Hello, and happy Friday! I’ve been indulging in some much-needed social distancing from my laptop this week, so this will be a bit of a shorter correspondence than usual. Stay tuned for the final 2020 edition of this newsletter on December 18th!
Never fear: Foreign Correspondence will be back in your inboxes in early 2021.
What I’ve written (from the archives)
Since I’ve been on vacation this week, I figured I’d take this opportunity to share some snippets from a piece I almost wrote, plus a story from the archives.
The first has to do with President–elect Joe Biden and the bizarre tendency among some observers to describe his bid for the presidency as a populist campaign. Biden, they noted, was testing the reach of “liberal populism.” His campaign’s efforts to frame the contest as one between “Scranton Joe versus Park Avenue Donald,” paired with his pledge to prioritize the needs of disaffected workers over wealthy elites, was a form of “economic populism.” His appeals to working class voters wasn’t just a political pitch—it was a “populist pitch.”
These populist comparisons have mostly died down since the election, but for the avoidance of doubt: Joe Biden is not a populist. I say this not because he doesn’t fit the mold of the world’s most prominent populist figures (à la Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro), but because he simply doesn’t meet the criteria for what makes a populist—at least not under any of the widely-accepted definitions of the term.
The hallmark of a populist is a leader who believes that society is divided between two competing groups: “the pure people” versus the “corrupt elite.” But claiming to represent ordinary Americans, as Biden has done, doesn’t make him a populist. If it did, there isn’t a democratically-elected leader alive who wouldn’t be classed as one. Representing the people is the literal job of any politician. What sets populists apart is that they claim to speak for an exclusive and, often, homogenous notion of “the people”—a group which populists believe only they can truly represent. For President Trump, as with many other right-wing, nativist leaders, “the people” is more easily defined by those who do not make the cut: immigrants, ethnic minorities, or those deemed to be part of the so-called “elite.” Biden, in contrast, has pledged to be “a President for all Americans—whether you voted for me or not.”
Even if Biden wanted to seize the populist mantle, he wouldn’t be very convincing. Populists, after all, frame themselves first and foremost as political outsiders—a label that Biden, a career-politician, cannot credibly claim. Plus, he isn’t anti-establishment. He isn’t anti-pluralist. He doesn’t share populists’ distrust of international institutions. But the issue here isn’t that Biden is trying to be something he is not. It’s that observers, equipped with an arsenal of terms to describe this moment in American history, have opted for one that doesn’t really fit. In doing so, they not only risk equating Biden with actual populists, but they also end up obfuscating an already misunderstood phenomenon.
As I wrote back in March, “The more populism gets invoked in these ways … the more muddled its definition becomes. And the more muddled it becomes, the less useful it ultimately is. After all, what’s the point of invoking populism without a concerted effort to apply it consistently? Lacking a clear attempt to better define such terms, we risk stripping them of their meaning entirely.” You can read the full piece here.
What I’ve read
This heartbreaking dispatch from Iowa by my colleague Elaine Godfrey about what happens when the government does nothing:
“To visit Iowa right now is to travel back in time to the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in places such as New York City and Lombardy and Seattle, when the horror was fresh and the sirens never stopped. Sick people are filling up ICUs across the state. Health-care workers like Klein are being pushed to their physical and emotional limits. On the TV in my parents’ house in Burlington, hospital CEOs are begging Iowans to hunker down and please, for the love of God, wear a mask. This sense of new urgency is strange, though, because the pandemic isn’t in its early days. The virus has been raging for eight months in this country; Iowa just hasn’t been acting like it.”
This piece on the very 2020 phenomenon of culinary burnout (which I enjoyed despite the fact that I am not the primary chef in my household, thank god):
“Simple, repetitive, semi-creative tasks like kneading dough and chopping dill are supposed to thaw us when we’re frozen with existential dread, to ground us in the tactile world, to give us a sense of power and control over the small universe of the cutting board and the stovetop. This makes sense, I know it’s true, and I guess I remember living it, and believing it. But lately it feels awfully far away. I don’t want to re-center myself by being mindful while I peel a head of garlic for the hundred-and-thirtieth day in a row; I want to lose track of myself entirely by playing seventeen straight hours of a battle-strategy video game in which I get to be a military-school professor with magical powers and green hair.”
This moving essay by Lena Dunham about confronting infertility:
“There is a lot you can correct in life—you can end a relationship, get sober, get serious, say sorry—but you can’t force the universe to give you a baby that your body has told you all along was an impossibility. Weak animals die in the woods as their pack mates run ahead. Bad eggs don’t hatch. You can’t bend nature.”
What I’m thinking about
This superb New Yorker cover:
Until next time,
Yasmeen
P.S. If you’re in the market for some great holiday gift ideas, might I suggest giving the gift of The Atlantic? 🎅