s presidential nomination, he or she pivots toward the center to appeal to the broadest group of voters. But after Biden won the 2020 primary, he turned to the left—because he felt he had to…As part of his deal with Sanders, he appointed Ocasio-Cortez to a task force to help develop climate policy. Two years later…, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which for strategic reasons wasn’t pitched as an environmental bill, but delivered the largest climate investment in U.S. history, $370 billion over a decade.”
Today, as Republicans quietly consider what their post-Trump future could look like and Democrats search for a new ideological direction, AOC represents a potential path that the Democratic Party could take for an electorate that continues to be enraged by a small group of political elites perceived to be enriching themselves at the expense of ordinary Americans.