While Hakeem Jeffries revealed, as he trash-talked Medicare for All, that he doesn’t believe we’re in a full-blown populist moment in America, Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and the neofascist tech bros and billionaires fully realize what’s going on — and are committed to making the most of it.
As are Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed and many more Democratic candidates this year.
At its core, populism is a way of understanding politics as a struggle between ordinary people and a powerful elite that has stopped serving them. It’s not inherently left- or right-wing; it’s really a way political scientists describe a moment when the majority of a population has lost faith in the existing system and is looking for alternatives.
Arguably, the greatest failure of government in the past century was the Republican Great Depression, kicked off by Herbert Hoover with GOP tax cuts and tariffs in 1929 and lasting largely through the end of World War II. It created a populist moment that brought to power a Bernie-like populist in America named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It also brought to power a Trump-like populist in Germany named Adolf Hitler.
Because populist moments or eras typically evolve out of desperation — a third of Americans and Germans were unemployed in the 1930s — they open the door to people who offer solutions that radically depart from the norm. Breaking the old model and replacing it with a new one, in fact, is the essence of that populist pitch, be it coming from the fascist or the democratic socialist side.
And make no mistake: America is now being pulled in both directions by powerful movements from both sides. A recent Pew poll found that while almost 90 percent of Americans trusted our government to “do the right thing” for them in the Eisenhower/Kennedy 1960s, today that number sits at a shocking 17 percent.
The ground for a major, wrenching transformation of America has been seeded and the neofascist movement — which figured it out first — has, for the moment, captured control of our federal government along with about half of our states. But there’s also massive progressive pushback and dissatisfaction that, if anything, is amplifying the widespread populist sentiment.
So, which side will prevail?
The creation story of this moment is found when Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian mullahs to hold onto their American hostages until after the election of 1980, thus destroying President Jimmy Carter’s chance at reelection. Reagan immediately began to execute a neofascist vision that had been presented to him by the billionaires who funded the Heritage Foundation with their 1981 “Mandate for Leadership,” that era’s version of Project 2025.
He destroyed the American union movement, slashed wages for working-class people, gutting the middle class, made it harder to retire on Social Security, made deep cuts to FDR’s social safety net, ended free college, killed Carter’s solar energy programs, gave trillions of tax dollars to billionaires while raising taxes on working people, slashed funding for our public schools, and repeatedly blamed the nation’s problems on Black people and “elites” in our universities.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton picked up Reagan’s neoliberal mantle and brought us “the end of the era of big government” and “the end of welfare as we know it” as Reagan’s draconian tax cuts — which no Democratic president since has seriously challenged — began the modern explosion of billionaires and monopolistic corporations.
President Barack Obama, although he campaigned on the populist-sounding slogan of “hope and change,” continued the neoliberal plan, turning our healthcare system over to a handful of massive insurance companies and their billionaire executives.
Forty-five years of neoliberalism, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, have taken us from two-thirds of us being in the middle class with a single paycheck in 1981 down to a mere 41 percent of us claiming that status and having to have two full-time jobs per family to do it today.
As the Republican Great Depression devastated average voters, so has this failed neoliberal experiment, bringing us to this second modern populist moment.
On the neofascist side, there’s a populist movement initially led by tech and fossil fuel billionaires that’s been joined by the more than 200 billionaire families and foundations who spent nearly one in five of all dollars used in the 2024 election.
They’re aided daily in their efforts by propaganda operations run by Vladimir Putin (internet trolls), Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Benjamin Netanyahu (AIPAC), all committed to spreading strongman ethnonationalist movements across the world at the expense of democracy. And, of course, Donald Trump and his seizure of our federal government and police agencies.
Their most compelling weapon is their control of most of our media, particularly the powerful social media sites Facebook and X. As Peter Thiel wrote in 2010, quoted in the opening of Gil Durand’s brilliant new book The Nerd Reich:Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy:
“The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world… the basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority… But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world—without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who were never going to agree with you—through technological means… technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”
On the side that still embraces democracy, the populist progressive movement has been led by Bernie Sanders for decades, although that mantle is increasingly being picked up across the Democratic Party as politicians recognized over the past decade this populist moment.
Multiplepolls from 2016 showed that Bernie Sanders could’ve easily beaten Trump, if the Democratic Party machine and the big donors Bill Clinton brought along hadn’t sabotaged him. It was verified by Politifact. Populist voters were ready to elect a populist in that election, and the only one offered to them was Trump.
They rejected the neoliberalism of Reagan and the Clintons alike, and those who vote for Democrats are clearly now opting for a reinvention of America along the social democracy lines pioneered by the Scandinavian nations.
In his book I Paid Hitler, 1930s steel baron Fritz Thyssen confesses that he was entranced by populist Hitler’s promise to “resurrect” Germany from the depths of the Depression and its loss in World War I. He organized the first seed money that got Hitler into power in 1933 and brought along many of his fabulously rich peers.
Today’s heir to Hitler’s authoritarian populist mantle is Trump (although Vance and Rubio, among others, are waiting for the king to fail so they can step into the vacuum).
During that same time, the plutocrat and former New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt turned his back on his own class and embraced a Bernie-like populist message, claiming that he could put America back together by taxing the morbidly rich at 90% and using government to meet workers’ needs.
Today’s heirs to FDR’s progressive populist mantle could well be billionaire Illinois Governor JB Pritzker or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (although there are numerous competitors).
On both sides, the message is similar:
“The elites and the government have failed us, feathered their own nests while ignoring us and ours, and they must be overthrown and replaced. We need radical change in the direction of our government and our culture.”
The only difference is that the Republicans are saying they’ll fix things by handing the reins of government to billionaires and the stability of society to armed, masked ICE agents while Democrats are saying we must reverse Reaganism, tax the rich, and use that money to restore our middle class with free healthcare, education, and housing supports.
We’ve been in this populist moment since the middle of the GW Bush administration, although it was a slow boil until the 2016 election. The first indication was Obama winning with a populist message, and the for-sure proof was Trump winning twice on purely populist messages. The Trump movement, however, figured out that this was where America was at, long before it occurred to Democrats (other than Bernie), and Biden’s efforts, although valiant, were too little and too late.
So, here we are at this populist moment, and our country faces a binary choice: fascism or democratic socialism.
Republicans are universally lined up on the fascist side, backing Trump and ICE while feeding at the trough of their billionaire donors. That unanimity gives them tremendous power; their only problem is that they’ve failed to deliver for the people — and voters know it.
But Democrats are split, between those corrupt neoliberals like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and John Fetterman who are deeply in the pockets of corporate and wealthy interests, and a new and growing generation of politicians who often describe themselves as democratic socialists or social democrats.
This schism, a remnant of the Clinton years, is weakening the Democratic Party’s populist appeal as many believe the Perez-style Democrats will prevent the AOC- or Pritzker-style Democrats from actually accomplishing the transition to a social democracy that America needs.
Some doubt that this is the most important election in our lifetime, noting that every cycle we hear that kind of rhetoric. But, given the stakes and the boiling populist energy arrayed on both sides, it’s hard to imagine this isn’t the most critical one since 1932 America and 1933 Germany.