Why liberals keep mistaking left-wing populism for selfishness

Left-wing politicians, like Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed and (to an extent) Andy Burnham, have found recent success by taking a fresh angle on selling their politics. The Economist, a stalwart institution of liberalism and opponent of leftism, refers to this new approach as “Gen-Z socialism”, which it characterises as a “me-first doctrine” embodying:

a form of retail politics that appeals not to notions of the common good, as in prior waves of socialism, but to people’s narrow self-interest.

The demands, according to the Economist, are:

Lower my rent! Cut my bills! Give me free buses!

It believes, furthermore, that this strain of leftism differs from earlier ones because, where past left-wing generations proposed broad-based taxes, now the expectation is that the money will come “by squeezing the very wealthiest.”

Populist or popular?

The Economist might simply be resenting that leftism is now popular. The philosopher John Gray laid out the liberal’s resentful framing:

‘Populism’ is a term used by centrist liberals to describe political blowback from the disruption of society produced by their policies.

That same reflex traces back further, to John Stuart Mill’s 1859 work On Liberty and his fear that:

the tyranny of the majority is now generally included among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard.

The same Mill, though, wrote elsewhere that a shared national identity was one of the background conditions a liberal order needs to survive, not a threat to it. What binds a nationality together, he wrote, is:

the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.

Liberalism kept the fear of the crowd and dropped the recognition that a crowd needs something holding it together. That gap is roughly where what Gray calls “hyperliberalism” lives – treating every inherited identity as something to be dismantled rather than relied on. Point that habit of mind at a politics that speaks in terms of an “us,” renters against landlords, taxpayers against billionaires, and it reads exactly like the tribalism that liberalism trained itself to fear.

The way that plays out today is more concrete: neoliberalism didn’t defeat mass democracy so much as hollow it out, moving policy out of democratic reach and into the hands of technocrats. More than eight in ten Britons want water and energy back in public ownership, for example, yet neither party that has governed for three decades has acted on it. That isn’t a fringe demand; it’s a landslide majority rejected by an unaccountable one. The reaction when a liberal figure loses to that backlash is consistent. Gray recalls David Cameron shrugging off an upset as simply “populism”, as though his own policies had nothing to do with it. Hillary Clinton did the same in 2016, telling donors Trump’s coalition belonged in a “basket of deplorables.”

Pothole politics

Beyond the Economist‘s liberal pearl-clutching about leftist populism, the observation that left-wing politicians are increasingly adopting a form of retail politics holds up.

In August 2026, outsider Abdul El-Sayed beat the DNC establishment-backed Haley Stevens to become the Democrats’ candidate for Michigan’s Senate seat. In many ways, El-Sayed’s campaign strategy was to present Stevens as the ideologue, specifically a Zionist one, rather than advance an ideology of his own.

Stevens had previously said that:

Israel comes to me in my dreams.

Her campaign received almost $30 million from AIPAC’s Super PAC, whereas El-Sayed told voters that:

the money that we should have to invest in our schools is being sent to foreign governments to destroy other people’s schools, instead of investing in our own.

El-Sayed wasn’t trying to make anti-Zionists out of Michiganders. He was signalling that his opponent was the ideologue, spending their tax money on that ideology, while he would redirect it into their retail offer. Asked what label he’d choose for himself, he said:

I choose the word ‘populist,’ because I’m for people, and I want people to have more power, versus the elites.

This week, Burnham launched a “cost of living tour” built around “everyday fixes”: subscription traps banned, a £2 bus fare cap, cheaper pub rates, a VAT cut on electricity bills. BBC Verify put the whole first-week tally at about £1.5bn, which RSM UK’s chief economist called roughly 0.1% of annual government spending – too small to alarm the bond markets or change the economic outlook. That’s not a flaw, it’s the strategy: symbolic, itemised proof that government still works, priced low enough not to spook anyone who matters.

The same instinct reshaped New York. Mamdani won the mayoralty on universal childcare, free buses, a rent freeze and city-owned grocery stores, a “public option for produce.” The record so far is genuinely retail: $1.2bn secured for childcare, the rent freeze approved, the first site for the city’s grocery programme confirmed in East Harlem. Free buses remain stalled, with the administration’s immediate focus shifted to faster buses instead, and the broader wealth and corporate tax rises he ran on needed state approval he didn’t get, landing instead on a narrower pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes.

That instinct also became a genuine social media phenomenon: in July, a New Yorker filmed two potholes on his street, then a follow-up hours later showing they’d been fixed, a clip that went viral. By his 100-day address, the city had filled 100,000 of them. As Mamdani put it around the same milestone:

How can you ask a New Yorker to believe in the promise of universal childcare if they look out of their window every single day and see the same pothole not being addressed?

Retail therapy

What has actually changed is not the ideology but the unit of persuasion. Mid-20th-century socialism argued in structural terms – nationalise the commanding heights, trust an entire theory of the economy before you see a result. What Mamdani, Burnham and the wider DSA slate are running instead is socialism itemised: not the abolition of landlordism, but a rent freeze for roughly a million rent-stabilised apartments; not the nationalisation of retail, but a network of five planned city grocery stores; not a reformed tax code, but a wealth tax pitched as the thing that pays for a bill cut on your account this month. The old method asked people to trust the whole system before they saw any of the parts, and that stopped working the moment trust in any system collapsed.

Retail offers succeed because they’re built for an attention economy. A pothole fixed on camera delivers a result you can check yourself; a promise to reform the tax base does neither. The deeper cause is a collapse in trust, in the age of the Epstein files as much as anywhere else. Just 12% of the British public trust governments of any party to put the country’s interests before their party’s interests – a record low. Just 17% of Americans trust the government in Washington to do what is right even most of the time – one of the lowest readings in almost seven decades of polling. Ask voters to trust a complicated new tax system, and you’re asking for something trust collapse has made almost impossible to give. Ask them to trust that a pothole gets fixed by Friday, and you’re asking for something they can verify themselves.

The honest answer is that retail politics is not zero-sum thinking dressed up, it’s what happens when politicians stop asking voters to take a fairer system on trust and start proving it one bill, or one pothole, at a time. What Mamdani, Burnham and El-Sayed have discovered is how to make collective action believable again. But a subscription-trap ban and a filled-in pothole are not, on their own, a wealth tax. Voters who were sold the small print will eventually ask what happened to the rest of the book.

Featured image via Axios

By Hugo Harvey

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