Delivery, a good story, and a perpetual campaign

Populism's relentless blaming, social media's insatiable swarming, and the consequent swamping of the digital public sphere are challenges rhe new government can beat.

On the Sunday after the General Election, the journalist Gabriel Pogrund drew attention in the Sunday Times to this aspect of the incoming Starmer team’s focus for government:

I’ve been reading Matt Stoller since 2016. He has developed over some years a strong argument that the Democrats had given up on their New Deal politics and caved in to corporate, Wall Street and Silicon Valley interests. What they needed to do, he said, was rekindle their former focus on economic populism - something he is urging on Kamala Harris as well. Stoller wrote a good book on corporate power - Goliath - and now produces a Substack on the same themes. His arguments are similar to those of FTC Chair Lina Khan, former White House anti-trust aide Tim Wu, and other critics of the corporate power of Big Tech. I drew on some of these arguments in my book on Facebook and my working paper for CREATe, the Centre for the Regulation of the Creative Economy.

Stoller’s warning about progressive governments is that delivering good policy outcomes is essemtial though not enough. In an essay with David Dayen of The American Prospect, he argues

Our political theory, nicknamed “deliverism,” is that Democrats, when in government, need to not only say popular things, but actually deliver good economic outcomes for voters. They did not do this for many years, and neither did the GOP, which is why Trump blasted through both party establishments. Deliverism is linked to the death of neoliberalism, because it’s an argument that Democrats could reverse their toxic image in many parts of the country by reversing policy choices on subjects like NAFTA, deregulation, and banking consolidation, which have helped hollow out the middle class for decades.

Stoller’s economic populism is different from but in my view can be allied with insights by Democratic pollster David Shor, who worries that Democratic elites are unrepresentative of the wider community, and do not understand the challenges facing the party if it is to win more broadly and deeply in the USA. Shor’s argument, summarised here by Ezra Klein as popularism, leads him to say

I think the core problem with the Democratic Party is that the people who run and staff the Democratic Party are much more educated and ideologically liberal and they live in cities, and ultimately our candidate pool reflects that

But Shor is also critical of more right-wing Democrats who swerve towards big business on issues like Medicare” and says Democrats need to

care more and cater to the preference of our low-socioeconomic-status supporters.

This analysis dovetailed with wider polling showing that Democrats were losing votes most heavily in de-industrialised areas or former ‘factory towns’. (The parallels for me with Labour are important, not least when I look at old coal-mining areas, such as my former Rhondda seat, (now for Westminster an expanded Rhondda and Ogmore) which voted Brexit in 2016 and had sa ignificant Reform vote in 2024).

Stoller and Dayen’s arguments for ‘deliverism’ have recently been criticised by other US writers. In their article ‘The decline of Deliverism’, Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams, and Harry Hanbur define ‘Deliverism’ as

the presumption of a linear and direct relationship between economic policy and people’s political allegiances.

They emphasise:

progressive economic policies do not necessarily lead to the political outcomes that deliverism predicts they should, and deliverism is proving ineffectual as a response to authoritarianism. People are fully capable of supporting or ignoring progressive economic policies while voting for authoritarians.

Their anxiety is that

Although we have long been sympathetic to deliverism, we now believe that it is mostly wrong. Delivering for people on economic issues is an important goal in itself, but it is not an antivenom for the snakebite of authoritarianism.

In particular, they argue in respect of Trump and his followers:

The power of this story derives partly from its clarity about the enemies—despised “others”—and from the sense of community and shared purpose that participation in the mass authoritarian project provides. There is considerable evidence that authoritarianism is driven by racial animus. Whether supporters view it this way or not, the MAGA movement is fundamentally a white supremacist movement that activates racist beliefs as a powerful political weapon. Despite the common narrative that Trump’s 2016 win could be explained by the economic distress of Americans who felt they’d been left behind, research shows that candidate preference was influenced more by issues that threatened many white Americans’ sense of dominant group status.

As I said a couple of weeks ago, populism is a strategy of perpetual ‘blaming’. Populism’s scapegoating is particulary attuned to the immediacies of social media, and the facility this offers to deflect and distract on to the next new outrage. Never look back or apologise, just blame forward, might be the motto. The algorithms are geared to amplifying division, anger and radicalization. As I pointed out in my book on Facebook, even Mark Zuckerberg was forced to concede that Facebook’s algorithm prioritised posts which were controversial, resulting in ‘polarization and extremism’. Zuckerberg said, ‘when left unchecked, people will engage disproportionately with more sensationalist and provocative content’. And we know how important Facebook was to Trump and the 2016 Brexit vote. Outrage predates social media, of course, and the tabloids and, in the USA, Fox News, have been just as important. The New Labour Governments of 1997-2010 did not really have to contend with social media, but on the other hand, tabloid newspapers were stronger then than they are today.

These authors - Bhargava, Shams, and Hanbur - argue for the need for four strategies for progressives, and I will summarise them pretty abruptly - taking stories, identity and emotion more seriously, offering a vision of the good life grounded in common sense ideas, addressing public concerns about issues like crime and social disintegration, and commit to a new focus on community organizing.

These commentators are not in fact so far away from each other. Stoller and Dayen concede ‘a pure policy program is not enough, and that we need political narratives that voters find compelling’ while then going on to challenge whether their critics actually do that. Where Stoller and Dayen are essentially right is on the need to move past Democratic neoliberalism.

What does all this American analysis mean for the UK? In effect, getting back to the basics of governing well and delivering, having a strong story, and never stopping campaigning, even in government, to flood the public sphere - digital and in real life - with positive messages of the difference a progressive Labour government is making and the alternative future it is offering.

It was interesting to see that ‘the death of deliverism’ was being used as shorthand for ‘what’s our story’ behind the scenes at the recent Tony Blair Institute conference by some commentators close to Starmer. Some of the key messages from the US debate are not so different from when Labour was last in power. Even the godfather of deliverology, Sir Michael Barber, said that

You need a story. Data on its own is not enough.

I’m a supporter of this Labour Government, and I think they have learned past lessons and are well equipped for the challenges ahead. But there is one clear underlying difference to the New Labour years: in an insecure, volatile world, the state is back, and globalized neoliberalism is no longer the flavour of the times.