Mexico and the Road U.S. Democrats Can Never Take
The promise and peril of Claudia Sheinbaum’s working-class agenda.
Democrats are in a trap. They imagine themselves as a party of the working class. They understand themselves as its natural leaders. They grasp they would be more successful as a working-class party. Huddled at the Ritz-Carlton munching on hors d’oeuvres like mini lobster rolls and short-rib tostones and a dinner featuring heirloom tomato carpaccio, beef tenderloin and seared sea bass, they hold seminar after seminar on how to become the party they feel themselves to be.
They lie to themselves. To see why, look south. North America has a government of the working class: Mexico’s.
Since its heterodox left came to power in 2018, Mexico has put the working class’s material interests first. But it hasn’t stopped there. It has doggedly incarnated the priorities and values of working-class people, very much including their prejudices and aversions.
The result is a government that American progressives would find repellent.
First under Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the populist firebrand who governed from December 2018 through the end of last year, and now under his more bookish hand-picked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico serves as a useful reminder of how far progressive orthodoxy has drifted from the actual priorities of working people. Their party, Morena, demonstrates what a true working-class agenda looks like—and why America’s Democrats can never deliver it.
Working-class voters everywhere care about their pocketbook first, so AMLO and Sheinbaum made improving workers’ purchasing power the centerpiece of their agenda. They’ve been smart about it, and crushingly effective.
That was far from a given. For decades, left-wing governments in Latin America promised to improve working-class incomes, then shot them in the foot by trying to deliver them through the macroeconomics of populism. Deficit spending soon fed through to sharply increased inflation, which ended up eroding the purchasing power of higher wages, leaving working-class people worse off than they’d been at the start.
Morena didn’t fall into this trap. First AMLO and now Sheinbaum have held to tight fiscal discipline while aggressively increasing Mexico’s minimum wage and expanding social programs to benefit the working class. What AMLO called “republican austerity” fell mostly on better-off people, leaving space for the daily minimum wage to jump from 88 pesos in 2018 to 249 pesos in 2024, with 279 pesos scheduled for 2025.
The macroeconomics of populism did not take hold, so inflation did not spike. It peaked post-COVID at 8.7% in September 2022, then started falling and sat at 3.8% as of March 2025—well inside the Banco de México target band. For all their incessant rants against neoliberalism, Morena governments have shown a scrupulously neoliberal adherence to fiscal rectitude, keeping fiscal policy tight and leaving the Central Bank alone. It turns out AMLO’s heterodoxy had a good dash of orthodoxy in the mix—neoliberal technocracy put at the service of populist goals.
But if you raise working-class incomes while keeping fiscal discipline, somebody has to pay. In Mexico, that “somebody” is the professional managerial class. Over his tenure, AMLO systematically dismantled some 280 “fideicomisos”—government trust-funds that, for the most part, bankrolled the lifestyles and priorities of Mexico’s right-thinking elites. Funds earmarked for everything from scientific research and independent film to sustainable energy, space exploration, women’s studies, biodiversity protection and elite sports were zeroed-out and their balances swept into the treasury to bankroll spending for the working class.
The result has been the kind of redistribution—from the managers’ pockets directly into their own—that working-class people can’t get enough of. Labor’s share of Mexico’s national income rose from 26% of GDP in 2018 to 31% by the end of 2023.
Is it any wonder President Sheinbaum’s approval sits north of 80%?
The kind of redistributive politics Sheinbaum champions is unthinkable for U.S. Democrats, whose activist core is top-heavy with the kinds of people Sheinbaum loves to pick on. The closest American analogue to the Twilight of the Fideicomisos has been DOGE—an infinitely clumsier attempt to strip power from the professional managerial class. But then, imagine the kind of reception a Democratic consultant would get at one of those $800/night hotel seminars if they floated a DOGE in left-wing guise. It would be calling for an intra-party civil war. It’s just a non-starter.
Unburdened by support from affluent voters, Morena antagonizes them with glee. AMLO and Sheinbaum calculated long ago that this is all political upside for them. Working-class Mexicans despise their hoity-toity right-thinking university class just as much as working-class Americans hate theirs. The only difference is that, in Mexico, it’s the left that baits them, and the left that reaps the political rewards.
The Mexican left have long since realized that working-class people aren’t interested in abstract questions of identity—racial or sexual. So while Morena did deliver, for instance, on same-sex marriage and some gender equality measures, it’s always known better than to adopt the phraseology of the identitarian left. It’s impossible, for instance, to imagine Claudia Sheinbaum getting tripped up by a question about whether to give transgender prisoners access to state-funded gender affirming care. Working-class Mexicans aren’t signed up with the crazier extremes of the woke agenda—and neither is Morena.
I imagine some Persuasion readers might find this kind of restraint rather appealing. Not so fast. Morena’s contempt for the values of the professional managerial class extends not just to the woke left, but also to old-fashioned liberalism. AMLO and Sheinbaum turn out to be just as indifferent to freedom of speech, the separation of powers and the whole notion of checks and balances as they are to identity politics.
When independent administrators put limits on Morena’s ability to dominate election campaigns, Morena reacted by trying to drastically limit the powers of the independent elections authorities. When the court told him he couldn’t do that, AMLO responded with a plan to kneecap the independence of the judiciary by subjecting judgeships to popular election. Under the guise of democratic accountability, a nationwide popular election of judges, held yesterday, June 1, stocked the bench with candidates pre-vetted by Morena’s congressional supermajority, locking in executive influence for a decade.
Meanwhile, journalists supposedly “under state protection” keep getting gunned down in Mexico, and the government doesn’t seem too bothered about it. Keeping journalists alive is not, apparently, a working-class priority. AMLO made a strategic choice early on not to fight the gangs and cartels that now control large chunks of Mexican territory. Previous governments had confronted the cartels head-on, often targeting their top leaders. This resulted in extraordinary levels of violence in working-class communities, as the remaining mobsters fought each other for control of fragmented rackets. AMLO’s “hugs, not bullets” approach (since rowed back by Sheinbaum) was a calculated gamble that Morena constituents crave order, even if its cost is ceding some ground to the cartels. This is part of the same strategy as the election of judges, which is all but guaranteed to increase the cartel’s influence over the courts.
The chattering classes in Mexico City may be appalled at a government that plays footsie with the cartels. But Morena knows working-class people despise having to live their lives in the middle of a shooting gallery.
Of course, real, living, breathing working-class Mexicans are not the uniform mass of hyper-materialist, indifferent-to-democracy brutes of AMLO’s imagination. Plenty of them are concerned by their government’s authoritarian drift. Many more ought to be appalled by its short-sightedness on everything from research funding to climate adaptation.
Still, Mexico shows what becomes possible when smart, ruthless leaders side with the working class consistently, not just on the issues where they happen to align with working-class positions. Inevitably—by design—the result is governance that upper-middle-class people find abhorrent.
Which is why no number of mini lobster rolls or short-rib tostones will rescue Democrats from the ideological trap they’re in. Nothing remotely like Morena’s approach is achievable for a party dominated by upper-middle-class progressives.
Flattering the prejudices and accommodating the aversions of the working class is not the same thing as furthering working-class interests. When the two diverge, Morena has too often privileged the former over the latter. That may not be very good policy, but it’s spectacular politics. Claudia Sheinbaum’s stratospheric poll numbers will answer for that.
Quico Toro is Director of Climate Repair at the Anthropocene Institute, a contributing editor at Persuasion, and writes the Substack One Percent Brighter.
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"Flattering the prejudices and accommodating the aversions of the working class is not the same thing as furthering working-class interests. When the two diverge, Morena has too often privileged the former over the latter. That may not be very good policy, but it’s spectacular politics."
This failure to recognize working class values in the US is a very large part of why the Democrats have lost the working class. The general liberal economics are probably not super-popular to the working class either, but the stick in their eye is the cultural differences between college-educated Democrats and non-college-educated working class. It's the most visible and emotionally-charged conflict.
I’ve wondered for years why progressive leaders under fire haven’t studied AMLO carefully and realized that he cracked the code.
Donald Trump did it for the right. AMLO absolutely did it for the left, with smashing success — after 6 years of him in power, his hand picked successor won in a landslide, and is wildly popular. And this just isn’t about political power, as you point out in detail — they’e actually been demonstrably improving the lives of the middle class in Mexico.
Hey, democrats, look south. And I don’t mean anything after the “Not so fast” part.