So when I see Klein missing the boat, my reaction is not just frustration but disappointment. That’s been particularly true in the weeks since the killing of Charlie Kirk, the leader of Turning Point USA.
Here’s what Klein gets right: There’s something seriously wrong with the Democratic Party. In response to their recent electoral losses, Klein said, Democrats need to engage in “a very fundamental rethinking—a disciplined, strategic rethinking—of: What have we been doing? Why are people preferring [MAGA] to us?” This is self-evidently correct. The Democrats have lost multiple elections to Donald Trump, and as far as I know, there’s not a single member of the party elite who’s faced serious career repercussions for their role in these catastrophes.
We are living in populist times, in which existing political authorities are increasingly seen as illegitimate. There are a lot of developments that led us here: the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis and our government’s failure to prosecute those responsible for it, the impunity of lawless elites, the hollowing out of entire economic sectors and geographic regions by private equity and corporate consolidation, the rank corruption unleashed by Citizens’ United, the unchecked growth of obscene inequality and concomitant rise of oligarchs, the socially destructive profit seeking of social media companies, and so on. The buildup of crises like these creates opportunities for populist leaders and movements to forge new majoritarian or even supermajoritarian alignments—if they can tap into the public’s growing discontent. But doing so requires a compelling populist vision that clearly names the problem—“elites” or “the establishment”—and articulates a new set of aspirations for “the people.”
In his interview with Remnick, Klein praised how Trump “built coalitions when he thought it would serve him” and “welcomed R.F.K., Jr., and all of his voters—from Joe Rogan all the way down—into their coalition.” But he seems to misunderstand how Trump built his populist coalition. It was not—and this should be overwhelmingly obvious, but I guess it needs stating—by giving in or compromising. It was by creating and defining a new bottom-versus-top (in affect if not in substance) axis of struggle under which a range of discontented forces could see themselves. A majority of the country didn’t vote for Trump because he convinced them he was open-minded and ready to surrender issues that mattered to him and his base for the sake of finding common ground. They voted for him because they believed he was an uncompromising fighter who would take on what they felt was an illegitimate system. Once someone buys into that, there’s a lot of other disagreements they’re willing to overlook.
But throwing vulnerable people under the bus isn’t by itself—unmoored from a broader populist vision like Trump’s—a compelling electoral strategy. Harris ran as a full-on immigration hawk in 2024. It got her nowhere, both because the people whose top priority is cruelty to immigrants were never going to choose her over Trump and because her rightward lurch on immigration and other issues did nothing to resolve her campaign’s utter failure to do what Trump’s campaign was monomaniacally focused on doing: naming enemies and channeling people’s valid frustrations about our rigged system against them.
If we’re looking to rediscover Democratic political strategies that led to durable majoritarian coalitions—and that realigned and expanded the Democratic Party, bringing in new loyal constituencies—we’d be well served to consider FDR, who created a New Deal coalition that broadly encompassed industrial workers, white farmers, and ethnic and religious minorities. Most crucially, FDR’s program wrestled the Black vote away from the GOP, the party of Lincoln and Emancipation. Now that’s a big-tent strategy, and one that—to again state the obvious—was not achieved through milquetoast moderation. It was achieved by naming enemies, channeling people’s frustrations, and crafting a new bottom-versus-top (in both affect and substance) axis of struggle, centered on a leader who asked voters to “judge me by the enemies I have made,” who stated clearly that all “the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering” were “unanimous in their hate for me,” and who bragged, “and I welcome their hatred.”
Klein’s blinders on this topic lead him to make analytic mistakes in his diagnosis of the Democratic Party’s problems. For example, speaking with Coates, he described “the huge backlash to Bernie Sanders for going on Joe Rogan’s show because Rogan was transphobic” as a prime example of “a politics of content moderation that took hold that was about enforcing boundaries of what were and were not ideas we should be engaged with.” While that incident certainly inculpated some of these dynamics, the backlash to Rogan’s 2020 endorsement of Sanders—which was led and exploited by Sanders’s opponents—should be understood in large part as a story of a Democratic establishment cynically weaponizing identity politics to stop a Sanders-led populist takeover of the party, a tactic Democratic elites have utilized frequently to protect themselves.
As I said at the top, I don’t relish criticizing Klein, who at times has played a singular role in pushing the Democratic Party in the right direction. Since the 2024 election, his stature and capacity to influence the party have grown substantially, and in my opinion he has not risen to meet that challenge and opportunity. In his interview with Coates, he argued that this moment called for “exploring things that are uncomfortable and being pretty disciplined … about separating the question of what I believe from what I believe will win power.” I don’t know how regularly Klein reads The New Republic, but if by some chance this essay crosses his desk, here’s my heartfelt imploration: When it comes to the debate raging within the Democratic Party over whether Democrats should reorient their ill-defined program and decrepit brand around a populist economic message, please reconsider whether you are being adequately disciplined in separating the question of what you believe from what will win power.
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