That is: center economic populism, stand up for workers, rail against the captains of industry, and give people a solid, concrete economic agenda to vote *for.* And there's some good evidence this can be effective. In fact, the reason Obama won re-election in 2012 was...

largely due to his strong performance in the industrial midwest, based on the auto-rescue and a campaign against Romney that successfully painted him as vulture capitalist. Sherrod Brown has found success in Ohio with a strong, worker-first message and record.

But as the politics of identity grow more powerful, amidst massive global migration flows, there are real limitations here as well. You can't just offer alternate policies, you need to offer an altnerate *identity* for people to vote for, and I'm not sure campaigns can do that.

For decades, that's what the labor movement has done. Organizing isn't just about forming a union and fighting for better wages/working conditions, it's also about building a consciousness and an indentity.

For decades, western center-left parties have been, in a literal sense, the parties of "labor." Built on the backs of organized, mass institutions of working class power. But labor has been mercilessly attacked and gutted, and we're seeing the result.

No matter how mobilized and organized a political campaign or movement is, it's going to have severe limitations in doing the kind of identity-building that labor movements do over the long-term.

But the other, even trickier part of this, is a question of what that counter-identity *is.* In the US, the Trump coalition is comparatively homogenous. The non-Trump coalition is diverse & hetergenous, across lines of class, race and geography. What's the identity that binds it?

I don't have any answers here, but part of the broader point, I guess, is that we are asking *campaigns* to do a lot of political work that is both necessary and vital, but not sufficent. Not a novel insight, but probably good to consider as campaign season ramps up.

@sdonnan  he's done this already twice before and it was not true! What is the reason to believe it this time particulalry when the Chinese are literally saying "we're not there yet "?

I think this is a really useful listen on the question of building an alternative to Trumpism among the constituencies most drawn to it. #WITHPod