When Donald Trump secured his return to the White House in the U.S. presidential election last month, shell-shocked Democrats promised that they would enter into a period of “soul searching” to try figure out why the American electorate opted for a gaudy reality TV star over Kamala Harris, a grating bureaucrat that probably reminds them of a sanctimonious hall monitor that they last encountered back in middle school.

Countless explanations have emerged so far, ranging from voters’ lack of consideration for macroeconomics, to white resentment, to Joe Biden. But my favourite one, by far, is the idea that the Democratic Party misread the populist moment that we’re all living through and need to respond to Trumpism with their own left-leaning version of populism to compete with the one offered by the MAGA GOP.

On election night, one of the first to rush to this conclusion was the YouTube pundit Cenk Uygur, who made his name on The Young Turks. On Twitter, Uygur bellowed: “Listen to the voters! They just sent you a huge wake up call. They want you to go populist! If Democrats double down on loser corporate Democrats, they’ll keep losing elections forever. Turn around!”. 

Kyle Kulinski, the host of Secular Talk, a YouTube channel that in its own words offers “political commentary from the populist left perspective” declared: “You fight revolutionary conservatism with revolutionary leftism. Voters are fucking pissed and anybody who is technocratic or feels technocratic will be rejected. Give me a charismatic controversial celebrity who actually wants to fucking help people and fight for it while entertaining us the whole time.” This statement came attached with a gif of Jon Stewart flexing his biceps.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the Guardian columnist Owen Jones recently argued that the Dems need to develop “an economic populism that champions the interests of the American majority – irrespective of gender, race, religion, sexual or gender identity” that’s able to “drown out claims that the Democrats care only for the marginalised ‘other’.”

These ideas aren’t new. They’ve been propagated by the so-called “Dirtbag Left” ever since Bernie Sanders launched his first attempt to become the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016. But anyone who thinks that a leftwing populism could actually succeed in a nation with an advanced economy like America clearly doesn’t understand populism nor do they understand the Democratic Party.

Because “populism” sounds a bit like “popular” or “popolo,” the Italian word for “people,” lefties tend to perceive it as a majoritarian politics that focuses on the desires of the most populous class in society: workers. But this is pure projection designed to advance their own personal opinions rather than an objective assessment of political reality.

Populism is fascinating as a political phenomenon because it’s so vague and malleable

Even though populism is one of the defining political buzzwords of our time, and has been so for the past decade, those who sell themselves as political experts still haven’t properly understood the true meaning of the term. So, a more informed perspective is needed. Without getting too academic, populism is several different things that can basically be described as a thin-centred ideology or strategy that divides society into three mutually antagonistic groups: the people, the elites, and those that collude with the elites and are therefore outsiders because the real “people” are the ones that rally around the gloriously charismatic populist leader.

Populism is fascinating as a political phenomenon because it’s so vague and malleable. Its meaning shifts and warps around the culture and context in which it emerges. That’s why so many politicians with differing ideologies, from Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez, can be plausibly described as populists. 

It isn’t a politics of opinion polling and data science and focus groups. It’s an entire way of being that encompasses the way that politicians present themselves, the words they use in their rhetoric, their accent, and whether they’re likely to eat a McDonald’s cheeseburger on a private jet and give unscripted three hour-long interviews to Joe Rogan rather than CNN. The academic Benjamin Moffitt describes populism as a performative political style, which is basically a politician’s public persona, that’s defined by a certain informality that’s designed to contrast against the stuffy managerialism we’ve come to expect from elected officials. Socialists can be populists just as nationalists can be populists because populism isn’t a set of policy prescriptions.

The Democrats … can’t simply pivot towards a left populism because … they are both culturally and temperamentally unsuited to it

Although leftwing versions of populism do exist, there’s a reason why they haven’t emerged in the advanced economies of the Western world. The Democrats in the U.S. can’t simply pivot towards a left populism because, like other progressive parties in the West, they are both culturally and temperamentally unsuited to it. Like Labour in Britain and the SPD in Germany, the Democratic Party is steered by university educated professionals with liberal cultural values and a fundamentally credentialist outlook. They value qualifications and diplomas, have been taught to construct arguments by citing figures and sources, and essentially approach politics as a sort of debating society where the most knowledgeable team with the slickest presentation wins by appealing to the electorate’s powers of reason.

Populism, on the other hand, is a politics of emotion that speaks to the gut. It is driven by narrativity rather than fact and is fundamentally combative. It values instinct over intellect and is comfortable with using manipulation when it fails to convince. It’s the politics of streetwise people, not overeducated nerds who think conceptually and theoretically. It is everything that the cultural elites and the liberal left are not, which is why any progressive attempts to don populist clothing are doomed to fail. You either get populism or you don’t. 

It’s also worth remembering that the Republicans didn’t consciously adopt populism, they were taken over by a populist outsider. But even then the party had a populistic streak because it accommodated characters like Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich. The GOP already contained the right soil needed for populism to thrive, which is why the Republican elites were unable to resist Trump’s MAGA insurgency whereas the Democrats fought off Bernie Sanders with relative ease.

Like country club Republicans, Democrat party elites are people who believe in meritocratic career progression, which means that they’re not simply going to give up the positions of influence that they believe they are due. You need to punch them in the face and take power from them as they’re crawling around on the floor looking for their glasses. Bernie wasn’t that kind of guy. Jeremy Corbyn isn’t that kind of guy. Neither are Cenk Uygur, Owen Jones, Jon Stewart, nor the lads from Chapo’s Trap House. Joe Rogan, who I personally detest, probably is.

This is why I say that populism doesn’t suit the progressive left temperamentally. They have forgotten that the post-war social democracy of their wet dreams was culturally conservative in nature. Its core voters weren’t the sort of people to fret over microaggressions or whether the term “tranny” qualifies as hate speech. 

If you want to see what an authentic leftwing populism in the West looks like today, pay attention to the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany. Democrats can’t stomach full fat populism because on cultural issues it requires them to prioritise the interests of the demographic majority over those of minorities, which in the West means white heterosexuals. The Democratic ecosystem, which is dominated by cosmopolitan knowledge workers who see the world as a live-action LinkedIn roleplay, is fundamentally unsuited to producing a populist candidate. Any attempts at mimicry will be as inauthentic as Ed Miliband’s struggles with human interaction.

So what should the Democrats and their ideological equivalents across the West do to win back the voters that have drifted away to the populist right? First of all, they should make an attempt at being sensible for a change. They need to pay less attention to the lunatic fringe that obsesses over things like structural racism and embrace some of the things that make sense in Trump’s America First worldview; like keeping fuel prices down rather than sanctimoniously defending the Rules-Based International Order or prioritising the interests of their own citizens over the human rights of a fictive refugee that were codified in an arcane UN treaty several decades ago.

Furthermore, the sort of people who get a political erection from the prospect of theorising a leftwing populism are completely ignoring its downsides: populism is a politics of noise and aggravation. It demands attention. Most people don’t want to engage with politics very often. They vote not because they spend their lives poring over the fine print of policy documents, but because they’re given the option of voting. They have been taught to value democracy even though they’ve never been exposed to Joseph Schumpeter’s minimalist conception of the term. They vote because someone has put a ballot in front of them, not because they’ve read Plato. To them, politics is something that happens once every four years. Why did Biden win in 2020? Because he wasn’t Trump. People were sick of being bombarded by the Trump-centric news cycle. But by 2024 they’d lost all tangible sense of how life felt in 2019 and responded to present-day circumstances like inflation.

A second Trump term will bring chaos, that much is certain. The Democrats don’t need to create more chaos from a different ideological standing point. Instead, they need to position themselves as the party of common sense in a relatable, folksy sort of way. That’s a big part of the reason why Biden succeeded and Harris didn’t. 

Old uncle Joe is the sort of guy who says things like “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black” because he truly believes that and knows that it’ll get a chuckle out of an African-American congressman from North Carolina. He understands why statements like “trans women are women” raise eyebrows in both Michigan and Georgia. 

Democrats need to find a younger version of Joe Biden that isn’t in thrall to campus politics. Someone who, like LBJ, understands that the first rule of politics is being able to count and that white men without college degrees are a huge chunk of the electorate that you can’t afford to alienate. Learn how to speak to them, focus on bread-and-butter issues that affect everybody, try to turn the volume down so politics hums quietly in the background and at least act like you want to Make America Normal Again.

A leftwing populism, particularly the sort imagined by Owen Jones, won’t do that. And the people who can’t understand why describing Kamala as a “DEI hire” is both genuinely funny and factually accurate wouldn’t let them take the party in that direction anyway.