The Populist's Guide to 2020 Quotes

“When Jeff Bezos paid 250 million dollars for The Washington Post, in effect what he purchased was the right to stop the second-most powerful newspaper in the United States from investigating his company, Amazon, and even better—that he could use that company to hire people who share a similar ideology to his own, which benefits his bottom line.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“When I hear Democrats wringing their hands about the ‘norms and guardrails of democracy,’ I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, and when I hear Joe Biden earnestly insist that Trump is some sort of aberration, I begin to wonder if we deserve what we’ve gotten. Open your eyes and look around at the world. Or, if international affairs aren’t your thing, look around at our own country, where life expectancy is actually in decline. We are rapidly heading towards a recession, domestic terrorism is on the rise, and pretty much everyone is addicted to some stupefying thing, from drugs to porn to Twitter.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“What might Democrats have been able to extract from this administration if they had put a quarter of the energy they spent on Russia and Ukraine into fighting for an increased minimum wage or health care or union rights?”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“What would happen if the public was actually enlisted in the service of a pro-working class agenda?”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“ghouls like Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer in key positions. He has continued holding campaign rallies with his die-hard supporters but he has yet to deliver on some key administration priorities.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“In his way, Donald Trump has made many of the same mistakes that Obama did. He too was brought to power by the combination of a passionate grassroots movement and a wealthy donor class.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“History is likely to look back at the Obama years as an unbelievable missed opportunity. He had it well within his power to reorient the Democratic Party around the working class, but instead he continued to move it towards the wealthy and the upper middle class. It remains to be seen whether the tide can be turned back.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“that under his watch, Democrats fell out of favor in most of the country. They lost nearly 1,000 state legislative seats, were tossed out of Governor’s mansions, lost the House and then the Senate, ultimately ushering in the era of Donald Trump.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“Boomers love the idea of appealing to young people; they just don’t like the revolutionary change politics that come with actually appealing to young people.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“in the end, voters care much more about what you’ll do than about your age, gender, race or sexual orientation.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“We will look back and see that Yang’s candidacy marked the beginning of a new age and his unintentional unmasking of identity politics will be a key part of his legacy.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“Your identity is only celebrated if it does not upset the economic structure which benefits the wealthy over the working class.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“Leave your identity politics at the door, and start evaluating people by the content of their character and their record, and not by some B.S. woke signaling that no one believes anymore—including, I might add, the demographic groups you are supposedly pandering to. Otherwise, prepare for another four years of Trump.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“If Democrats want to be the party of working people, then they can’t pick and choose which people. I want no part of the party centered around the professional-managerial class, throwing a bone of identity politics to the black and brown working class to keep them in the tent.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“If the Democratic Party wants to win, then they should actually do something for the multi-racial working class instead of just changing the race of the so-called “leader” that runs palliative care for the working people in the giant hospice that both rural and urban America have become.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“If you’re a millennial drowning in student debt, do you care that President Platitude Pete-the-millennial is the one who lets you keep drowning in that debt? If you are one of the parents of the 70,000 people per year that die of an overdose, do you care about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the political coward who continues our racist and inhumane War on Drugs? Woke people need to wake up!”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“It was Democrats who put in place the racist 100-to-1 crack sentencing disparity. Thanks, Joe Biden! It was Democrats who proudly destroyed welfare as we know it, Democrats who let the banksters off the hook so they could pillage African American and Hispanic communities with their subprime mortgages of mass destruction.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“If you’re an immigrant getting deported, does it matter to you that the deporter-in-chief is the first African American president? If you’re in jail for marijuana possession or because your kids were truant at school, does it make a difference that it’s Kamala Harris who gleefully prosecuted you? Aren’t you delighted that Kellyanne Conway was the first woman to run a successful presidential campaign?”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“I don’t want to pretend that breaking race and gender glass ceilings is meaningless. It’s not. I loved that the first president my kids knew was a black man. It does make a difference to see people of color and women in leadership roles. But if those people pursue the same racist, classist, elitist, crappy policies of their white brothers and sisters, well, it is not really change we can believe in, is it?”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“identity politics is a thin gruel to be offered by the Democratic Party establishment, corporatists, and media elites in lieu of actually delivering anything of consequence.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“The reckoning with this type of politics is only just beginning on the left as we grapple with the real legacy of the Obama years. It meant something to elect the first black President. I don’t want to diminish that. But for the disproportionately black and brown and female working class, it would have meant more to have a President who fought for union rights, who helped middle class homeowners rather than standing by as their net worth was destroyed by criminal banksters, who didn’t let corporations write his big Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“elevating a candidate based on their identity can provide a progressive sheen to the status quo. A way to score all your good lefty points without having your own class interests, power structures, or cocktail circuit access threatened. A way to feel good about what a good person you are without actually having to commit to change a system that has allowed you to get yours.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“There is a massive group of Americans whose first commitment is to ending the disgusting bipartisan consensus of corruption, corporatism, and war profiteering that has so damaged our nation.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“for many voters establishment versus anti-establishment is a more important barometer than the typical left-right spectrum—or maybe authentic versus inauthentic or principled versus pandering.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“In his new piece in Jacobin, Karp lays out how the Democratic Party has rejected the politics of class solidarity in favor of embracing the professional elite. The results of this should be abundantly obvious: NAFTA, TPP, allowing union power to decline, banking bailouts, an embrace of woke virtue signaling to keep working-class minorities in the tent while providing nothing of substance in terms of their economic well-being.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“Let me be clear, I am a feminist. But my aspirations are greater than hoping we can have more women as oil executives and hedge fund managers. As a woman, I support candidates who will create a system that provides dignity for all, rather than just changing the gender ratio of our oppressors.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“There’s Tulsi Gabbard, the Hawaii congresswoman who in 2016 resigned from a leadership position in the Democratic National Committee in protest over their treatment of Bernie Sanders. She dares to challenge the bipartisan pro-war foreign policy consensus and has been continually smeared as unpatriotic.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“Let’s face it: Biden’s general election campaign would be Hillary Clinton 2.0. Trump could easily cast him as another corrupt establishment tool and the result would likely be the same failure Democrats achieved in 2016.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“Multinational corporations realized sometime in the mid 2010s that if they began to parrot and sponsor social justice seminars, that these critical race theorists would in turn not criticize them for shipping U.S. jobs overseas and perpetuating the class divide within our society. In effect, they purchased leftist”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising

“The truth is that in an era where both parties have decided to center corporate interests, identity has been used to culturally pander to the working class so that you can keep screwing them economically. For those who hold power, it’s relatively nonthreatening to embrace a type of change that would only go so far as to change the race or gender of the keepers of the status quo. The great American meritocracy, in which every little boy and girl can ascend to their rightful status, can be venerated and preserved if the only problem with it is bias of race and gender. Once you start thinking hard about class interests and start asking whether there’s really anything so special about those people at the top of the meritocracy, that is ultimately a much more dangerous and potentially transformational view.  What really threatens American elites isn’t the notion that we need more women or more people of color with their boot on the throat of the working class, the real threat comes when people start asking why the working class should have a boot on their throat at all.”
― Krystal Ball, The Populist's Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising