Kamala Harris wins the biggest battle in the Democratic Party

When the electorate is seething, a victorious political party becomes the mouthpiece of discontent. But in the elections following Donald Trump's victory in 2016, Democrats were unsure which wave of anti-establishment anger to channel: the spirit of Occupy Wall Street or that of Black Lives Matter?

Each protest movement proposed a different campaign strategy against Trump. By railing against the plutocracy, Democrats hoped to win back white working-class voters in the industrial Midwest who had defected to Trump. By denouncing white supremacy and mass deportations, they hoped to capitalize on the nation's growing diversity and appeal to college graduates, whom my colleague Ronald Brownstein called the “upward-mobile coalition.”

This question—should Democrats lead with class or identity?—became the subject of boring books and ugly social media squabbles among the party's intelligentsia, and it continues to simmer to this day. Only now has Kamala Harris' campaign team unexpectedly and unceremoniously resolved it.

The conventional wisdom is that Harris's late entry into the presidential race has allowed her to run a vacuous campaign that has avoided difficult strategic decisions and uncomfortable policy confrontations. But this description, which contains a grain of truth, obscures an undeniable fact: Her rhetoric and the rhetoric of her campaign are far more populist on economic issues than that of any other Democratic candidate in recent history.

Read: Kamala Harris can grab the populist mantle

Partly, this is a matter of necessity. The public's biggest complaint is inflation. Once inflation is unleashed, there's not much a president can do politically to rein it in. In our system, for better or worse, that's the job of the central bank. But prescription shortages aren't a useful fact to cite on the campaign trail, so Harris has blamed high prices on corporate price gouging. She's painted a picture of firms and landlords exploiting the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting price shocks to boost their profits at the expense of consumers. That line of reasoning is sure to make Larry Summers have apoplectic fits — and it's a far more aggressive description of corporations than has ever come out of the mouths of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, or Joe Biden.

It is obvious that Biden's successor will turn to economic populism to capitalize on his legacy. His Justice Department has aggressively broken up trusts and proposed new rules to restrict corporate mergers. He has picketed and helped restore the prestige of the American labor movement. He has defeated the pharmaceutical lobby and secured bargaining power over drug costs for Medicare.

That record lends itself well to a story about taming big business. But that's not the kind of story Biden likes to tell. Aside from the hostility he shows toward Trump, Biden naturally shies away from confrontational politics. He never called the villains he fought villains. Based on the early evidence, Harris better understands the political need to populate her economic narratives with villains.

That understanding was clear at the convention, with her surrogates portraying her as an implacable enemy of corporate greed. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described her as “a woman who fights every day to free working people from the boots of greed that tramples on our way of life.” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, a figure close to the economic center, promised that a Harris administration would continue to break up monopolies.

While Clinton and Obama seemed to choke on their obligatory nods to the labor movement, Harris' convention felt like union hall. In prime time, United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain strutted across the podium in a T-shirt that read “Trump is a Scab.” With his fist raised, he yelled, “Which side are you on?” Fain was no outsider. As Harold Meyerson wrote in The American Prospect, “I have been attending Democratic conventions for over 50 years, and I have never heard anywhere near as many references (all of them laudatory) to unions as I did Monday night.”

That Raimondo and AOC are aligned is not just a matter of disciplined messaging on national television. The economic consensus has shifted toward populism in response to rising inequality, China's abusive trade practices and the lessons of the pandemic. David Leonhardt of the New York Times has poignantly described populism as “a new form of American centrism.” Populism no longer smacks of eccentricity.

But the emphasis on populism is also a reaction to the failure of the Democratic majority that is just emerging. Despite the party's commitment to criminal justice reform and opposition to mass deportations, its share of black and Latino voters has been declining. That is, men of all races without college degrees share similar political instincts and a shared hatred of elites. A strategy to win back working-class black and Latino men should not be so different from a strategy to win back white working-class voters who have turned away from the party.

Read: Joe Biden's late farewell

There are good reasons to see the Democrats' turn to populism as mere rhetoric and an expedient campaign tactic. Progressives fear Harris might fire Lina Khan, the combative head of the Federal Trade Commission – a figure despised in Sun Valley and the Hamptons for her prosecution of lawsuits against Big Tech companies. Those fears are in line with the flood of Silicon Valley executives, veterans of the Obama administration, joining her campaign and assisting her as strategists. In some ways, social media executives and venture capitalists are her tribe, a group that nurtured her career in San Francisco.

On the other hand, the very definition of populism, both in its economic and its more pernicious cultural manifestations, is to describe politics as a battle between interests and the people. The vice president's campaign slogan has long been the same one she used to introduce herself as a prosecutor in court: “Kamala Harris, for the people.” Sometimes a slogan is destiny.