Populism Has Won, Democrats Embrace Populist Rhetoric and Style
Populism Has Won, Democrats Embrace Populism, Reject Elitism.We now see rising stars in the Democratic party trying to appear down to earth and relatable by using livestreams or posting pictures in normal clothes and cooking dinner.The idea of suited elites is over and the idea of the down to earth politician is here. Elizabeth Warren just announced her 2020 exploratory committee and almost immediately got on Instagram and cracked a brew.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez started the trend which was repeated by Beto O'Rourke and now Elizabeth Warren. It would seem that regardless of what the media says Populism has won and the Democrats are embracing this idea full force for 2020.
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In a debate between David Frum and Steve Bannon a few months ago, Bannon argued that elitism has essentially lost already.
That the real argument is whether or not we're going to see left-wing populism come to power, or right-wing populism maintain their power.
And I think he's kind of right.
I mean, we can look at 2016 and see the enthusiasm behind Bernie Sanders, and we can see that Hillary lost.
She was the elite candidate.
It's really funny that media outlets try to smear populism when the opposite would be elitism, and rule by elites for elites, not necessarily the qualified, doesn't seem to make sense.
Just the other day, Elizabeth Warren announced her exploratory committee for the 2020 presidential run.
Everyone believes, yes, this means she's going to be running.
Almost immediately, she hops on Instagram Live, cracks open a beer, and starts talking about politics.
We see something similar with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Many people relate her to Bernie Sanders.
It would seem that Bannon hit the nail on the head.
Right now, the most news we're getting about Democrats in 2020 are coming from populists.
So today, let's take a look at what's going on with the 2020 Democratic race, and let's take a look at exactly why populists have basically already won.
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I want to start by bringing up the monk debates between David Frum and Stephen Bannon.
This is from The Globe and Mail.
They say, at Friday's Monk debate in Toronto, Stephen Bannon, former strategist for U.S.
President Donald Trump and David Frum, a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, debated the following resolution.
Be it resolved, the future of Western politics is populist, not liberal.
They say, at times in the interview, Bannon appeared to be less concerned with right-wing economic nationalism supplanting the established order than with any form of economic populism doing so.
He was full of unprompted praise for the left during the U.S.
election year.
They've got the fight and energy and focus of the Tea Party of 2010, which I was a part of, and spoke almost fondly of Bernie Sanders.
And he described Italy as the current center of the universe because inexperienced left-leaning populists have paired with right-wing nationalists to try to run the government, creating an anti-establishment marketplace of ideas.
But because he envisions populism ultimately triumphing one way or another, he also paints a picture of a battle for dominance.
between a populist left that wants more state ownership and intervention and a populist right that wants less.
Whoever gets this right, he said, could wind up with two-thirds of the electorate behind it and essentially govern the country for 50 years.
They say that Bannon kept returning to the concept of economic nationalism, which he sees as a form of populism so appealing to the masses that emerging fight between left-wing populists and right-wing populists will determine who sets the policy agenda for decades to come.
He said, the center of economic nationalism, the center of populism, is to bring high-value-added manufacturing jobs back.
And it would seem like that's a reference to the 2016 campaign.
Many of the people I met on the Trump campaign and out for Hillary or Bernie expressed concern over the Trans-Pacific Partnership and how NAFTA has actually caused problems.
Bernie Sanders was opposed to these free trade agreements.
I talked with Trump supporters and asked them, why do you support Trump?
And I was shocked to find in some circumstances, there were people who used to be Bernie supporters.
They told me that Bernie was a real politician who has experience, and he opposes these free trade agreements which are decimating manufacturing.
And thus, that's who they wanted.
However, when Hillary Clinton got the nomination, they switched to Trump.
Populism was key, and Hillary Clinton was an elite that nobody wanted.
Well, the latest news is that Elizabeth Warren announces a 2020 Presidential Exploratory Committee.
Vox says she's running.
And she announced it by showing these kind of home videos, where she's standing in her kitchen, showing her family, trying to be relatable, and seemingly not like an elitist.
And she stepped it up.
From the Washington Examiner, Elizabeth Warren drinks beer, talks 2020 in Instagram livestream.
Senator Elizabeth Warren drank beer and talked about her day in an Instagram live stream hours after she announced that she is taking a major step toward a 2020 White House bid.
The Massachusetts Democrat set up the camera in her kitchen and said she would take questions from followers.
It's been kind of an amazing day, Warren said, detailing how she spoke with reporters outside her home and how she's received donations from people in all 50 states, D.C.
and Puerto Rico, according to Fox News.
David Ketanese tweeted, Elizabeth Warren is on Instagram Live, cooking dinner and drinking a beer.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is picking our next president.
We just don't know it yet.
Her husband, Bruce Mann, and her dog, Bailey, also made an appearance.
At one point, Warren told her audience to hold on while she grabbed a beer, which she cracked open and drank.
They added, her use of Instagram Live was reminiscent of live streams put on by two rising Democratic stars, outgoing Texas Rep Beto O'Rourke and New York Rep-Elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who have popularized talking to the supporters while cooking dinner or doing other tasks.
A few days ago, I made a video called Debunking the Narrative, where I addressed something called the Alternative Influence Network.
It was essentially an opinion piece masquerading as research, which smeared me, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, etc.
You get the idea.
But in it, they talk about how people like me use this relatability of YouTube to try and form a relationship and convince people that they're right.
And it's not unique to any of us in this smear campaign.
Cortez, Warren, O'Rourke, they all do the same thing.
This is the future.
For the longest time, people have asked, what works on YouTube?
And the answer has always been relatability.
That's why vloggers got so popular, because it feels like you're hanging out with your friends.
In fact, after I cracked a joke about many top podcasts and how it's seemingly just people laughing non-stop, someone said it's because people want to feel like they have friends.
They want to feel camaraderie.
They don't really care necessarily about the subject matter.
And that's what we're seeing now with Elizabeth Warren, Cortez, and O'Rourke.
The fact that they're getting on social media, they're acting like normal people.
To me, it seems like Warren's trying a little too hard.
Put on the livestream in the kitchen, crack open a beer, and I'll take a swig.
It's like, dude, you don't have to drink a beer to prove you're relatable.
But it seems like that's what's actually happening.
I'd be willing to bet there are some high-powered consultants telling her to do it, and it's still probably a very canned circumstance.
But it would seem, regardless of any of that, What's going to win in 2020 is going to be down-to-earth relatability, the idea of a populist figure.
Elizabeth Warren is praised very much so like Bernie Sanders.
In fact, people assumed she would endorse Bernie in 2016.
She didn't.
People were upset.
But they considered her to be very similar.
When we look at this poll from USA Today over who the Democrats want to run, Overwhelmingly, Hillary Clinton was told, should not run.
We can see this massive bar of around 75 or more percent of Democrats saying, please don't run.
There's a funny bit in that there's this tiny sliver of people who have apparently never heard of Hillary Clinton, so bless their souls.
But when we look up, we can see that Joe Biden is still kind of your establishment Democrat, and he is the most popular choice, short of someone entirely new.
Because admittedly, almost 60% of Democrats don't want any of these people.
But Bernie Sanders is coming in second.
When we go to the latest analysis from The Hill, they say this story is the top 10 Democrats for 2020, they jump straight to Beto O'Rourke.
And once again, we see this idea of the down-to-earth candidate who's cool and in touch, as the top choice.
They list Bernie Sanders as number two, who is a left-wing populist.
However, Elizabeth Warren falls to fifth place, and there's a reason for this.
People think she might not be able to get elected.
In fact, New York Mag ran a story called Elizabeth Warren and the Democrats 2020 Electability Dilemma.
Now the piece brings up a bunch of points where people criticize Elizabeth Warren, saying that she's allegedly too liberal, she's school marmish, standoffish, and a fear of a blatantly sexist public rejection of women, especially older women, as presidential prospects.
We can see something similar in the USA Today story, where they interviewed a man who said he thought Democrats might need to nominate an older white male to defeat President Trump for re-election.
Although he agreed the party needs to move to a new generation of leaders, the world's changing so fast.
Identitarianism is playing a huge role in what's going on with the Democrats.
One of the biggest problems Elizabeth Warren faces is that she ran this whole Native American DNA thing which people thought was just weird.
She's what, at worst 1,000th Native American?
Basically not Native American at all.
Accusations from the right are that she was trying to get some kind of benefits by claiming to be a minority.
And the interview we saw where this man said that the Democrats should nominate a white male is not the first time we've heard this.
Michael Avenatti, who for a time was considered to be a contender for the Democratic primary, actually told Time Magazine in an interview that the Democrats will need to nominate a white man.
Because many people on the left have begun to adopt this ideology.
It's not about politics, it's about this belief system.
They're now actually, in my opinion, becoming more racist in that they genuinely believe a woman can't win or a minority can't win, even though we had two terms of Barack Obama.
This is what concerns me about left-wing populism.
This idea that on the left, you have this ideology of protecting marginalized communities.
They want to kind of embrace All people, and make sure everyone is being taken care of.
You then see these weird ideas start to pop up, like they have to nominate a white man because they believe white men have privilege and thus they'll win.
To me, it's absurd considering Obama won.
But you also have some groups coming together who are actually at odds with each other.
And we can see that in the Women's March, how at the highest levels, they're anti-Semites.
Because there are elements on the left that hate Jews and Israel, and there are elements on the left that don't.
But when they come together to try and form a coalition, you just end up having two groups that don't actually like each other, and then when they find out, it causes inner turmoil and collapses.
Among the right-wing populists, their ideas have sort of coalesced around core values, and they agree with each other.
The left's response was to try and reach as far left as possible to bring in more people, as many people as possible.
And thus, I think the left is facing a massive uphill battle.
One other issue that has to do with populism is that, as the left starts to embrace much of this ideology, Generation Z rejects it.
In fact, according to many sources, Gen Z is becoming more conservative.
And as we enter 2020, we're going to see a lot of first-time voters who are more likely to support Trump.
Individualism, entrepreneurial attitudes, and reject identitarianism.
And thus, I think, regardless of what happens, the left is going to have a hard time coming into 2020.
It's hard to predict exactly what will happen going into 2020, but things are starting to heat up.
Elizabeth Warren has effectively announced she's running, and the polls are coming in.
We might actually just see the establishment candidate be the prime choice, but I believe this is likely due to a fear of identity politics from the left.
Bernie Sanders at number two, in my opinion, would likely fare much better than Joe Biden.
But with Joe Biden being the top pick outside of the reality that people just want someone completely different, but Joe Biden is number one, it would seem that for the time being, the old school elite class still is hanging on by a thread.
But with Bernie Sanders in the number two position, and with Beto O'Rourke being so popular, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being so popular, whether or not they're actually popular doesn't matter.
The media says they are.
They do live streams on Instagram.
They talk to their followers.
This idea is here to stay.
The elites, they're not doing it anymore.
Nobody wants Hillary Clinton.
They want something else.
They want to watch Elizabeth Warren crack a beer open and be a normal person.
I'm not a huge fan of Elizabeth Warren because I feel like she's played into the politics too hard.
She's trying too hard and her strategy is bad.
But I do think the left is going to need someone who is young and strong.
And I don't think race or gender matters.
I think honesty, integrity, and relatability matters.
And they're seeing this too.
The elites, whether or not they're still on top, doesn't matter.
They won't be in the next few years.
And if the Democrats don't win in 2020, they still will likely fare a lot better going into 2024,
and they're probably going to run a very, very populist and very left-wing candidate.
But let me know what you think in the comments below, and we'll keep the conversation going.
Ultimately, it's not so much about whether or not Elizabeth Warren can win, although I don't think she can.
It's about the idea that when she announces, she plays the populist role perfectly.
And this is what we're going to see.
So do you think the populists have won?
Do you think the elites have lost?
Comment below, we'll keep the conversation going.
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