Canadian Politics Today

It should be regarded as no accident that in 2016, when a populist movement carried Trump to victory over his establishment opponents, an equally fervent populist movement propelled Bernie Sanders to a serious challenge of Hillary Clinton's position of prohibitive front-runner.

Voters are regular people who just want to know why they can't get ahead in the world. People who want to know why they work harder and prices go up and their wages don't. People who see the stock market numbers go up and the unemployment index go down and ask "why am I just as broke as before?"

lol no they aren't, at least not the voters who actually turn up on election day. Like Trump, I suspect Pollivere's base are revanchist old people and an alliance between the haute and petite bourgeoisie interested in securing their own economic interests. The "working class, blue collar joes" thing is a facade.

Populism, it seems to me, should be aimed directly at those people. It used to be, didn't it? So why has "populism" become a dirty word?

The left is supposed to have BETTER answers for people like that (which is most of us) than the likes of Trump or Poilievre. So why can't the left reach those voters? Why did the "Rust Belt" states flip to Trump in 2016? Why didn't Biden win a resounding victory in "the Rust Belt" in 2020? Why did Ontario unions support Ford instead of Horvath in the recent Ontario election?  Why does it seem like "the left" has become the choice of Ivory Tower egg-heads and completely lost the blue-collar voter who used to be their base?

One of the post-mortems of the Ontario election I read said that Horvath's campaign was a big hit with Twitter people but a complete miss with real voters. Anybody disagree?

The reason populism has become a dirty word is that it's fundamentally empty in the hands of demagogues like Trump and PP, just cynical sloganeering with nothing behind it.

As for the rest, the left does have answers from a policy standpoint, except mainstream left and centre parties aren't interested in implementing them, as the Jacobin article you link to says. Not that it would matter if they did because the idea that you can win people from the right who are embedded in the populist movement over with policies is absurd.