If you can tear down the system without affecting anyone’s life, you win

There is a craving in this country, a call coming up from the oppressed masses everywhere.  They are calling for a politician who will break the system.  And also not disrupt their life in any way.

In short, the country wants a politician who talks big game and does very little.  Is this or is this not a job for the bumbling centrists and center-leftists of this country?

We have accepted as a political truth that Americans are unhappy with their lives and want politicians to deliver on their promises to change things.  But this flies in the face of recent history.  Sure, voters think the system is broken.  But there’s also nothing more hated than a disruption to the status quo.

In America, Democrats offer real policy solutions whereas Republicans offer anti-establishment vibes.  Democrats think that this is an easy choice: people choose action over inaction.  But this is completely backward.  Republicans look good for taking on “the system.”  Democrats look bad for introducing scary change.

Sometimes, the Democrats debate whether to run against Republicans as enemies of democracy or run a positive campaign about social benefits.

The answer is neither.  Both have their upsides.  But the first one has the side-effect of making Republicans look anti-establishment, and the second one can raise fears in swing voters that they might end up worse off.  We need political strategies that catch the wind of voters’ angsts and fears, not strategies that work against them.

There’s another way, a centrist populism that can displace right-wing populism and maybe deliver us bigger victories that we can be prouder of.  Embracing centrist populism doesn’t mean that we have to give up on making positive policy changes either.

The goal of politics is to improve lives, but we have to understand that that’s not the same thing as the way to win elections.  The stakes of elections are too high to so deeply misunderstand the forces that make politics run.

Electoral philosophy as it stands

There are, as I see it, four dominant strains of electoral philosophy.  First, there’s progressivism: the idea that if you successfully positively transformed society, the voters whose lives you improved would give you a permanent majority.

Next, there is fundamentals theory. This is the idea that whether the government is reelected is entirely based on the fundamentals.  Is the nation at war?  Is inflation up?  Is unemployment up?  The supremely annoying Allan Lichtman has been trying to sell this theory for years.

Third, there’s popularism, an electoral philosophy that has gotten a ton of ink over the past few years.  Popularism is the idea that parties have electoral success by messaging and legislating around the most popular parts of their programs and minimizing the unpopular parts.  The Democrats’ position on abortion is overwhelmingly popular, while their position on immigration is more contentious.  Popularists like Matt Yglesias urge Democrats to focus their message on abortion and moderate their positions on immigration and climate change.

Finally, there’s vibes theory, which is really a mishmash of different things, but the central tenet is that a party’s electoral success has nothing to do with policy or fundamentals, rather it’s purely the narrative of the campaign.  Some vibes theorists, like Will Stancil, specifically blame the media environment: noting that voter perceptions are deeply swayed by what the media says is important.

All of these theories have their committed proponents, and I’d rather stand between President Biden and the New York Times Editorial Board than get into an example war with any of them.  So I’ll suffice to say that there is a lot of truth in each of the theories, but I don’t think any of them best explains the dominant forces that we see in politics.

The real electoral dynamics

A president is elected.  They get thrashed in their first midterm.  They win reelection.  They get thrashed in their second midterm.  A president of the other party succeeds them.  That’s the election cycle.

And sure, this cycle has been off-kilter since 2020.  Trump was a figure who changed the game in a lot of ways.  But if you look at the 2020 results, you see that while Trump overwhelmed the effects of the election cycle, he didn’t eliminate them.  Republicans did well down-ballot, and Trump’s voters came out in historic numbers.  They just couldn’t get over the perfect storm of Trump’s personal unpopularity.  The fact that the cycle is off-kilter at the moment makes the next election unpredictable.  But it doesn’t mean the cycle doesn’t exist.

Any successful electoral philosophy has to explain why voters keep flipping from one party to the other.

The progressives explain this best: they might say that voters are unhappy with the status quo, which is why they always vote for the opposition.  If anyone actually followed through on their promises to fix society, the voters would rally behind them.

But attempts to act on this theory have been either irrelevant or disastrous.  The Child Tax Credit, one of the Biden administration's most successful anti-poverty programs had absolutely zero impact on the president’s poll numbers.  The year of the American Rescue Plan was also the year that Democrats lost the Virginia gubernatorial race in a landslide.  We can look at the Republicans also: rather than boosting their fortunes, Trump’s tax bill (which despite the spin, really did lower taxes on most Americans) was deeply unpopular.  Parties always think that they’ll get a big boost from their preferred program.  It either gets caricatured by the opposition or gets buried by something the public is more interested in.

The popularists might say then that the truth is that voters want consensus policies, not radical reforms.  But capping prescription drug prices, which is like the quintessential popularist policy, hasn’t done much for the White House either.

The popularists also don’t have a compelling answer to why voters keep lurching from one party to another.  The answer to why voters swept in the Republicans in 2014 and 2016 can’t be the policy radicalism of the Obama administration in . . . 2013.  It has to be some sort of anti-incumbency,

A successful electoral philosophy has to keep both thoughts in its head simultaneously: the voters want change often and always.  And they also either don’t care or don’t like it when you actually change anything.  Let’s review these principles one at a time.

Tear down the system

The election cycle does point to some persistent discontent.  It’s not universal: incumbents do tend to win reelection, and sometimes even get an extended stay in power.  But voters also tend to flip between opposites, the aristocratic elder Bush to the young Bill Clinton, for example.  After a certain number of years with one party, marked by mini-rebellions in the midterms, voters want whatever represents change.

There are many ways to claim the mantle of change.  Voters like outsiders, so people who represent something unique in politics have an advantage.  Liberal parties often nominate young people: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron, to signify a generational break from the past.

But the most effective way of associating your movement with change is a strategy that we call populism.  Definitionally, populism is somewhat nebulous, but at its core, it’s a movement that is more popular among the voters than the columnists and intellectuals.  Populism thrives on the disdain of the talking heads.  Voters like populism because it’s more than just change: it seems threatening to the chattering class which they might see as emblematic of a system that’s not working for them.

Far-right populism is particularly effective.  The appeal of far-right politics is not entirely ideologically unmoored — immigration can be unpopular.  But that’s not the far-right’s ace card.  The ace card is that they can draw a contrast with the existing establishment easier than anybody else because the existing establishment loathes them more than anyone else.  Who’s going to destroy the corrupt system keeping you down?  Probably the guys that The New York Times say are going to destroy humanity as we know it.

Voters gravitate towards the political movement that best expresses opposition to the current regime, and they don’t like it when their two options start to like each other.  If the center-right opposition joins with the center-left government to condemn the far-right, that boosts the far-right as the true opposition.  We’ve seen that in Germany where the supposedly center-right CDU kept forming grand coalitions with left-wing parties.  The result of the main parties’ commitment to keeping the far-right AfD out of power was that the AfD gained and the collective vote share of all the other parties dropped.

For both populists and young opposition leaders, won’t voters notice when they don’t actually break the system?  Different politicians have different milages, as I’ll discuss in more detail.  But it’s true: over time, a party’s ability to claim the mantle of change diminishes.  As David Cameron once said to Tony Blair, “He was the future once.”  It was a signal that Blair, once seen by voters as a force for change had inevitably become a representative of the government which voters are never truly thrilled with.

For that reason, anti-incumbency is one of the most consistent forces in politics.  Even in countries like India, Poland, and Thailand, where government attacks on civil society have been well-documented, after some time, the opposition has started to make gains again (and even taken power, in the case of Poland).  As long as the ballots are counted, voters will somehow stagger to the polls every eight years and vote for the other guy.

It’s not a coincidence that in the vast majority of democracies (with some exceptions like Japan), the voters really do tend to be split pretty evenly down the middle.  That’s the only way the constant desire for change can be satiated.

Do not actually do anything

Given that parties win on a mandate of a break from the past, they often feel pressure to, you know, break from the past by making policy changes.  This, as I demonstrated earlier, is usually pretty unpopular.

We haven’t seen any big policy-based popularity boosts in any of the last four administrations.  Voters never give politicians credit for doing actual good things.  There’s a well-accepted theory about inflation that voters see the price increases and blame the government, but when their wages increase, they credit their own hard work.  This trend in public opinion is not limited to inflation.  Big pandemic stimulus package?  It was the least they could do.  Resulting inflation?  I’m never voting for these clowns again.  Big infrastructure package?  Those are just words.  Construction-related traffic jam?  The Capitol Hill incompetents are at it again.

So who is popular?  Let me tell you who is popular, Phil Scott is popular.  And you know why?  Because Phil Scott can’t do anything.  The Republican governor in Vermont always has a Democratic supermajority in the state legislature to contend with.  So he can’t do anything except sit in office and appear mavericky.  This makes him super popular since he looks like he’s pushing against the grain, but also voters are never worried that he’ll affect their lives in any way.

The things that actually make politicians popular: Larry Hogan getting cancer and surviving, Rick Scott “managing a hurricane well” (going on TV a lot during the hurricane) — these are all about giving the impression of leadership or courage, not actually fixing society’s problems.  Joe Biden got his biggest boost from the overturning of Roe v. Wade.  Voters blamed the Republicans, not because they understood the intricacies of Supreme Court machinations, but because banning abortion sounds like something the Republicans would do.  Biden gains because it looks like the other side is trying to disrupt the status quo.

This is what the vibes theorists are right about: it is media vibes that spur improvements in presidents’ popularity.  The media loves set pieces like the President standing on top of the rubble.  But what the vibes theorists miss is that if politicians start making major policy changes, their opponents will use those policies to discredit the administration, and as the country polarizes and sours, it becomes nearly impossible to create good vibes, because everything is seen as political.

A popular president maximizes positive media moments and minimizes moments of actual policy disruption.  Maintaining the mantle of change is still important: Donald Trump was particularly talented at this, being able to portray himself as at war with his own government, and therefore pretend he was as much of a constrained maverick as the actually constrained Phil Scott.

So can you just say anything and voters will forgive you until you start doing things?  Well, it depends on who you are.  Politicians run into trouble when people take them seriously.  Trump understands this better than anyone else in politics.  When Trump says deport every immigrant (which he very well may be serious about), he has such a reputation as a liar that voters don’t take that threat seriously.  When Ron DeSantis says the same thing, voters are repulsed because they believe he might do it.

And when Trump actually acts on immigration, it goes horribly.  Family separation was one of the worst weeks in the Trump presidency.  Republicans were being stopped in the halls and being asked whether they supported tearing children away from their parents.

This is one of the reasons that left-wing populism hasn’t had the same appeal as right-wing populism in recent years.  People take leftists more seriously, and they can’t hyperbolize as easily before voters start worrying they’ll actually do the things they say they will.

The fact that voters take Democrats a lot more seriously than Republicans is a structural disadvantage.  When voters believe you’ll do what you say, anti-establishment messaging becomes confused with actual policy prescriptions, and you then have to moderate and it’s harder to claim the mantle of change.

To acknowledge the fundamentals theorists, the fundamentals still matter a lot.  If the president does nothing and gas prices go up, well, voters consider that a change to the status quo also.  Politicians should try to aim for good fundamentals to improve their electoral prospects.  But this is the bare minimum: nothing has to go wrong for voters to sour on the party’s policy agenda.  The economy is rarely good enough that the voters will forgive the party in power for things not being better.  I’m not sure it can ever be.

Tony Robbins once gave a quote which is often applied to history: “Change happens when the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of change.”  And the truth is that in America today, the pain of staying the same for most voters is not that much.  It feels like a lot.  But not compared to the pain of change.  So the progressives are right that it’s possible that things could get so dire in the country that voters will demand actual policy change, not just discontinuity.  But it’s harder to get there than they imagine.

What do we do about all of this?

One unique feature of this style of politics is there is no roadmap at all to a permanent majority.  Anti-incumbency is the most enduring force in politics.  If you can live with your opposition, the voters will elevate someone who you don’t like at all.  If you create internal competition within your party, voters will still eventually flip to someone with a completely different approach.  And maybe that’s a positive thing.  I’ve always been fond of Joseph Schumpeter’s interpretation of democracy: its core job is to cycle people through power.

The fact that we can’t win a permanent majority or that the country will be run by people we viscerally hate half the time doesn’t mean that politics is determinative.  There’s a ton that you can do to increase your chances in the next election as possible.  Who knows?  Maybe the voters will turn on you in six years rather than two.

Creating internal competition is an effective strategy: when there are factions within a party and structures that enable competition, voters are able to demonstrate that they hate the people running the country without flipping to the other side.  Frequently replacing leaders also allows for a sense of change and revitalization, again without ceding power (though it’s important to acknowledge the other dynamic at play here — voters have to accept the new leader is a plausible head of state).

This theory also doesn’t crowd out some of the others.  The fundamentals are still critical and must be tended to (even if they are sometimes out of politicians’ control).  Popularist messaging on issues is consistent with seizing the mantle of change.  And as the vibes theorists noted, watch and shape the media narrative, it matters.

In search of a centrist populism

People tend to choose theories and philosophies that fit with the practical things that they want to do.  Unsurprisingly, the main proponents of electoral progressivism are actual progressives, and popularists like Yglesias are just more moderate on the issues.

Progressives and leftists are not going to find much to like about my theory.  Because fundamentally, they want to do a lot of things.  The right embraces a do-nothing populism a lot more easily because they simply want to do fewer things.

Centrists and center-leftists have an advantage over the left in this way.  Center-leftists are not as content with the status quo as the right, but their politics can be about taking and keeping power and making important changes through the appointed bureaucracy and the occasional, well-timed, incremental reform bill.  What the center lacks is a way to separate itself from the politics of the past.

To win, the center needs to find its own populism.  As I noted earlier, populism isn’t the only way to project change, but it’s an important one.  While people eventually sour on the Emmanuel Macrons of the world, populist leaders can craft more enduring political brands.  Some view centrist policies as incompatible with populism, but that’s not true at all.  Populism isn’t the domain of any one ideological movement.

But it has to be populist: it has to attract the ire of the talking heads.  It has to lose its association with the establishment and the think tanks.  They have to abhor the tactics and the positions.

Centrist populism will never be as successful as right-wing populism.  The personalities are just not a good enough fit.  But politics is about the next election.  And centrists should recognize they do have some electoral advantages.

Some have predicted, and waited in vain, for a left-wing populism in the Democratic Party to rival the populism of the Republicans.  But populism can come from anywhere.  Center-leftists can harness it and use it to find compelling candidates and pursue power for as long as they can maintain it.