We must reclaim populism from process. Being pro-union, anti-billionaire, and pro-working class isn’t a sufficient economic vision for the scale of crisis we’re in. To win, the Left needs to prioritize promises and outcomes working people can feel.
What a bizarro time we now live in. Coming off a defiant election in November 2025 and early 2026, Democrats of all stripes seem to be singing the same tune in 2026. Neoliberal scions Rahm Emanuel and James Carville, socialist NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani, DNC Chair Kenneth Martin, labor leader UAW President Shawn Fain, centrist VA governor Abigail Spanberger, and Bernie Sanders are seemingly aligned: we need to be the party of working people again. To win back the working class voters that the Democratic Party has abandoned, we need to focus relentlessly on affordability and cost of living for working people, orienting ourselves towards economic populism in the process. It’s a long-overdue course correction, both morally and tactically.
While I know we’re still quite a ways away from everyone in the Democratic Party singing Solidarity Forever together, this is a real victory for us on the Left. After decades of elections that shouldn’t have been lost, there’s finally something nearing a consensus amongst Democrats. For this emerging orientation towards economic populism to represent a real break from the past and to result in sustained political power for the Left, it must advance an ambition that can sincerely match the scale of the crises we’re in. That means our movements have to prioritize demanding economic results, not economic processes.
We need to focus on ends, not means.
Yet the economic populism I think we’re settling into—and settling for—across the different factions of the Left is a means-focused economic populism, or what I refer to as “Process Populism.” Process Populism merely prioritizes demands that are processes of working-class politics. Three most emergent demands on the Left now found on countless policy platforms that best exemplify Process Populism are (1) supporting unionization, (2) taxing the rich, and (3) electing working-class candidates.
PROCESS POPULISM vs. MATERIAL POPULISM
What’s odd about us championing and emphasizing process is that process is one of the powerful’s oldest and easiest tools for defusing pressure. When workers demand change, bosses respond with task forces and listening sessions. When students organize, a university president proposes committees and surveys instead of fixing the actual problem. Delay via process is a part of the toolkit to nullify organizing, even when it’s well-intended.
As organizers, that’s why we have to apply the same clarity to our politics that we demand from those in power: tools and processes are not material outcomes. Working people are not just out of time and money, they’re out of patience. They deserve to know how their lives will materially and specifically change. Process Populism does not offer that.
Process Populism is no doubt an improvement over the neoliberal drift that defined the party for decades, but it stops halfway. One reason Process Populist policies are emergent is because they do poll well: only a small minority doesn’t want higher taxes on billionaires or doesn’t want stronger unions. And precisely because they poll pretty well, even left-leaning pundits and strategists often center them in our collective vision. Yet, there’s a significant difference between popular support and popular will. Popular support reflects what people agree with; popular will reflects what they’re ready to fight for. Process Populism produces the former, not the latter. It may win consensus, but it doesn’t build power nor demand urgency.
And urgency is both a moral and strategic imperative. Process Populism isn’t likely to deliver material gains to the working class fast enough for those workers to want to keep its proponents in office. Globally and domestically, there is anti-incumbent bias for elected officials; the signal for us to draw is there’s a healthy chunk of voters who are willing to vote for candidates across a range of idologies, but they are focused on results. The only way to break out of this “pendulum theory” of politics is to deliver a quickly better life for working families in concrete, economic ways. And if elected officials and movements can’t deliver within the first 2-3 years of their term? They’ll be voted out.
Real economic populism—what I call “Material Populism”—starts where this version ends. Material Populism also engages with a politics of specificity: it names the specific outcomes we’re fighting for: shorter workdays, rent freezes, higher wages, better care, etc. The affirmative economic specificity encouraged by Material Populism can build popular will.
Mamdani’s campaign offered one such model of that kind of affirmative materialism. His message focused on what working people could picture immediately: universal childcare, fast and free buses, and rent freezes. Though his campaign had concrete, thoughtful answers for how they were going to achieve those priorities, the process was not the campaign’s calling card. A campaign that emphasized process over results—a campaign that led with raising taxes on the rich or a campaign that focused on appointing the right people to the Rent Guidelines Board—would not have unleashed the same kind of inspiration and sense of possibility.
These examples aren’t limited to socialist electoral campaigns: the most notable policy idea emerging out of the NJ Governor’s race was Governor-elect Sherill’s commitment to freezing energy rates for at least a year. You see a similar dynamic in Shawn Fain’s “core four” at the UAW: wages, healthcare, retirement, and control over time. Fain knows that workers don’t rally in the political nor bargaining arena around procedures but that they’ll rally hard around material outcomes they can feel. The beauty of Material Populism is that it doesn’t require uniformity of policy. In one state, the fight might be for free public transit; in another, for debt relief, universal childcare, or a shorter workweek. The specifics can differ from race to race, movement to movement. What matters is that each is grounded in the same mission: to make life materially better for working people in quick, visible, and non-marginal ways.
When movements and politicians focus on material ends during campaigning, they also bring clarity and accountability to the task of governing. It keeps us from treating process as a solution and ensures that once in power, politicians are guided by the result we were promised and that our movements pushed for, not the mechanism they used to get there.
Being able to distinguish between Process Populism and Material Populism must become a core part of how we analyze and prioritize demands on the Left and in our electoral, labor, and issue-based movements.
To more deeply understand the limitations of the emerging consensus, I look at the three key pillars of today’s process populism and why each, even when taken together, remains insufficient: pro-unionism (how workers conceivably gain power), taxing the rich (how elites potentially lose power), and working-class candidates (who we’d want to wield power). All are necessary for shifting power. Examining each, however, also shows how a process-obsessed politics doesn’t unleash nor match the urgency for the material things working people deserve.
Being Pro-Unionization is Not Enough:
Of the populist pillars, being “pro-union” has become the easiest and safest, helping stitch an economic coalition from the Left to the center-left. For a clear example, look at the memo from DNC Chair Ken Martin. It, perhaps surprisingly, nailed the diagnosis: Democrats lost in 2024 because the working class abandoned them after years of feeling abandoned themselves. But when it came to solutions, the memo fell back on the same familiar playbook: defend workers’ rights, protect existing benefits, and support unions. Supporting unions and unionization were the extent of the offensive ambition; that’s a defensive posture, not a real vision
On the Left, we often treat unionizing as an end in and of itself. The theory goes that unionizing is an important outcome because unions let people experience their workplaces more democratically. But that’s a politics that’s focused more on form than substance. Though unions remain the most powerful vehicle workers have to win dignity and democracy at their workplace, the reality is nothing materially changes simply from being part of a union. I love unions—I work as a union contract negotiator! But unionism that pretends a union automatically guarantees material gains — or that the moral and spiritual value of solidarity can substitute for them — is not an honest unionism. It risks disaffecting the very same workers it hoped to galvanize.
The reality is that unionizing, having a strong union, and winning strong contracts take significant time, resources, and courage. And that’s due to both employer-friendly American labor law and the inherent challenges of collective action. Employers can fight tooth and nail to stop unionizing: captive-audience meetings, retaliation, delay tactics, firings, etc.
Even when workers win a union election, the road to a first contract can be terribly long. The average length of a first contract negotiation is 465 days, but bosses can drag out contract negotiations for much longer too. The effort to unionize Starbucks has been one of labor’s most visible, high-profile fights in the last few years. While unionization has been broadly successful, actually winning a contract to secure improved working conditions has proved a tougher task. Starbucks workers unionized in 2021, but as of Summer, 2026, there is still no collective bargaining agreement.
That’s not because workers nor unions have failed. They’ve been sufficiently militant and organized to authorize a strike across 500+ stores, and the sustained pressure of unionization has certainly improved working conditions in numerous ways. But the safety and promise of a collective bargaining agreement which guarantees those material conditions has thus far remained out of reach. And even when workers win a contract, maintaining a strong union that can continue winning strong successor contracts remains a challenge.
Changing that system by making it easier to unionize or bargain a first contract (as the Faster Labor Contracts Act recently passed in the House does) is good policy, but we saw through the shortcomings of the pro-worker Biden administration why it may not make for savvy politics.
The main way the Biden administration signaled its pro-worker commitment was to be, relative to other presidencies, unabashedly pro-unionization. Biden deserves credit for NLRB reforms, for championing the PRO Act (a bill exclusively focused on accelerating unionization and building union power), and for standing with workers on picket lines. But friendlier processes and moral support didn’t automatically translate into faster or larger gains for workers. A working class that’s living paycheck to paycheck needs solutions faster than unionizing alone can deliver—and solutions more transformative than even many well-intentioned employers or arbitrators (if the Faster Labor Contracts Act were to pass) could ever grant. It’s no surprise that even as union drives surged during the Biden years (“Hot Labor Summer” now feels like a distant memory from a bygone era), (1) union density went down and (2) working-class people kept drifting away from the Democratic Party and from the labor movement—perhaps justifiably so given the lack of immediate change in their lives.
Even if union density went up under the Biden-style labor reforms and every active organizing campaign succeeded, it could take decades for density to rebound to the post-New Deal era level where unions held economy-wide power. That’s why a pro-union stance, while essential, cannot be the centerpiece of an economically populist agenda. It’s too slow to meet the scale of the crisis, and voters intuit that. It’s why labor—despite support from every notable union in the country—was ultimately unable to build popular will around the PRO Act, their signature legislation during the Biden administration.
For all these reasons, we should also be deeply dissatisfied and, frankly, upset with politicians who limit their working-class advocacy to a simple pro-unionism. 70% of Americans support unions. Politicians being simply “pro-union” is lazy politics because it outsources what should be a politician’s political fights in legislatures—wages, health care, retirement, and more time off the clock—to workplace fights led by overworked workers.
A politics for working people has to aim, at minimum, to put increased pressure on legislators to deliver specific and material gains for workers via political avenues. Given how long unionization and collective bargaining can take and how hungry the public is for real change in their paychecks, it may even be easier to win bold, universal improvements in the political arena than at the bargaining table. We need leaders willing to fight for those things themselves, not just to say they stand with those who do fight.
THE SHORTCOMINGS OF “TAX THE RICH”
If pro-unionism is one side of the Process Populism coin, “tax the rich” is the other. While unions build power for working people, taxing the rich reduces elites’ power. It polls well, and it names a villain. It’s a welcome development for more than a small minority of politicians and unions to name who they’re fighting (the billionaires and the oligarchs), but they have to go one step further and name what they’re fighting for.
The wealthy should be taxed more—substantially more than they currently pay. (And after news of Elon becoming the first trillionaire, we should also really consider strict legal limits on CEO wealth accumulation via both salaries and stocks.) But “tax the rich” shouldn’t be the centerpiece of an agenda even if it should be the engine for one. A billionaire’s higher tax bill alone doesn’t make childcare cheaper, shorten anyone’s workweek, or lower rent. There must be a clear line between new revenue and new results.
In fact, taxing the rich without clearly naming what that money will fund risks unintentionally mimicking the perverse logic of trickle-down economics. The right promises that tax cuts for the wealthy would eventually benefit everyone else. The Left shouldn’t make the mirror-image mistake of assuming that taxing the wealthy will automatically improve ordinary people’s lives. Just as trickle-down economics failed because it never delivered material gains for the working class, a tax-the-rich agenda without clear outcomes risks the same disappointment.
Failing to fill that missing connection could present a political problem. Paradoxically, taxing the rich is popular at the same time that cutting government waste and fraud is popular. Inoculating the public against the claims that taxing the rich will fuel more government waste thus requires coupling taxes with an affirmative economic vision. Naming what the tax revenue will fund will make the tax policy more popular. This is because people are more likely to support taxes when they can see what that revenue is buying: free childcare, cheaper housing, debt relief, or time back in their lives. Clarity about ends can build consensus around the means.
Some campaigns and movements are already getting this right. The New York DSA’s “Tax the Rich” campaign explicitly connects their tax campaign to clear, material outcomes: universal childcare, emergency rental assistance, and mass public transit. It showed what a Material Populism’s embrace of tax the rich looks like: specific, visual, and immediate. Contrast that with the labor movement’s more generic “Workers Over Billionaires” campaign, which channels righteous anger at the rich and at corporations, but stops short of offering an affirmative economic vision. Both campaigns rightfully pit workers against elites, but only one conveys to working people in clear terms how their life will actually change if they join the fight.
CLASS POLITICS AS IDENTITY POLITICS
If taxing the rich names a villain, electing working-class candidates names a hero. It’s the final notable way today’s Process Populism confuses means for ends. It is the most narratively satisfying and culturally memetic form of contemporary populism: representation constituting substantive change. Absent explicit economic commitments however, I’ve found that this emphasis risks collapsing class politics into a type of identity politics.
In that framework, class becomes a marker of authenticity rather than a program of redistribution. A candidate’s biography substitutes for their platform; proximity to hardship stands in for a plan to end it. The moral authority derived from working-class identity is treated as self-justifying. This is the aestheticization of class—a politics of identity without a clear politics of delivery.
We’re already seeing this pattern emerge over the last few years. Figures like Sen. John Fetterman and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez represent a growing cohort of Democrats who lean into the aesthetics of the working-class—small-business ownership, rural rootedness, cultural moderation—while offering little in the way of transformative economic policy. Even a candidate like Graham Platner — who, unlike Fetterman or Gluesenkamp Pérez, actually holds genuinely transformative economic positions — has become known to almost all voters primarily through his biography (both the compelling and controversial parts) rather than through the substance of what he’d do on the economy if he’s in office.
The allure of the “working class candidate” has meant that even among candidates who aren’t working class, a working-class aesthetic has emerged: the Carhartt jacket, the pickup truck, the f-bomb. Putting aside the discussion that working class voters are likely to see through these transparent attempts to mimic their culture from candidates who aren’t working class, it’s clear how focusing on class aesthetics can easily shift from meaningful solidarity signalling to an exercise in brand cultivation. As the party (hopefully) becomes increasingly economically populist, this phenomenon of working class politicians with vacuous politics could proliferate. Without affirmative commitments to major economic outcomes, however, this genre of populism risks substituting affect for agenda.
Counterintuitively, the two most notable figures at winning working-class support in the 2025 and 2024 election cycles lack any working-class identity at all and don’t hide that. Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump could not be more different ideologically and both hail from wealthy enclaves in New York, but both speak in the language of ends. They promise visible, near-term, specific outcomes that people can imagine in their own lives. They illustrate that building inter-class coalitions and solidarity is not solely determined by background but by what a candidate persuades people they will do with power.
Representation matters. It must, however, be instrumental, not expressive. The presence of working-class candidates in public office is meaningful only insofar as it expands the horizon of economic possibility for working class people. Or else class identity, untethered from affirmative material commitments, risks becoming another form of identity politics. If we’ve learned anything from the last two decades’ misplaced overemphasis on representational politics, it’s that a genuinely working-class politics must demand much more than who holds power.
CONCLUSION:
The Democratic Party’s turn toward economic populism is welcome, and it didn’t happen on its own. Nor did it happen easily. Organizers, unions, and activists fought for decades to make pro-worker politics common sense again, and significant electoral losses in 2016 and 2024 expedited the process of Democratic self-reflection. But if we want to win elections and we want to win them for more than a term or two, we must promise outcomes to working people—and then actually deliver them within one term. That’s how the majorities of the New Deal era that persisted for decades were built: through results working people could feel.
Voters are impatient and rightfully so. They want leaders with real answers, not just the right mechanisms. Pro-unionism, taxing the rich, and working-class candidates are all necessary components to a working class politics, but they should not be the ultimate agenda. Without a clear economic vision for specific, fast, tangible gains—higher wages, shorter hours, cheaper care, more time—leftist populism risks failing as a governing project.
This conversation couldn’t come at a more critical moment. The 2026 midterms, the organizing push toward a 2028 general strike, and the 2028 general election will test whether the Left can build powerful campaigns that can deliver on their promise. Those campaigns’ successes won’t be measured by pro-worker rhetoric or process, but by results that make ordinary life tangibly easier, freer, and more equal. That’s what it means to build power and govern with the working class, and that’s the only kind of politics worth building.
