Liberalism Might Need Some Populism
From Managing the People to Governing with Them
The liberal establishment keeps searching for the perfect message, the right candidate, the optimal policy mix that will restore the center and defeat the populist surge. They’re looking in the wrong place. The problem isn’t messaging or policy. It’s that they’ve forgotten what made liberalism powerful in the first place: not technocratic competence but democratic energy.
Look at what liberals celebrate as one of their greatest achievements—the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t save American democracy through careful administration. He channeled popular rage at economic elites into structural transformation. “I welcome their hatred,” he said of the financial oligarchs. When was the last time you heard a mainstream Democrat welcome anyone’s hatred? They can barely bring themselves to criticize billionaires who are literally buying the government.
The New Deal wasn’t born from white papers and expert panels. It emerged from populist movements—farmers’ organizations, labor unions, senior citizens’ clubs—demanding dignity, security, and power. Social Security didn’t spring from actuarial tables but from hundreds of thousands of elderly Americans organizing through the Townsend Clubs. The Wagner Act didn’t come from labor economists but from workers dying in the streets for the right to organize. The experts figured out implementation, but the energy, the legitimacy, the political will—that came from below.
Somewhere between then and now, liberals traded that populist energy for technocratic competence. By the 1990s, they’d decided markets plus smart regulation could replace politics altogether. By 2016, they were shocked that people preferred a fake populist to a real technocrat. They wanted to govern without politics, to administrate without participation, to optimize without asking anyone what they wanted optimized.
The neoliberal technocrats weren’t wrong about everything. The Clean Air Act worked. The earned income tax credit lifted families from poverty. Even some trade agreements, for all their disruption, created opportunities and lowered costs for struggling families. But they made a fatal category error: they thought good outcomes would create political legitimacy. They thought being right would be enough.
Instead, people felt managed. Even when their lives improved materially, they felt politically and spiritually diminished. Every major decision affecting their lives was made by someone with credentials they didn’t have, using criteria they didn’t choose, optimizing for outcomes they never voted for. The factory closes—that’s global efficiency. Your town thrives or dies—that’s market dynamics. Everything happens to you, never with you, certainly never by you.
The response to complaint was always more expertise: “You don’t understand the models.” “You don’t grasp the complexity.” All true, perhaps, but devastatingly anti-democratic. The message was clear: this is too complicated for you to have an opinion about, but also it’s going to determine your entire life.
Consider Obamacare—a reform that provided healthcare to millions. But it was architected in backrooms, explained in incomprehensible terms, rolled out through byzantine systems. Even beneficiaries felt like something had been done to them rather than for them. The wonks were mystified: “Don’t they understand we’re helping them?” But that was the problem—the frame of “we” helping “them,” rather than “us” solving “our” problems together.
This created perfect conditions for populist demagoguery. When people feel dispossessed of agency in reality, they become vulnerable to fantasy versions of it. When real levers of power hide behind expertise and bureaucracy, fake levers become irresistible. When actual participation is impossible, symbolic participation—the rally, the red hat, the raised fist—becomes everything.
The uncomfortable truth liberals must face: the populist critique is largely correct. The system is rigged, just not how Trump claims. It’s rigged toward those who understand its complexity, who can navigate its bureaucracy, who speak its language. The meritocrats did become a class. “Norms and institutions” did become an excuse to avoid hard political choices. The cosmopolitan bubble is real—not just geographic but cognitive, cultural, experiential.
Many Trump voters aren’t voting for fascism—they’re voting against being managed by people who treat them like problems to be solved. They’re wrong about Trump being the solution, catastrophically wrong. But they’re not wrong that something is broken. The mother in Ohio who lost her factory job and was told to “learn to code” has every right to be furious. The young man who did everything right but can’t afford a house has legitimate grievances. The small business owner drowning in regulations they had no say in creating isn’t imagining their powerlessness.
The solution isn’t to abandon expertise or embrace the mob. It’s to reunite technical competence with democratic energy. To make people partners in complexity rather than subjects of it. To recognize that legitimacy doesn’t come from being right but from being responsive.
This means accepting inefficiency—democratic participation is messy. It means accepting suboptimal outcomes—what people choose isn’t always what experts recommend. It means understanding that the most sensible policy in the world becomes oppressive when imposed rather than chosen. A good decision you had no part in making feels worse than a mediocre decision you participated in.
Liberal populism wouldn’t mean destroying institutions but democratizing them. Not abandoning expertise but putting it in service of popular will rather than substituting for it. Not embracing simple answers but trusting people with complex ones when they’re included in the process.
It means saying: “I went to Harvard, but that doesn’t make my values more valid than yours. I’ve studied these problems for decades, which gives me useful knowledge, but you live these problems every day, which gives you essential wisdom. Let’s figure this out together.”
It means fighting for things, not just managing them. Naming enemies—the oligarchs, the monopolists, the democracy-destroyers—and welcoming their hatred. Building movements, not just policies. Creating participation, not just outcomes.
The technocrats wanted to solve politics, to replace messy democratic contestation with clean technical solutions. But politics can’t be solved, only practiced. And when you try to solve it, you don’t eliminate it—you drive it underground where it metastasizes into something much worse.
The path forward requires liberals to remember that their greatest achievements came not from being smart but from being responsive. Not from having the best policies but from giving people power over their own lives. Not from efficient administration but from democratic mobilization.
The center cannot hold because there’s nothing at the center but hollow institutionalism and exhausted expertise. It needs to be rebuilt with populist energy channeled through liberal principles toward egalitarian ends. Not the fake populism of demagogues but the real populism of democratic participation. Not the empty technocracy of optimal solutions but the living democracy of shared choices.
The circus needs new management. Not the oligarchs who want to own it. Not the technocrats who want to optimize it. But all of us who walk the wire every day, who know what it feels like when it trembles, who understand both the necessity of keeping our balance and the impossibility of doing it alone.
Liberalism without populism is management. Populism without liberalism is mob rule. But liberalism with populist energy—that’s democracy. Real democracy. The kind that saved us before. The kind that might save us again.
You asked, “When was the last time you heard a mainstream Democrat welcome anyone’s hatred?”
I heard it yesterday from California Governor Gavin Newsom. And I read it in HCR’s August 14 letter encapsulating his words and intent in yesterday’s speech in LA.
Perhaps Newsom isn’t a mainstream Democrat. I don’t care “what” he is. And I’m not saying that the Dems have found their voice and leader in him. But if his words and advocacy are unable to rally our better angels to fight for our democracy, we are the ones who lack the spine.
We need to stop expecting other people - a political party - to save us. We must each turn our frustration, anger and despair outward, in whatever ways represent us and give us personal agency.
The easy thing is to give up and grow still. It is the hard path that leads to change. At this point, what do any of us have to lose by taking it?
Thanks for keeping the light on things. Thought this was salient. It’s from an August 6, FB post by Mike Greenburg:
“The MAGA movement isn’t just about Trump. It’s about rejection—of expertise, institutions, education, science, government. Democrats often interpret this as ignorance or manipulation, the result of disinformation or cultural backlash. But there’s another way to understand it, one that anthropology and years of applied research have made difficult to ignore.
What if this anger is rooted not in a refusal to know, but in a history of not being heard?
Across rural, working-class, and marginalized communities, there’s a long record of programs, policies, and reforms—often designed by professionals and launched with confidence—that arrived uninvited and left resentment in their wake. These were not abstract debates about truth or data. They were lived experiences of being overruled, bypassed, or told what was good for you by someone who never asked what you needed.
This didn’t just happen in Washington. It happened on the ground, in counties, watersheds, school districts, tribal lands, farming cooperatives, and urban neighborhoods. And when you’ve been treated that way long enough, you start to distrust the entire system that produces these so-called solutions. That’s the soil MAGA grew in.
This pattern isn’t new. One of the most durable lessons from applied anthropology is that development efforts—whether abroad or at home—fail most often because they don’t listen. They assume. They impose. They evaluate themselves on their own terms. And when people don’t comply, the system blames them.
Consider the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies. For biologists, it was a landmark achievement. But for many ranchers, it was a federal imposition—made without consultation, disruptive to their livelihoods, symbolic of a deeper loss of control. Cooperation eroded. Poaching rose. The wolves were real, but they became proxies for something else: decisions made by others in the name of a common good that didn’t feel common at all.
You see the same dynamic in coastal fisheries, where conservation zones were drawn without input from local fishers, many of whom carried generations of knowledge about tides, migration patterns, and sustainability. They were treated not as stewards, but as risks to be managed. Resistance followed.
In the Midwest, conservation programs promote buffer zones and no-till practices. But many of them are designed without regard for tenancy patterns, equipment costs, or crop insurance structures. To many farmers, they read as prescriptions from people who’ve never been on a tractor. Participation is low not because the goals are wrong, but because the process is. Again, no one asked.
In cities like Detroit and Los Angeles, tree-planting campaigns and green infrastructure projects often arrive in neighborhoods that have faced decades of neglect. But residents quickly recognize that these programs aren’t always for them—they’re signals to real estate developers and planning commissions. Beautification isn’t benign when it’s followed by eviction notices.
These efforts may look different on paper, but they follow the same template: solutions designed in absentia, community knowledge devalued, local adaptations dismissed as noncompliance. When people deviate, it’s called a problem. When programs fail, the blame rarely travels up.
And there’s a deeper issue at work. It’s not just a failure to listen—it’s a refusal to recognize other forms of knowledge. What gets counted as expertise is shaped by institutions that credential, formalize, and standardize. A logger’s seasonal sense of snowfall and thaw, a mother’s knowledge of neighborhood safety, a farmworker’s observations of soil change—none of these pass as “data.” But that doesn’t make them wrong. It makes them inconvenient.
This isn’t just a design flaw. It serves power. When only formal expertise is valid, institutions get to define the problem and its solution. Those on the receiving end are not collaborators. They’re implementation targets.
The consequences are everywhere now: widespread institutional distrust, a rejection of science and public health, school boards turned into battlegrounds, government viewed not just with skepticism but contempt. Trump tapped into that. He didn’t invent it—he exploited it. The rage that animates MAGA isn’t just cultural. It’s rooted in long histories of exclusion from decision-making, especially when the decisions were made in the name of progress.
And yet, there are other ways to work. In the 1990s, I was one of the principal investigators for a research project that came to be known as the Funds of Knowledge approach [1]. It began with a simple question: What if, instead of seeing working-class, immigrant, and minority families as lacking what schools need, we asked what they already know?
What we found wasn’t deficit. It was abundance. Through labor, migration, language, caregiving, and survival, these families had developed deep practical knowledge that schools had failed to recognize. We brought teachers into homes—not to assess, but to learn. One brought a student’s father, an auto mechanic, into the classroom to show how compression ratios and conversions work. The math lesson came alive. The family’s knowledge wasn’t a supplement. It became the curriculum.
This wasn’t charity. It was pedagogy rooted in respect. It changed how teachers saw their students. And it changed how families saw the school—not as a distant authority, but as something they had a stake in.
That kind of work isn’t limited to education. It can apply anywhere. Conservation, health, infrastructure, climate adaptation—every field that touches people’s lives needs to ask not just what we want to accomplish, but who needs to be part of the conversation from the beginning.
Because when people are excluded, they don’t forget. And when someone finally comes along who says, “They’ve lied to you, ignored you, used you,” that story lands. Even when it’s false, it lands.
This is the part many progressives still miss. You can’t counter authoritarian populism with fact sheets and better branding. You can’t fix the trust gap with another rollout. You have to build relationships, redistribute authority, and start by acknowledging the ways institutions have failed—not just materially, but relationally.
Democracy is not sustained by procedures. It lives or dies by whether people believe the system sees them, values them, listens to them. If they don’t believe that, they will turn elsewhere. And they have.
We’re not going to repair the damage until we stop treating listening as symbolic and start treating it as foundational. Otherwise, we’ll keep handing the microphone to those who claim to speak for the unheard, even when all they offer is grievance.
Endnotes
[1] Greenberg, James B., Luis C. Moll, and Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez. “Community Knowledge and Classroom Practice: Bridging Funds of Knowledge with Pedagogy.” In Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms, edited by Norma González, Luis C. Moll, and Cathy Amanti, 115–132. New York: Routledge, 2005.”