An actual populist uprising will take place outside of all this electoralist bullshit. Krystal and Saager are decent journalists but they epitomize why reformism fails. I like the way they constantly bash neoliberals but the FDR nostaglism gets a bit old. I’ve noticed that virtually the full-range dissident economic opinion buys into this nonsense, including Dengists like Caleb Maupin, “anarchists” like Noam Chomsky and his acolytes, the spectrum of do-gooder left-liberals and social democrats (Krystal, Bernie, AOC, Kulinski, Pakman, the Jacobin boys), all the way over to economic nationalists like Saager and Tucker Carlson. The shared line is “Maybe this neoliberalism thing has gone too far, maybe we should turn back the clock to the New Deal paradigm!” The exception seems to be the “Let’s go back to the Gilded Age!” libertarians (we’re in the new Gilded Age now, guys).
The New Deal was part of the problem, i.e. failure to counter the managerial revolution of the Great Depression by fully vanquishing the ruling class, not saving the ruling class through the creation of a populist facade. (And, for all my fascist/NS or Marxist readers, fascism and communism were simply the Central European and Asian versions of the managerial revolution).
