this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2026
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Why are there no populist socialists? I mean people like Milei or Trump, but unapologetically radical far-left, who bring a chain saw to slash landlords, or implement a myriad of taxes that hit the wealthy. They would be incredibly popular. I don't want timid liberals who worry that capitalists emigrate to evade taxes. I want dyed-in-the-wool Marxists who confiscate their property and let them flee to whatever country wants them or put them in camps if they don't behave.
Propaganda mostly.
Like look at hispanic trump voters. He campaigned on deporting their family. They voted for him anyway because they want to make it financially, and they have been told that voting Republican is how you do that.
Same with other conservative voters. They vote against their best interests because they are miseducated. They have been told their whole lives that government spending is irresponsible, taxation is theft, immigrants are stealing their jobs, that the Republican party is the party of fiscal responsibility, and that the Democrats are communists (spooky!) who want to make you poor and want to eliminate personal property.
So say Comrade Trump ran on a populist far-left platform. There is no way to really communicate the economic benefits in a way people would understand or believe. They are conditioned against it.
The DSA is attempting this now with folks like Mamdani and El-Sayed. Trying to frame generally left wing economic ideas in terms of "affordability" and making the policies directly applicable to their lived experience. But it is an uphill battle to cut through the conditioning.
Democrats lost Hispanic voters by running to the right on immigration and giving up on any sort of rhetoric about how "building the wall" is racist. The anti-immigrant people still voted Republican, while conservative Hispanics no longer saw a reason to look past culture war issues based on immigration, since there wasn't that much difference between what the two parties were saying.
People love to go all "leopards ate their face" and just attribute it to stupidity but it's really a failure on the part of the Democratic party's messaging and tactics. They caved to the right's rhetoric and it backfired, just like it always does.
Oh no, that is totally correct. I'm not even really blaming them entirely, because the Democrats really fucked up.
But the Republicans were obviously running to the right of the Dems. With trump and friends openly saying they wanted essentially more concentration camps and more deportations and to expand ICE to enact that policy. Democrats maintained the system of concentration camps and deportations, but Republicans were obviously still worse on that issue. And many voters, including hispanic voters, cited trump as being the better economic choice.