Men of the People

Dawn arrives for a new, yet old, American populism.

America’s newest tribunes make for an unlikely pair.

One of them built a career on the story of his origins. From Appalachia, he scaled the ladder that America keeps insisting still exists. Up, up he climbed, past the Marines, Ohio State, Yale Law, a bestselling memoir, and the Senate. The improbable final rung delivered him into the White House. Along the way, he accumulated patrons — professors, politicos, billionaires, a president — who recognized in him a sui generis blend of potential and usefulness. They invested time, money, and titles into someone who, despite his credentials, was never quite one of their own.

The other man’s mettle was also forged in ideas, though of a more activist sort. Born in Uganda to Indian intellectuals and raised in a Manhattan private school, he found his political footing in pro-Palestinian protests at Bowdoin, an exclusive liberal-arts college. With little to his name beyond promises of cheap rent and cheaper groceries, and with New York’s political machines arrayed against him, this little-known assemblyman became mayor of the world’s city. In his campaign against the has-beens, he toppled a Cuomo dynasty that had ruled for decades from Albany.

No one in their right mind would vote for these men, the pundits grumbled. The hillbilly was too intellectual; the democrat too socialist. Their ascent provoked disbelief as much as ridicule. Yet here they are: Vice President JD Vance and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, two men poised to inherit the batons of political power. And though they hail from opposite aisles and opposing traditions, and though they speak different languages to different constituencies, their cadence is unmistakably similar. One can hear in both the same plain insistence that the people have been talked past, overmanaged, and left behind.

“The people,” ironically, is a phrase for which the politician reaches when he has nothing more precise to offer — a chameleon of a term, meaning everything and nothing at once. Men and women far more ordinary than Vance and Mamdani have wielded it to lesser effect. So how did its usage empower these two and not others? Most use it as pastiche, in imitation rather than with conviction. To understand why Vance’s and Mamdani’s language lands, it might be simpler to begin with what the ordinary is not. We must first name the extraordinary: the elite whose decisions, incentives, and blind spots have terraformed what the rest of America must navigate. Though “the elite” is also a nebulous term, they — and their failings — are much easier to identify.

64 years ago, President Eisenhower made it a point in his farewell address to speak to the rise of a military-industrial complex, the iron triangle of defense contractors, military brass, and policymakers whose interests aligned a little too neatly. If this alliance were to accrue unwarranted influence, he warned, it would pose a principal threat to American democracy and self-governance.

Eisenhower could not have predicted how this dynamic played out in another more germane area of American life. What might be called an elite-industrial complex emerged with far more cachet and power than its military counterpart. Over the following decades, America’s governing class, a group of technocrats, financiers, and highly credentialed professionals, coalesced and then convinced itself it had mastered the art of running a modern nation. The fall of the Soviet Union added fuel to this belief. Neoliberal thinkers, emboldened, declared that their way represented the end of history that would lift all boats with its tide. Under this umbrella, the elite were free to pursue their own interests. With that came the notion that the right policy memo and the right multilateral deal could, so long as they stuck favorably to their preferred metrics, guide a country of 300 million into a seamless Pax Americana.

The formula seemed to work, at least for those designing it. Deregulation buoyed asset prices; globalization cheapened goods; financialization made wealth abundant for the few. Offshoring removed labor, the costliest component of production. Corporate pensions gave way to 401(k)s that shifted risk away from management and shareholders. A gig economy fueled by technology rose up and lined the pockets of their founders and investors. Regulatory capture blurred the line between public duty and private reward; “public-private partnerships” became fashionable jargon. The elite evolved from a somewhat rich, old, white men’s club into an even richer, younger, cosmopolitan one.

The result was a strange homogeneity: a ruling class that spoke the same language, passed through the same institutions, lived in the same zip codes, and interpreted American life through the same periscope. They trusted — still trust — metrics because metrics absolved their actions of accusations of self-interest. And so the numbers they prized most were the numbers that mattered least to those they governed. GDP was perennially up as life expectancy fell. The S&P 500 made high after record high while real wages stagnated. Seductive top-line growth masked economic reality, but that was not material because who could argue with the data?

It was in that widening wedge, between the numbers celebrated in Washington and Wall Street and lives lived far from it, that another truth became impossible to ignore. When people feel unseen at home, the matters that consume their leaders abroad begin to look not only distant, but also beside the point. Foreign policy — long the favored arena of elite earnestness, populated by pedigreed technocrats from universities and think tanks — makes this gap obvious. To that class, Ukraine is a question of grand strategy, credibility, and the durability of the American experiment itself. To millions of Americans, including the rising populists, such high-minded prose does not click as it did before World War II. It represents something else entirely: a distant conflict with no evident bearing on their paychecks, hospitals, or schools.

Thus, Vance can say with a candor that rattles establishment nerves, “I don’t really care about what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” Thus, Mamdani, when asked which foreign country he would visit first, can shrug and reply, “I would stay in New York City” (this is after three candidates on the debate stage before him all declared they would pay a visit to Israel). Neither are to pay a price for their remarks because their instincts align with the people’s: that the foreign has become a distraction from a domestic order in deep disrepair.

But fundamentally, what beats in the chest of the populist is not foreign policy or rent control or culture wars. To define them by individual campaign positions and policy white papers is to misunderstand their reason for being. They are channeling a pervasive, creeping feeling that the institutions invented to serve ordinary people have been captured and repurposed for someone else’s benefit. This is one of those few measurable intuitions: Gallup polls show that Americans’ trust in the federal government has fallen from 77% at the end of the 1960s to 16% in recent years, where it has flatlined.

It is unfair to say the elites caused all of this. But Americans have watched them pass enough times through familiar revolving doors — from official to consultant, consultant to board member, board member to commentator, in varied order, parroting the same three lines on efficiency and innovation and competitiveness, all while ordinary people's own circumstances narrowed. 

Their lived experiences, anecdotes, are evidence enough. Who frets about taking a child to the ER out of worry that they can’t afford the bill before the deductible is met? Who sits for six hours on hold with an understaffed unemployment office or waits in a miles-long digital queue for social services? Who worries about their mom not speaking the language of the only nursing home within a 30-mile radius that doesn’t require dipping into the last days of sick time just to visit? The local church stands empty, its communal congregation dispersed. The local newspaper, if it has not already been rolled up by a private equity firm, operates with a skeleton staff wholly unable to meet the reporting demands of active civic life. Rent, outpacing both inflation and the annual 2% salary bump, eats half of take-home pay.

Americans developed their own names for the feeling that something, somewhere, had gone wrong. And now they sense that the country’s newest tribunes speak this language from the heart.

Our history shows what usually follows. Populism has appeared time and again in the republic’s story, frequently in reaction to the overreach of elite interests: Andrew Jackson’s war on the Second Bank; William Jennings Bryan’s crusade against the gold standard; Huey Long’s redistributionist “Every Man a King” campaign. Populists fight for what the people believe is in their interest. Because of populist pressure, institutions like the progressive income tax and Social Security came into being. And their character is rarely polite. Sometimes they veer into dangerous demagoguery; sometimes they are full of air and false promises; but they are a start and more often necessary than not. One could call them wildfires for democracy’s old forest.

Which brings us to last month’s Oval Office meeting between the mayor and the president. Many in the commentariat predicted a showdown, or at least some measure of spectacle. What they got instead was hardly surprising: Mamdani and Trump presenting a more-or-less united front on making New York great again. As Steve Bannon, divisive Trump strategist and resident of the elite world he disdains (MBA ‘93), said of the two a few weeks before they met: “game respects game.”

The point is not that populists like Vance and Mamdani agree. On many things they do not, and they will likely tear each other apart before long. The point is that their insurgent and unexpectedly convergent movements are no longer fringe. They are now fixtures of a country searching for a vocabulary adequate to its discontent and in proportion to its malaise. Men of the people, in short, are here to stay.

Alex Qi (MBA '27) is from Irvine, California. He studied philosophy and physics at New York University, graduating with honors in 2020. Prior to HBS, he worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Northrop Grumman in Falls Church, Virginia and previously in deep tech ventures.