Krystal Ball on Populism in the Trump Era and the Need for Left-Wing Voices in the Media
Interview by Joaquin Romero
This interview was originally published by our partner Media For Us.
We spoke with journalist Krystal Ball about the nature of populism in the Trump era, and the necessity of left-wing voices in the media. Ball, along with conservative commentator Saagar Enjeti, hosts The Hill’s news program Rising. On Rising she is known for her “Bernie Sanders-Left political ideology”, which she believes represents a growing movement and trend within the Democratic party. She is also the co-author of the book The Populist’s Guide to 2020.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Media For Us: A consistent theme in your work is populism. I think it's present in Rising, and of course in your most recent book, The Populist’s Guide to 2020. They both share the idea that there is a populist left and a populist right in this country that are now becoming dominant political forces. Would you say that’s accurate?
Krystal Ball: I don’t think I would say a dominant political force in terms of established politicians. I mean, I think Trump is a total fraud in terms of being any sort of real populist. One of the things that characterizes the populist right is a demonization of certain groups, including immigrants, so he’s not a fraud in that regard. But in terms of actually representing the interests of working people, I think he’s pretty much a fraud, as are most of the populist right’s leaders. On the left, obviously, Bernie Sanders got completely clobbered ultimately in the primary, although he outperformed what a lot of people were predicting early on.
I think that maybe the more important thing to look at is the sentiment and direction of the American public, and to that I would point to the George Floyd protests as an example of the kind of anger and frustration at the way the elites in our system of power have consistently oppressed and crushed working class people and the poor in this country, especially marginalized and disenfranchised groups. I think that’s almost the more important trend at this moment than who the national elected figures are, because these structures just continue to serve corporate interests, big-money interests.
MFU: How do you define populism?
KB: Well it’s one of these words that’s very squishy. It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For me, my politics is all centered around a focus on the multiracial working class. So to me that’s the definition of at least the populist left. I think populism on the right also talks a lot about the working class, although that tends to be more narrowly defined, and I think their narrative about who the villains are tends to demonize other parts of the working class, and also elites and institutional corruption. So it focuses that anger, and creates a narrative that pits parts of the working class against each other. For me the populist left does the exact opposite, and would seek to bring all aspects of the multiracial working class together.
MFU: We just had a month of nationwide protests, we’re in the middle of a months long pandemic, it’s an election year, and it has been said for some time that we may be on the cusp of an economic depression. Since we are talking about populism, what do you think will be the response of those popular movements now that everything has sort of been turned on its head?
KB: I don't know what you can say you can expect right now. I feel like we’re in this period of suspended animation. The entire country is like a ghost town, you've got the pandemic still raging out of control, surging to record numbers every day, and yet, walking around here in DC it's like people are completely disconnected from that. So I don’t think these things are easy to predict…what the spark will be, or what direction it will lead in, and whether that direction will fundamentally be positive or negative. I mean it could go either way.
What I can say is this crisis has revealed what a complete shell game and sham our whole economic system is. Just to give you a couple of examples…This whole idea like, ‘Oh my god, the debt and the deficit!’ and ‘We've gotta balance our checkbook the way a household does!’ is stupid when you just think about it. Your household can't just print money, so it's a little bit different. But we’ve been fed this lie, and people have bought it for a long time, for decades. Every time anyone steps up to say, ‘Hey let's do something for regular people’ it's always shouted down with, ‘Well how will you pay for it?’ Well, that's just been obliterated. When the stock market crashed, suddenly there were trillions of dollars to do whatever they needed to do to prop up the stock market. So that mythology, the hollowness of that, has been utterly revealed.
We’re not facing hyperinflation. We’re not facing inflation. In fact they've been worried more about deflation. The idea that the stock market is representative of anything other than a graph of rich people's feelings, as I say on the show, has also been utterly revealed as a grotesque and disgusting notion. And also, these tools that are normally used to coerce people; the most powerful one being shame, shame around not having enough money, shame around missing a bill, shame around a low credit score, those things are just not gonna have the same power anymore because the whole thing has been revealed. I am 100% certain that there will be massive, long-term ramifications for that.
MFU: You were a supporter of Bernie Sanders during the primaries, and Bernie is often invoked as being the face of populism on the left in the US, the same way that Donald Trump is considered the face of populism on the right. However, if you spoke to Bernie voters or Trump voters about the other, I think many would likely say that they didn’t have anything in common with each other. What is the commonality between people who approach populism from the left and people who approach it from the right?
KB: I think there’s a discussion to be had, for sure. And I think there are areas of overlap. Just last week, Ro Khanna teamed up with Matt Gaetz to try to allow the president to draw down troops in Afghanistan. You could see alliances on trade deals. You could see alliances on bringing supply chains back from overseas. You could see alliances on labor rights and union rights. So I think there are some areas of overlap, even as there are other areas of complete and utter divergence.
A critique of power, of big business, of elites — that is somewhat of a shared thread between the populist left and the populist right. Where things go completely astray, in my view, on the populist right, is that rather than binding the working class together in opposition to those forces, there's an attempt to divide them apart and turn them on each other.
This is obvious, clearly. But it was particularly apparent during the [George Floyd] protest movement. Here’s an uprising — a multiracial uprising led primarily by young black activists — like, here’s ‘the people’. And the instinct wasn’t, ‘Hooray, here's the people taking power!’ It was like, ‘We gotta crush them. Call in the military. Call in the police. Send in the national guard. We gotta crush them.’
So yes, is there a conversation to be had? Absolutely. If you believe in a future alliance between the white, black and brown working class, you aren’t going to get there by saying, ‘You’re all Hitler. You’re all evil. You’re all deplorable. You’re beyond the pale. Your views are so abhorrent that we can’t even talk about it.’ I don’t think you get anywhere tactically with that, even while recognizing that when we see bullshit we have to call it out as it is, and believe that our arguments and our worldview is strong enough to overcome that incredibly noxious and divisive worldview that seeks to tear people apart.
MFU: We mentioned Bernie Sanders, who is now essentially out of the race and has endorsed Joe Biden, a moderate candidate. Biden is now polling well against Trump, suggesting that there is a good chance that he will win the election come November. Should Biden win, and both the de facto populist ‘leaders’ are taken out of the equation, where does the movement that formed behind both of them go?
KB: I think that we already have that answer. To me the protest movement gave us that answer. But more to your point of what does it look like under a Biden administration…During the Obama administration (that was when I was at MSNBC, and there was very little appetite for or ability to critique Barack Obama from the left), there were some brave voices out there. There were the Glenn Greenwalds always. The Young Turks were getting their feet under them at that point. But there was very little independent left media. There was very little permission within the left to critique Barack Obama. Even today, you say anything about the guy and people melt down about it. But you’re at least allowed to say a little bit, and there's a space for it, and there's a group of people who are willing to level that critique.
With Joe Biden, it's gonna be very different. This is one thing that I think is a real legacy of Bernie Sanders. And I’ll just speak for myself here…I had always positioned myself on the left edge of where you were allowed to be within the Democratic party. And so for me, and I think for a lot of people, what Bernie Sanders did was he gave you permission to think bigger. He gave you permission to have that critique from the left, and question the Democratic party establishment itself. That’s not going away. And so I think what you’re gonna see in a Biden administration is a civil war within the Democratic party. You’ll have the people who will still say, ‘Oh my god, you can't say that about Joe Biden because you're gonna help the other side!’ And that’s pretty effective right now, with Donald Trump there. That is actually a pretty effective tactic to shut down dissent against Joe Biden, and yet still you see a critique. With Trump gone, I think you lose a lot of the energy around shutting down the critique.
Now look, it’s Joe Biden. How much is he gonna move? He doesn’t feel like he owes anything to the left. We just got the task force stuff…it's all moderate, incrementalist, it’s nothing transformational, and so our expectations should be fairly low. But I think that fight for the future of the Democratic party is really going to determine the direction of a leftist or a democratic socialist movement. Whether it stays within the Democratic party and is able to hijack that infrastructure — which I think is the correct direction and one that has the most historical precedent of success — or whether there is actually the need for a third party to challenge the parties that exist today, I think a lot of that will be fought out over the next four years under a Biden administration.
MFU: I think you would agree that your show Rising is part of a larger trend that we have seen over the past few years, where there are spaces emerging in the media — mostly punditry or political commentary shows — that present a sort of uniquely left wing, populist perspective. The Young Turks network, Kyle Kulinski, Michael Brooks all come to mind, and there certainly are others. As someone who is now a notable player in that emerging media sphere, what do you think of it, and are you optimistic about its ability to grow?
KB: Yes and no. I am in the grand scheme. Absolutely. The space is growing, it’s becoming more powerful, and especially with younger generations — they’re more questioning and they’re searching out those independent voices. And so that, in the long run, is incredibly important, and maybe going to be one of the most significant contributors to a massive political and ideological shift in the country.
However, one of the things that was most depressing about the democratic primary was how powerful those legacy media outlets still are. And by and large, they mostly ignore the voices that you just mentioned.
Because of our affiliate not actually being independent media, even though we are very independent minded media, that has given us a little bit more access to influencing that legacy media conversation than some others have. The fact that Saagar [Enjeti] was a White House correspondent, the fact that I worked at MSNBC, has given us a little more entrée there, because ultimately those gatekeeper organizations still do have just absolutely tremendous power.
While we are developing these alternative platforms and voices, and they’re growing in size, and importance, and scale, we need to not cede the terrain of mainstream media. Not that you’ll be treated fairly, not that it’ll be easy to get access to shaping those narratives, but I think we have to do everything we can to compete in those spheres in the medium term.
