Why the Left Can’t Win

My students are taking their AP Comparative Government & Politics exam on Wednesday. In the course, we examine the systems of government in six states: the UK, Russia, China, Iran, Mexico, and Nigeria. We spent this week reviewing material and concepts from the year. My feelings about the exam and the College Board in general are mixed, at best, and I recently detailed them on the TG2 Blog. But despite my personal reservations about the org, I’m a professional and make sure students are prepared for their exams. They’re reviewing the major and some more niche concepts from the course,  from how Nigerians elect their legislature to how the Chinese Communist Party limits the independence of the judiciary. 

On Thursday, we discussed the term-limit system in Mexico. To prevent the entrenchment of figures like Robert Byrd (he represented West Virginia in the US Senate from 1959-2010, a gobsmacking 51 years), Mexican politicians are denied the right to serve consecutive terms. Notably, the Mexican president is elected to a single six-year term with no chance for reelection. The current Mexican President, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, will leave office in 2024 and Mexico will elect a new leader (along with the US—the cycles sync every twelve years). AMLO is a singular figure in Mexican politics. He served as the former mayor of Mexico City in the 2000s. He ran for president unsuccessfully in 2006 and 2012 before winning the office in 2018 with 54% of the vote. He is a left-wing populist figure and leader of the MORENA Party. 

AMLO’s populism became a topic of a rabbit hole conversation in class. My students couldn’t seem to get their heads around the inability of left populists, like AMLO, to get a foothold in the US and throughout the Anglosphere: Canada, UK, Australia, and NZ. I was unable to help them and I have been thinking about it for the last few days. I realize the answer I gave them Thursday is “man, it’s really complicated” is both a copout and correct.

In contrast to the US, left-populists have found electoral success to our south. In addition to AMLO, there are figures like Evo Morales who was elected as the President of Bolivia in 2005 and led the country until 2019. He was a former farmer and labor leader who campaigned on a platform of economic justice, indigenous rights, and anti-imperialism. There was also Rafael Correa. He served as president of Ecuador for twelve years. He was an economist who advocated for socialist policies and investments in education, healthcare, and infrastructure. Even Lula in Brazil, who resumed office in 2023, is considered a populist. 

No such equivalent figures have risen in the US (or elsewhere in the Anglosphere for that matter). The easy answer is to blame corporate media coverage or capitalism, but while each of those play a role, they absolve people on the left of their culpability and unforced errors.

I have my thoughts, but they’re largely grounded in Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, but I am curious about yours. 

Take your best shot at answering my students’ question: Why are left-populists more successful in Latin America? Why do you think left-populism is so unsuccessful in modern US politics? Why is it that populist figures like Trump and Johnson (in the UK) were able to win power but similarly populist left figures can’t seem to get traction? I’d love to hear your thoughts* hit my inbox or leave a comment and I’ll share some responses next week.

*One caveat: I may catch hell for this but the “Bernie got screwed by the DNC” meme isn’t real. Bernie was my preferred candidate in 2016 but the reality is he garnered fewer votes (13,210,550 to 16,917,853) and delegates (1865 to 2842) than Clinton. He didn’t get screwed—he lost and lost again in 2020.

How the Culture of the WWE Took Over US Politics

Throughout my career, the Sunday evening work session has become a ritual. I sit down at about four o'clock and start prepping for the week ahead. For atmosphere, I usually have some combination of Law & Order, soccer, or wrestling in the background. Wrestling is actually perfect for productivity. You can focus on your task and mostly tune it out. The crowd and announcers will signal you to tune in for the chair shot, occasional shooting star press, or the finishing move. WrestleMania XXXIX happened last week at SoFi Stadium in LA, so it was my background this weekend. 

Wrestling is theater. It’s a scripted soap opera (in tights) with feats of athleticism and risks that defy common sense. But for a person with my worldview, enjoying the product is complicated. You could build an encyclopedia of the racist and xenophobic gimmicks that have been used over the years (see below). Women’s bodies are habitually objectified. The people in charge of the two major promotions (AEW and WWE) are billionaires of questionable character, both born into wealth.

It goes deeper than that. If you look at their biographies, Donald Trump and Vince McMahon’s resumes are largely indistinguishable up until about 2015. Both inherited businesses from their fathers: Trump a real estate empire, McMahon the then WWF. Both spent much of their careers awash is scandal. McMahon was indicted in federal court in 1994, charged with providing steroids to wrestlers. He was forced to resign as chairman of WWE in 2022, after it came to light that he, like Trump, paid hush money to a mistress. Their lives are intertwined in other ways. Trump made several appearances in the WWE and was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013 and McMahon’s wife served as a member of Trump’s Whitehouse, as administrator of the Small Business Administration. 

They are basically the same dude and I find both loathsome. I wouldn’t want someone of their character as a colleague at work or representing me in public office. 

Despite this I enjoy wrestling and can largely ignore its excesses because I understand it’s all an act. Everything is scripted, the animosity is a pantomime. The audience is mostly in on the joke. But increasingly, I find myself using the language of wrestling to describe our unfortunate period of American politics. 

When I see conservative culture warriors attacking teachers or the LGBTQ+ community, I see heels generating cheap heat. A heel in wrestling parlance is a villain in a storyline and heat is the negative response they desire from the crowd—bad guys want crowds to boo them—they want to be hated. The “own the libs” aesthetic of the modern GOP is indistinguishable from a heel wrestling promo. Earning the scorn of the establishment, helps them get more over, the wrestling term for gaining popularity, with their base. Why else would we have politicians wearing AR15 pins into congress days after school shootings? It’s heel nonsense, meant to spark outrage.

The more we revile them, the more their supporters revere them.  

The clip above is a masterclass in cheap heat, Elias earning deafening boos insulting a crowd in Seattle on Monday Night Raw in 2018.

The word kayfabe refers to the illusion that wrestling is real, unscripted—that it’s a competitive sport. When we puncture that veneer and address the sport as the scripted drama, we call it breaking kayfabe. The feigned outrages that rise up in our politics everyday feel like kayfabe. Look at events this week in Tennessee: two Black Democratic legislators were expelled from the House for breaking rules on decorum while participating in a protest against gun violence. Rep. Andrew Farmer, who has a voice that is simultaneously reminiscent of Foghorn Leghorn and a plantation owner, condemned their actions in this video.

Farmer, maintaining kayfabe, pretended to be outraged by the protest, treating it as an unprecedented breach of decorum. Rep. Justin Pearson, one of the expelled members, rightly called out the expulsion as what it was—a racially motivated power grab, overturning the will of voters in Memphis. Pearson’s response was a shoot, an unscripted breaking of kayfabe, bringing real life elements into the storyline. Pearson highlighted the hypocrisy of the GOP majority, expelling him while keeping people in the chamber accused of grave misconduct. 

I’m already dreading the ever expanding 2024 campaign that is taking shape right now. Collectively we face a number of overlapping crises and find ourselves in serious times but have a deeply unserious political culture.

But for better or worse, I am an institutionalist. I believe in democratic institutions and that government can help solve problems and make society better. But I find myself caring less and less about US national politics as it becomes more and more like pro-wrestling.

I have more to say about wrestling and politics, in particular about how progressive politicians should embrace the populist message of Dusty Rhodes’s Hard Times promo. But that will have to wait until next week.

A Nation of Accidents

This week, I published a piece with my friends at Teachers Going Gradeless. It’s about my old nemesis the College Board and their gatekeeping function in university admissions. In researching the piece, I learned a bit about the organization’s founding. The College Board’s role as a third party between high school students and universities is not something that anyone in government or in states necessarily planned; it just ended up that way. Like so much of the dumb stuff we do in the US, policymakers couldn’t be bothered to actually make policy. It fits a pattern that I’ve been thinking about recently. Due largely to the dysfunctional nature of Congress in policymaking and the decentralized nature of the US’ system of federalism, much of our most important national practices are really accidents of history:

Why are Iowa and New Hampshire the first caucus and primary? 

Why do we vote on Tuesdays rather than weekends? 

Why are there nine judges on the SCOTUS? 

Why do we treat dental care as something separate or distinct from health care? 

Why are 401ks the primary vehicle for retirement saving? 

Why are interest rates on student loans so damn high? 

There was never a meaningful national debate about any of these—we just ended up like this and we all live with the consequences because of inertia and the inability of our leaders to imagine alternatives.

In the piece, I looked at one of these accidents, the system of employer based health coverage in the US. We’re basically the only country that does this and if you think about it for more than thirty seconds you’ll see why no one chose to follow our lead. For the unfamiliar, here’s where the system came from (from the TG2 article):

It’s an unintended consequence of domestic policy in World War II. During the war, the federal government imposed wage controls which made it difficult for employers to attract workers by offering higher salaries. To compete, many companies began offering health insurance as a benefit. This became more popular in the post-war period as labor unions began negotiating health benefits as part of collective bargaining agreements. 

We stumbled into a system that is inefficient, keeps potential entrepreneurs stuck in jobs they hate to maintain their benefits, and makes life nearly impossible for small business owners. This was never the plan, it just happened but a bunch of politicians treat the model like some immutable sacrement handed down by Hamilton & Madison. It is not. It’s only been with us as long as air conditioning. Tangentially, understanding the employer health care schemes helps us understand why some unions have opposed a national healthcare system like Sen. Sanders’ Medicare for All. 

Another example of this is the state of cannabis laws. We first visited Thailand in 2018 and can see a shift. In 2022, the Thai government legalized marijuana and dispensaries have popped up in major cities, increasing Thailand’s already powerful tourist draw. The government thought legalization was the best policy, they created legislation to enact said policy, said policy was put in place—that’s how governance is supposed to work. Compare that to the sloppy patchwork in the US. Weed is legal in Washington State. It is sold, consumed, and taxed. Meanwhile in neighboring (and deeply inferior) Idaho:

 “Possession of three ounces or less of marijuana is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year imprisonment and/or a fine up to $1,000. If the quantity possessed is more than three ounces but less than one pound, it is a felony punishable by up to five years imprisonment and/or a fine up to $10,000.”

But in both states, it’s illegal under federal law and at any time the feds could bust in the door of every dope shop in Washington, sending everyone working and shopping to prison. The feds choose not to do so because they know the drug laws are idiodic but they can’t be bothered to remove them. Meanwhile, roughly a quarter million mostly poor Black and Brown people are locked up every year for marijuana possessions largely in Southern States [Texas (of course), Tennessee, and North Carolina lead the pack].

If you think about any of this for more than a moment, you’d see red. But most of us don’t think about it at all. 

One of the gifts of teaching young people political science is that they aren’t burdened down with the weight of lived experience. They violently question or openly reject things that we take for granted because “it’s always been that way.” When I explain the extent to which the entire system is made up of historical accidents and held together by norms rather than laws, they give me the most dumbfounded and “WTFAYTATDMNS*” faces. I love them for that. They aren’t jaded or beaten down by the stupidity of it all like we all are. That’s why they’re our best hope.

*WTFAYTATDMNS: What the f*** are you talking about? That don’t make no sense!