'Utterly fake': Robert Reich dispels 'bogus' myth of GOP as a populist party

10 October 2024

Economist Robert Reich, in an op-ed published Thursday at the Guardian, wondered why Democrats “have not embraced economic populism” in their messaging, bemoaning that “the only version of populism available to angry voters has been the Republican’s cultural one, which is utterly fake.”

Referencing Elon Musk’s endorsement of Donald Trump, Reich described the richest man in the world “as the quintessential robber baron of the United States’s second Gilded Age.”

“More than a century ago, in the US’s first Gilded Age, the idea that someone running for president would feature at a rally the richest person in the country, let alone the world, would have been absurd,” Reich explained.

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The economist tracked the dissolution of economic populism from the first Gilded Age through the 1950s when “the Democratic party had given up on economic populism.”

“Gone from their presidential campaigns were tales of greedy businessmen, unscrupulous financiers and monopolistic corporations,” Reich wrote. “There no longer seemed any need. Postwar prosperity had created the largest middle class in the history of the world and reduced the gap between rich and poor."

“The Republican party, meanwhile, embraced cultural populism,” he continued. "In Ronald Reagan’s view, Washington insiders and arrogant bureaucrats stifled the economy and hobbled individual achievement. Cultural elites coddled the poor, including ‘welfare queens,’ Reagan’s racist dog-whistle."

In his op-ed, Reich urged Kamala Harris to embrace a more “anti-corporate and more anti-robber-baron economic populism" as an antidote to the GOP's "bogus" populism:

Republican cultural populism is bogus. The biggest change over the last four decades – the change lurking behind the insecurities and resentments of the working middle class, the change that animates America’s second Gilded Age – has had nothing to do with identity politics, “woke”-ism, critical race theory, transgender kids, immigration, or any other Republican cultural bogeymen.

It’s the giant upward shift in the distribution of income and wealth; in the power and status that accompany it; and the injuries to pride, status, and self-esteem suffered by those who have lost it.

“The Democrats’ failure to critique this shift and adapt economic populism has made the Republicans’ fake cultural populism dominant by default,” he wrote.

Read the full op-ed at the Guardian.

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