On Inauguration Day, many felt real euphoria at the prospect of a wholesale renovation of America’s institutions. And, as I’ve argued often, our constitutional democracy does need renovation—the various elites are disconnected from the people, bureaucracy afflicts everyone, and many of us find it impossible to hold our elected officials accountable. Yet I fear that the renovations we’re about to get will take us in the wrong direction.

Americans have been yielding sovereignty to tech magnates and their money for years. The milestones are sometimes startling, even if one has long been aware of where things are heading. I was astonished and alarmed when I learned, in the summer of 2023, that Elon Musk had, within a span of five years, built an orbital network comprising more than half of the world’s active satellites. His share has now risen to more than 60 percent. Already in 2023, he controlled battlefield communications infrastructure used in the war between Ukraine and Russia. Musk is currently the head of Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, which is taking over the U.S. Digital Service. At the same time, he may be making a bid for TikTok’s American platform. Ownership of TikTok brings immense power. In December, the Romanian elections were canceled in the middle of voting because of fears that propaganda from Russia, by means of TikTok, was driving the election results.

Musk is well on his way to controlling the world’s communications infrastructure. This is not by accident. He swims in an intellectual universe, alongside his PayPal associates Peter Thiel (who funded J. D. Vance’s Senate campaign) and David Sacks (now Trump’s AI and crypto czar), whose writers advocate for replacing democratic leadership with a CEO-monarch, and argue that higher-IQ “sovereign individuals” should rule over people with lower IQs. Musk, Sacks, and Thiel all spent formative boyhood years in South Africa. As the historian Jill Lepore noted in The New Yorker, Musk’s grandfather took the family to South Africa for the sake of apartheid, having left Canada after being jailed for his leadership activities in the Technocracy movement, “whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule.” Thiel has made “freedom” his life’s pursuit. Since 2009, he has argued that freedom is incompatible with democracy, and that “the fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”

[Brooke Harrington: The broligarchs are trying to have their way]

Two original MAGA leaders, Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, have railed against this “techno-feudalism.” That is what they see Musk and his allies trying to bring about, whether in collaboration with Trump or by using him as their puppet. For the first time ever, I find myself agreeing with Bannon and Loomer.

The whole situation went from concerning to surreal when, two days before his inauguration, Trump issued a meme crypto coin, known as $TRUMP. A memecoin is a form of cryptocurrency that has no value-creating function in the crypto ecosystem. Instead, it references some popular phenomenon and gains its value only because of people’s interest in that popular phenomenon. Typically, memecoins also lack the security that could render them a stable part of the crypto financial infrastructure.

The fully diluted value (or market cap when the full supply is circulating) of  $TRUMP, 80 percent of which is owned by entities that the Trump family controls, shot up within 24 hours of its release to more than $70 billion. It is now bouncing around between $20 billion and $30 billion—meaning the president now holds something like 75 to 80 percent of his wealth in crypto. That goes well beyond monetizing the Trump brand through T-shirts, gold sneakers, and steaks. This time, Trump has auctioned himself. Leaving aside the technical substrate, there is arguably little difference between $TRUMP and the president posting a deposit-only Swiss-bank-account number online, into which people can deposit funds and privately show him the receipts for their deposits. His personal wealth now depends on these depositors. He has turned himself—and therefore his office—into a for-profit joint-share stock corporation. People with $TRUMP in their crypto wallets are the shareholders.

[Read: The crypto world is already mad at Trump]

Who knows if the president intended this outcome, but leaders in the crypto space have long hoped for the replacement of nation-states with “network states” encompassing communities that come together on the blockchain. They are celebrating $TRUMP as the first crypto community to have gained control of a nation-state’s powers by capturing the president’s attention through control of his digital wallet. If what Trump has done is upheld as legal or becomes a norm, other global leaders have every incentive to do what he did, turning democratic governance into corporate governance. Melania Trump, for one, has already followed suit; her coin was issued a few days after Trump’s.

Last week, the DOGE homepage displayed the icon for Dogecoin, which Musk has declared to be his favorite coin, and which he holds. (He has faced litigation as a result of accusations that he sought to pump it up; the lawsuit was dismissed.) The icon appeared in vibrant color against a black background. It was removed within 24 hours.

Two features of the $TRUMP memecoin are especially troubling. First, there is the question of who owns the coin. Initial activity for sales of $TRUMP—and, therefore, its financial backing—came from buyers on the platforms Gate and Binance, which are restricted in the United States. Although it will take years of analysis to determine who the eventual beneficial owners are, the reliance on Gate and Binance suggests that early uptake occurred abroad, and particularly in markets controlled by U.S. adversaries—China, Iran, North Korea, Russia. As of 2023, according to a Wall Street Journal report, U.S. trading volume on Binance was very low. Users in China provided Binance with its greatest market share, at 20 percent of trading volume, and about 10 percent of Chinese customers were at the time identified as “politically exposed persons”—that is, according to the Journal report, “government officials, their relatives or close associates who require greater scrutiny due to their greater risk of involvement in bribery, corruption or money laundering.” Because memecoins depend on a collective belief in their value, investors (other than the issuer) who buy the coins are the people who hold up that value. Those early movers on the Gate and Binance platforms can be meaningfully understood to have handed Trump billions, at least on paper. (Steve Gregory, the Gate CEO, was invited to the inauguration.) They also hold power over that wealth. If they withdraw confidence and dump their assets, the value of the coin would trend toward zero. So Trump now appears to owe most of his new wealth to crypto investors in adversary states who are quite possibly closely connected to governments themselves—investors whom the rest of us are not able to identify, but who can identify themselves to him by proudly waving their $TRUMP-filled digital wallets.

[Read: Hawk Tuah wasn’t what it seemed]

Second, there is the question of what it means to convert political office into something that is subject not merely to the general pressure of financial influence but to the power of shareholders over an officeholder’s immediate personal wealth. This is of course why other presidents and senior executive-branch officials have sold off their investments or placed them in blind trusts for the duration of their terms. The neo-reactionary voices in the tech space—the NRx crowd, as they call themselves—have for some time wanted to take the powers of governance over territory out of the hands of nation-states and place them into the hands of platform-based collectives committed to capitalism first and foremost. For years we’ve watched the problem of money in politics get worse and worse, but the Trump coin takes the matter to another level. It provides the technical means for enabling the vision of total capture of governance institutions by tech communities.

What speculative futures are now possible? The president could easily organize a one-token, one-vote referendum—as many coins and decentralized autonomous organizations, which are built out of blockchain communities, already do—among asset holders on major U.S. public-policy issues. Think of it as a corporation giving shareholders their one vote per share. Yes, a corporation has to please its customers—in this analogy, American voters—but it really needs to please the shareholders who help sustain the share price. If $TRUMP were to introduce a voting mechanism for asset holders in this way, it would immediately implement the long-held anarcho-capitalist dream of converting global governance regimes into for-profit joint-stock corporations—minus any Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure requirements, which the president has hinted about relaxing. If other leaders do what Trump has done, then we would see global governance structures generally privatized—and political leaders provided with great incentives to collude with the common interest of capital holders, rather than governing for a true cross-class common good.

Where would that leave voters? In a position somewhat akin to fans at WWE wrestling matches. Politicians, all beholden to a community of shareholders separate from their voters, would collude in steering toward benefits for those shareholders, while pretending to fight one another in public. Imagining such a possibility would seem crazy if people in the tech world hadn’t been writing so much about just this kind of governance structure—and if the technical pieces weren’t now all falling neatly into place.

Trump promised back in 2016 to “drain the swamp,” and he was correct, as I’ve written before, about the need to restore experts to their rightful place as servants of the people rather than quasi-autonomous technocrats who order the world as they think best. But instead of draining the swamp, Trump appears simply to be importing even larger crocodiles from Silicon Valley: multimillionaires and billionaires who mostly couldn’t give a fig for self-government of, by, and for the people. The man who vowed to slay the old “deep state” appears ready to accept a new, more totally controlling, one.

[Read: The Trump sons really love crypto]

Speaking recently on NPR, Bannon used the term techno-feudalism again and went on to explain: “These oligarchs in Silicon Valley, they have a very different view of how people should govern themselves … They don’t believe in the underlying tenets of self-governance.” This seems right. In his inaugural address, Trump echoed Lincoln, promising a new birth of freedom, but just a few rows behind him, among other tech luminaries, was Musk, nearly levitating with joy when Trump promised territorial expansion both on this planet and in space and cheered for DOGE—Musk’s agency and his favorite memecoin.

The principles of popular sovereignty were hard-won—principles that vest the ownership of government in we, the people, not they, the owners of memecoins. When early Americans before, during, and after the Revolution sought to make self-government durable, they circulated pamphlets that articulated the values and tools necessary for successful self-governance. The renovations we need will similarly depend on real understanding of self-government. I’ve been a civic educator my whole life, but now I see an even more urgent need to pick up the pace at which we spread the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers, as well as works that have updated those texts, to sharpen our collective understanding of what popular sovereignty requires.

After the British government first allowed the East India Company, traffickers in tea, to rule India, and then fell into a full fiscal entanglement with the company, Americans dumped the company’s tea in Boston Harbor. Maybe it’s time to dump Dogecoin.

Pete Hegseth, President-Elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, was initially considered one of his most endangered nominees. But after the MAGA movement organized a campaign to threaten Republicans who expressed reservations about Hegseth’s fitness, criticism dried up quickly. “We gave the Senate an attitude adjustment,” Mike Davis, a Republican operative known for his florid threats to lock up Trump’s political targets, told Politico.

That attitude adjustment was on vivid display in Hegseth’s confirmation hearing today before the Armed Services Committee. During the proceedings, the Republican majority displayed no willingness to block or even seriously vet a nominee who resides far outside the former boundaries of acceptability for a position of immense power.

Hegseth’s liabilities can be divided into four categories, each of them individually disqualifying:

personal behavior, including allegations of drunkenness on the job, of maintaining a hostile workplace, and of sexual assault lack of managerial experience, or at least positive managerial experience (According to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Hegseth ran two tiny advocacy groups so poorly that he was forced to step down.) a disregard for the laws of war and a habit of excusing the actions of  convicted war criminals an enthusiasm for domestic political combat that blends into an inability to distinguish Democrats from enemy combatants

Hegseth’s strategy today was to evade these problems altogether. In this, he had the full cooperation of the committee’s Republican majority. If you’ve ever had media training for a television appearance, a common piece of advice is to use the prompt to get to whatever point you wish to make, rather than focus on answering the question. The method generally works on television because the queries are mostly just a way of saying, “Now it’s your turn to talk.” It isn’t supposed to work in a Senate hearing, especially one in which lawmakers have serious qualms about the nominee’s record or statements. But Hegseth, a slick and successful television talk-show host, employed it to great effect.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s most dangerous Cabinet pick]

Democrats tried to probe Hegseth’s long record, only to meet endless evasions. Hegseth has categorically denied having sexually assaulted or harassed anybody. Senator Tim Kaine asked him whether the alleged behavior, if true, would be disqualifying. Hegseth refused to say, calling the question hypothetical. When Kaine asked whether spousal abuse would be disqualifying, Hegseth also declined to answer, likewise refusing to opine about the relevance of multiple alleged episodes of drunkenness on the job.

Hegseth has promised to abstain from drinking completely if confirmed. It is a puzzling vow given his unwillingness to concede that drinking on the job would be a bad habit for someone who runs the nation’s military. It is also one to which he’s apparently unwilling to be held accountable, even in spirit: In response to a question from Senator Mazie Hirono, who asked whether he would back that pledge by promising to resign if he violated it, Hegseth declined to answer.

One issue area where Hegseth might have expected more Republican resistance concerned women in the military. In the past, Hegseth has categorically opposed letting women serve in combat. After his nomination was announced, Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican member of the committee, publicly questioned that stance. Hegseth has since altered his position. He now claims that he objects only to lowering the standards of performance, and will permit female soldiers to serve on equal terms if they can meet standards of strength, speed, and other metrics. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren tried to pin him down on that conveniently timed conversion, but Hegseth simply refused to admit to having changed his mind at all.

In one notable exchange, Senator Mark Kelly asked Hegseth to describe a series of allegations about drinking and sexual harassment as either true or false. Hegseth instead robotically replied to each answer, “Anonymous smears,” even after Kelly reminded him that he was specifically asking for an answer of either “True” or “False.” What could explain the nominee’s reluctance to directly state under oath that none of the alleged incidents took place, even as his answer attempted to imply as much? None of the Republican senators pulled on this thread. Their questions mostly consisted of talking points supporting Hegseth’s preferred themes about wokeness ruining the military and the need to restore “lethality” in the military.

Senator Markwayne Mullin proved an exception to the general trend of evading uncomfortable topics. He came to Hegseth’s defense by answering some of the hypothetical questions the nominee wouldn’t touch. “How many senators have shown up drunk to vote at night?” he asked, addressing his colleagues. “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen it, because I know you have. And then how many senators do you know have gotten divorced for cheating on their wives?”

Perhaps realizing that he was not painting the nominee in the most flattering light, Mullin followed up with the incisive question, “Tell me something about your wife that you love.” He even helpfully suggested that Hegseth mention her wonderful mothering of their children.

Meanwhile, Democrats on the panel complained that Hegseth had declined every offer to meet with them, solidifying the impression that he conceives of the position for which he has been nominated in purely partisan terms. They likewise complained that the Republican majority rejected their requests for a second round of questioning. Hegseth looked like a man who understood that the fix was in, and that all he had to do was run out the clock on the Democrats’ allotted time while dodging their questions. So far, his calculation appears to have been correct.

If there was any place in America where President Joe Biden’s economic agenda ought to have won him votes, it would have been Lordstown, Ohio. A September CNN article noted that, thanks to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, “a gleaming new 2.8 million-square-foot manufacturing plant symbolizes something that has been fleeting in recent years: hope.” Biden was bringing well-paid union jobs in the cutting-edge battery industry to a struggling region long written off as the Rust Belt.

But if Biden was expecting the community to reward his efforts, he was sorely disappointed. In 2024, the county in which Lordstown is located shifted toward Trump by six percentage points compared with 2020, the second-highest swing to Trump of any county in the state.

Lordstown offers a test case of a political theory that has not only guided the Biden administration’s economic policy but also sought to explain the past several decades of American politics. The theory holds that Donald Trump’s 2016 election represented a voter backlash against “neoliberal” economic policies that had impoverished people in the heartland, who in their desperation turned to a populist outsider promising to smash the system that had betrayed them.

From this analysis, it naturally followed that if Democrats abandoned neoliberalism, they could win back the working class and become competitive in more of the country. A post-neoliberal party would curtail free trade, ratchet up enforcement of antitrust and other regulations, run a high-pressure economy with rising wages even at the risk of higher inflation, support labor unions categorically, and subsidize manufacturing employment to reindustrialize hollowed-out areas left behind by globalization—all of which Biden ended up doing.

On the substance, Biden’s economic agenda has registered some meaningful successes. The hot labor market raised wages; union organizers at a handful of companies, such as Starbucks and Amazon, have made breakthroughs; and the administration’s public investments in chip production and green energy have built up strategic domestic industries. As a political strategy, however, post-neoliberalism has clearly failed. Biden’s popularity dropped to catastrophic levels in his first year and never recovered, leaving his successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, unable to escape his gravitational pull. If rejecting neoliberalism for four years did nothing to pull working-class voters away from Trump, perhaps Trumpism was never a revolt against neoliberalism in the first place.

Some Democrats have responded to the disaster of 2024 by insisting that the way forward for the party is to keep doing what Biden did, but louder and more insistently. In fact, Trump’s reelection ought to call into question the whole foundation upon which the strategy was constructed.

People tend to believe that events with profound consequences must have profound sources. The shock of Trump’s 2016 victory led many Democrats to search for an origin story that matched the scope of such a traumatic outcome. A belief took hold, especially on the party’s economic left wing, that working-class voters had revolted against an economic order perpetuated by Democrats and Republicans alike. In this telling, every president since at least Ronald Reagan had governed in the service of corporations and wealthy elites, at the expense of ordinary Americans and “left behind” places. After all, Trump had pulled off his surprise Rust Belt sweep while denouncing free-trade deals and intermittently posing as an enemy of Wall Street. Defeating him would consequently require reestablishing a full-fledged populist program rather than the warmed-over variety of the Clinton and Obama years.

This theory always contained fatal flaws. The Democrats had maintained a coalition divided between business and labor since Franklin D. Roosevelt—who also established the modern free-trade order. The recent versions of the two parties did narrowly agree on a handful of policies, including the virtues of globalization, but starting with the Reagan era, they had grown more divided, not more united, on economics. Barack Obama had bailed out the auto industry, regulated Wall Street, and redistributed hundreds of billions of dollars from the rich to the poor. Even Bill Clinton had engaged in bitter showdowns over taxes and spending. The notion that Clinton and Newt Gingrich, or Obama and Paul Ryan, were partners with a shared ideology that could be usefully defined by a single term ignores almost everything that happened during these years. It is a measure of the incoherence of “neoliberalism” that the term can be, and has been, applied as an epithet to almost anything: Paul Krugman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, public-employee unions, Beatles fandom.

[John McWhorter: When people were proud to call themselves ‘neoliberal’]

What’s more, the 2016 election’s shocking outcome can be adequately explained by any one of a number of perfectly mundane causes: Hillary Clinton’s drawbacks as a politician, Democrats’ leftward moves on social policy, the difficulty that incumbent parties have winning a third straight term, the mainstream media’s fixation with the email scandal, James Comey’s last-minute intervention to reopen the FBI investigation into it.

Still, the narrative that neoliberalism was to blame took hold widely—including, most fatefully, during the Biden administration. Even though Biden had served as Obama’s vice president, and won the nomination in large part because Democratic voters looked back on that partnership with fondness, he filled his administration with staffers who believed that Obama and Bill Clinton had failed the working class. The administration’s policies accordingly departed in ways that those post-neoliberal theorists deemed especially important. Biden supported organized labor almost unconditionally, even in policy areas that conflicted with other liberal priorities; pulled back on unfettered free trade; gave policy-making roles to lawyers over economists; and appointed crusading reformers to the top antitrust-enforcement positions. Perhaps most important, the administration saw its subsidies for green energy and chip manufacturing not merely as targeted responses to market failures but as the core of a new industrial policy that would restore prosperity to large swaths of America.

Triumphant headlines such as “Biden Is Getting Ready to Bury Neoliberalism” and “Why Neoliberalism Is Finally on the Way Out” celebrated the populist left’s newfound influence. “The Biden administration has explicitly disavowed all aspects of neoliberalism, including the assumptions about free trade and the alleged efficiency of outsourcing, the lack of support for trade unions, and the bipartisan contempt for industrial policy,” Robert Kuttner wrote in The American Prospect in 2023.

As recently as this past fall, the Biden administration and many of its supporters continued to insist that his post-neoliberal policies constituted a genuine revolution in American politics and economic life—a return to the Democratic Party’s New Deal–era identity as the champion of the working class.

That conviction helps explain why Biden felt entitled to a second term and why, once he finally abandoned his candidacy, he chose to pass the baton to his vice president rather than an outsider who could more credibly distance themselves from his politically toxic record. “I think one of the arguments that get made, you have the most successful presidency of any president in modern history, maybe since Franklin Roosevelt,” he said last July, by way of explaining his reluctance to drop out of the race after his disastrous debate performance.

This belief also explains why much of the party’s left wing—including Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and Ro Khanna—lined up behind him, even as members of the party’s centrist wing fought to replace him as the candidate. “He’s been the best president of my lifetime, and we have his back,” Omar told The Washington Post. One of Biden’s final gambits to retain the nomination was a vow, apparently influenced by Sanders, to expand Social Security benefits and eliminate medical debt during the first 100 days of his second term—as if pushing the “Populist” button even harder would finally cause the public to wake up and realize all the positive change that Biden had wrought.

In reality, Biden presided over the most unpopular Democratic presidency since Jimmy Carter’s. In November, working-class voters of all races, the very constituency that Biden’s anti-neoliberal turn was supposed to court, deserted the party. Perhaps hoping for Roosevelt-size majorities was a bit ambitious, but Biden’s sweeping, historic changes ought to have had at least some positive directional impact for the party. Unless, that is, the post-neoliberal theory of politics was wrong all along.

Rather than considering that possibility, however, many of the post-neoliberals have strained to explain why the theory is still sound despite its apparent real-world failure. These explanations fall into a few main categories. Some leftists have tried to pin the blame for the election result on Harris’s decision to run toward the center once she became the nominee. Harris did embrace a more overtly moderate message than Biden, and gave less attention to his populist economic themes. But Harris performed better in swing states, where voters were inundated with her campaign messages, than she did in the rest of the country. This strongly suggests that Biden’s record was pulling her down, and that her centrist campaign themes made her more popular, not less.

Another defense holds that Biden’s successful policies simply haven’t produced political rewards yet. “The 40-year damage of neoliberalism to the living standards and life horizons of working Americans was so profound that three years of modest improvement was far from FDR-style transformation,” Kuttner argued in a postelection Prospect essay. “Many of Biden’s initiatives will take many years to bear fruit.” The outgoing president has sounded a similar note. “It will take years to see the full effects in terms of new jobs and new investments all around the country, but we have planted the seeds that are making this happen,” he recently argued in a Prospect essay under his name.

It’s true that most of the spending in Biden’s major infrastructure laws is still in the pipeline. But these delays are themselves a result of Biden’s post-neoliberal ideology, which insisted on attaching a long list of social criteria to its projects, while failing to enact legislation to speed up the permitting process. In any case, industrial policy is just one piece of Biden’s allegedly transformational agenda. Other elements—including on trade, labor, and fiscal policy—have taken immediate effect. None of these actions has shown any sign of helping Biden politically. The president’s stream of actions to forgive student debt did not produce higher support among young voters, his unwavering deference to labor unions did not yield more support among union members, and so on.

[Rogé Karma: Reaganomics is on its last legs]

And although many of the administration’s infrastructure investments remain stuck in the planning stage, some of them, such as the new Lordstown factory, have come online, bringing jobs with them. These projects offer localized mini tests of the hypothesis that delivering concrete benefits will lead to political support.

In an October story for The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann described visits to five places on the receiving end of Biden-enabled investment: Fort Valley, Georgia; Menominee, Michigan; Kokomo; Indiana, and Manitowoc and Milwaukee, in Wisconsin. “If you squint, you can see the outlines of a new post-neoliberal Democratic coalition,” he wrote. “Fast-growing clean-energy industries—wind, solar, batteries, hydrogen, electric vehicles—could join Hollywood and Silicon Valley in supporting the Democratic Party.”

In fact, every one of the counties Lemann visited wound up voting for Trump at a higher level in 2024 than it had four years earlier.

The pro-Trump swings were small, ranging from 0.1 percent to 3.5 percent—well below the national average. One could spin this as evidence that Biden’s domestic build-out had brought some marginal benefits—fractional gains concentrated in areas that were chosen as the staging grounds for gigantic national expenditures. But we are talking about small local shifts, obtained via many billions of dollars of federal investment. That is not a scalable national strategy.

Biden’s defenders also insist that his otherwise winning policies were simply overwhelmed by the headwinds of inflation, which felled incumbent parties around the world last year. But letting down your guard against inflation is, in fact, a key tenet of post-neoliberal doctrine. A 2020 strategy memo from the Hewlett Foundation, a major proponent and funder of post-neoliberal thinking, argued, “If economic developments over the past decade show anything, it is that there is greater headroom for spending without causing undue inflation,” and that the task was to focus on bringing down unemployment “without worrying about inflation quite so frantically.”

Supporters of Biden’s ambitious spending—I was one of them—were clear that events would prove out this doctrine’s soundness, or lack thereof. “If there were any doubt that Joe Biden’s economic proposals represent a big break with the policies of the Obama and Clinton Administrations, the debate about Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan dispelled it,” The New Yorker’s John Cassidy wrote in February 2021. “The only definitive way to find out whether the inflation threat is real or chimerical is to pass the $1.9 trillion package and see what happens.”

Inflation was always going to be a problem that Biden had to deal with. He dealt with it less effectively because the post-neoliberal argument that inflation either wouldn’t rise, wouldn’t last, or wouldn’t matter politically carried the day. Ignoring fears about inflation was a sound policy choice before the pandemic-induced price spike, but a dogmatic one after it. Biden’s inability to alter his course was a direct consequence of the ideological rigidity that his advisers embraced.

Finally, there’s the excuse that Biden’s policies would have been popular if only he hadn’t been too old and inarticulate to sell them properly to the public. “Biden wasn’t up to the kind of explanatory duties that the presidency requires—much less a presidency that was advancing landmark economic policies to benefit workers and consumers,” The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson wrote. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy has made a similar argument. “One of my frustrations is that President Biden and Vice-President Harris didn’t lead their economic messaging by talking about their break with neoliberalism,” he told New York magazine shortly after the election. “So the policy was really good. I just don’t think the rhetoric always matched the policy.”

[Chris Murphy: The wreckage of neoliberalism]

A great deal of evidence from political science suggests that presidential rhetoric has little ability to change public opinion, so the expectation that better speeches would have led to dramatically different outcomes is far-fetched. Even if that were not the case, the emphasis from post-neoliberals on rhetoric as a driving force of history is deeply strange. The whole point of their theory was to explain Trump’s rise as a proletarian revolt against neoliberal immiseration. Now that neoliberalism has supposedly been overthrown, we’re told that the crucial dialectical stage was for the president to deliver West Wing–quality inspirational speeches? What kind of materialism is this?

The theory that Trump’s popularity was a reaction against neoliberalism had an irresistible attraction to progressive elites. For the labor movement and other parts of the economic left, it supplied a political rationale for policies they’d long supported. For social-issue progressives, it implied that they had no need to compromise with the socially conservative positions held by working-class voters; all Democrats needed to do was address people’s “real” material concerns.

Public policy, of course, is not just about winning elections; it’s about improving people’s lives. Some of the policies Biden implemented are worth preserving on the merits. The blue-collar workers of Lordstown may well be in a better position than they were four years ago. But the electorate’s diffidence in the face of these measures is bracing. The notion that there is a populist economic formula to reversing the rightward drift of the working class has been tried, and, as clearly as these things can be proved by real-world experimentation, it has failed. It turns out there’s more to popularity than populism.