PITTSBURGH — Establishment Democrats lost the 2024 election and are blaming. . . the populist left?
Vice President Kamala Harris lost all the swing states, the popular vote and even the working class to President-elect Donald Trump, but Democratic influencers are scapegoating the left’s anti-monopoly populism for their defeat — even when a western Pennsylvania House Democrat survived the red wave by focusing his fight on corporate power.
Centrists are looking in the mirror and not seeing themselves as the problem.
Adam Jentleson, a former senior staffer for Democratic Sens. John Fetterman, Elizabeth Warren and the late Majority Leader Harry Reid, took to The New York Times opinion pages to urge his Democratic allies to embrace the “supermajority thinking” of Trump and appeal to the working class to take back the White House in 2028.
But then the apparent revolutionary served up the recipe on which Harris ran and lost.
Jentleson resold the same policy smorgasbord (like Medicare and abortion rights without mentioning the minimum wage), said a second Trump administration will prove a failure and told the party to ditch “people with the cultural sensibilities of Yale Law School graduates who cosplay as populists by over-relying on niche issues like Federal Trade Commission antitrust actions.”
The left smelled a fool — and a fraud.
“The only Yale Law grad who addressed ‘niche’ things like corporate power and the FTC on the campaign trail was JD Vance. I forget, did his side win?” tweeted Matt Stoller, director of the anti-monopoly American Economic Liberties Project.
Vice President-elect Vance, who’s leading a small populist vanguard in the Republican Party, has routinely praised President Biden’s FTC chair, Lina Khan, for seeking to expand antitrust powers and break up Big Tech companies like Amazon and Google.
And though he might not get confirmed, President-elect Trump appointed antitrust hawk and Big Tech critic Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz to lead the Department of Justice as attorney general.
Far from Ivy League elites, the Teamsters union, which represents 1.3 million blue-collar workers, asked Harris if she would commit to keeping Khan. Harris did not, and the Teamsters famously did not endorse her.
Harris never embraced Khan while billionaire Democratic donors and surrogates publicly urged Harris to fire the Yale Law anti-monopoly crusader.
“No swing voters were complaining about that, Silicon Valley money men were,” said progressive journalist Zaid Jilani, mocking Jentleson and the “Democratic egghead class” for believing “woke non-profits” have an antitrust agenda.
Instead of condemning cartels or placating progressives, Harris watered down her “anti-price-gouging” proposal, distanced herself from Biden’s populist ambitions to tax the rich, promised to crack down on illegal immigration and campaigned with former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney and “Shark Tank” billionaire Mark Cuban.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Democratic Socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said the day after the election, blaming Dems for listening to “big money interests and well-paid consultants” instead of voters.
Nonetheless, centrist Democrats retweeted Jentleson’s platitudes and blamed the left for Harris’ loss.
“Incremental progress can lead to revolutions,” said gun-control advocate Shannon Watts.
“We just saw the failure of a Dem administration that listened to Yale Law grads over anybody else,” Obama alum Joel Wertheimer said, pushing Democrats to listen to people with corporate experience — even though Harris frequently consulted her Uber executive brother-in-law Tony West on economic talking points during the campaign.
Jon Favreau, a host of Obama-alum podcast Pod Save America, promoted the piece, highlighting that politics is about winning and policy comes second.
Except polling shows antitrust policy is good politics.
A centrist Democratic polling firm found 39% of voters want the government to prosecute “price-gouging” companies — the most popular policy avenue for reducing prices.
Facing backlash from the left, Jentleson said antitrust has an “a–hole problem,” but he supports it as a “good tool in the toolbox” while emphasizing it’s “limited as a holistic worldview or political strategy,” showing Amazon — much maligned by antitrust advocates — is a popular institution second only to the military.
He blames antitrust purists for washing away these sort of nuances when Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) broke from progressive orthodoxy, championed deregulation and kept their House seats in Trump-y districts.
But again, as Biden alum Jennifer Harris noted, “Literally the campaign we all just witnessed was marked by **the very absence** of antitrust.”
And Jentleson himself seems to be part of the problem.
He went to an Ivy League university (Columbia), worked for progressive senators, was the president of Fight Corporate Monopolies and as late as 2023 was involved in policing the supposedly transphobic journalism of the New York Times — all while criticizing interest groups for pushing Harris to adopt woke positions that Trump used against her.
As one lefty writer put it to his centrist critics: “You lost. Why should anyone listen to you about how to win?”
“It’s getting to the point where there’s enough of a market for ‘antiwoke’ takes that you can get a bunch of people to eat something up even if you’ve just been wrong about everything and in fact you were the ones urging Democrats to be super lefty on all social issues,” Jilani added.
“[I]t’s the height of smarmy disingenuousness,” said Jesse Singal, whom Jentleson shamed for reporting on the problems of transgender medicine. But Singal said he expects more DC “snakes” to attack the left without confessing their role in fueling its orthodoxy.
As a priest says after an election in the Washington-set Netflix show “House of Cards,” “A person’s character is not determined by how he or she enjoys victory, but rather how he or she endures defeat.”
