ONLY A POPULIST STRATEGY CAN HOLD UNDEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS IN CHECK AND AVOID A REPUBLICAN COMEBACK

If Joe Biden wants to avoid heavy losses for the Democrats in November, he is going to have to follow a populist strategy, which most political scientists mistakenly consider to be inherently anti-democratic and opportunistic. Specifically, Biden needs to scrap his consensus politics approach in which he in effect pleads with, and kowtows to, Joe Manchin and in doing so waters down His Build Back Better program. A populist strategy would mean ruling by executive order to fulfill such promises as cutting the student debt significantly. The strategy must also include rallying the rank and file to counter undemocratic institutions such as the Senate, in which minorities get greatly overrepresented and the filibuster is employed thus making a mockery of majority rule. Such a strategy (executive orders, mass mobilizations, countering undemocratic institutions) typically gets called "populist" in the pejorative sense. Populism is by nature undemocratic, or so it is said, because democratic institutions are spurned. In fact, undemocratic are the institutions themselves - the Senate and the Supreme Court, to name but two.