Spectrum Inversion

Henry Farrell posts on some recent research on the politics and public opinion of tax cuts, then concludes on a slight tangent with the observation "that there is space for a much greater degree of left-populism in American politics than we’ve seen recently." The interesting thing about this is that while I think Henry's right, we've seen a large-scale collapse in support for left-populism inside the Democratic Party. Also interesting, this collapse reflects less the decline of the "left" wing of the Democrats vis-à-vis the centrist wing (the reverse seems to be happening) than it does a changing conception of what counts as a "left" position. The most clearly populist in a traditional soak-the-rich corporation-bashing kind of way major Democratic candidate during the 2004 primaries was Dick Gephardt whose campaign was luckluster and collapsed early in an unlamented way.

Interestingly, none of the intellectual organs of left liberalism in the United States (say, The American Prospect, The Nation, Mother Jones, etc.) seemed interested in boosting his candidacy. This is largely because we've seen in recent years a reconceptualization of which political axes are the important ones. Howard Dean was left of the other major contenders on the Iraq War, on gay rights, on religion in public life, and had very orthodox liberal views on the environment. Therefore, his candidacy became coded as the "left" candidacy relative to the other major contenders. Efforts by his rivals to point out that in his years as Vermont Governor, Dean took positions to the right of several other major candidates on trade and on entitlement spending got no traction whatsoever. Dean eventually collapsed basically over "electability" concerns, and we wound up with Kerry versus Edwards. Here Edwards tried to play the populist card against Kerry a bit, but didn't go too hard at it (because he wanted to be Vice President), and his own DLC associations made this a rather unlikely move anyway.

Roughly speaking, I wonder whether there are enough left-populists left inside the Democratic Party for this to be a viable politics. It may be that too many of left-populism's possible constituents have already moved into the Republican sphere or into apathy for this to work.