Why the left keeps losing (or does it)?

[MUSIC PLAYING] MARK BLYTHE: From the Rudd Center for International Finance and Economics at Brown University, this is the Rhodes Center Podcast. I'm the director of the center and your host, Mark Blythe. You've probably noticed in the last few years that incumbent political parties haven't been doing great in elections around the world. First COVID and then inflation pummeled these incumbent vote shares everywhere.

But all of that has to be seen against a broader backdrop of the rise of populism since around Twenty Fifteen. You might not remember this, but initially, there was as much left populism as there was right populism, with Bernie Sanders in the US, Corbin in the UK, and Podemos in Spain. But lately, only one flavor of populism seems to be gaining momentum-- that of the right. These forces seem to be on the march, having won power in the US and Italy, while growing in strength in the UK and Germany.

Meanwhile, incumbent left and center parties, at least until very recently in Canada and Australia, seemed to be in retreat. So in this episode, I wanted to explore something very specific-- why the left keeps on losing.

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To do that, I spoke with two experts, Bjorn Bremer and Paul Pierson. Bjorn Bremer is a political scientist at Central European University, and this year he is a JFK Memorial fellow at the Minda Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. Paul Pierson is a prolific author, great observer of American politics, and a professor of political science at UC Berkeley.

Later in the episode, you'll hear from Paul Pierson, who in some ways challenges the very premise of my argument. But first, Bjorn Bremer. Bremer's new book is called austerity from the left-- social Democratic parties in the shadow of the Great Recession. And as you can imagine, based on the title alone, this instantly caught my eye. One note before we begin-- both of these conversations were recorded earlier in the semester, which means President Trump has certainly shaken things up a bit since then. That said, I think these guests court analysis are just as relevant as ever. To start, here's my conversation with Bjorn Bremmer.

Hi, Bjorn. Welcome to the podcast.

BJORN BREMMER: Hey, Mark. Great to be here.

MARK BLYTHE: So I dragged you into this one because you've written this very interesting book, which speaks exactly to the theme of this podcast, which is why the left keep getting beaten. And your book is austerity from the left, correct?

BJORN BREMMER: That's correct, yes.

MARK BLYTHE: Now, that's weird because we think about austerity as this project that the right's want to squeeze the state and all the rest of it. You think Clara Mattei's book, a whole bunch of other work. My own work has been very much this way. And what you point out is that not only have left parties embraced this, they've embraced it despite the fact that it has, in some ways, a lot of diminishing returns.

So just so everyone's on the same page. You've got an electoral dilemma that animates this, and it's one side of your work. And the other side is an ideational or ideological dilemma. Just give us the overview. What's the story? Why do you think they keep doing this, and what is it they keep doing exactly?

BJORN BREMMER: The point that I'm making in my book is that often, yes, austerity may be coming from the right, but there has also been a lot of austerity that has been implemented by the left, in particular following the financial crisis in the context of the European sovereign debt crisis, especially in Europe. And what's happening there was that on the one hand, the left was trying to reach out to voters in the center, who they believe were fiscally conservative, who they believe they needed to convince that they were fiscally competent, that they were credible.

MARK BLYTHE: So why did they have to care about these people? They don't have enough people in the working class?

BJORN BREMMER: Exactly right. They believe that they need to branch out their electorate, especially against the background of deindustrialization, the shrinking of the Industrial working class. And they did it successfully for a while in the Nineteen Nineties and early Two Thousand. They reached out to these voters, believing that they would be able to build a coalition of the working class and the higher educated middle classes in favor of a left wing project. And that's the electoral problem was that essentially you need to convince these voters to vote for you, while still bringing together an electoral left wing program.

MARK BLYTHE: So for a long time, though, there's been a bit of suspicion amongst academics, at least, about whether this strategy is going to work. And I remember a piece from Comparative Political Studies a long time ago, now called "Catchall or Catch and Release," which basically pointed out that, yes, you can do that. You can win these voters in one election, but there's no guarantee that they're going to stick with you in the next election. How does your book go beyond that?

BJORN BREMMER: That Dilemma-- the problem is really at the core of what I'm saying. I'm extending it to a certain-- in some way. Because the point really is that these people that are in the middle, that are going between the center left and center right from one election to the other, those voters make up their mind pretty fluidly from one election to the other. And when it comes to the issue of fiscal crisis to fiscal policy, they often-- actually, what we see-- end up going for the center right, independently of whether the left positions itself in favor or against austerity because they believe that actually the center right is much more credible in implementing austerity-- much better at implementing austerity. So to the extent that the left is trying to woo these voters, they actually just actually push them towards the center right.

MARK BLYTHE: And of course, that pushes them to the center right. They're not voting for the left. What about the left's core constituents? Don't they get fed up with the fact that they're moving away from them?

BJORN BREMMER: Yes. The core voters are the ones who bear the costs of austerity. And because they don't what the center left stands for anymore, they certainly see that they're not getting their interests represented, they are moving away from the center left as well. Meaning that, actually, in the end you have different electoral groups moving away rather than to the center left all at the same time.

MARK BLYTHE: So this goes back to the famous line in American politics-- I forget exactly which Democratic politician who said it, but to paraphrase-- for every blue collar worker we lose in Pennsylvania, we'll pick up two suburban moms somewhere else. Only it doesn't work, does it?

BJORN BREMMER: Well, it doesn't work. And of course, it depends on the context when it works. This may have worked in the early Two Thousand. It certainly didn't work anymore after the financial crisis. It certainly doesn't work today I would argue. Today, you're actually losing a lot of these voters at the same time to the different groups around you. Especially in Europe, where you have different parties coming at this from different extensions.

You have the far left. You have the new left, competing with the center left for power. But you also have the center right and the far right competing with you for votes and being attacked from all these different sides. You cannot do this trade off. You cannot do this math anymore.

MARK BLYTHE: And that's exactly the environment we find ourselves even in so-called two party systems. So if we think about what's happening with the UK, with the Reform Party-- if we think the United States is still a two-party system, but essentially the MAGA-isation of the Republican Party has essentially shifted it in such a direction that it's no longer competing at all. The Democrats are trying to move into that space.

They're not winning in the middle, and they're certainly not winning at the back end either with their traditional core supporters. So you've got a strategy, which yields increasingly diminishing returns. At that point, we would expect some kind of learning to come in. But what you also argue in the book is they're not learning, and they're not learning is because of a certain set of ideas-- how they think about the economy. Walk us through that.

BJORN BREMMER: Yeah. I think you have to distinguish a little bit what happened in the Twenty Tens and what is happening now because I do think that nowadays you do see some learning, but maybe we'll get to that in a minute. What I think we saw in the context of the financial crisis and the aftermath of it, the Great Recession, was essentially that people, first of all, were drawn to their own old ideas that they developed in the previous decades. We saw countries undergoing relatively good economic times, good growth rates. But we also saw a lot of people being lifted out of poverty around the globe.

So there was a reason why these economic ideas were popular, and they were also popular among the left. The problem was that because these ideas were successful in the past, they were also applied in the context of the crises. When they actually didn't get any traction anymore to implement a fiscal consolidation in times when the economy is already hitting rock bottom is something very different than to implement fiscal consolidation when you're living through the Great Moderation and the economy is doing relatively well.

MARK BLYTHE: So back in the '90s, when the left-- looking at what we came to be known as supply side social democracy, you could say, hey, the welfare state is not really a macro shock absorber. It's about skills activation. It's about bringing people into the workforce. You could look at the national debt, and say, we need to actually reduce this debt because then we'll have more firepower going forward if we go into the next crisis.

But when you take those ideas then and put them down in the economy when it's already heading South, you just end up digging a big hole. But that would, again, suggest to me-- and I come back to my puzzlement, which is this whole episode is about. Why did they keep losing? Because they keep doing the same stuff. So what we've got on the table is an irresolvable electoral dilemma. The more you try and catch these people, the more likely they'll swim away and your core vote swarms away. And at the same time, you learned a particular period a bunch of ideas that once you put them into rougher economic seas, really don't help your cause. Is there a second bit of learning that comes from this, or are they just stuck?

BJORN BREMMER: I think there's learning going on. For example, now, among the center left or the left in many places. The problem is in some ways twofold. On the one hand, in many places the left is now so weak that even though they have learned from the past, they don't have the political or electoral power to push for new ideas the way they maybe could have still done it 10 or 15 years ago. But on the other hand, even places where they are able to still get into power-- for example, think about Biden in this country. To implement some of these ideas, on the one hand, take some time, but it also relies on tools that you undermined yourself in the first place.

Think about state capacity. Often the state nowadays doesn't have the capacity anymore to implement, for example, Bidenomics or big state project that the left should really support these days, based on learning. And therefore, you have dug yourself, again, into this hole that is very difficult to get out of. Either because you electorally cannot get the keys to power anymore, or when you get into power, you actually don't have the tools to at least in a really fast way to change the trajectory of your economy. And so in that sense, then you don't get any of the benefits out of this learning that you actually seeing in some parts of the left.

MARK BLYTHE: So is it safe to say then that in the almost 20 years since the financial crisis what's happened is the left learned the wrong lessons and adopted the wrong strategy? By the time they figured out it was the wrong strategy and possibly the wrong lessons, they had weakened themselves and weakened the states that they're allowing to do things to such an extent that they just can't do it, even if they learn it. That does seem to explain what's going on in the UK at the moment, where you have a Labor government that comes in, basically adopts an austerity posture, and talks the economy down further than it is now, and then finds themselves in a whole heap of trouble.

This is very convincing to me. But then let's put something on the table. We just had an election here. It's Trump. Trump wasn't about this stuff. Trump was about wokeism, the elites. They're out of touch. They're self-centered. That the populist argument, in a sense, is that this is about a loss of culture as much as it is anything about economics. But if we take your story seriously, most of that's ephemeral, right?

BJORN BREMMER: Yes, but it's something that right, of course, likes to play up. That's their playing field. That's where they're strong at. The left's problem is that they don't have a way to counter this. They don't have their own convincing narratives on these issues, but maybe even more so is that they are not able to bring it back to the economics because they are for a long time they've under-delivered, or they actually don't have their own narratives on the economy to tell to voters this is what you're going to get if you're going to vote for us.

It's very much a problem that the left, at least in the eyes of many of the voters, doesn't stand for anything really anymore. There's this idea of the brand that parties have, and the brand of these parties of the center left parties in many places, has just so been diluted over time that the left doesn't manage to make the election or the campaign any more about the economy, but it then often gives in to the right when the right is trying to drive the narrative about, for example, cultural issues, about immigration, about many of the topics that the right is much better than the left, at least at the moment.

MARK BLYTHE: So this isn't an alternative explanation. What you're actually seeing is the two of them are complementary insofar as the left get themselves stuck in this hole. And part of being stuck in this hole is a function of a certain set of ideas. Those ideas find it very, very difficult to even talk about these, "quote, unquote," cultural issues, which immigration is both cultural and economic and all other sorts of things. But they don't seem to be able to actually address that. That compounds their weakness. Is there any hope for the left here?

BJORN BREMMER: I believe there is hope, but only to the extent that the left manages to rebuild its brand on economic terms. It needs to not only to have, for example, the right policies and the right policy mix-- because often, when you look at, for example, the data, a lot of the policies that the left wants to implement find huge support among the electorate. The problem is that the left at the moment doesn't have a way to put this into a coherent framework. The ideology, the program, the overall program, is missing.

MARK BLYTHE: Like who are we and what are we for?

BJORN BREMMER: Exactly. And then they also need to be able to talk about this. They need the narrative, the language, the discourse to convince the voters that this makes sense and this is credible. And the problem is that this is a long term project. That's nothing you fix within one electoral cycle-- maybe not even two electoral cycles. That's something that you have to do over time.

And I think in that sense, in the short run, maybe there's not a lot of hope. But in the long run, to the extent that parties manage to mobilize these ideas, programs, and the discourse, and get help from it from other movements, such as trade unions, other social movements, and they can actually still revitalize some of these ideas, I believe.

MARK BLYTHE: But if the key to this is to revitalize the ideas side-- let's say that they do this. Let's say it takes two electoral cycles. They capture the high ground. They basically capitalize upon the fact that the right can't do what they say they're going to do-- that the outcomes are worse, et cetera. Don't they still run into the electoral dilemma? That there just aren't enough of core voters? Do they have to become, in a sense, big catch all parties again? Which ultimately leads to the dilution of the brand because you're trying to be all things to all people.

BJORN BREMMER: I mean, you don't have to be catch all. You just have to catch enough.

MARK BLYTHE: Catch enough.

BJORN BREMMER: And I think there is evidence that you can be catch enough because there's a lot of voters, I mean, among the educated, among the higher upper middle classes that are actually very sympathetic towards the left, and the left economic program, and the economic framework. And especially if you combine that with questions about climate change, which touch about a huge amount of distributive issues.

But also if you combine this with question of access-- who gets access to welfare state? Who doesn't get access to it? You can actually, I think, build an electoral coalition that is enough to get into power, again. Because people, like, for example, public sector workers, people like the social cultural professionals, they do have left wing economic positions. You just need to be able to combine those voters with those-- maybe, for example, working class voters, who have slightly different views on the culture but agree on the economic issues. And in that sense, it's really a strategy, where you emphasize the economy, again, and manage to downplay cultural issues.

MARK BLYTHE: I can imagine not working to a certain extent, or at least being possible in Europe. I'm thinking now in a fully Trumpian US, where there aren't that many public sector workers, where unions are weak, where the working class is not just culturally divided on this. They actually have quite orthogonal preferences on redistribution in many cases. As I like to remind people on my side of the fence, being conservative is not a brain disease. It's just a set of preferences that one third of every population tend to have. And I just don't know if in that soil you can grow that rose anymore, or whether it really has changed that much.

BJORN BREMMER: It's easy to see where you're coming from this pessimistic view. But I mean, the optimist is, now, living in the US for a year, you do see even the places like the suburbs, where we always think that people are hoarding privilege, in those places there are also issues that you can actually campaign on as a left wing Democratic party.

I mean, think about the housing crisis. Think about the cost of childcare. Think about the cost of private medicine. There's a lot of impacts that are related to the cost of living crisis. A lot of elements, where I think you can mobilize a lot of the educated elite and mobilize them alongside the working class in a way that-- probably even in the United States you can still build majorities for the left wing platform.

MARK BLYTHE: Let's leave it on an optimistic note. Thank you very much.

BJORN BREMMER: Thank you, Mark. Great to be here.

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MARK BLYTHE: Well, there you go then. A rare optimistic note for those on the left. I'll let our lefty listeners savor it for a moment. OK. We're back. While Bjorn Bremmer outlines potential ways the left could become a winning movement, it's hardly a given. And there are a few issues we didn't touch on that complicate the left's problems even further. But there's also reason to think that the left may not be in as much trouble as headline election results in liberal hand-wringing suggest. Even in the United States, as my next guest put it--

PAUL PIERSON: Democrats actually did a lot better in the election than they had any right to expect, given what was going on cross-nationally.

MARK BLYTHE: That's Paul Pierson. As I mentioned earlier, Pierson is a political scientist at UC Berkeley and an expert on US politics, and he helped me to see this whole conundrum for the American left in a new way. Here's our conversation.

Hi, Paul, welcome to the pod.

PAUL PIERSON: Great to be here.

MARK BLYTHE: So we've been talking with Bjorn Bremmer about his analysis of why the left keeps losing. And for a quick recap, essentially, it boils down to two things. One is the old electoral dilemma. There aren't enough workers, which begs the question, if the workers would still vote for you, anyway, if there was enough of them. And then the other one is this kind of catch and release phenomenon that when you're constantly chasing the median voter, you can get them for one election, but there's no reason for them to stick around the other elections. And then you begin to eat away at your own base.

I'm coming at you for something different on this. Your writings have actually been-- about the United States, in particular, have really pressed on basically the notion that the right has been super effective and the left has been way less effective. So why has the left been so less effective, and why do they keep losing from your point of view? What's going on?

PAUL PIERSON: I have really been focusing on the US in the recent work that I've been doing on this mostly with Jacob hacker at Yale, and I just don't think it's accurate to say in the US that the left keeps losing. I mean, if you mean electorally that the left keeps losing, they've won the popular vote, now, in six out of the last eight presidential elections. It was six out of seven, until this last November. And the two times the Republicans have won the popular vote was under quite exceptional circumstances.

This case, the post-COVID election that was basically wiping out all incumbents, regardless of whether they were right or left, and they barely won. And they won in post 9/11-- still early days of the Iraq war with a nationalist rally around George W. Bush in Two Thousand and Four. They've lost the popular vote in every other presidential election. Republicans have not represented a majority of American voters in the US Senate since the mid Nineteen Nineties. It's been 30 years since they've actually represented a majority in the US Senate.

And in the House, Democrats picked up even in what was a really, really hard year for incumbents. They actually picked up a couple of seats in the House in Twenty Twenty-Four. I totally take the point if one looks broadly at parties of the center left and the left across the rich world. It does look like the left is losing and losing badly in many cases. But the US, I think, stands out as something of an exception.

MARK BLYTHE: It's good to hear that in the sense that maybe it's just the shock of the last election in the United States, but there is this pervasive narrative that here we go again. They're losing again. But as you point out empirically, the exception is the other side actually win. And they got exceptionally fortunate, shall we say, this time. You mentioned the Germans. Let's pop over to Europe for a minute just for comparison.

The SPD are down to 15% of the vote, and you've got the Labor Party back in with a huge majority, despite getting two million less votes than the last time they lost, which is really weird. So there the narrative is that they're definitely on the skids. The right is on the rise. Is it more mixed there still as well? Do you think there's actually a more mixed narrative there, or is it really like that's going wrong?

PAUL PIERSON: I do think the overall narrative should be pretty negative for the left. I think part of the reason why the US looks different-- and again, it's like to talk about the US at this particular moment, things look pretty dire for the Democrats, and I understand that. I share a lot of those feelings about the contemporary circumstances, but it shouldn't be fit into this broad narrative of, oh, yeah, they've just been losing all these elections for the last 20, 25 years.

And I think, actually, we need to understand why, again, compared with what's happened in a lot of other countries, they actually did pretty well in this election, given that they were running at this time of very high inflation, where people were very anti-incumbent really, regardless of what the incumbent government was. I think a big difference here is the fact that the US has a solid two-party system. And so if you're a center left party in virtually every other country, you have a bunch of places to go.

You may go to the hard right. And clearly, some working class voters have done that in many cases, but there are a bunch of different places that you can go, and the center left just seems to have a very hard time holding voters in that kind of context. But in the US, unless you're going to just not vote, which of course, a lot of people choose to do-- and the turnout for Democrats-- I think a bunch of Biden voters did stay home in Twenty Twenty-Four, and that was important.

But basically, the main choice that you have is to vote for the other party, the other major party. And it's the case for some demographics, which I think we're going to want to get into, like White working class voters. It's true that Republicans have gained at the expense of Democrats. But I think it's hard to make the case that they've done that across the board over a significant run of elections.

MARK BLYTHE: So let's go there. Let's go to the White working classes. There was a paper that when it first came out about Twenty Sixteen by Thomas Piketty on Brahmins and merchants, and essentially said that the people who increasingly vote for left parties and constitute left parties are $100,000 college-educated, and everyone else is kind of deserting them. And at the time, I thought, there's got to be something wrong with this paper. This just doesn't seem right. But it does seem, election after election, that the working class has defected from what has been, if you will, the working class party. What do you think is behind this? Is there any one thing, or is it a whole series of things?

PAUL PIERSON: I think that paper is basically right if one thinks about it cross-nationally. I agree with you. I think the evidence, since it was written, largely comports with it. Again, I think the US looks different. And so in the US, I would say we need to distinguish between the working class and the White working class Because race just matters enormously in American politics.

The White working class has clearly moved very strongly towards the Republican Party over a period of time, and Trump's emergence has only accelerated that. And it's true, increasingly, even with union voters, White working-- and in the US, of course, a relatively small percentage of working class voters are union voters. But for a while, it seemed like white working class support for the Democrats held up pretty well if they were actually in union households, or they were union members. Even that seems to now be eroding pretty radically.

I think I saw figures the other day suggesting that in swing states, about 2/3 of white union voters voted for Trump, in is just shocking and historical perspective. So among Whites, that's clearly the shift. The Democrats, they say it's not a Brahmin left party in the same way that I think you could say some of the European left parties have center left parties have become. I would say it's a multiracial, multiclass coalition because it still includes a substantial majority of working class voters of color are voting for the Democrats.

Those numbers are going down, especially in the last couple of elections, and it's important to understand why that would be. But most non-college educated Blacks are still voting for the Democratic Party. So what's interesting about the use case is, again, that it's this cross-class coalition. The income used to be a really good predictor of who you voted for in the US. It's no longer a particularly good predictor of who you're going to vote for. If you know whether somebody was educated-- whether they have a college education and you know what their race is, then you've got a lot more information about who they're going to vote for. But I think calling it just a Brahmin left party doesn't capture that really important complexity about the Democratic coalition.

MARK BLYTHE: So let's throw both Latino voters and the issue of immigration in the US into this one, and this we can generalize across lots of countries. In fact, let me take a segue. The only left party in Europe that seems to have done really well were the Danes, and the Danes basically politicized the immigration. They took control of that debate. They paid a price for it. They were excluded from social congresses and all that sort of stuff. They were castigated as being racist, but they managed to kill the right and basically solidify their electoral position.

Why is it, do you think, that other left center left parties have such a hard time, in a sense, responding to those predominantly working class voices that say immigration is something we want to talk about? And the response of the parties in many times is, no, you're not allowed to talk about that.

PAUL PIERSON: So I'll stick to the American case, but maybe it actually fits well with the cross-national story. I just don't enough. I do think immigration was a really damaging issue for the Democrats in the campaign. I don't think there's any question about that, really. And I think there were a couple of things going on. One is that the public opinion just turned much more anti-immigration in the US between Twenty Twenty and Twenty Twenty-Four. The change is really quite striking.

I think it goes something like the percentage of people saying that they'd like to see immigration go down. Not stay the same or go up, but go down, which was about 28% at the end of Trump's first term in office in Twenty Twenty. And now, it's 55%. Or the Twenty Twenty-Four election was 55%, which is really an astonishing shift. So that happens. I think it's driven to a significant part-- some of this is a pendulum thing. So Trump is really hard on immigration, and so people react about that.

There's a lot of backlash in both directions that goes on in American politics these days. Whoever is in, people tend to not like, and so there's a reaction the other way. So Trump was very energetically anti-immigration, and there was somewhat of a backlash against that. And Democrats actually picked up on that and used it, I think, reasonably well in the Twenty Twenty campaign. But then there was a big wave of illegal immigration into the US after Twenty Twenty, especially in Twenty Twenty-Two, Twenty Twenty-Three.

And so I think reality was a really important factor here. And then the other thing was that as public opinion shifted, in part, I think in significant part as a reflection of that reality, but also because, again, the pendulum is swinging is you've got a more pro-immigration administration. Democrats are very slow to respond to that.

And I think part of that is what you were kind of I think getting at in your initial comments about this is that there are a lot of powerful interests within the party. And I would say also just the affect of the party and party elites that didn't want to be tough on immigration. That just does not come naturally to them. And that was reinforced. There's been some good reporting on this recently, suggesting that the Democrats were actually getting pretty bad polling on this issue.

It's controversial. I'm not an expert on this, but I've seen reporting that makes me think this a plausible interpretation that they were slow to recognize that it wasn't just that they didn't want to alienate certain parts of their coalition, but also they didn't realize the extent to which they were out of step with public opinion.

MARK BLYTHE: I remember the survey that you were quoting there that basically showed the big jump in support for anti-immigration policies. So we now have a majority of people who are in favor of deportations, actual deportations. But I think it was the same poll that said that a majority also back a pathway to legal immigration. So, which bit are we pulling on here?

So, to me, I've always wondered this about the Democrats electoral logic to think rather Machiavellian about this when elections are decided by 1% or less in many districts. So was it kind of banking on that of Two Thousand logic that there's an inevitability to a Democratic majority, that immigrants tend to be Democrat, et cetera, which seems to not be the case, particularly with male Latinos. But there was of demography is destiny thing that pushed it along, and they've just been really slow to figure it out.

No. Guess what? They can be conservative, too. They can be reactionary, too.

PAUL PIERSON: Yeah, no, I think that's right, Mark. And I do think that there was a lot of optimism slash confidence, about the demographic pull that goes back all the way to Obama. The idea that this is not just a majority coalition, but it's a majority coalition that is growing over time. So there's that element of it.

And then, I think in retrospect, pretty clearly a big mistake in thinking that Latino voters were one issue, voters with one view about immigration. And both those things are clearly wrong. So I mentioned before, Democrats have this cross-class coalition. They continue to draw lots of support from working class, voters of color. But the one place where they are clearly losing ground there is among non-college educated, particularly Latino voters, but also to some extent, Black voters, especially men who are culturally conservative, which may be about immigration.

It may be about other things-- It may be about gender, it could be about abortion, it could be about a bunch of other things. But immigration is part of that. There is a substantial bloc of those voters, and I think Democrats assumed there's no way we're going to lose those voters to Donald Trump. And they were wrong.

MARK BLYTHE: Let's talk about vibes. You'll recall that last year, everyone was very obsessed with vibes in the economy. So we had this thing which is a very Democratic center left thing to do, is look, we do facts. The other people do hysteria. And our facts say that the unemployment rate is good and the growth rate is good, and inflation is coming down, so why is everyone bitching about it?

What's going on here? This is terrible. You people don't understand the economy, which is the worst thing you can say, right? And then a little while later, John otters and others came along and said, you know, if you take the core inflation rate and strip out all the things that are core and just leave the volatile elements, then it turns out the inflation rate, particularly for poor people, is in double figures. So in a sense, they got it right.

I mention this because I wonder if there's a particular style of Democratic governing that gets them into trouble. And I think this is true of the center left in general, which is we've got this slavish devotion to what we see as facts, and the other side just has given up on that. That's been their modus for the past 30 years is just give up on facts.

So they are running vibes all the time, and we're telling a story about this is the way the world is. And we tell the same story with immigration. Immigration is good for the country and so on and so forth. And they have a living disposition that tends to say, no, this is not the way that I see this. This is not how I experience this.

Is this, in a sense, part of the long-term problem that in a sense, in a post-fact world, that we're unable to really pivot and make arguments because it's just it's not really what people are experiencing. The vibes are different between, if you will, the ruling class and everybody that they pretend to talk for.

PAUL PIERSON: There are two, I think, important strands in what you're saying, both are worth engaging with. The first one is just the idea that, well, actually, the economy was not so great, did not feel so great for a lot of voters for genuine reasons. And I think that's true. I think what you're saying about that is right.

And I'm sure the Biden people, I mean, a lot of the Biden people were probably kicking and screaming while this was going on, saying, like, look how much better our economic record is than anybody else's economic record. I mean, lower unemployment, faster growth. We're the envy of the rich world.

Which is true, but essentially irrelevant to voters. Voters are not like comparing how economic conditions are in Europe.

MARK BLYTHE: Exactly, look at our aggregate investment statistics. Yeah, nobody's playing that game.

PAUL PIERSON: So, inflation, I think we see again as part of the cross-national story of all these governments. So again, it's not just left governments. I mean, look what happened to the-- Tories had their worst electoral defeat in the history of the party. So it's not just the left that gets hit by this, but it was the economy. And the impact of inflation was felt by people in a way that made them want to throw out the party.

And in the case of the US, made people think like I felt like things were better in Twenty Twenty. At least pre-COVID, under Trump, the economy was better and under Trump than it was under Biden. And I understand why people would feel that way, even though I think there's a lot of interesting things to say about both what the Biden administration and Congress did on the economy and certainly what they tried to do on the economy, which was enormously ambitious and interesting.

So that's the first dimension is like, well, what was actually happening in the economy, and what were people experiencing? The second thing, the vibe thing, or as you say, the discursive thing, if you want, the way that people think about what's going on and what they're exposed. You know I tend to be resistant to these kinds of arguments in lots of cases, but I also think it's hard to argue with the idea that Democrats have been doing less and less well in the informational game, like the informational battle, as the informational environment has changed very radically in a short period of time in these countries.

I think Republicans have adapted to that world better than Democrats have, and that's important. And just one quick maybe a caveat on that last point. I don't know if you've seen the initial polling on Donald Trump and his approval rating, which is not good for a new president. Overall, it's a little better than it was his first time around, but it's terrible compared with other presidents.

But his approval rating on the economy is quite bad. He's like minus 12 on do you approve of how he's doing on the economy. And I was quite struck by that. That suggested to me it's a warning sign for him and his administration that people continue to not feel very good about the economy, and that they are maybe disinclined to allow him a long honeymoon where he can blame the Biden administration for the price of eggs or whatever.

MARK BLYTHE: Yeah. There's two parts to that I'd respond to. The first one is there's a new NBER paper out. The author is blinder, but not Alan Blinder. Maybe it's a relative. There's a lot that goes on in econ.

But it's a fantastic paper. And what it shows is the-- you know, the Michigan Confidence Survey, how there's the partisan split, and it just reverses the minute the president is in. This is actually causally important. They've managed to estimate that because Republican voters were so convinced the economy was worse, and when inflation became a topic, they massively overestimated inflation, that their own buying behavior actually led to an increase in the underlying rate.

So they literally-- to use the sociological parlance, they performed inflation into existence, which is just crazy. But it's a really good paper on this one. The second one is, yeah, I mean, I've been more sympathetic to these types of arguments, but as I get older and more cynical, I just basically go-- where are the interests in this stuff, so I want to push in that direction.

Now, there's a wonderful study that came out. I don't know if you've seen it. I did a book years ago called The Great Transformation. I just thought this was funny because they called their study The Great Transformation. What it shows is that in Nineteen Ninety, 9% percent of households at a zip code level were dependent for 25% or more of their income on government transfers. So Medicare, Social Security, et cetera, and it was broadly geographically distributed.

Now it's 54% of those zip codes, and the vast majority are in Republican areas. So if you're going to take a chainsaw to government, that's where the blood's going to come from. Now here's a kind of classic ideas versus interest story. Do the ideational or ideological ties that bring people to this coalition of MAGA deweight how much that's going to hurt?

Do they recognize that it hurts, but it has to happen because you have to cut the government? Or they recognize, but it's really Joe Biden's fault. Do they still manage to play those games, or is it really a case of no, there are actually real interests in these voters are going to come and get you eventually if you try this? How do you think that's going to play out?

PAUL PIERSON: Well, I think that is the $64 billion question about what is going to happen over the next two years. They are going to do things that are extremely unpopular. House Republicans just passed a budget resolution. We'll see if they can actually pass an actual budget.

But if they do, it's going to be full of massive cuts, especially to Medicaid, that are going to put enormous fiscal pressure on the states and are going to take away health insurance from-- depending on how they do it-- but I don't know 10, 15 million people, something like that. And the majority of those people are going to be in households that voted for Donald Trump, probably. So, like you say, it's those areas of the country that have become--

There has been an expansion of the American welfare state, particularly on healthcare for voters in the bottom half of the income distribution. A lot of that was done through the Affordable Care Act, but big expansions of Medicaid as well. And they're going to undo a lot of that. They're going to try to undo a lot of that.

There was a great article in the Washington Post shortly after the election. They went to a small town in the middle part of Pennsylvania that was totally Trump country. And was also, like you're describing, it was one of these counties where there was a huge amount of reliance upon federal social welfare benefits. A lot of people on disability, that's another big--

MARK BLYTHE: Right. Another huge one, absolutely.

PAUL PIERSON: --for this as well. And so they interviewed people there. And basically what people said over and over again was we trust Donald Trump. He's going to take away the benefits of those other people that are undeserved. They're not going to take away our justified benefits.

Well, they're going to find out it's not going to work that way. So then the question is, how are they going to respond to that? And normally, we would think, well, there's going to be a backlash. A pendulum is going to swing back the other way.

But I would say that there are now two barriers. I think we're going to see a test of this. How much can you get away with doing really unpopular things? I mean my doctoral dissertation from way back, way, way back was the idea that, well, can't really cut these welfare state programs very much because they're electorally entrenched. So we're going to find out.

And I think there are two obstacles to what we might, 15 or 20 years ago, we would have expected. One is, like you said, it's not clear that voters, even under these circumstances, are going to blame Donald Trump and the Republicans for this. I think people have gotten much, much better at living inside their own informational bubbles and engaging in motivated reasoning.

There's a wonderful new book coming out by a guy named Michael Shepherd. He teaches at University of Michigan, that looks at the South and doom spiral you can get on healthcare as you get more and more voting for Republicans, worse and worse healthcare outcomes-- really kind of terrible things that are going on. Big cuts in programs leads to worse healthcare outcomes, but it leads to more voting for Republicans.

MARK BLYTHE: Yeah, because it shows that the state doesn't work. You see, this was all along.

PAUL PIERSON: Yeah, so there's just kind of a doom loop that he actually shows has worked in the case of healthcare in the American South. And we're going to see whether that's going to be true in other places, when it's maybe more visible that Republicans are driving that downturn. And then the other question, like, probably beyond the scope of this podcast, but to what extent are we going to have reasonably free and fair elections in Twenty Twenty-Six and Twenty Twenty-Eight?

I think, given what's going on in Washington right now, that question is on the table. I think how the media is going to perform leading into that election, what the courts are going to look like by then, I mean, I think we are in very dangerous territory right now for both these reasons, both because changes in the way that voters behave and changes in the whole apparatus around elections. We'll have to see whether that kind of backlash kicks in.

MARK BLYTHE: So, which changes our conversation from does the left keep losing? Well, I started with why does the left keep losing. You threw it back, as does the left, losing. And then the next question might will the left even get to contest. That's where it goes.

Let's end this on, if not a positive one, then at least an outcome which was not foreseen. I'll put it this way. When you look across these different elections, Germany, the United Kingdom, recently, the United States, one thing that's become noticeable is the left is now feminized because it turns out that hierarchy misogyny doesn't sell that well. Who knew but amongst the people who were affected by it?

And this seems to be quite robust. And you can imagine splitting off other groups. You're white incel males might definitely go completely MAGA for the rest of their lives. Who knows? But there are other groups that are reachable. Does that mean that of women, in a sense, you can take that and work with it as a base for an alternative coalition? Is this something that the left can and should try to build on?

PAUL PIERSON: I'm going to just limit myself to the US because I feel like I know it better, and you and others can figure out whether it extrapolates to other cases. It's a great question to ask. I do think it's promising. I don't want to slip back into the demography is destiny thing, but women are the majority of the electorate in the US, and they vote more.

So if you could only have one gender is the base for your coalition, it's probably more promising to have women. And I think, as in other areas that Republicans are likely to do a lot of things on gender issues that are alienating and frightening to voters who have a different view on this issue, and I guess I would extend it's partly about gender, but it's also, I guess, about what you could call sexual minorities that are a growing part of the electorate and minority of the electorate, but a growing part of the electorate and they have families and they have friends and relatives. And so I do think that there's potential there.

I mean, I was struck, I was actually really shocked by how misogynist the Trump campaign was on many levels, kind of adopting the kind of pro wrestling affect.

MARK BLYTHE: My favorite one was where Vance and Trump walked out together to "It's A Man's World." I mean, it's just really?

PAUL PIERSON: Exactly. And I don't think that helped them. I think one real danger we have in analyzing these things is that we think that whichever side won, they did everything smart, and whichever side lost, they did everything stupid. And usually that's followed up at least on the left, where the circular firing squad kicks in. It's like and the stupid things that we did were the things that were not my ideas.

And we really need to be like so suspicious of all of that. And again, like Democrats actually did a lot better in the election than they had any right to expect, given what was going on cross-nationally, given the public mood. So I just think we really need to be careful about thinking like, oh, yeah, the Trump people figured out the total playbook to capturing the median voter in the US. I don't think there's any evidence for that at all.

MARK BLYTHE: Yeah, exactly. It's the minimum winning coalition. It's a carbon coalition. It's a male coalition. It's a very tight coalition. But it's still ultimately a minority and fragile coalition, and we'll have to see how that breaks or does not under what we've been talking about.

Paul, it's been great to chat to you as ever. I really appreciate that. You've changed the conversation. I started off going like, OK, they're screwed. This is it. Let's figure out why. And actually, you're like, no, it's not. They're not that screwed, particularly in the US, which is the one that is held up as the complete failure.

But as you say, no, look at it, cross-nationally. It's not quite that clear-cut.

PAUL PIERSON: I'm rarely accused of bringing optimism, so I really appreciate that, Mark.

MARK BLYTHE: Well, remember are talking to a Scotsman, so your existence is optimistic.

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Thank you very much.

PAUL PIERSON: Thanks for having me.

MARK BLYTHE: All right, bye-bye. OK, a few takeaways from these conversations. The first is that the left and center parties may not be in as much of a decline as I thought. Paul argued as much, and Bjorn, in turn, suggests that to the extent they are in trouble, it's down to the parties themselves pursuing the types of policies they aim to attract voters who are never going to vote for them anyway. This is very much a self-inflicted wound. They can stop it.

The second is that one of the key issues of the day, immigration, has become the kryptonite of the left in the center. Right populism feeds on voter fears over the very large waves of immigration that many countries have seen over the last 20 years. But given the type of coalition such parties try to build, cross-class and multiracial, it's very hard for them to pivot into that space, which leads that field much more open to right populism.

And the third one is that if all the center and left has to offer is endless austerity and appeals to college-educated urbanites, then voters will go to the right for either a more credible version of the same or for, as they see it, real alternatives. But as Paul says, they are far from down and out, and the hold of right populism may be brief. Let's see if he's right.

This episode was produced by Dan Richards and Zach Hirsch, with production assistance from Sabrina Clumeck. If you like this episode, leave us a rating and a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and be sure to subscribe to the show while you're at it. We'll be back soon with another episode of The Rhodes Center Podcast. Thanks for listening.