This week, Paul and Goldy sit down with journalist Kurt Hackbarth to discuss the recent electoral success of Mexico’s Morena party and their progressive economic agenda. The conversation explores how Morena’s focus on middle-out policies, such as significant minimum wage increases and sweeping social safety net programs and reforms, has lifted millions out of poverty and challenged decades of neoliberal orthodoxy. Hackbarth also highlights the effective communication strategies employed by Morena’s leaders, particularly their innovative use of social media, and the importance of staying connected to the base while appealing to a broad spectrum of voters, offering insights into what U.S. Democrats can learn from Mexico’s left-leaning Morena party.
Kurt Hackbarth is a writer, playwright, and freelance journalist who contributes to Jacobin Magazine and co-founded the independent media project “MexElects.” His writing often explores the complexities of global affairs and the impact of neoliberalism on society.
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Further reading:
Jacobin Magazine- Mexico’s Lessons for the International Left
Soberanía: The Mexican Politics Podcast
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Paul:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Goldie:
The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked, but what’s the alternative? Middle-out economics is the answer because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
Paul:
That’s right.
Speaker 3:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Goldie:
Oh, you’re joining me on the pod today to do a therapy session.
Paul:
Believe me, if you ran a GoFundMe for therapy, I would be your top donor.
Goldie:
Because as you know, I’m a little down about the election.
Paul:
Oh, yeah.
Goldie:
And I guess by the time this airs about the inauguration.
Paul:
Yeah, that’s understandable, Goldie. I mean, I would say that the week after the election was pretty rough for me too. It was one of the roughest weeks of my life, I will say emotionally. In public, it was incredibly depressing. And one of the things that helped me at that time was there was a chart that was going around, and I think you’ve probably seen it, Goldie, but it’s the one that showed that ruling parties around the world have been getting thrown out of office and losing elections, one after the other.
Goldie:
Right and left.
Paul:
Right and left. It didn’t matter who was in power, the party in power was getting kicked in the teeth by voters around the world this year. And in fact, that was one of the things that was helpful for me because Americans like to believe where living in a vacuum, but, in fact, the loss in America was less than almost every other country in the world, meaning that all that work, all those donations, all that everything that we did in the election wasn’t in vain, right? We were working against an intense global tide, and so our work mattered. So not to get too Pollyanna-ish on you because I know you loathe Pollyanna.
Goldie:
Oh, yeah.
Paul:
But that chart really gave me a lot of comfort knowing that because of the global wave of inflation and the pandemic and everything, voters are restless and they are just in a mood to throw the bums out.
Goldie:
Right. Both in response to the immiseration of the COVID pandemic and the policies that were implemented to get us through and out of it. Either way, either the government didn’t do enough or they did too much. People were angry everywhere, except apparently Paul along the nation, along our southern border.
Paul:
Do tell.
Goldie:
Well, instead of me telling, we should probably get to our guests because there were elections in Mexico, and in fact the incumbent party, the Progressive Party Morena won. They elected a new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, not only a progressive, not only the representative of the incumbent party, but a Jewish woman, which is something I have to say as a Jewish man, I can’t imagine the American electorate doing.
Paul:
Well, and she’s the first female president of any North American country, which is just a pretty huge achievement.
Goldie:
Wow, that’s weird.
Paul:
So, Goldie, in order to improve your mood, we are talking to Kurt Hackbarth who recently wrote a fascinating piece for Jacobin Magazine about the Morena party success and what lessons the US and Democrats in particular can learn from it and maybe what it might signal for the future of progressive politics around the world. Let’s talk to Kurt.
Kurt Hackbarth:
My name is Kurt Hackbarth. I’m a writer, playwright, and journalist writing for Jacobin Magazine in the United States, Sentido Común Magazine in Mexico. And I’m also the co-host of Soberania, the Mexican Politics podcast, which is on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcast.
Goldie:
Great. Well, thanks for joining us. Obviously, we had a very disappointing election in the United States. I don’t know about you, Paul, I’m still having trouble recovering from it, but the elections in Mexico were good for the left, which is actually not what we’ve seen around the rest of the world. What happened there, and why was Mexico different?
Kurt Hackbarth:
That’s an excellent question, and you’re absolutely right. It seems like Mexico is one of the few bright spots in the world right now, and especially in an election year where incumbents getting beaten up in a lot of countries. Mexico’s incumbent party not only won again, but actually built on its previous result. Mexico’s new progressive party, Morena won a landslide in 2018 and actually built on its landslide this time in 2024, beating its closest competitor by a 30-point margin and getting only majorities in both Houses of Congress in Mexico, but super majorities of two-thirds, which allows them to pass constitutional-level reforms.
So the question is how have they managed to do that with the same set of conditions that other incumbent parties have had to deal with COVID, inflation pressures, supply chain pressures, all the international instability? And a short answer to that question, I sketched out in an article recently in Jacobin, which I called Mexico’s Lessons for the International Left.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who has now been succeeded by Claudia Sheinbaum, the second president from Morena. Their big focus has been focusing on Mexico’s poor and lower middle class. Their big slogan was for the good of all, the poor come first, which was a totally opposite paradigm from the neoliberal trickle-dime paradigm that had dominated in Mexico for the last generation and in many parts of the world. So in very practical terms, how did that take shape? It took shape in raising a minimum wage yearly by 15 to 20%. So the Mexico’s a minimum wage has gone up over 100% over the course of Morena’s first term. It took the form of increasing vacation days, doubling of vacation days, increasing profit sharing, pension reform to increase what employers contribute to pension funds, disability benefits, aid to dependent mothers, a new pension reform now where workers are going to be able to retire with 100% of their last salary up to a certain level or a certain cap, outsourcing reform so that companies cannot outsource core functions, only secondary functions.
A labor reform that provides for secret ballot elections and requires all label contracts to be renegotiated. And the most recent one, which just passed a couple days ago, is a reform for gig workers. So that gig workers who earn at least a minimum wage salary rate per month will be covered by social security and pension benefits. Something very similar to the reform that was passed in California and then gutted by Prop 22. So, Mexico managed to stare down Uber and Lyft on that one. A universal senior pension and stay-in-school scholarships for students, and then a whole raft of infrastructure projects we can get into if people are interested.
But that in a nutshell is what Mexico is doing, and it’s worked according to both Mexico’s INEGI Institute and the World Bank. This combination of policies lifted 9.5 million people out of poverty over the course of Morena’s first term. Wages have outstripped inflation by about 32%, and the social programs have been a factor, but what the World Bank noted was that up to half of that poverty reduction can be directly attributed to the minimum wage increases. So sometimes it’s the simplest solution which is the most effective.
Paul:
Can you give us a little context on how inflation is going there? I know inflation is a global problem, but it affects different countries differently. So what’s it like there right now?
Kurt Hackbarth:
Yeah, Mexico did have inflation pressures under COVID. It got up to six or 7%. It’s down now to about 4.5%, the last measurement in November. And the minimum wage this year is going up 12% for 2025. So it’s about two and a half times inflation, which is what you want to see. There was, of course, the same scare tax ticks in Mexico as you see otherwise, that minimum wage increases will cause inflation to go up. And they haven’t. That’s been totally disproven. The minimum wage has gone up 15 to 20% year-on-year, and actually inflation after its COVID high has been coming down.
Goldie:
So in Mexico, when you propose raising the minimum wage, the opponents don’t warn that it’ll force all these jobs to move to Mexico? Because that’s the message we get here.
Kurt Hackbarth:
Well, that’s kind of a mind-boggler, right? We’re going to move them to where you are. But the threat is always the same. The threat is always, if wages rise too much in Mexico, we’ll move them to Bangladesh or we’ll move them somewhere else, so don’t dare raise them too high. So the threat there is implicit and in just a very similar sense of we’ll take them and we’ll move them elsewhere. Fortunately, Mexico is experiencing an interesting phenomenon called nearshoring, which is a post-COVID phenomenon where a lot of companies from Asia are relocating to Mexico to be closer to the North American market. So that has actually given the lie to this idea that jobs will flee a country where wages are increasing.
Paul:
Soon they’ll be threatening to move jobs to Texas if things keep going this way. And so I’m curious about the minimum wage. Is there a cap on the increases that are happening or is it just scheduled to keep going up?
Kurt Hackbarth:
Claudia Sheinbaum, who was just inaugurated on October 1st, ran on a platform of annual minimum wage increases until it gets up to what’s called two and a half basic food baskets, which means that she wants the minimum wage to be able to buy two and a half basic food baskets for a family, which would basically mean recovering the purchasing power of the minimum wage that it lost from the early ’80s onward. Remember that Mexico had a terrible crisis in 1982. There was a terrible devaluation. There was another big devaluation in 1994, which was called the Tequila Crisis. So there’s been a series of shocks and privatizations over the last generation that’s really eroded purchasing power amongst average Mexicans. So she wants to get that buck up to two and a half food baskets.
What’s interesting is she has business buy-in for this. It’s quite a different scenario in the United States, when they announced the minimum wage increase for 2025 a week ago, business leaders and union leaders were on the stage with her. So this has been a negotiated wage increase with business organizations and with labor organizations. So it’s scheduled to continue to rise to get to that two and a half limit, and it has to because it’s still way too low. Well, Mexico’s wages, we’re still talking about $13 a day. It’s got a long way to go to recover a lot of that purchasing power. So it’s $400 a month. That’s what the minimum wages. Fortunately, that has pushed wages higher elsewhere, right? Having that lower floor pushes wages up otherwise, and there are, of course, certain union contracts where the actual language is, if minimum wage rises, your wages rise accordingly. But we’re still not talking about a very generous minimum wage in terms that we understand, right?
Goldie:
Obviously, Mexico and the US are very different countries despite their proximity to each other, but we do face a lot of the same media challenges in that the media is largely corporate-owned and has a corporatist right wing. I mean, to say it has a slant to it, I think is a vast understatement. How has Morena managed to get its message out in its own terms in the face of this corporate-controlled media opposition? And I’m starting from the assumption that of course, they face a lot of opposition in the media.
Kurt Hackbarth:
Oh, yeah. Mexico’s media is totally corporate-controlled, both print media and the two main television networks, Televisa and TV Azteca, it’s just totally corporate dominated. What’s interesting is that Lopez Obrador was very ahead of the curve, precisely because the media was so slanted in Mexico. He very early on, recognized the power of social media and the Internet. We’re talking about 15 years ago or so when a lot of these things were still relatively in their infancy. So there was radio … AMLO is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, his acronym. So he’s known him as AMLO, right? So there was Radio AMLO online back in the aughts. There was a TV AMLO online back in the aughts, and it’s almost like the analogy I make is countries that never had a great landline system jumped more quickly to cell phones.
Mexico’s media landscape was so just awfully slanted and really exclusive. Mexico’s progressive community made the leap very early to social media. So you have a really well articulated ecosystem of YouTubers, YouTubers and other social media programs ahead of a lot of other countries in that regard. So that’s one thing.
The other factor, which was hugely important, is that Lopez Obrador debuted from day one of his presidency, a daily morning press conference, which was known as the Mañanera, which was, I mean, a daily conference of two, sometimes three hours a day from seven to nine or seven to 10, where he’d take questions from anyone and everyone, but also invited YouTubers in, which was interesting. It wasn’t just legacy media, although they were also there, and it became a real way to talk directly to the nation, go over the head of the corporate media, and make it fun. He made it interesting. He’d give a daily, he’d give a history lesson. He’s a writer, he’s a published author, so he’d talk about Mexican history, he’d crack jokes, he’d put on songs, but also it was a very pointed media critique of a lot of this stuff. And it became a hit. He became one of the top streamers in the Spanish language. I mean, competing with 20, 25-year-old streamers. You’d have the president of Mexico with his daily program, which then they put on Spotify and obviously YouTube and all that.
And it’s so successful they were that Claudia Sheinbaum has decided to continue the Mañaneras, the daily press conferences, and she’s continuing to do them a little bit shorter. She doesn’t go for three hours like AMLO, but it was a real way to plug directly into the population and turn these media attacks into a form of popular entertainment to say, “Look at these people. Look at what they’re doing. Look what they’re saying. This is why it’s wrong, and this is what we’re doing.” And he really found the winning formula in that.
Goldie:
Did Sheinbaum have the same sort of, I don’t know, charisma the personality capable to keep it up? I know she was his personal pick, right?
Kurt Hackbarth:
Well, Sheinbaum is quite a different personality, and I think to her credit, she hasn’t tried to imitate López Obrador. You know, what she has said is this is very much, we are the second floor of what’s called the fourth transformation of Mexico. So she on a basher, they ran on a continuity platform. She didn’t try to distance herself from López Obrador. He has a 70% approval rating. It would’ve been silly for her to do that. So she ran very much in a continuity program, but with her own program of, for example, measures related to women and an accent on different issues that López Obrador hadn’t prioritized as much.
She runs a tight ship. She ran a tight ship in the campaign, a very no-nonsense tight ship, and she does the same thing in the press conferences. She was a borough leader in Mexico City. She was also the mayor of Mexico City, which considering the whole outlying area is 25 million people. So it’s like there are countries that are smaller than Mexico City population-wise. So she certainly has plenty of experience in that regard, and she also has her experience as a professor and a researcher beforehand. So it’s very much a tight ship, no-nonsense way of handling the Mañanera. Not as many anecdotes, not as many jokes, doesn’t put on songs, but she’s an able communicator in her own right. She is.
Paul:
I’m sorry, I’m going way out of order here, but I am curious if you could just give us a little bit of context. You alluded earlier to the continuous neoliberal trickle-down rule in Mexico that preceded these administrations, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. Was it similar to what we were seeing in America? Was it a similar flavor of trickle-down and was it also a similar form of communication compared to AMLO?
Kurt Hackbarth:
Very much like America, but worse, it was closer to what happened in Chile after Pinochet. It was the wholesale sell-off of the state. I mean, it really was. I think they sold off over a thousand different state agencies or institutions over the course of the late ’80s and ’90s, creating a whole new class of crony capitalist millionaires that benefited off of the wholesale sell-off of telecoms, of airlines, of mines, of banks. The trains were sold off. It was sold off piece by piece, and it was just a terrible phenomenon.
So for a time, Mexicans with the world’s wealthiest person, Carlos Slim benefited from the sell-off of Mexican Telecom and then also had Mexico’s largest cell phone company at the same time. The banks, for example, Mexico’s largest bank, Banamex, was rescued by the Mexican taxpayer in what was called the Fobaproa bailout in the ’90s, which was similar to TARP, only worse because TARP, they paid back the loans and Fobaproa, they never did.
So the Mexican taxpayer bailed out the banks and then they were sold off. Banamex was sold off to Citigroup or Santander or HSBC or whatever else, and these banks make a killing in Mexico because regulations are less so they can charge fees up the wazoo and all kinds of commissions on everything, very high interest rates on things like mortgages. And that cut across every sector. Cut across every sector. And yes, of course, the rhetoric to justify that was very similar. We’re going to free up resources for investment. We’re going to free up resources so that the state can do what it can do best, and it doesn’t need to be doing these kind of things. And that never happened. That never happened. The Mexican public just got poorer and poorer, and they watched their state being dismantled around them while their wages were being deliberately suppressed. This was the saddest part of all of this, that throughout the ’80s and the ’90s, which began the NAFTA era, Mexico’s neoliberal leadership kind of sold Mexico to the world as a low-wage haven, “Come invest in Mexico because basically, they’re starvation wages.” “Come invest here. We have abundant resources and cheap wages, so come and invest.”
So it’s no surprise that after NAFTA, migration exploded. And they had to know that was going to happen. So it’s this constant, how can you say it, the kind of schizophrenia of American policy towards Mexico and Latin America. They always say they’re against migration. Fine. People don’t want to migrate, actually. It’s not their first choice, but then they pursue policies both politically and economically that lead to greater migration, and that means destabilizing any government that has ever tried to create the conditions for people to be able to stay home. And that’s what Mexico is trying to do right now. So it’s very worrisome that Trump, for example, has just nominated an ambassador to Mexico, Ron Johnson, who’s an ex-Green Beret CIA guy. So you can kind of see where that might be going.
Goldie:
Obviously, in the US, on the right and everywhere, really, anytime you have any type of program that benefits ordinary people, it’s labeled socialism. Morena, this is not a socialist government. They don’t identify as socialist, do they?
Kurt Hackbarth:
No, they don’t identify as a socialist party.
Goldie:
So economically, ideologically, how do they describe themselves? They’re not neoliberal, they’re not trickle-down, they’re not socialist. What do they think they are?
Kurt Hackbarth:
That’s a really good question. I would call it a post-neoliberal government. Lopez Obrador himself called it Mexican humanism. That’s his philosophy of what this is. He calls it Mexican humanism, and that means defending Mexican sovereignty, but building out a welfare state, which to me is the most similar to a new deal. I mean, if you go down the list of what I said at the beginning, a lot of what I mentioned came out of the new deal in the states. We’re talking about pensions and disability, labor protections. Some of the newer ones are things like gig worker protections, which didn’t exist back in those days, but it’s creating a basic fair welfare state for people in Mexico, which never existed.
Well, there was some of it in the ’50s and ’60s during the Mexican boom, which when the Mexican Health Service was created in the pension service, but it was gutted in the neoliberal era. So I think it’s really not that far off from this kind of patriotic progressivism idea that I see that your show discusses because Lopez Obrador very much considers himself to be a patriot. And I think part of his secret to his success was he was viewed by the Mexican public as very much the quintessential Mexican in favor of the Mexican public and not selling off Mexico to global interests or globalists that would come in and dismantle the country.
Just as an example, one of López Obrador’s big reforms 2021 was an energy reform to try to get more control over Mexico’s electrical grid and energy system for the state. And that of course, made companies like Iberdrola or Enel or a lot of these energy multinationals very upset because they wanted to be able to use Mexico’s electrical grid to their own uses, just like in Spain, where Iberdrola actually bills people directly. So that’s, I think an example of where know López Obrador has this idea of sovereignty, but also building on a welfare state through this idea of what he calls Mexican humanism.
Paul:
What do you think democrats in the US can learn from what’s going on in Mexico right now, I guess in terms of policies, but also communication with voters?
Kurt Hackbarth:
I think there’s a lot to be learned from Mexico. I think if people have just the … Sometimes Americans, we think that we have nothing to learn from anyone. That’s kind of the we’re number one kind of phenomenon. And I think if we have some basic humility to learn from other experiences, I think it would be helpful to see how a party can win two straight landslides in challenging economic conditions. I think it’s not abandoning your base, not abandoning your base. It’s interesting that if you look at the numbers in 2018, which was Moreno’s first election as a progressive party, working-class voters were kind of all over the place a little bit, but by 2021, the midterm elections, they’d come home to Moreno. And by 2024, Moreno won working-class voters overwhelmingly because they passed policies … I mean, it is that simple. They passed policies that benefit their base, right? The minimum wage, the outsourcing reform, the labor reform, vacation days, profit sharing, pensions, that’s bread-and-butter issues, that’s meat stuff. And they didn’t get deviated from that.
And the interesting thing with Sheinbaum is that she managed to hold the working-class base, but they didn’t alienate the middle-class voters either. That’s why they won by such a landslide. She won poor, she won working class, she won middle class, and they even won upper-middle-class voters, 49 to 41%. So if you do it right and you communicate it, you don’t necessarily understand that Mexico is a different country from the US in a different context. You don’t necessarily have to alienate your middle class voters if you pass policies that benefit a working-class base. And I think Moreno has been really good at that, and it’s been really good at communicating that.
I think people understand that you’re not going to win every battle in politics. You never do, but the idea is if they have the sense that they’re fighting for you, they’ll back you. And I think the Democrats have lost that because they’ve gone too much to billionaire donors and concerts with Beyonce and lost touch with their base.
Goldie:
Yeah, I don’t know. It’s hard to be faithful to your base when you’re not sure who your base is anymore. I think that’s part of the identity crisis with the Democratic Party right now. Given Mexico’s success recently, is the country prepared for the wave of migrants coming in across the American border, people fleeing Trumpism in the US? I’m saying this as an almost 62-year-old, wondering whether I’ll be able to retire here.
Kurt Hackbarth:
Well, there has been quite a wave of immigration from the US to Mexico over the last years, digital nomads and such. That doesn’t always get all the publicity, as the migration going the other direction. And another interesting phenomenon is people crossing the border to get abortion care because Mexico has liberalized its abortion laws and they’re now more liberal in Mexico than the United States. So you see people literally crossing over to get abortion care in Mexico than in US states.
I think it’s going to be a challenging time for Mexico over the next few years with all the Trumpian threats and tariff threats and deportation threats, whatever else. I think one advantage that Mexico has is that Sheinbaum is very popular. She’s got also a 70 to 80% approval rating. Her recent letter to Trump saying, “Hey, listen, if you do tariffs, we’ll do tariffs. And we’ll all lose.” I think was well received. And I think Claudia Sheinbaum is a really good person to be able to communicate Mexico’s case to the American public. She did her doctorate in California, she speaks English. She really is, I think, uniquely positioned to make Mexico’s case to kind of middle American.
Goldie:
Was the fact that obviously, she’s a woman, was that ever really a factor in this election like people predicted it would be?
Kurt Hackbarth:
It wasn’t really. There are so many stereotypes about Mexico, and it’s unfortunate. We have a lot of stereotypes about Mexico, a lot of negative stereotypes, which Trumpism has only served to worsen the bad old buddies, the rapists, all of this nasty stuff.
I’ve lived here for 23 years, and it’s a much more open society than people understand. Mexico right now, elected not only a woman, but a Jewish woman without a problem. Actually, if you look at the numbers, more men than women voted for Sheinbaum. And it’s funny because I was amongst the gaggle of reporters at the Hilton Hotel at the night of the election and following the results at Moreno headquarters and reporting. And it was funny to watch the foreign correspondents coming in because sometimes there are people who will live here and have really studied the country. And then there are, of course, the reporters that just come in for a couple of days and go elsewhere with their job. And they’re like, “Well, how is it that such a macho country could elect a woman?” And they were really, really scratching their heads about this one. I’m like, “Well, maybe it’s not as macho the country as you think it is.”
Of course, there is machismo here. There’s also machismo in the US but Mexico is an interesting, complex, nuanced country. It’s got 126 million people. It’s got 70 to 80 indigenous languages, all different kinds of cultures. The south is different from the north. The mountains are different from the coast. I mean, you could spend a lifetime discovering Mexico. So I think it evades simplistic labels and stereotypes.
Goldie:
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the stereotypes about the US are true. So by comparison. What do you think, you want to get to the final question, Paul?
Paul:
Yeah, you’ve been very generous with your time. Thank you. We wanted to ask you a question. We ask all of our guests, which is why do you do this work?
Kurt Hackbarth:
I love what I do. I love Mexico as a country. It’s really adopted me and really with open arms. Mexico is really, really welcoming the foreigners in a way that I think is another thing United States can learn. But also, I love the work I do because I can split, divide time between fiction and we have a publishing house and we publish Mexican writers of short stories and novels and then my journalistic work. And so I’m able to work with Jacobin Magazine, with Sentido Común here. We have our podcast, Soberania. And I’m also going to be doing some work with Mexico’s public broadcaster, Canal Once in the new year. So it’s not a bad way to earn a living.
Goldie:
Well, thank you for joining us today, and I’m really looking forward to at least having one positive election to cheer me up over the next few years.
Kurt Hackbarth:
Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I hear you. It’s really good to have at least one bright spot there and have been able to live it and watch it and see it because it hasn’t been easy. López Obrador ran for office twice before he won in 2018. 2006 was an electoral fraud. 2012, there was a lot of foul play as well. There’s been, if you go back over the decades, all kinds of electoral malfeasance, all kind of progressive activists disappeared back in the days, killed in the ’80s and ’90s when this movement was just getting started. So it’s been a very long and hard road to get to this. It didn’t just come out of nowhere. So it’s that much more gratifying, I think, to see them finally get into office and be able to take good advantage of it.
Paul:
Thank you so much. This has been really fascinating, and I really appreciate you taking the time.
Kurt Hackbarth:
Thanks, guys. Yeah.
Paul:
So, Goldie, how you feeling?
Goldie:
How am I feeling? I have to say, Paul, I’m still a little depressed. I’m a lot depressed. It’s not going to take a conversation about the progress in Mexico and the positive electoral results to get me out of my funk here. But it is fascinating that Mexico was able to buck the trend. Of course, very different countries, very different politics, very different challenges, very different personalities than we have here. I think one of the interesting things about Mexico is Morena is a relatively new party, and they had a very different process for selecting Sheinbaum as their candidate, as their nominee. They didn’t go through a primary process, which they thought would be too chaotic and divisive. Instead, they did a series of polls. They had an internal poll and hired four independent pollsters and agreed to go with whoever came in first of their slate. And that was Sheinbaum. I can’t imagine the Democratic Party abandoning primaries saying caucuses to do that here.
So, it was a much more controlled process on the part of Morena in terms of trying to pick the best candidate possible. Whereas Democrats often seem intent on seeing “Let’s see. If we could figure out how to get the worst candidate possible. What process could we choose to do that?”
Paul:
Well, you can always find the lead lining in the silver lining of a cloud if you look hard enough, Goldie. Yeah, I think, obviously, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but I was really heartened to hear how, first of all, how quickly the transition came. As Kurt said, the fact that it only took a couple of elections for Morena to start showing real tremendous swings in the electorate, and that after they started delivering results, it didn’t take long for the divisiveness of class to sort of break down and for people of all stripes from lower class to upper middle class to sort of form a coalition. And so I think that’s really heartening. I think that in an media environment as corporate-controlled Mexico’s was, I think that’s pretty remarkable. And it shows that it doesn’t necessarily take very long for change to take root, even when the game is completely rigged against a party the way it was against Moreno. So I’m feeling more optimistic after that conversation.
Goldie:
And from an economics perspective, I think this is another example of the worldwide death of neoliberalism as a valid and winning ideology. It’s dying in different places in different ways. In some ways, Trumpism has contributed to the death of neoliberalism. Their policies are still, for the most part, trickle-down. But their narrative is not. And clearly, Trump is just an autocratic oligarch who’s in it for his own selfish and evil reasons. But you see it in Mexico, you’ve seen it throughout Latin America. You’ve seen the old neoliberal regimes falling and being discredited. Even if it’s not necessarily replaced by a progressive or leftist government, it doesn’t seem to hold anymore. And to see that collapse in Mexico where it had been at least as dominant as it had been in the US, is really heartening.
Paul:
Wow. Well, look at that. It’s a positive statement from Goldie after the 2024 elections. So I will take that as a win and-
Goldie:
We’ll leave it at that. I should just quit while we’re ahead.
Paul:
I’m certainly not going to push my luck. That’s true. Yeah. Yeah. We’ll get you to come around yet, Goldie. Don’t worry.
Goldie:
And if you want to read more from Kurt, we will provide a link in the show notes to his piece in Jacobin: Mexico’s Lessons for the International Left.
Speaker 5:
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