Many Democrats won as "populists." What does that mean?

When Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016, right-wing populism surged worldwide. Now U.S. Democrats are deploying populist rhetoric to their advantage from the left, and have defeated right-wing, populist candidates in the midterms.

“Marketplace Morning Report” host Kimberly Adams spoke with David Rennie, geopolitics editor at The Economist, about what these recent left-wing victories mean for right-wing populism worldwide, and whether or not populist candidates can help fix the economic conditions that push them into power.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. You can listen using the player above.

Kimberly Adams: The term populist gets thrown around a lot and can be used to describe both right-wing and left-wing policies. How would you define populism?

David Rennie: I think a pretty good working definition is a candidate who says, "If you think that the world is just wrong, it feels wrong. The wrong people are in charge. No one is caring about me. It's because the corrupt elites are betraying the good, ordinary people, us, the right people, and so it's that kind of clash between the good masses, the good people, and the bad elites.” That, I think, is the core message of populism.

Adams: We've heard a lot about right-wing populism in recent years, but now we're talking about left-wing populism. How are those different?

Rennie: So I think the core of populism is to offer magic solutions, simple solutions. That if you think everything is wrong, if only we — and if you're a right-wing populist, you say, close the borders and throw out all the foreigners who are stealing our jobs — then the world will be fine. If you're a left-wing populist, you say the reason the world is all wrong is because the billionaires are in charge. And if we just, you know, pick your poison — tax the billionaires, have a wealth tax, stop building data centers, then everything will go back to how it should be.

And I think the concern for the newspaper I work for, The Economist, is that if you look at the economic promises being made, very often, populists, almost by definition, they're offering policies that don't work. They are too simple, and they are kind of magical promises to fix actually, very, very hard-to-fix, intractable problems.

Adams: I can imagine somebody listening to this and hearing what you are talking about as some of the magical solutions, as big ideas and goals to aim for, even if you can't get all the way there at once. How can people still pursue big, ambitious goals in politics and policy and the economy without it falling into the realm of magical thinking?

Rennie: Yeah, so don't overclaim for policies that might be sensible. So I think in the context of American politics, I think a lot of voters felt that under the Biden administration, the border was not secure. And there are a lot of Americans who are not right-wing populists, who do not dislike immigrants at all, who think they're tremendously valuable in America, but they are willing to live in a country with lots of legal immigration as long as they feel the border is secure and they get to choose who comes in. That's an entirely reasonable politics. And so I think the lesson you're seeing all sorts of Democrats learning in this midterm cycle is address those problems. Don't be a populist and claim that the only reason that the economy feels bent out of shape is because foreigners are stealing all the jobs. That's the populist kind of overclaiming for something that is entirely good governance can mean tackling a problem. Just don't overclaim for what it will do to the economy once you've tackled it. Plenty of things need to be fixed, but fixing them won't make everything magically better.

Adams: After President Trump was elected in 2016, a lot of experts predicted that it would set off this wave of right-wing populism around the world. Walk me through what's actually happened since then.

Rennie: I think that a decade ago we had the first election of Donald Trump. We had the Brexit vote here in Britain. We saw a big sweep to the hard right in election after election in Latin America. We saw in Europe rising poll numbers for lots and lots of hard right wing parties. Now, was that Trump as the Pied Piper leading everyone in the same direction, or are these all in some ways people rising up to meet the moment because the economy is changing in ways that leave an awful lot of people feeling left behind? I don't know where I come down on that debate. I think it's kind of a bit of everything in one, and I think that's also a corrective against some of the happy talk that we see in the wake of the extraordinary blue wave you've seen in the United States. And look at Brazil, where Lula, the left-wing sitting president, beat back a very nasty populist right-winger. But the problem is, you could also point to rising right wing poll numbers in lots of European countries. Probably the next president of France is going to be Marine Le Pen. So I think populism has not burned itself out, and part of it is because the economy, the economic numbers, continue to be like a sort of hurricane-generating ocean. There's just a lot of heat out there that is making room for politicians with magical solutions to voters who are feeling betrayed and left behind, and want to be told that if only the right people were in charge, everything would be different overnight.

Adams: But some of these populist messages really do resonate with voters because they feel it deeply. They see billionaires in charge while they're suffering. How then are people supposed to recognize when it's magical thinking versus when it's actually an avenue to real policy change?

Rennie: We should never blame the voters for bad politicians. You're absolutely right. But here's the problem: The fact that there are corrupt elites enriching themselves doesn't mean that there's more money sitting in the Treasury. And some of the sort of solutions, like taxing billionaires, if you look at how much money that raises, it doesn't begin to address the fundamental structural problems. So, you know, if you look at France's crisis, one of the problems is they're spending just a gigantic share of their revenue on things like pensions. In the meantime, you see Marine Le Pen, front runner for the hard-right populists in France, saying that she's going to cancel a planned increase in the retirement age, which is going to put an unbelievable strain on the budget. There's no taxes you could levy on the billionaires in France that would fill the gap that is going to be left if you can't tackle things like the retirement age.

Adams: Now that the U.S. midterms are over, what other elections are you watching globally?

Rennie: There's a whole bunch, and you know, to be a bit parochial, looking at Europe, we have over the next 12 months a really alarming set of elections. We've got a snap election in Spain this month. The right is going to win that. We've got elections in France. That's a really big one. We then got Poland, Italy. Given all the problems sitting in the in-trays of today's elected governments, including here in Europe, there's no reason to be too cheerful and think that populists aren't going to make a lot of headway.