The political divide I keep coming back to is not left versus right but populism versus pluralism. I say that as a liberal with no particular interest in becoming more moderate—and even less interest in using “pluralism” as a fancy way to say we should always split the difference. Sometimes politics is an ugly compromise nobody loves; other times it is a partisan Hail Mary on something that really matters. You can want enormous change, fight hard for it, and judge the other side’s policies harshly while remaining a pluralist. The real question is what you believe about the people standing in your way.
Jan-Werner Müller offers a useful definition. Populism is not simply anger at elites, distrust of the establishment, or a preference for policies that are actually popular. All of those things can be perfectly democratic, and the anger can be richly deserved. The defining move is the claim that one movement, and only that movement, morally represents the real people. Once you accept that, your opponents are no longer merely wrong; they are corrupt, fraudulent, or somehow not full members of the political community. That is why putting Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders into matching “populist” boxes obscures more than it explains. You can hate billionaires, advocate socialism, and remain completely committed to democratic pluralism.
Let me get the obvious objection out of the way, because this is the internet and someone will otherwise pretend I said the opposite: the Democratic Socialists of America are not left-wing MAGA. DSA has not attempted to overturn an election or rejected the peaceful transfer of power; after January 6, it explicitlycondemned the effort to overturn a democratic election. Its 2026 program supports expanded voting rights, proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, and a multiparty system. Those are not just democratic ideas; in several respects they are more pluralist than the system we have now. No honest comparison should erase that.
My concern is narrower and, I hope, fairer. Parts of the socialist left use a moral vocabulary that trains the anti-pluralist reflex before anything overtly anti-democratic happens. DSA’s currentnational program calls billionaires and war profiteers a “criminal class,” says that for bosses the world’s chaos is “all going according to plan,” and urges its readers to know “our enemies.” That is not a coup, obviously, and it does not cancel the pluralist reforms in the same document. It is also not nothing. A movement can remain formally democratic while teaching its members that virtue belongs naturally to us and corruption naturally to them.
Workers and bosses really do have conflicting interests. Tenants can be gouged, corporations can exploit workers, and wealth buys an absurd amount of political power; class analysis is not populism. The trouble begins when a useful description of one conflict becomes a complete moral map of the world. Consider a rent freeze or a 32-hour workweek at the same pay. I can imagine supporting either policy, but somebody still bears the transition cost, which may show up in profits, productivity demands, prices, hiring, maintenance, or businesses that close. A pluralist can decide that those costs are justified. What a pluralist cannot do is pretend the costs disappear because the people on the other side of the transaction are less sympathetic. Slogans do not need footnotes, but policy eventually has to account for the people the slogan leaves out.
Chantal Mouffe, one of the most interesting defenders of left populism, is not oblivious to this danger. Her idea ofagonistic pluralism says politics inevitably creates an “us” and a “them,” but they must remain adversaries rather than enemies: people whose politics we may despise but whose right to participate we still accept. The left, in her account, should build a democratic people, unite its grievances against oligarchy, and give people something passionate to fight for. I understand the attraction, and I do not think the theory is incoherent. My disagreement is empirical. If you spend years constructing an aggrieved “us,” naming the group responsible for its suffering, and turning that conflict into an identity and a social world, it seems optimistic to assume everyone will remember the adversary-not-enemy distinction when it matters most.
Maybe it can be done. Watching MAGA develop over the past decade does not make me eager to run the experiment. Grievance politics gives you friends, villains, heroes, memes, a moral vocabulary, and a ready explanation for why things have gone wrong; eventually it can supply a large part of your identity. That is one of the similarities I see between MAGA and parts of the DSA left. Their policies are not equivalent, their conduct is certainly not equivalent, and I am comparing a political psychology rather than respect for the Constitution. Still, tribal structures can rhyme even when their causes and consequences differ.
This is where the argument gets more personal and, depending on your taste, perhaps a little ridiculous. I am vegan, and I believe meat is murder. That is not a rhetorical flourish for me. I have spent years arguing about it with family members, friends, and people whose intelligence and goodness I would defend without hesitation. Some of those arguments were awful, and I still occasionally dream about having them. After all this time, I cannot make the pieces line up: I can know someone is kind and thoughtful, know that he understands what happens to an animal, and then watch him eat one.
There is something almost Camus-like about that. InThe Myth of Sisyphus, Camus wrote about the absurdity created when our demand that the world make sense collides with a world that refuses to cooperate. The political analogy is mine, not his, but human beings create a similar problem for one another. We know each other’s humanity firsthand and then watch each other make choices we cannot square with it. Populism offers a wonderfully satisfying escape: they are bad people, so there is no contradiction to explain. Pluralism makes you live with the contradiction.
Living with it does not mean I have decided eating animals is fine, stopped judging people’s actions, or given up fighting about things that matter. There are bad acts, dangerous people, greed, cruelty, and evil; as I get older, though, I find myself believing there are very few people who can be reduced without remainder to the role of villain. Pluralism is not naïveté, and it does not ask us to treat a coup, political violence, or the denial of equal citizenship as a normal policy disagreement. Democratic rules have to be defended. But defending them is different from treating every opponent as an enemy of the people, and the exception cannot become an excuse that swallows the principle.
This is the point where I sound most like a hippie, but I mean it completely seriously: all you need is love. I do not mean that as a policy platform, and I am not suggesting Congress resolve the budget through a group hug. Love does not require approval, passivity, surrender, or even liking everyone. It is the refusal to reduce a person to the worst thing he has done or the political category into which he happens to fall. When you really experience your shared humanity with another person, that person becomes too large to fit comfortably inside “them.” The whole structure starts to break down.
That is my version of pluralism, and it probably should not be yours. When I was a teenager, I wanted everybody to become a liberal hippie; I no longer think a country containing only people like me would be especially pluralist, or perhaps even much fun. Some people are squares. Some are conservatives, devout believers, or uptight rule followers, and some are simply people I would never invite to my party. Fine. Pluralism does not require me to invite everyone to my party or pretend I approve of how they live. It requires me to remember that the people I would never invite still own the country with me.
If veganism, Camus, and an unironic belief that all you need is love sound ridiculous to you, good. Find something else—religious faith, humility about your own fallibility, patriotism, simple exhaustion with hating people, whatever works. The point is not to arrive at my reason. It is to find your own reason to remain completely yourself without requiring everybody else to become you. Pluralism is not history’s natural destination; it has to be chosen by people who could choose something easier and more emotionally satisfying.
The lesson the left should take from MAGA is not that grievance works and we need a more virtuous version of it. The lesson is how quickly that kind of politics consumes everything around it, including the principles it was supposed to advance. Pluralism is harder because it leaves us with unresolved contradictions and denies us the pleasure of imagining that history would work perfectly if only those people would get out of the way. It asks us to fight, sometimes bitterly, while remembering that our opponents remain legitimate co-owners of the country. MAGA has shown us what happens when a movement decides that it alone is the real country. The left should study that as a warning, not a manual.