The battle to define what went wrong for Democrats in the election, and chart a path out of the wilderness, is well underway. Trump’s campaign successfully courted working-class voters with stories attributing their pain to clearly defined villains—immigrants, transgender people, failing institutions, social elites—that Trump promised to take on. To beat this MAGA populism, prominent Democrats have begun urging their party to adopt similarly populist postures but with a different set of villains—the economic elites and rapacious corporations that are actually making the lives of working people harder.

Leftists aren’t the only ones urging Democrats to go populist. No less an embodiment of the centrist ethos than David Brooks proposed that “maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption—something that will make people like me uncomfortable.” James Carville lamented that Democrats didn’t run with Bernie’s populist issues “more front and center.” Congressman Pat Ryan, a swing-seat Democrat from New York, put it this way: “It’s about who fights for the people vs. who further empowers and enables the elites.”

If this emerging logic is critical to Democrats’ future prospects, it is doubly important for the climate movement. The way Democratic leaders have framed climate change over the last four years—as an opportunity for green jobs and industrial policy—was not the electoral winner many had hoped. Indeed, Kamala Harris’s campaign treated climate change as a political liability to be avoided, not a politically advantageous fight to play up.

And yet, if Democrats are looking for issues and villains that demonstrate which party fights for the people versus which one further empowers and enables the elites, the climate crisis actually provides one of our strongest playing fields. After all, Big Oil executives are villains straight out of central casting. We’re talking about millionaire and billionaire elites who price-gouged consumers, lining their pockets with outrageous profits while raising costs on regular people. They created the........

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