Confronting Capitalism: Economic Populism at a Crossroads

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🗓️ 19 November 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

While Democrats recently scored some much-needed electoral wins, the party remains in crisis. Recent reports like Welcome PAC’s “Deciding to Win” argue that the Democrats must drop unpopular cultural positions and recenter economic demands. Can a populist economic agenda shorn of unpopular identity politics get the party back on track?

On this episode of Confronting Capitlism, Vivek Chibber evaluates these reports and examines the pros and cons of this approach. Based on recent polling data, working class voters have rejected elitist cultural demands but support social-democratic economic solutions.

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Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and published by Jacobin. Music by Zonkey.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Confronting Capitalism.
0:19.2	I'm Melissa Nashek, and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chipper, a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy.
0:29.0	Just a reminder before we get into our discussion, if you have any questions for Vivek or suggestions for future topics, you can send us an email at confronting.capitalism at jacobin.com.
0:43.3	And I just, again, I want to thank our listeners for continuing to send in such thoughtful
0:49.3	and engaging questions and comments.
0:51.3	We really love hearing from you all.
0:53.3	Absolutely. It's been a tremendous experience and I think it's been a great addition to the show.
0:57.6	So this past month has been, you know, something of a mixed bag for the Democrats. On the one hand,
1:03.4	they won some important elections in states like New Jersey and Virginia. On the other hand, the government shutdown, which recently ended,
1:15.7	I think it's fair to say that that did not go very well for the Democratic Party. They did not come
1:20.6	out looking good. Yeah. And there's been a fair amount of rethinking inside the party as well.
1:25.2	A few documents have come out that show what direction that might be going in. Yeah, there's a lot that you could say about the shutdown. I think one of the
1:32.6	things that stuck out to me was that the Democrats are still struggling to come up with a coherent
1:39.8	strategy in response to the fact that the party is so unpopular right now. And that's where
1:47.4	these reports that are published by PACs associated, you know, however loosely with the
1:53.1	Democratic Party, like this recent report deciding to win comes in, because these are people who
1:58.3	are trying to point the party in a coherent direction
2:01.6	and a specific response to Trumpism and to the current crisis of the party.
2:08.3	Yeah, deciding to win is an interesting report because it was the culmination of a
2:13.3	month's long polling process in which they did quite dense interactions with their audience.
2:18.7	But there's another one that was aimed just at working class voters over a nine-month period
2:24.1	that was put out by Democracy Matters, which is a nonprofit. The full report isn't out yet,
	...

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