Sunday, August 23, 2026
The Words People Use To Describe Trump Are Now Much More Negative Than Positive
The chart above was made using YouGov Poll numbers between November 2024 and August 2026. The margin of error of each poll is approximately 4 points. Note that the positive description have gone down and the negative ones have risen.
What Is A Real Populism?
Thanks to the devolution of understanding its meaning over the last 80+ years, it’s tempting to start this conversation by sharing what populism is not. Every time someone calls Trump or Marjorie Taylor Greene or, God help us, JD Vance a “populist,” Woody Guthrie rolls over in his grave. But defining anything by saying what it isn’t would also make our high school English teachers roll over in their graves. So let’s start with what it is, and what it means to us.
Populism is, at its core, the movement to create more power for everyday people and the Common Good, and to fight against those who currently withhold that power from us. Specifically in the United States, those in power are often moneyed elites and corporate titans who continually seek to exploit and steal from folks just trying to survive. The whole point of populism is to overhaul the economics that currently benefit the greedy few while the masses suffer.
Economics systems are also unfairly structured to place common folk at a disadvantage according to different facets of identities, so we also define populism to include the fights for basic human rights, inclusive of (not regardless of!) race, gender identities, sexuality, abilities, religion and every other possible characteristic that makes us diverse human beings. We bring our identities with us to the table every day—populism does not tell folks that their allegiance to a movement or party has to come before their identity to achieve our collective dreams.
Populism today acknowledges and reckons with the fact that the American experiment has for too long relied heavily on the exploitation of labor from Black people, women, immigrants and more. Real populists work to dismantle these divisions and to create a future where everyone’s participation is welcomed and celebrated. . . .
Let’s weave ourselves together into the gorgeous fabric of human dignity, joy and aspiration that can be the true future of an equitable America: populism. We’re already seeing some of our great modern organizers embrace the term, not just in rhetoric, but actual practice.
There’s Bernie Sanders, of course, but there’s also people like J.D. Scholten, who’s running for the Senate seat held by Joni “We’re All Gonna Die” Ernst in Iowa, and Clayton Tucker, running for Agriculture Commissioner here in Texas. There are elected officials like Sen. Chris Murphy, and Representatives Pat Ryan and Pramila Jayapal who embrace the populist tradition. Organizations like the Carolina Federation talk about their vision for a “multi-racial, progressive left populism.” Who else should we add to this (in no way exhaustive) list?
Now more than ever, we need each other’s strength to forge through this frightening battalion of fascism that threatens to block our path into the populist justice future that would benefit all of us, and while we’re all aware of the immense challenges, we also have the collective tools, history and multi-generational smarts to build cooperative movements for true justice for everyone.
Saturday, August 22, 2026
Voters Across Political Spectrum Strongly Oppose Political Corruption
The charts above are from the Data for Progress Poll -- done between August 1st and 3rd of a nationwide sample of 1,187 likely voters, with a 3 point margin of error.
Support For Data Centers Continues A Sharp Decline (Among All Political Groups)
The charts above are from the Heatmap Pro / Embold Research Poll -- done between August 8th and 13th of a nationwide sample of 2,045 registered voters, with a 2.3 point margin of error.
Wall Street Journal Editor Warns That The Current Capitalism Is Harming The U.S.
Here are some thoughts from Wall Street Journal editor-at-large Gerard Baker in an editorial in his newspaper. He is warning his fellow capitalists that today's capitalism is getting out of hand.
“The widespread popular dissatisfaction with the working of modern American capitalism may be the product of some real, objective problems in the way American capitalism is working: income and wealth inequality on a scale not seen in a century; the concentration of economic, cultural and increasingly political power in a class of technology leaders whose products are dissolving the bonds that keep society together; the tightening nexus between business elites and the people who control the political process; rampant corruption and a political establishment that doesn’t seem interested in accountability; the revival, after decades of stable prices, of inflationary pressures that are pushing the cost of living to painful levels.
These are the conditions that historically have made for collapsing popular faith in the system and demands for something radical to replace it.
At some point disintegrating cohesion produces costs — social, economic and political — that undermine the benefits of the inequality and erode support for the system itself.
By almost all measures, American income and wealth inequality have been increasing sharply in recent decades and social and economic mobility falling.
The New York Federal Reserve reported in June that the labor share of income — wages and salaries — fell to its lowest level in 80 years as returns to capital continue to soar. Studies of intergenerational mobility suggest the inequality is becoming embedded in what looks increasingly like a class-based socioeconomic model. The proportion of Americans earning more than their parents has dropped precipitously in the past 50 years and is expected to drop further. With the adoption of artificial intelligence promising — or threatening — to return ever greater rewards to a diminishing number of those best placed to exploit it, the trends will intensify.
Most of the causes of America’s economic dysfunction are the result of a capitalism that has mutated into a system run by and for large corporate interests. If you look at America today and see a perfectly functioning free-market economy, a ‘neoliberal’ utopia guided by the invisible hand of Adam Smith, then you need to take off those rose-tinted spectacles and take a closer look: oligopoly-level industrial concentration in almost every sector, endemic cronyism, the application of regulation, legislation and policy for the benefit of big companies, a ruinously expensive healthcare system run principally for the benefit of insurers and pharmaceutical companies. In short, the steady accretion of market, economic and political power by a business-political class that promotes its own well-being at the expense of competition, the market and ultimately the people."
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