The Need for Charismatic Leadership in Progressive Politics

“Expect More Bulldozings”, the Princeton historian Matthew Karp predicts in this month’s Harpers magazine about MAGA America. In his analysis of the Democrats' loss to Trump, Karp argues that the supposedly progressive party has become disconnected from working-class voters partially because it represents what he calls "the nerve center of American capitalism." He suggests that for all Democrats’ strong cultural liberalism and institutional power, the party has failed to deliver meaningful economic reforms. The party's leadership, particularly Kamala Harris, he says, appeared out of touch with reality in the last election, celebrating the economic and poltical status quo in an America where the voters clearly wanted structural change. Karp advocates for a new left-wing populism that combines innovative economic programs with nationalism, similar to successful left-wing leaders like Obrador in Mexico and Lulu in Brazil and American indepedents like the Nebraskan Dan Osborne.

Here are the 5 KEEN ON takeaways in our conversation with Karp:

* The Democratic Party has become the party at the "nerve center of American capitalism," representing cultural, institutional, and economic power centers while losing its historic connection to working-class voters. Despite this reality, Democrats are unwilling or unable to acknowledge this transformation.

* Kamala Harris's campaign was symptomatic of broader Democratic Party issues - celebrating the status quo while failing to offer meaningful change. The party's focus on telling voters "you never had it so good" ignored how many Americans actually felt about what they saw as their troubling economic situation.

* Working-class voters didn't necessarily embrace Trump's agenda but rejected Democrats' complacency and disconnection from reality. The Democrats' vulnerability at the ballot box stands in stark contrast to their dominance of cultural institutions, academia, and the national security state.

* The path forward for Democrats could look like Dan Osborne's campaign in Nebraska - a populist approach that directly challenges economic elites across party lines while advocating for universal programs rather than targeted reforms or purely cultural politics.

* The solution isn't simply returning to New Deal-style politics or embracing technological fixes, but rather developing a new nationalist-leftist synthesis that combines universal social programs with pro-family, pro-worker policies while accepting the reality of the nation-state as the container for political change.

Bulldozing America: The Full Transcript

ANDREW KEEN: If there's a word or metaphor we can use to describe Trumpian America, it might be "bulldoze." Trump is bulldozing everything and everyone, or at least trying to. Lots of people warned us about this, perhaps nobody more than my guest today. Matthew Karp teaches at Princeton and had an interesting piece in the January issue of Harper's. Matthew, is bulldozing the right word? Is that our word of the month, of the year?

MATTHEW KARP: It does seem like it. This column is more about the Democrats' electoral fortunes than Trump's war on the administrative state, but it seems to apply in a number of contexts.

KEEN: When did you write it?

KARP: The lead times for these Harper's pieces are really far in advance. They have a very trim kind of working order. I wrote this almost right in the wake of the election in November, and then some of the edits stretched on into December. It's still a review of the dynamics that brought Trump into office and an assessment of the various interpretations that have been proffered by different groups for why Trump won and why the Democrats lost.

KEEN: You begin with an interesting half-joke: given Trump's victory, maybe we should use the classic Brechtian proposal to dissolve the people and elect another. You say there are some writers like Jill Filipovic, who has been on this show, and Rebecca Solnit, who everybody knows. There's a lot of hand-wringing, soul-searching on the left these days, isn't there?

KARP: That's what defeat does to you. The impulse to essentially blame the people, not the politicians—there was a lot of that talk alongside insistences that Kamala Harris ran a "flawless" campaign. That was a prime adjective: flawless. This has been a feature of Democratic Party politics for a while. It certainly appeared in 2016, and while I don't think it's actually the majority view this time around, that faction was out there again.

The Democratic Party's Transformation

KEEN: It's an interesting word, "flawless." I've argued many times, both on the show and privately, that she ran—I'm not sure if even the word "ran" is the right word—what was essentially a deeply flawed campaign. You seem to agree, although you might suggest there are some structural elements. What's your analysis three months after the defeat, as the dust has settled?

KARP: It doesn't feel like the dust has settled. I'm writing my piece now about these early days of the Trump administration, and it feels like a dust cloud—we can barely see because the headlines constantly cloud our vision. But looking back on the election, there are several things to say. The essential, broader trend, which I think is larger than Harris's particular moves as a candidate or her qualities and deficits, has to do with the Democratic Party as a national entity—I don't like the word "brand," though we all have to speak as if we're marketers now.

Since Obama in particular, and this is an even longer-running trend, the Democratic Party's fortunes have really nosedived with voters making less money, getting less education, voters in working-class and lower-middle-class positions—measured any way you slice it sociologically. This is not only a historic reversal from what was once the party of Roosevelt, which Joe Biden tried to resurrect with that giant FDR poster behind him in the White House, but it represents a fundamental shift in American politics.

Political scientists talk about class dealignment, the way in which, for a long time, there essentially was no class alignment between the parties. These days, if anything, there's probably a stronger case for the Republicans to be more of a working-class party just from their coalition, although I think that's overstated too. From the Democratic perspective, what's striking is the trend—the slipping away, the outmigration of all these voters away from the Democrats, especially in national elections, in presidential elections.

The Party of Capital

KEEN: You put it nicely in your piece—I'm quoting you—"The fault is not in the Democrats' campaigns, it's in themselves." And then you write, and I think this is the really important sentence: "This is a party that represents the nerve center of American capitalism, ideological production and imperial power." Some people might suggest, well, what's wrong with that? America should be proud of its capitalism, its imperial power, its ideological production. But what's so surreal, so jarring about all this is that Democrats don't acknowledge that. You can see it in Harris, in her husband, in San Francisco and in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where you live. You can see it in Princeton, in Manhattan. It's so self-evident. And yet no one is willing to actually acknowledge this.

KARP: It's interesting to think about it that way because I wonder if a more candid piece of self-recognition would benefit the party. I think some of it is there's a deep-seated need, going back to that tradition of FDR and especially on the part of the left wing of the party—anyone who's even halfway progressive—to feel like this is the party of the little guy against the big guy, the party of marginalized people, the party of justice for all, not just for the powerful.

That felt need transcends the statistics tallied up in voting returns. For the media and institutional complex of the Democratic Party, which includes many politicians, that reality will still be a reality even if the facts on the ground have changed. Some of it is, I think, a genuine refusal to see what's in front of you—it's not hypocritical because that implies willful misleading, whereas I think it's a deeper ideological thing for many people.

The Status Quo Party

KEEN: Is it just cyclical? The FDR cycle, Great Society, New Deal, LBJ—all of that has come to an end, and the ideology hasn't caught up with it? Democrats still see themselves as radical, but they're actually deeply conservative. I've had so many conversations with people who think of themselves as progressives and say to me, "I used to think I'm a progressive, but in the context of Trump or some other populist, I now realize I'm a conservative." None of them recognize the broader historical meaning. The irony is that they actually are conservative—they're for the status quo. That was clear in the last election. Harris, for better or worse, celebrated the old America, and Trump had a vision of a new America, for better or worse. Yet no one was really willing to acknowledge this.

KARP: Yes, institutionally and socially, the Democrats have become the party of the status quo. People on the left constantly lambaste Democrats for lacking a bold reform agenda, but that's sort of not the point. Some people will say Joe Biden was the most progressive president since FDR because he spent a lot of money on infrastructure programs. But my view is that enhanced government spending, which did increase the federal budget as a share of GDP to significant levels, nevertheless didn't result in a single reform program you can identify and attach to Biden's name.

Unlike all these progressive Democratic presidents past—even Obama had Obamacare—it's not really clear what Biden's legacy is other than essentially increasing the budget. None of those programs, none of that spending, improved his political popularity because that money was so diffuse, or in other cases so targeted that it went to build this one chip plant in one town in Ohio. If you didn't happen to be in that county, it made no difference to you. There wasn't anything like healthcare reform, structural family leave reform, or childcare reform—something that somebody could say, "This president actually changed the way my life operates for the better."

Cultural Politics and Class

KEEN: Let's talk about cultural politics. Thomas Frank has sometimes been accused, if not of racism, certainly of being a kind of conservative populist, even if he sees himself from the left. Is one of the reasons why the Democratic Party has lost the support of much of the American working class attributable to cultural politics, to the new left victory in the '60s and its control of the Democratic agenda, which is really manifested in many ways by somebody like Kamala Harris—a wealthy lawyer running as a member of the diverse underclass?

KARP: Look, I don't want to say the Democrats lost because of "woke." I think there were larger issues in play, and the principal one is this economic question. But you can't actually separate those issues. What people have intuited is that the Democrats have become a party that has retained, if anything advanced, this cultural liberalism coming out of the new left. As recently as 2020, there was a very new left-like insurgency of street protests focused on police brutality and structural racism.

I don't actually think Americans are broadly hostile to civil rights equality and, in substance, a lot of the Democratic positions on those issues. But when you essentially hollow out your party's historic core connection to the working class and to economic reform, and in a hundred different ways from Clinton to Obama to Biden take so much off the table in terms of working-class politics, then it's no wonder that a lot of people come to think these minority populations are essentially the clients of very powerful patrons.

Paths Forward

KEEN: You note in a tweet that the Democrats are what you call "politically pathetic." In your piece, you write about Dan Osborne, an independent union steamfitter who ran for Senate in Nebraska. Are guys like Osborne the fix here? The solution? A new way of thinking about America, perhaps learning from right-wing populism—a new populism of the left?

KARP: Absolutely. I don't think they're a silver bullet. There are a lot of institutional and social obstacles to reconstituting some kind of 19th-century style or mid-twentieth century style working-class project, whether it's organizing labor unions or mass parties of the left. That being said, the Osborne campaign absolutely represents an electoral road forward for people who want real change.

He wildly outperformed not just Kamala Harris but the other Democrat running for Senate. His margins were highest precisely in the places where Democrats have struggled the most. In the wealthy suburban districts around Omaha where Harris actually won, Osborne more or less held serve. But where he really ran up the score was further out in rural areas and among workers. I would bet a lot of money that he way overperformed with voters with lower education levels and lower incomes.

Looking to the Future

KEEN: Finally, is there an opportunity in a structural sense? You're still presenting the old America, a federal state. But the Trump people, for better or worse, are cutting this. They're attacking it on lots of levels. Are there really radical ideas, maybe not traditional left-wing ideas or even progressive ideas, certainly associated with technology—you talked about universal basic income, decentralization, even what we call Web3—which might revitalize progressives in the 21st century, or is that simply unrealistic?

KARP: We've got to keep our eyes open. My little faction of the sort of dissident left is often accused of being overly nostalgic by opponents on the left. I take the criticism that the vision I've laid out risks being nostalgic, towards the middle decades of the 20th century when union density was higher, industrial America was stronger, and you had healthy families and good jobs.

I'm very leery of technological quick fixes. I don't think the blockchain is going to resurrect socialism. I do think there is a political opportunity that would represent a more conscious break with the liberal leftism that has been in the water of the Democratic Party and the progressive left since 1968. We need to move away from this sort of championship of small groups and towards a more universal, family-centered, country-centered approach.

I think the current is flowing towards the nation-state and not towards the globe. So I'm okay with tariff politics, with the celebration of the national, and to some extent with this impulse to get control of the border. That doesn't mean mass deportations, but it does mean having some actual understanding of who is coming into the country and some orderly procedure. Every other country in the world, including those lefty social democracies, has that.

The successful left-wing leaders have all been nationalists of one kind or another. Look at AMLO in Mexico or Lula in Brazil. There are welfare policies that are super popular that can be branded not as some airy-fairy Nordic social democracy thing, but as a pro-family, pro-worker, pro-American sensibility that you can easily connect to traditional values and patriotic sentiment. It's the easiest thing in the world, at least ideologically, to imagine that formulation. What it would run afoul of is a lot of entrenched institutional connections within the Democratic Party and broadly on the left, within the NGO world, academia, and the media class, who are attached to the current structure of things.

Matthew Karp is a historian of the U.S. Civil War era and its relationship to the nineteenth-century world. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 and joined the Princeton faculty in 2013. His first book, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy(Link is external) (Harvard, 2016) explores the ways that slavery shaped U.S. foreign relations before the Civil War. In the larger transatlantic struggle over the future of bondage, American slaveholders saw the United States as slavery's great champion, and harnessed the full power of the growing American state to defend it both at home and abroad. This Vast Southern Empire received the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association, the James Broussard Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Stuart L. Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Karp is now at work on two books, both under contract with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. The first, Millions of Abolitionists: The Republican Party and the Political War on Slavery, considers the emergence of American antislavery mass politics. At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, the United States was the largest and wealthiest slave society in modern history, ruled by a powerful slaveholding class and its allies. Yet just ten years later, a new antislavery party had forged a political majority in the North and won state power in a national election, setting the stage for disunion, civil war, and the destruction of chattel slavery itself. Millions of Abolitionists examines the rise of the Republican Party from 1854 to 1861 as a political revolution without precedent or sequel in the history of the United States. The second book, a meditation on the politics of U.S. history, explores the ways that narratives of the American experience both serve and shape different ideological ends — in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and today.

Named as one of the "100 most unconnected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's least known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four poorly reviewed books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two badly behaved children.

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