Christians on the left should own populism, make it our own

https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/distinctly-catholic/christians-left-should-own-populism-and-make-it-our-own
MGB: The old Democratic populism was linked strongly to socialism before FDR triangulated the New Deal by edging out the socialists. Stalin's bloody cult of personality and the sclerotic gerentocracy that followed him further discredited it, even though real socialists consider the Soviets to be bureaucratic authoritarians. Indeed, we have not changed much since the days of Eugene Debbs and later Michael Harrington.

Obama was a populist and his success was getting black people to vote that never thought it was worth doing. They stayed home for Hillary. Bill made it save for the people now voting for Trump to vote for him, both in the board room and rural south. He was one of them and his policies toward welfare and gays proved it, which is why his wife lost.

MSW's obsession with Democratic positions on abortion and transgender bathrooms is misplaced. If the right wing did not keep the fires burning on both issues, which are substantially settled on the legal fronts, they would not be a focus in primaries or elections. They could, of course, correct their message and say that, accusing the GOP establishment of feathering their nests off of populist Catholic support without doing anything, which we did in the Obama campaign, thus getting the Catholic vote to mirror the society at large, unlike 2016. I not only blogged this on the Catholics for Obama blog, but I made sure NARAL echoed it. If Clinton had kept it up, she might have won the Catholic vote, but not the election.

Liberals will never be populists again. They are divided into cultural liberals, Wall Street Neo-Liberals (think Larry Summers) and Socialists - which go way beyond Bernie Sanders. The latter offer the best hope for a populist solution by channeling unionism and employee-ownership back to socialism, making socialism something to be desired by showing how workers can control the means of consumption, where consumption includes hiring supervisors and CEOs and making home loans. We need to Occupy Capitalism. When we do, Conservatives will beg us to go along with overruling Citizens United.