The New Zealand Fabian Society hosted a timely panel last night with me, Ollie Neas of Public Interest, and Bryce Edwards of the Democracy Project.
New Zealand has an election coming in November and the country’s left parties are at once positioning themselves to win and studying the rise of left populism in other rich countries—especially in the US. To that end, we had an extended discussion about class politics at the end of history, what left populism even is, and everything you ever wanted to know about the Democratic Socialists of America. You can watch the entire event here:
The transcript of my written remarks (not the Q&A discussion) appears below.
Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.
Remarks to the New Zealand Fabian Society
19 August 2026, as delivered
Everyone probably knows who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) is. She’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she’s a congresswoman representing the Bronx in New York, and there’s a decent chance that she’s America’s next president.
But AOC went to Germany a few months ago and gave this great talk about left populism. She said something like
When you have economic stagnation for the working class…that is the stuff of populist movements. The choice is what direction those populist movements can go.
That’s a great starting point because Left and Right populism are similar only in fingering the failure of normal liberal politics to keep the working class secure and enfranchised and alive. But identifying the pain of the working class is where the comparison between left and right populism stops.
Because right populism tells a story about workers being screwed—which is the reality—but it’s a story that blames everything on vulnerable populations. Immigrants, Muslims, trans kids, Chinese people.
That content doesn’t compare to left populism in any way at all. Left populism tells a story about workers getting screwed because that’s the material reality you’re starting from. But it’s not a story about cultural grievance or identity politics—it’s a story about class. The working class.
I think if you’re a centrist or someone who’s not especially attuned to the shape of our historical moment, you might be inclined to treat left and right populists as somehow equivalent.
But that’s a huge mistake, and not just because I’m on one side versus the other. The mistake is an analytical one: If the story of your politics professes to diagnose a problem and propose a solution, it must also account for who within society is benefiting from the problem.
This is the failure of far-right populism that exposes it as a farce—the people and systems it blames to deflect from the economic precarity of the working class is not the people or systems who thrive in conditions of economic precarity. It’s those at top of the k-shaped economy that obviously benefit from the fact of a k-shaped economy.
And there aren’t a lot of immigrants and trans kids at the top of the economy—there’s a rentier class, there’s a class of lobbyists, military contractors, venture capital and private equity firms, and, in New Zealand, a grocery store duopoly that price gouges me every time I buy chicken nuggets and apples.
We can name all of that as oligarchy—because oligarchy is the politics of wealth hoarding or wealth defense. And because the power of the state in rich countries—including New Zealand—functions foremost to protect wealth…we’re being dominated by oligarchic politics. By those at the top of the k-shaped economy.
So in the US, where inequality trends are visibly more extreme than in New Zealand but just a few years ahead of us, we see in the US the ghost of Christmas future. And that’s something we can learn from.
In the US, “left-populism” describes a big tent with multiple tendencies—progressives, radlibs, and of course the rise of DSA. And there’s more to say about that, especially DSA, but the left populists, regardless of their tendency, are all running on three core issues:
Against militarism and genocide;
Against data centers and Big Tech;
Against oligarchy.
And how politicians talk about those three sets of issues involves tailoring a unique home style. If you’re Mamdani, maybe you talk about unaffordability instead of oligarchy. If you’re Ro Khanna, maybe you talk about the Epstein class instead of oligarchy. And then of course Bernie Sanders talks primarily about oligarchy. Home styles will vary. And in some districts, you’re going to message heavily on only one or two of these things…but the novelty of what’s happening is that it’s a package deal. For the first time in my lifetime, you get a coherent platform that everyone from this part of the political spectrum endorses regardless of how they emphasize or de-emphasize parts of it.
By way of an example, my friend Will Lawrence won the Democratic nomination for Congress in Michigan two weeks ago. And there’s a few really noteworthy things about his campaign. One, he’s been a democratic socialist as long as I’ve known him, and he won in Michigan, a purple state, anyway. Two, the two competitors he beat were credentialed national-security professionals—one was a navy SEAL and the other was Biden’s ambassador to Ukraine.
That’s ruptural. In my adult life, ever since the War on Terror began, national-security credentials used to be sufficient to win in electoral politics and now it’s discrediting. Literally today the golden child of the national security state, Alex Vindman, got beat by a democratic socialist in Florida, for Marco Rubio’s senate seat! We’re experiencing a paradigm shift.
And my buddy Will won by making his entire campaign about being against data centers and Flock surveillance cameras and being for community control…But you look at Will’s platform, it’s the entire left-populist agenda—he also wants to cut aid to Israel, he opposes billionaires, he wants to cut the defense budget and opposes illegal wars, he wants free buses and a peace economy at home. He wants to demilitarize Michigan industry.
So when you get a left-populist politician, you get a coherent package of policies that respond to the suffering of the working class. I think that’s not just necessary; it’s smart politics. And it’s not sufficiently in evidence in New Zealand party politics and we need to explore why that might be.