Scarborough, on the other hand, loved it:

In my back-and-forth with Scarborough on this, what clearly intrigued him about the ad was the possibility that one could articulate a message of economic populism without the bigotry and casual racism that Trump has epitomized from the first day of his campaign.

Scarborough may well be correct — he’s been elected to something and I haven’t. It is certainly true that a LOT of election post-mortems will likely revolve around this very question. But let me suggest three big problems with the notion of a GOP platform of economic populism.

AD

AD

The first is whether it is politically possible for the Republican Party to embrace economic populism without Trump’s nastier strain of cultural populism. Given the shifting demographics of the party — accelerated by Trump — I don’t think it’s possible. Sen. Bernie Sanders was able to pull this off because he had a nonracist socialist ideology to use as his intellectual support. Any conservative variant of economic populism means a heavy dose of nationalism. It will be hard to keep that from bleeding over into a more virulent strain of ethnic nationalism. By definition, populism tends to bash elites, and low-information voters will respond better when the elites are cast as some villainous “other.”

Second, to repeat a theme, I’m completely unconvinced that a message of economic populism is actually all that popular. One can certainly point to the primaries of both parties as a counterexample. But the polling on this is quite clear: “Republicans, particularly Trump supporters, have mostly shifted in a more economically populist direction. The rest of the country, however, has shifted in the opposite direction. This might just be a function of raw partisanship, although the movement of independents suggests not.”

If you think I’m wrong, ask yourself the following questions: (a) can the GOP win national elections without attracting support from Asians and college-educated voters; (b) do you think those voters will be super-keen on a message of economic populism?

AD

AD

Third, and most important, the American economic system is not spinning out of control against workers. Over the past 18 months, the American economy has done pretty well for its workers, as the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson notes:

Combine this with rising levels of real income and health-care coverage and you have an economy that finally seems to be working for the poor and the middle class. This is not a moment when economic populism — and the policy disasters that usually come with it — seems like a very good idea.

Even during boom times, economic populism will play to parts of the country that feel left behind. Focusing on those who are worse off is the one feature of populism that holds some broad-based appeal. But I would suggest that Scarborough’s desire to graft a message of economic populism onto a conservative party is based on some faulty premises.