Looking back from 2050
Suppose we look back from an imagined future. This is one way to speculate about 2050 — how the previous three decades would be summed up by a 50-year-old writer who remembers being a student during the pandemic and the aftermath, but then lived on through everything that followed. We could paint this retrospective in different hues.
Let’s begin by supposing that Trump claws his way back in 2024, running with Pompeo, and they set up a duopoly on power that keeps the Trump children in the picture and plays the constituencies Trump has gathered — especially men, a category that cuts across race and ethnicity, gathering that swathe of Americans who went to high school or community college, live outside the left-leaning metropolises, and favor closed borders; Russia over China; racial separation; traditions rooted in popular Christianity and reflected selectively in federal and state laws; an America First approach to trade, aid, and alliances; personal freedom over practices recommended by the medical and environmental sciences, and the deregulation of industries that support the regime.
Power will shift back and forth, but the right-leaning populists will control the Executive or Congress, checking reform and advancing itself. Because it faces continued, vociferous opposition, it will move in the direction of Russia, controlling the dialogue and openly harassing perceived enemies.
This is one scenario, but here’s another. Instead of ceding the populist terrain to the Republicans, the Democrats under Biden take up the Green New Deal and consciously address those of all stripes who were passed over by the pre-2016 establishment. Instead of Trump’s inflammatory and pandering rhetoric, the populist Democrats will act. Its actions will aim to build social mobility by taking the public realm seriously, working closely with state governors and city and town mayors to coordinate efforts and make sure that the direct and indirect support reaches the people it’s intended to help, and not be shunted off to pay for layers of bureaucracy and its pensions. A populist Democratic Party needs to slay its sacred cows by enacting top-down reforms and negotiating settlements whenever the math doesn’t add up and lax practices overburden the present and the future.
The tone of the populist Democrats needs to shift from hectoring and patronizing to taking on a pragmatic “let’s get this done and here’s why” way of speaking that assumes the good will and ambition of the hearer. The goal is not to dumb society down and make it beholden to the state — the populism of the Trump Republicans — but to raise all boats, with short=, medium, and long-term programs to do this. True populism recognizes that every cohort has its issues and possibilities. For working adults, staying employable is crucial. That means childcare, transit, lifetime learning, healthcare, and a safety net. If working life these days is 50 years, it means a fund that provides security thereafter. For young people, it means the best possible education, a way to enter the job market quickly — for example, a civil version of the military that provides training in return for a commitment to help run parts of the public realm.
Democratic populism will be informed by the experience of social democracies and also of welfare capitalist city-states like Singapore. They will study what works and what doesn’t, recognizing that it has to work well in an American context. In pushing for a new “brand” of populism, the Democrats may force the Republicans to rethink their own. By acting in concert with states, cities, and towns, the Democrats can build a bipartisan network that can get things done in ways that are directly responsive to regional and local concerns, and make the whole network accountable, not just the leadership. The problem of logjam — an opposition party digging in its heels — can be worked around and the opponents isolated.
I’ve emphasized the front end, and it would involve the Democrats breaking with some of their own unproductive habits, especially their ties to big business. One way to break that habit is to end run the Supreme Court decision that gave business an outsized voice. It won’t stop everything, but it will stop the enormous and pointless flow of money into political campaigns — a good start. But what impact might Democratic populism have over the next 30 years? What would be a visible sign of it in 2050?
One good measure is the comparative situations of different categories of Americans. Will women and men be paid equally for the same work? Will the opportunities for social mobility and advancement be widely shared or still mostly a sign of privilege? Will the public goods and services that make up the public realm be accessible and consistently good, whatever the income levels of those using them? Will obvious signs of social breakdown still be the norm or increasingly the exception? What are the trends?
Trump populism connects the human game that the psychiatrist Eric Berne called “Ain’t it awful?” (in his 1964 best seller, Games People Play) with so-called solutions that pin the problem on a scapegoat and try to marginalize, suppress, or eliminate them. Ending the gameplaying and scapegoating will take time, but comes down to identifying and working on the real problems that are currently overlooked or paid lip service by our still-largely neoliberal state.
Democratic populism would focus federal and state programs on complementing the market by addressing those areas where it falters: long-term thinking and investment; ongoing stewardship of public land (federal, state, and local, with the aim of consolidating those efforts and giving them a reliable revenue stream and the ability to share resources); and ensuring an adequate base of support for the public realm, including a minimum income and the revival of and investment in public, i.e., accessible education, healthcare, housing, and transit, along with other socio-economic supports.
To bring this full circle, federal, state, and local governments might in time define and empower the regions to manage their own public realms. Regions would receive federal block grants to do this, with federal taxes supplanting state and local taxes as their main revenue source. Corporations would pay their fair share, no longer able to shop jurisdictions.
