In times of crisis—and who can doubt that we are living in one now?—political people ask themselves whether they are about to witness a dramatic ideological realignment and, if so, whether the reconfiguration of the left-to-right spectrum of U.S. electoral contests opens up new possibilities for themselves and the issues that motivate them.
We are currently undergoing a major realignment, perhaps as significant as the one that began in World War I and culminated with the 1932 election of FDR and the status quo that Americans have lived with all their lives. In that earlier shift, Democrats abandoned their conservativism and became a liberal coalition of working-class people, labor unions, ethnic minorities, and marginalized identity groups, while Republicans embraced big business, libertarianism, and an aggressive, militaristic, materialistic posture toward foreign policy.
In the years following the 9/11 attacks, who could have imagined that—at least in their rhetoric and campaigning, if not in actual governance—Republicans would identify themselves as isolationists and even protectionists supporting late-19th-century-style tariffs, while Democrats, epitomized by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, articulated a hawkish Russophobia marked by the leveraging of Ukraine into radical NATO expansion, and were even willing to lose the 2024 presidential election over their unwillingness to stop arming Israel as it committed genocide in Gaza? Yet here we are.
This has populists of the left and right wondering if it is time to leave their respective big-tent major parties—both of which barely tolerated them in exchange for their votes—and form a unified populist front organized around a simple proposition: America and Americans first?
We’ve seen intriguing hints that a united populist front may be possible. 12% those who voted for Bernie in the 2016 Democratic primaries voted for Trump in the general election. Trump appointed RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard—figures to the left of the Democratic mainstream—to his administration. Young men in particular shifted from Bernie in 2020 to Trump in 2024.
Let’s set aside, for the next few hundred words, the question of whether left-wing populists, primarily motivated by economic inequality, can not only make common cause with but actually work on an ongoing basis—perhaps even in a new major political party—with right-wing populists who are, in large part, more worried about losing what they perceive as the country’s cultural and ethnic identity to immigration.
When you’re in a lousy marriage, as populists of both stripes are with the Democrats and Republicans, the first step should not be to search for a new boyfriend or girlfriend, but rather to consider whether you’re willing to go through the pain of a divorce to the extent that anything—even being alone—would probably be better. By that standard, populists really should consider ditching the big two, because they are not understood and never will be.
In a recently published conversation, “the economist Natasha Sarin and the Bulwark editor Catherine Rampell examine the strange disconnect between how the economy is doing and how Americans feel about it,” as the New York Times put it. First, they note that consumer confidence is in the toilet. Then they wonder aloud about the fact that public opinion of the economy worse than during the Great Recession of 2008–2009, even though, by most conventional measures, it has improved significantly since then. “Why do people say this economy is so terrible? Why do they hate it so much?” Rampell muses.
She doesn’t really know. “I don’t think that the economy is actually in the trash, despite those consumer sentiment numbers we were talking about,” Rampell continues. “People say that they hate this economy, that it sucks, that it’s worse than the financial crisis and the Great Recession. I do not—again, I do not think any of that is true.”
Allow me to introduce you to the Rall Economic Indicators (REI).
First REI metric:
Can I find a job?
72% currently say this is a bad time to look for work.
Answer: No.
Second REI metric:
Can I pay my bills?
27% currently fall short.
Answer: No.
Third REI metric:
Can I save money for the future?
62% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
If two out of three REIs exceed 50%, the economy officially sucks.
The first step toward never solving a problem is refusing to admit that it exists—or never seeing it in the first place.
The great mushy moderate middle blob that controls economic thinking in Washington and mainstream media can’t address populism because they don’t understand where populists are coming from.
Economic populists are individuals. Unlike a business with high access to credit at reasonable interest rates, American consumers who lose their job and/or suffer through years of watching their wages eaten away by inflation can’t write off a bad quarter or easily pay off their accumulated debts if and when things turn around. Millions of Americans still haven’t financially recovered from the Great Recession and never will.
For most of the people who have come around to the idea of putting America first, the U.S. economy is not an infinitely growing postwar machine that will generate wealth for everybody, but rather a finite set of resources and a zero-sum game in which every job that goes to an H-1B visa holder from another country is one that won’t go to them, their child, or someone they know or care about. This scarcity mentality—whether fair or not (I happen to believe that it is fair)—is inherently incompatible with the worldview of the two major parties, for whom your individual problems are your concern, not theirs.
Which brings us to the question, as promised, of a left-right alliance among populists. There is plenty of common ground; most Americans readily agree that we shouldn’t be sending billions of dollars to other countries when so many Americans are suffering here at home and the nation’s infrastructure is in such woeful condition.
As in any alliance, the concern is about the differences that might tear apart a Populist Front down the line. Could left-wing populists make peace with their right-wing counterparts who openly espouse nativist and even xenophobic views? Could the right embrace the social-welfare spending and retraining expenses that would help displaced American workers, rather than focus on debt repayment or deficit reduction?
Significant parts of the American electorate are starting to consider not whether it’s time to get divorced, but who their new partner will be and whether they will be able to make their new marriage better than the last.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)
