No. of Recommendations: 7
What I am proposing is Fetterman was a Trojan horse. Maybe the same with Platner.
I mean....this is what comes with populism, right? You dial the salience up on economic issues so that you're appealing to and advancing the economic interests of the working folks. What that means, though, is that you might end up dialing down the salience of other interests relative to that. So you get a candidate who's committed to working-class economic issues but might deviate from the party line on a host of other things. They might be a military hawk, or not care too much about preserving voting rights for minorities, or be less concerned about dismantling the patriarchy or fighting climate change, or other issues that are deeply important for some parts of the Democratic coalition but aren't economic populism. For example, I'm not sure the Sunrise Movement is overly thrilled about the Democratic party's shift to economic populism, as they watch climate change get hugely downshifted in the list of Democratic priorities.
I don't think that's "Trojan Horse," so much as getting what it says on the tin. If you're opening up the party to candidates who prioritize progressive economic issues over all others, you're going to get some folks who hold some positions that don't square with the party line. They will downplay those issues during the campaign (we shouldn't talk about Graham Platner's obviously retrograde attitudes towards women and sensitivity towards minorities), but those deviations aren't exactly going to be a surprise. Indeed, they're somewhat of a feature - if you think working class voters want a candidate who talks like "normal" people do when the HR person isn't around, you're probably not getting a candidate who's going to have the same views on the issues that HR people care about than other progressive candidates.
