What's going on with Elizabeth Warren?

My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

Phoenix, summer of 2015. Netroots Nation, an annual conference for what was once called the progressive blogosphere, was in town, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren was doing the Friday morning keynote. I was there in the audience, covering the event for Al Jazeera America.

Warren was the perfect headline act for a netroots audience; it is difficult to think of anyone else who could command such unanimous and uncomplicated loyalty from that particular crowd, and she knew it. I was an admirer myself, although I endeavored to maintain the emotional distance that I felt my profession demanded. Maybe that distance was the reason why I left the ballroom with a bitter taste in my mouth. Or maybe it was just my chronic allergy to rhetorical red meat. Either way, Warren’s closing peroration left me feeling more unsettled than rapturous. I didn’t buy it; I would have liked to, but I couldn’t.

The problem was her big applause line, the thesis she kept returning to: “The American people are progressive, and our day is coming. Our values are American values, and America’s values are progressive values.” “On the economic issues that will shape the future of this country, America is progressive.” “It’s on us to show that our agenda is America’s agenda, and that America’s agenda is a progressive agenda.” You get the idea.

What if she’s wrong? That’s the question I kept asking myself. Sure, minimum wage increases, paid family leave, and a more progressive tax rate all seem to poll well. But what if there’s something that the polls are missing? What if the forces of reaction weren’t just astroturfed into existence by the Koch Brothers, but instead bubbled up from somewhere deep inside the American psyche?

A little over a year later, Donald Trump was elected to his first term as president.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Warren’s Netroots Nation speech as I’ve tried to make sense of her recent behavior. One of the reasons why I and many others have long held Warren in high esteem is because she always seemed to take policy and implementation extremely seriously. It was her research and advocacy, after all, that led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. When she ran for president in 2020, her semi-official campaign slogan was “I have a plan for that.” Yes, her Medicare For All proposal seemed pretty dubious, but 2020 was a weird time; everyone was doing it. Overall, I considered Warren to possess one of the rarest and most precious virtues that an American politician can have: she was a bona fide serious person.

But lately, she’s been coming off as considerably less serious. One warning sign: her apparently sincere efforts to work with the Trump administration on capping credit card fees. Her endorsement of Graham Platner — the guy who sported a Totenkopf tattoo for the better part of two decades until it became politically inconvenient — was even more concerning. And then there were her efforts to turn genuinely bad policy ideas into statutory language: her work with Sen. Josh Hawley to turn a Trump executive order regarding defense industry stock buybacks into law and, most alarming of all, her insistence on clinging to a poison pill amendment in her own housing bill.

Taking all of these baffling missteps as a whole, it would be tempting to argue that Warren has changed over the past 10 or 20 years. But I think it’s rather the opposite. Circumstances have changed; the political economy of Washington, D.C. is no longer what it was. Elizabeth Warren has failed to change with it.

In a sense, Warren is a victim of success — a perverse, be-careful-what-you-wish-for type of success. She was a populist at a time when populism, in both its left and right variants, was largely relegated to Washington’s margins. Now an especially malignant strain of right-wing populism is one of the dominant political tendencies in American politics.

The political scientist Cas Mudde is one of the foremost scholars of modern populism. Here’s how he defines the term:

The language and structure of populism, as Mudde defines it, is all over Warren’s Netroots Nation speech. “We believe that the real strength of this country starts with people, not with corporations,” she says at one point. Corporations and “Insider Washington” are the corrupt elite in Warren’s cosmology; “the American people,” “working people,” and “hard-working families” are the labels she assigns to “the pure people” at various points. The volonté générale naturally demands a progressive economic platform. This sort of language recurs again and again throughout Warren’s political thought, most recently in a speech on the future of the Democratic Party from January of this year. Notably, she herself dropped the P-word in those remarks: “Running on small, vague ideas that may also raise costs for families—instead of on full-throated, economic populist ideas—is a terrible plan for winning elections.”

Regardless of how we decide to label Warren’s analysis, we should recognize that it commands some genuine explanatory power. Billionaires do command outsized influence over the American political system. Regulatory capture by multinational corporations and financial institutions is a real phenomenon. And it is one that Warren got to see up close even before she entered the U.S. Senate; in the 1990s, as a professor at Harvard, Warren joined a commission intended to propose reforms to U.S. bankruptcy law, only to see institutional creditors successfully lobby for legislation that made bankruptcy rules even more hostile to debt-ridden households.

By the time of that experience, Warren—a former Republican—had already grown disillusioned with the version of free-market capitalism that had previously commanded her loyalty. As Will Wilkinson has put it, “what Elizabeth Warren wants is the kind of democracy and market economy she thought we had when she was a Republican, but was scandalized to discover we didn’t have, thanks to the undue influence of self-dealing moneyed interests in the policymaking process.” There is a lot of power to her insight that corporate lobbyists have manipulated the rules of American capitalism to serve their own ends.

But a simple populist analysis ends up blurring some critical distinctions when it comes to America’s capitalist class. By focusing so much on Wall Street and multinational giants, Warren downplays the influence of local economic barons; the car dealership moguls and cornfield titans who the historian Patrick Wyman has crisply described as American gentry.

This was perhaps a forgivable oversight for someone who primarily operated on the federal level in the 1990s and 2000s. The American gentry may have commanded quite a bit of power in their respective communities, but they were junior partners in the national parties. Shareholders in colossal firms held the balance of power in Washington, not partnerships and sole proprietors.

But then came the 2010s.

In November 2010, the Republican populist insurgency known as the Tea Party movement arrived in Congress. Though the movement received support from some right-wing billionaires (notably the Koch Brothers—more on them later), it drew much of its grassroots support from the middle and upper-middle class. In 2011, Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin noted that “Older, white, and middle class is the typical profile of a Tea Party participant.” They bore a certain familial resemblance to the Middle American Radicals (MARs) who proto-MAGA intellectual Sam Francis once wrote would overthrow the cosmopolitan elites in charge of both major political parties.

They certainly bloodied the Republican elite, particularly those who were perceived as aligned with Insider Washington against the interests of the pure people. Williamson, Skocpol, and Coggin observed that there was a very strong ethno-nationalist and welfare chauvinist component to this revolt from the very beginning: the Tea Party activists they interviewed were very preoccupied with the threat that undocumented immigrants would come to the United States in droves, live the high life on federal welfare subsidies, and serve as the foot soldiers for permanent Democratic supremacy.

The money that supported Tea Party organizations did not, primarily, come from the traditional mainstays of corporate capitalism — the banks, energy companies, and health care firms that traditionally hedged their bets by giving vast amounts to both parties. Instead, the biggest Tea Party funders were almost certainly Charles and David Koch. The Koch Brothers were billionaire businessmen, but that was about all they had in common with consummate insiders like Jamie Dimon. Their political activities had a harder ideological edge. And, notably, Koch Industries did not answer to the stock market; Charles Koch once said that the company would go public “literally over my dead body.”

The Kochs were not titans of Wall Street; they were titans of what scholar Melinda Cooper calls family capitalism. In both the Tea Party and in Trump’s subsequent rise to power, Cooper writes, “what is at stake here is less an alliance of the small against the big than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.” Even Trump II’s alliance with the tech right fits into this framework: even those tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos who preside over publicly traded companies have successfully insulated themselves from anything like accountability to a broader class of shareholders.

Notably, one of the main fissures between family capitalism and shareholder capitalism pertains to so-called identity politics. Shareholder capitalism has proven adept at metabolizing social movements like feminism, the gay rights movement, and Black Lives Matter; this is the source of the now-defunct “woke capital” tendency that populists of both the left and right deplore, albeit for different reasons. Family capitalism is different, because its governing philosophy is more bound up with traditionalist white patriarchy. The Middle American Radicals, Francis wrote, adhere to “a domestic ethic that centers on the family, the neighborhood and local community, the church, and the nation as the basic framework of values” as opposed to cosmopolitanism’s “abstract universalism, its refusal to make any distinctions or discriminations among human beings.”

Shareholder capitalism is far from dead, but the shareholder capitalists are now the junior partners in the Republican coalition — to the extent that they can be considered part of that coalition at all. Trump’s tariffs, his attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve, and his bloody misadventures in Iran and Venezuela have all undermined the interests of shareholder capitalism’s key stakeholders. He is not a servant of Wall Street; he is a warlord backed by America’s landed gentry.

Warren’s political thought cannot accommodate the family capitalism/shareholder capitalism distinction that Cooper highlights. The populist dichotomy—the people versus the elites—leaves no room for distinguishing between different sets of elites with mutually exclusive goals. To the extent that Warren divides the capitalist class into different categories, she usually pits small businesses (overseen by hard-working real Americans) against big businesses (ruled by corrupt elites). This blinds her both to how family capitalism cuts across both categories and to the ways in which the owners of small and mid-sized businesses can be brutal tyrants in their own right.

A related category error helps to explain why she’s sabotaging her own housing bill. The American housing shortage simply cannot be understood in terms of a populist, people-versus-corporations Manichean framework; adopting that political analysis leads one to embrace policy ideas that either do nothing or actually throttle housing production where it is badly needed. Thus, Warren’s attachment to a ban on build-to-rent single-family home construction which, if it survives conference committee, could potentially offset all of the bill’s other benefits.

Worse, Warren’s populist orientation blinds her to the true nature of the Trump phenomenon. If “America’s agenda is a progressive agenda,” how is one to make sense of Trump’s 2024 popular vote win? To my knowledge, Warren has not directly answered this question. But her indirect answer is troubling. As she said in January: “Americans are stretched to the breaking point financially, and they will vote for candidates who name what is wrong and who credibly demonstrate that they will take on a rigged system in order to fix it.”

Did Trump “name what is wrong”? Did he “credibly demonstrate that [he] will take on a rigged system”? Warren does not say. But if we follow the line of her intellectual trajectory—including her adoption of some Trump administration policies as her own—then it at least seems like she believes Trump was tapping into the righteous anger and dissatisfaction of “hard-working families.” It follows that the problem with Trump is not in the content of his promises but in the fact that he broke them; on some level, his own brand of populism and his attack on “Insider Washington” (or, if you prefer, “the deep state”) is to be accommodated and even welcomed.

But to get to that conclusion, you need to either ignore the fascist and white supremacist currents in Trumpism or downplay their centrality. You certainly can’t confront the reality that many Trump voters—including many Trump voters who are not members of America’s top 0.1% in terms of wealth—voted for him specifically because he campaigned on a promise to ethnically cleanse the United States and restore patriarchal hegemony.

But this is the ideological core of Trumpism. When Donald Trump calls Somali immigrants “low-IQ” and promises to deport them en masse, he isn’t simply trying to distract people from the failures of his economic agenda. He’s articulating his essential value proposition for his political base.

For the record, I think Warren is genuinely appalled by Trump’s racism and authoritarianism. But I don’t think she understands these as essential features of MAGA-style right-wing populism. The problem with being a populist yourself is that once you accept populism’s essential premise—that the essence of politics is the struggle between a homogeneous cadre of “elites” and a homogeneous mass of “the people”—you become relatively defenseless against other, more poisonous populist factions. You may even be tempted, as Warren has been, to form tactical alliances with those factions against the elites.

But that is a misguided, even self-destructive strategy. It redirects our attention from the main threat to American democracy, to global stability, and to the lives of tens of millions of people. Just this morning, Trump threatened genocide against a country of 90 million. There can be no accommodation with the political coalition behind these threats, not even against common enemies. One would hope that a standard-bearer for modern American progressivism understands this. In the pivotal fight of our time, “the people” are not one of the two main combatants; instead, “the people” is contested territory. Progressives won’t be able to contest it if they take their own popular legitimacy for granted. It’s not enough to position yourself as a tribune for working America; at some point you need to start doing politics.