When you have to qualify populist as much as has been done in this article you wipe out all major interesting movements, and simply redefine populism to mean authoritarian.
Here are 20 populist movements that were generally not authoritarian in nature, and are the tip of the iceberg. I don’t even look to pre-19th century.
The American revolution is almost the definition of a populist movement.
1. **Progressive Era (United States, late 19th to early 20th century)** - Aimed at addressing social issues like corruption, labor rights, and women’s suffrage.
2. **People's Party (United States, 1890s)** - Focused on agrarian concerns, economic reform, and the power of monopolies, advocating for direct democracy.
3. **Green Party (Various countries, 1970s-present)** - Emphasizes environmental issues, social justice, and grassroots democracy.
4. **Pirate Party (Various countries, 2000s-present)** - Advocates for digital rights, privacy, transparency, and direct democracy.
5. **Zapatista Movement (Mexico, 1994-present)** - Fights for indigenous rights and autonomy, using participatory democratic structures.
6. **Occupy Movement (Global, 2011)** - Aimed at addressing economic inequality and corporate influence in politics, organized through horizontal decision-making.
7. **Five Star Movement (Italy, 2009-present)** - Initially focused on anti-corruption, environmentalism, and direct democracy.
8. **Podemos (Spain, 2014-present)** - Emerged in response to economic crises, advocating for social justice and participatory democracy.
9. **Sandinista Revolution (Nicaragua, 1970s-1980s)** - Aimed at overthrowing a dictatorship, initially had strong populist elements before evolving.
10. **Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn (United Kingdom, 2015-2020)** - Focused on anti-austerity, social justice, and democratic socialism.
11. **Bernie Sanders' Movement (United States, 2016-2020)** - Advocated for economic justice, healthcare reform, and reducing the influence of big money in politics.
12. **Vermont Progressive Party (United States, 1980s-present)** - Focuses on social and economic justice, environmental sustainability, and grassroots democracy.
13. **Civic Forum (Czechoslovakia, 1989)** - Aimed at overthrowing communist rule through non-violent means, advocating for democracy and human rights.
14. **Velvet Revolution (Czechoslovakia, 1989)** - A non-violent movement that ended communist rule and transitioned the country towards democracy.
15. **Mahatma Gandhi's Movement (India, early 20th century)** - Advocated for non-violent resistance to colonial rule, emphasizing democracy and social justice.
16. **Lega Nord's Early Years (Italy, 1980s-1990s)** - Initially focused on regional autonomy, anti-corruption, and federalism without authoritarianism.
17. **Evo Morales' MAS (Bolivia, early years 2000s-present)** - Initially centered on indigenous rights, economic equality, and social justice.
18. **Women's Suffrage Movement (Global, late 19th to early 20th century)** - Focused on gaining the right to vote for women through democratic means.
19. **Syriza (Greece, early 2010s)** - Emerged from opposition to austerity, advocating for social justice, economic reform, and democracy.
20. **United Farmers Movement (Canada, early 20th century)** - Advocated for agrarian interests, cooperative economics, and political reform without authoritarianism.
These movements have varied in their goals, methods, and impact, but they share a common thread of advocating for the people without resorting to authoritarian control.
This is good. I love all the examples. The original article has a lot of good points, especially when it highlights how populism can be an expression of the disaffections and resentments of FAVORED groups in “the majority”. But I t’s a mistake to call whites or white Protestants a “dominant” group in US politics or history. That’s because this “fact” (of *demographic* prevalence) obscures not only the diversity within those groups we call “white” but distracts from the “fact” that most “white” people are not (and do not feel) influential in even local politics and culture — and never did. But the original article does draw a necessary distinction between disaffections and resentments of disfavored minorities versus those of favored groups. The agrarian Populism of the turn of the last century emerged from a particularly favored group at that time when farming was much more labor intensive and farms had not been so capitalistically “collectivized.”
Farmers weren’t necessarily “dominant” even when they were major voting blocks in the South (Democrats) and West (Republicans). Still they were politically and culturally potent. Their numbers and their centrality to America’s self image (even as we were rapidly industrializing and urbanizing) is what made the radical aspects of their policy proposals and economic organizing so terrifying to bankers and industrialists. When immigrant workers agitated for economic democracy, they were easy to demonize as foreigners under the sway of evil (Jewish) ideologues and then massacre them. Between 1870 and 1934 there were at least three major massacres of organized working people per decade (with “major being defined as more than 5 fatalities — and some massacres were many magnitudes larger). But it would be much more costly to unleash Pinkertons, the National Guard, and the US Army against church ladies, preachers, farm hands, and feed store owners even if they were building alternative member-owned cooperatives for wholesale, retail, and banking needs. Mobilizing to prevent them from building a lasting common cause with urban and industrial workers involved building redoubtable armories in every city and almost every large town. But it also required making significant economic and political concessions that were and are labeled as Progressive reforms.
"I don’t agree with this thesis. When you have to qualify populist as much as has been done in this article you wipe out all major interesting movements, and simply redefine populism to mean authoritarian."
I agree with your assertion here...however, I would be interested in hearing your analysis of the author's assertion that "populism is not anti-elitism." I happen to believe that it is an absolutely essential ingredient of populism. The issue doesn't appear to be addressed in your other posts below...just curious about your take on this given, as one poster wrote, your interesting perspective.
Populism is defined a movement based on an assertion that governance by an elite minority doesn’t represent the interests of the majority, the populace. The elite minority is defined by a self-sustaining boundary which is wealth, class, or status. Where everyone is relatively poor, or wealthy, or well-educated, or the society lacks a self-perpetuating hierarchy, or the elite don’t govern, populism doesn’t exist - Many European countries; where governance by an elite maintains congruence to the interests of the populace, the so-called benevolent dictatorship model, populist movements doesn’t really exist: Singapore, Taiwan. To make the assertion that populism isn’t necessarily anti-elite is the same as saying Being Alive isn’t necessarily not being dead, or being female isn’t necessarily not being male. Elite and Populist governance are defined by the exclusionary boundary, and the wish to remove the boundary by eliminating the elite, elite governance, or elite power influencing governance. There is no such thing as a pro-elite populist.
Explain the idea that Trump & trumpism is a populist movement. Trump represents a threat to the average American citizen. His authoritarian instincts smell of fascism and creating a permanent political order where rules are for thee but not for me. The mask of fear that Trump exudes is falling away as I write. He appears to be a hollow shell of a wannabe dictator.
I don’t know that Trump is populist, I mean he lost the last election, he hasn’t received a majority of the popular vote ever, and his supported candidates lose.
We are told he’s populist sometimes but what proof is offered? He’s clearly supported by Republican elite. He is an “elite”. He is authoritarian, in the sense that he thinks violent actions have a place in government.
But tax breaks for the wealthy, insulting the military, constantly telling people he is wealthy, that’s not populist.
Clowns do the same thing and are popular, but not populist, they are entertainers.
But why does the media world keep calling him a populist? He has proven himself to be an elitist, but a poor man’s elitist. In other words, he is crass, unmanageable, bigoted, sexist, and otherwise self-obsessed. He represents disaffected folks that can’t find a place to hang their hats.
Whoever calls him populist doesn’t understand the term, it’s a technique I call “MSU” or “Make Shit Up” and see what sticks. He’s entertaining but I’ve never heard him say a single thing which makes me think he’s a populist. The closest I’ve heard is Bernie Sanders. Compare their language.
But the U.S. Republican Party is trying to enforce permanent minority rule. That must be the function of the « real people. » Immigrants, sexual and gender minorities, and people of color are not the « real people. »
Real people are ones making less than $100,000 a year, have a couple of kids, didn’t realize the Trump administration gave billionaires a tax credit, and miss roseanne and Pat Sajak. My entire family in the south, and I love them to death.
How about a discussion on how the Liberals of today are NOT the Liberals of yesteryear?
The 'Liberals' of today, better known as Marxist neo-cons posing as Liberals can't define what the difference is between a male and a female, have changed the definition of a vaccine to suit something that wasn't a vaccine and now are trying to define populism as a narrow band of people to paint a picture.
The problem is that the far Left used to be considered extremist and are now considered 'centrist' and have moved the goal posts to paint anyone who were centrist as right wing extremists when they are anything but. They are the normal centrists who want family to be the priority.
It's time to admit that the Left is the extremist party, that the Woke movement is a coup of merit based society, which outright destroys everything that made society function willingly, and that they are pro big government, more regulations over society, and the Left are the ones that are inherently authoritarian since that is the inevitable conclusion of the ideology. The Right are now the Liberals of yesteryear. It's apparent to everyone except the Liberals.
There is no “Left” - there are reactionary conservatives and there are authoritarian conservatives.
William F. Buckley (“God and Man at Yale”) conservatives are extinct, and FDR Liberals are extinct, but they both “won” - women can vote gays can get married, there’s a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. What’s left are groups which want authoritarian enforcement of 60-year-old ideas vs groups who want to return to the 1870 gold standard.
Neither is evolving, and they are locked in a struggle to the death over ideas which belong in a museum, in an age when wealth relative to 1870 or 1970 is unimaginable.
One wants America to be poor again, the other wants America to be racist again. Both work towards the bliss of ignorance, the ultimate conservative fever-dream of all ages.
Ideas have to evolve or they don’t model reality and using them to predict solutions to problems fails.
Liberal isn’t meaning free (“liberal arts” - goodness) conservatives want to be agents of Chaos. Neither word accords to the definition.
The Sierra Club has replaced Buckley Republicans as an example of preservation of the past and tradition, Progressives want to trans convert children to 1950’s ideas of female. Everything points to the past e.g. conservative.
Some ideas from the last work very well - marriage. Some don’t - segregation.
Neither authoritarian nor reactionary conservatives have adapted to Internet or globalization, as a start.
Immigration is a “problem” roughly every 30 years - Irish, German, Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Mexican… Although the real jobs transition was via importing work via globalization accelerated with internet.
We keep wanting to “preserve” or revive ways of life that exist only in museums called film. Judy Garland is dead, there are no Rock Stars, nobody cares about Madonna, promiscuity is a laugh, Catholicism and Boy Scouts are collapsing because of pedophilia, it’s all a very 1968 moment without being in an active war.
I'll take the New Deal-thriugh-1964 consensus over what we have now. Heck, I'll take Obama's "No Black America, no White America" -- before it morphed into a bait-and-switch ("Oh, we didn't really mean that; it was only aspirational") during the Summer of Floyd. No wonder we have Obama/Trump voters.
And then we have our nomenklatura -- our caste of "experts" and "social justice warriors" with their oligarch-sponsored foundation money (and the unelected bureaucrats of the Deep State), telling us what to think in their Brave New World of "behavioral health," and prattling away on NPR.
And so we keep picking each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," while the oligarchs keep laughing all the way to the bank.
Perhaps ideas need to evolve, but they've been evolving into a smokescreen.
By oligarchs of course you mean of course Elon Musk and Larry Ellison types or Donald Trump and Sam Walton? Which foundations do they support that drive social justice? Foundations of dead people - Ford Foundation perhaps, Rockefeller - dead for some time, those drive movements which are 60-70-80 years old, and are out of date. They are driving a social justice model that seeks to establish racism as a foundation of society. They will throw a lot of money away because nobody cares. That’s my point - you can’t stamp out pornography (1960-1990) nobody cares. Throw all the money and time you want. You can’t stamp out regulation, that’s a conservative idea from 2500 years ago (read Euripides) because even conservatives drink water. There are few social unknowns left. Hallucinogenic drugs - good? Bad? Army want them for PTSD? What? We’ve been pretending families will just run on autopilot but we’re entering a period where few people will have cousins and aunts and uncles, but plenty of grandparents. Insurance takes care of some old age but all the groups that were around to help raise kids are gone. What happens. None of the conservative authoritarian or reactionary have even the language to talk about these new things. Anyone can fly anywhere in the world. Everyone is on cellphone. Everyone has a computer, oligarchs and the “deep state” which came into place 60 years ago is meaningless except who are over 60. Who cares? TV - who watches TV? Who has a TV? Who has a housephone.
It’s a new century. Old century ideas don’t work except in a few cases.
Which foundations? Listen to NPR for the full rundown: The John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, the James L Knight Foundation, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Foundation, etc. Also see Schumpeter for how capitalism devolves into managerial bureaucracy -- and take that process a step further, to those nonprofits. Or see Ibn Khaldun on the decline of civilizations with sedentarization and the loss of asabiyah. Or read Brave New World.
I'm anything but a Trumpster (I voted for Bernie [as a California write-in] in 2016), but I don't see much going on in public life to recommend this shiny "new century." (Then again, I'm not sure we disagree.) :-)
PS: Sadly, if I had to guess, I'd expect that well within 50 years the human species will no longer be the apex predator on this planet. What happens beyond that is anybody's guess; it's certainly beyond my pay grade -- and in any event, any attempt to control the process would be hubris. If you seek to know who has that sort of agency (on behalf of the entire species), listen for the sound of one hand clapping.
PPS: Re your Substack... I'm gay, but when it comes to nostalgia, I'm more wistful for pictures of Woodstock than of Fire Island -- and don't even get me started on Tom of Finland's fascistic imagery. FWIW, my worldview is somewhere between Allen Ginsberg and Philip Roth (but I'm glad it was Bob Dylan, after all, that won the Nobel Prize). As they say down South, there ain' no accountin' for taste. ;-)
Which is bigger, the Squad or the House Freedom Caucus? Did Bernie win either primary? Yet Trump easily won his. The extremist left is kept in check. The extremist right is not.
How does Bernie losing the Primary prove the extremist left is kept in check?
With this statement, you're assuming Bernie is extremist while Clinton and Biden are not, and yet many of their policies are far worse than any other previous Liberal leader.
Further, Bernie losing the Primary doesn't mean he wasn't popular, it means the Democratic party didn't want him to win.
I watched the Bernie rallies. He was popular. I'm actually close friends with people at the top of his campaign and followed it closely. Bernie just isn't corrupt the way Hilary is, and couldn't be controlled the way Clinton and Biden were, and that's why he wasn't allowed to win. Bernie is too honest for the Democratic part to win anything serious.
If anything, Bernie not winning the Primary shows that the system is broken.
Biden's Zombie presidency and now the country "rallying" behind one of the least popular VPs in history is just another example of how the Democratic party cares nothing about what the people want and just installs it's own malleable puppets at will.
The right needs to crush the Left and the swamp needs to be cleaned out for democracy to be saved. The Left is the greatest threat to democracy in recent times regardless of what they say about the Right.
Calling all Democrats as being Left is a misnomer. The Left is not what it was.
Biden and Hilary are not Liberals. They're co-opted, neo-con, military complex puppets posing as Liberals.
They're proven themselves dishonest because over the course of their careers, they've flip-flop on everything depending on which way the win blows.
I believe Bernie is honest, and is about as close to an old school Liberal, and an old school politician as you can get these days, but because he's honest he'll never get into higher office.
I believe the reason Bernie wasn't pushed as presidential candidate was because he can't be bought and manipulated like the rest.
Regardless of what people have said about me on here, calling me a right wing extremist, a Trumper etc, etc, I don't believe social structures are a bad thing, as long as there are checks and balances to keep them from being abused, and from being used as primary means of support. They're necessary in large societies.
So I think what the Left needs to do is start realizing that not everyone on the Left is a Liberal.
In fact, I don't think anyone knows what a Liberal truly is anymore. It's certainly not what the Democratic party is today.
It is true that “rule of law democracy” (call it “constitutional republicanism” if you will) requires limits against popular passions. Without those limits, no minority (or individual of any persuasion) is safe from majoritarian abuses. Unfortunately so many people (actually practically everybody) are sometimes tempted, willing, or very eager to dispense with the complications and niceties of the rule of law under certain conditions. No one is immune including those on the left, the right, the apolitical, the very wealthy, the middle class, the poor, the religious, the secular, the young, the old, the formally educated, the self taught, those innocent of much dealing with the abstractions of analytic thinking, and especially those intoxicated by their own analytic acuity and ability to synthesize and manipulate abstractions and generalizations. This is only one reason why it may not be too useful to blame populism for rising illiberalism.
There is no legal system that is not based on previous traditional and ancestral injustices. There is no legal system that cannot generate new injustices. There are ALWAYS plenty of additional reasons for ANY of us to feel discontented, deprived, manipulated, discounted, condescended to, ignored, or abused. There are ALWAYS those who seek to exploit such feelings to mobilize popular actions because those feelings can ALWAYS be linked empirically supportable facts and conditions. But as humans we are all prone to lie to others and to deceive ourselves. We can do this for the most altruistic, self serving, high minded, or despicable reasons. NONE of us (no matter how well educated, privileged, unprivileged, socially well balanced, or emotionally unstable, etc.) is immune from temptations to fudge, conflate, exaggerate, minimize, ignore, imagine, contrive, or hallucinate “facts.” This is an inescapable (but potentially manageable) facet of the human condition. Blaming populism for illiberal attacks on epistemic stability is akin to blaming humanity.
Blaming populism is also akin to blaming the cumbersome procedures of constitutional republicanism for those who would exploit those complexities for private advantage and/or to undermine, attack, or to destroy it with popular resentments and furies.
There is another reason why it’s wrong to blame populism for illiberalism, authoritarianism, racism, etc. This is based on the actual historic record of The Farmers Alliance, The People’s Party, and other “Populist” groups in the late 19th century and early 20th century US. Yes, the record is mixed. Yes, some of their leaders later found it politically expedient to exploit racist animosities. But the American Populist Movement made significant positive improvements that endure to this day in the form of rural and local “Co-ops” which include not only farmers’ cooperatives but cooperative banks. Cooperative banks and worker owned corporations are, of course, still marginal to this day. But they continue to exist and offer a “populist” model that remains an anathema to most capitalists and to many formally educated (ideologically indoctrinated?) members of the middle class. In fact the largely middle class “Progressive Movement” was in many ways a reaction to the radically “DANGEROUS!” threat of a relatively well functioning cooperative economic democracy represented by the Populists and their member controlled businesses and banks. The Progressives in the Republican Party and in The Democratic Party were naturally more terrified of white farmers and church ladies than they were of immigrant radicals who were easier to demonize and massacre. That’s why they ended up co-opting(!) so many Populist ideas into legislation and Constitutional Amendments related to currency, the banking system, the income tax etc. If the Populists had succeeded in their attempts to unite farmers with urban workers and overcome racial divisions in the South and West, they would have been a very potent threat to the destabilizing concentrations of private wealth that threatened our constitutional democracy before the Great Depression (which was largely caused by that overly concentrated wealth and its irresponsible misuse) and which threaten it again so mortally now.
Irresponsible concentrations of privately controlled wealth means that a nation’s resources are not being employed productively but are being used in non productive speculations including mechanisms of repression and opporession to generate more wealth inequality. Obscene levels of wealth inequality become dysfunctional as those who control vast concentrations of wealth use it to structure markets, regulations, and laws so that the few are more likely to continue to accumulate wealth at the expense of workers, consumers, communities, and the environment. Risky, bubble producing “Casino Capitalism” (a term coined by the economist Susan Strange) also undermines people’s faith in the economic system and the rule of law leaving the vast masses of the population easy prey to master demagogues and thaumaturges (like trump) as well as all other kinds of (less gifted) grifters, charlatans, bullies, and fascists.
Finally, there is another historical phenomenon highly correlated with the rise of authoritarian populism and the ability of small groups of oligarchs to trample the rule of law. This is “empire.” Of course, imperialism is viciously entangled with the primitive (and sophisticated) accumulation of vast concentrations of unaccountable wealth that can be used to support despots, Bonapartes, Caesars, and Hitlers who, during brief and bloody periods of impunity, can capture the fevered imaginations of a world of desperate, nearly hopeless, victims and onlookers. In the US we call it “military Keynesianism” but the dramas and contingencies of empire require that wealth be invested in the capacity for destruction rather than in health, education or welfare. The urgencies and dangers of empire also require the cultural elevation of military values and habits of mind which can certainly be associated with honor, duty, and virtue, but which can never be fully quarantined from celebrations of violence as well as authority. Wars (especially fiascos like Vietnam that are seen as defeats) generate legions of disaffected and traumatized veterans who are primed to react to conspiracy thinking tinged with violent and apocalyptic imagery. Martin Luther King was not wrong when he proclaimed the US to be the greatest purveyor of violence in the world in his day which means the US was and still is the greatest purveyor of violence in history up to today. The US is different in many ways from previous empires, but MOSTLY it is much more much more well armed, much more sophisticated, and therefore much closer to being an “invincible” world hegemon than any previous world power. The US also is a pioneer in establishing legal frameworks for certain civil liberties that (with social media technology) offer new avenues for messianic fantasies to seize upon frenzied minds. History may someday judge to what extent the US should be credited with creating a future framework for a lasting international rule of law—or if it will be justly condemned for savaging (permanently or temporarily) such a possibility.
The temptation to blame populism for the current upsurge in illiberal authoritarianism also ignores those elites who are not demagogues and rabble rousers. Do a Google search on “post liberalism” and see what you get. There are a number of publications (financed by plutocrats of course) that are drumming up illiberal and anti-Enlightenment trains of thought that are endemic to certain notions of Christianity. This isn’t to say that there are not fine and influential Catholic and Protestant writers who have not only made their peace with The Enlightenment (as it emerged between c 1650 and c 1750), but actively seek to advance the ideas and values embodied by “Liberalism” as it first emerged in reaction to the horrors of the Thirty Years War and other outbursts of carnage that exploited schismatic religious fervors as European imperialism was being launched before the juggernaut of industrial and technological revolutions which continue to accelerate to this day. These thinkers rightly see the separation of church and state as just ONE necessary protection for the development of individual consciences and consciousness so that what they (rightly?) see as the most important values of the Gospels may find fertile ground there.
Blaming populism for illiberalism, authoritarianism, or fascism is actually not just akin to blaming people. It actually IS blaming people (or our human nature) in a way that risks breeding more despair, more contempt, and more irrational fury. I may not be a Christian (anymore) myself, but I honor and value those who see the church and Christian ministries as a way to *humbly* work to “save souls” on an individual level. I may not believe that a “kingdom of God” where pure justice reigns and all contradictions are resolved can ever be established on earth. I may not even believe that the “kingdom of God” is within me. But I would like to believe and try to act as if I believed that there are vast potentials of good within ALL of us (mixed in, of course, with other potentials). Churches, ministries, ideologies, institutions, laws, constitutions, and democracy are all faulty structures that we can neglect, use, abuse, destroy — or build, maintain, and reform as we try to cultivate and celebrate their (and our) best. And we do. And we will.
Hi, thanks writing this post, I enjoyed it. However, I would say that it seems to employ a specific definition of populism and perhaps you should note to people that you aren't (even though many may interpret you as having done so implicitly) referring to other things people refer to as populism. For example, The USA used to be a semi-populist, semi-politically decentralized, semi-economically decentralized, semi-culturally decentralized, and semi-scientifically decentralized republic with semi-democratic governance structures built around its former decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member Republican and Democratic parties of old. This began to undone after the war, that picked up steam at some point in the 1960s and then between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s it was effectively mostly gone. Stuff like that is the sort of thing many people (maybe even most?), at least in some not insignificant amount of geographies, are referring to when the say populism.
You are quite on point for America up to the 1900’s. The two wars started concentrating wealth, and with the advent of mechanized farming (I think building war materiel and farm equipment with similar factories makes “tanks to tractors” more vivid than “swords to plowshares”. The move from agrarian power to factory power kept concentrating more and more wealth. I think the big shift was in the 50’s - everything became “mass” mass media, mass housing, mass distribution. The 70’s were the last period of flattened income distribution - populism still had financial power, but suddenly big oil became so cheap that manufacturing could be done elsewhere and shipped using fuel. If you look at the revenue flattening of the big oil infrastructure builders (Fluor, Bechtel and others) right after that oil made non-US labor super cheap. Populism lost funding relative to concentrated wealth, the 80’s you didn’t have “lifestyles of the rich and famous” even as a concept until after the oil shocks.
Something quite different is happening now. Internets evolution is still not over.
Hi. Yeah, I think what we have now began to be constructed after the war, it just took decades. The centralizations that occurred there in the information ecosystem, media and the education, played a big role, anti-democratic propaganda began to proliferate (ie. curriculums influenced by stuff like the "consensus historians"), I think the 50s were at least partly contrived, at least in the shapes and their details.
A few things occurred with manufacturing (heavily subsidizing Germany, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, domestic consolidation, domestics hit by the Korean then Vietnam wars reqs during important times, most of which was avoidable, and either way it was policy decisions that did it. Only some of what occurred was organic, although there likely would have been losses by the time we had gotten to the 1970s
I'm not sure what you mean by "populism still had financial power", but we ran a populist banking and finance regulatory regime for every single day of the nation's existence until we phased out the USA's internal capital flow inhibitors between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s
Thank you for adding clarity to a difficult term to quantify. I have read many definitions of populist and have always found them wanting. Defining it as an array of different meanings is helpful to those of us that struggle with questions like “How is it possible for a Donald Trump or a Narendra Modi to be called populists and yet have strongman ideas.” In the case of Trump, he represents a ruling minority and pursues power for revenge for personal slights. I suppose there are a lot of people who seek that kind of player, but he ultimately doesn’t really care much about them, though he uses “otherism” to frighten his supporters.As he said, “ I don’t care about you, I just want your votes.” Modi, on the other hand, does represent a majority, but he uses “otherism” to make scapegoats out of the Muslim/Sikh minorities to buy power. Both will collapse under their own weight in time. Let us hope that it is sooner rather than later.
Happy to try to keep my rattling on simple. As Fran Leibovitz said, Trump is the poor persons version of a rich man. He’s the most cynical politician since Stalin, and seems to be a populist simply because he keeps saying he is.
That is what I was getting at and I didn’t expect long-winded esoteric responses. Fran Leibovitz has a unique way of distilling thoughts into every day speech and a keen perspective on things that some of buy hook, line, and sinker.
What I mean is that Leibovitz can yank you into reality by cutting through the bullshit that most of us fall for. The hook, line, and sinker is the daily sludge we get fed and those who feed on that diet alone. She reveals the reality that most of us do not want to perceive.
I intend to run on with my opinions and my brain often goes faster than my typing so I leave out words and stray off topic from time to time. I didn’t mean to scold. I appreciate your point of view.
This is the best definition/argument against populism I have read yet, thanks!
It's a bit silly to argue about which populist movement is worse, that's a sure way to distract people from the important point, that all populism is bad.
I'll take the New Deal-thriugh-1964 consensus over what we have now. Heck, I'll take Obama's "There's no Black America, no White America" -- before it morphed into a bait-and-switch ("Oh, we didn't really mean that; it was only aspirational") during the Summer of Floyd. No wonder we have Obama/Trump voters!
And then we have our nomenklatura -- our caste of foundation-funded "experts" and self-appointed "social justice warriors" (and the unelected bureaucrats of the Deep State), telling us how and what to think in their Brave New World of "behavioral health," pontificating about the threat to what they've claimed as "our" democracy. You can hear them prattling away on NPR.
And so we pick each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," while the oligarchs keep laughing all the way to the bank.
In the face of this situation, the temptation of populism is obvious -- and if that temptation's not to become irresistible, liberalism needs to get its act (back) together (and repudiate those too-readily-dismissed "woke excesses") VERY quickly.
Except that America doesn't have oligarchs. The people in government don't run the corporations, everything in our system is widely distributed with competing interests. The idea that wealth possession in the US is illegitimate is itself a populist idea. There's too much money in politics, that doesn't mean that the corporations own the government.
The problem is concentration of power, whether the pretext is public or private. Also, see Schumpeter on the ways capitalism devolves into managerial bureaucracy (and extend that farther, to foundation-funded nonprofits and NGOs). As those interests converge, the "competition" becomes mere infighting, and it ceases to be the safeguard one might hope it would provide.
Right. What matters is the extent to which people can run their own lives without undue government interference. When a government is illiberal, when it robs half or more of what people earn, it does not matter much what the name or form of that government is.
Here's a list of countries with the highest income taxes in the world: Belgium, Finland, Portugal, UK, Switzerland. Those all seem like great places to live IMHO. Take a look at countries that collect the lowest amount in taxes. Not places you would want to live, I'm pretty sure.
If a majority votes for the government to collect 50% in taxes, that's not robbery. That's democracy. The tax rate for top earners in 1950 was 92%. That's what the voters wanted and that's what they got. That's liberalism.
I don’t agree with this thesis.
When you have to qualify populist as much as has been done in this article you wipe out all major interesting movements, and simply redefine populism to mean authoritarian.
Here are 20 populist movements that were generally not authoritarian in nature, and are the tip of the iceberg. I don’t even look to pre-19th century.
The American revolution is almost the definition of a populist movement.
1. **Progressive Era (United States, late 19th to early 20th century)** - Aimed at addressing social issues like corruption, labor rights, and women’s suffrage.
2. **People's Party (United States, 1890s)** - Focused on agrarian concerns, economic reform, and the power of monopolies, advocating for direct democracy.
3. **Green Party (Various countries, 1970s-present)** - Emphasizes environmental issues, social justice, and grassroots democracy.
4. **Pirate Party (Various countries, 2000s-present)** - Advocates for digital rights, privacy, transparency, and direct democracy.
5. **Zapatista Movement (Mexico, 1994-present)** - Fights for indigenous rights and autonomy, using participatory democratic structures.
6. **Occupy Movement (Global, 2011)** - Aimed at addressing economic inequality and corporate influence in politics, organized through horizontal decision-making.
7. **Five Star Movement (Italy, 2009-present)** - Initially focused on anti-corruption, environmentalism, and direct democracy.
8. **Podemos (Spain, 2014-present)** - Emerged in response to economic crises, advocating for social justice and participatory democracy.
9. **Sandinista Revolution (Nicaragua, 1970s-1980s)** - Aimed at overthrowing a dictatorship, initially had strong populist elements before evolving.
10. **Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn (United Kingdom, 2015-2020)** - Focused on anti-austerity, social justice, and democratic socialism.
11. **Bernie Sanders' Movement (United States, 2016-2020)** - Advocated for economic justice, healthcare reform, and reducing the influence of big money in politics.
12. **Vermont Progressive Party (United States, 1980s-present)** - Focuses on social and economic justice, environmental sustainability, and grassroots democracy.
13. **Civic Forum (Czechoslovakia, 1989)** - Aimed at overthrowing communist rule through non-violent means, advocating for democracy and human rights.
14. **Velvet Revolution (Czechoslovakia, 1989)** - A non-violent movement that ended communist rule and transitioned the country towards democracy.
15. **Mahatma Gandhi's Movement (India, early 20th century)** - Advocated for non-violent resistance to colonial rule, emphasizing democracy and social justice.
16. **Lega Nord's Early Years (Italy, 1980s-1990s)** - Initially focused on regional autonomy, anti-corruption, and federalism without authoritarianism.
17. **Evo Morales' MAS (Bolivia, early years 2000s-present)** - Initially centered on indigenous rights, economic equality, and social justice.
18. **Women's Suffrage Movement (Global, late 19th to early 20th century)** - Focused on gaining the right to vote for women through democratic means.
19. **Syriza (Greece, early 2010s)** - Emerged from opposition to austerity, advocating for social justice, economic reform, and democracy.
20. **United Farmers Movement (Canada, early 20th century)** - Advocated for agrarian interests, cooperative economics, and political reform without authoritarianism.
These movements have varied in their goals, methods, and impact, but they share a common thread of advocating for the people without resorting to authoritarian control.
This is good. I love all the examples. The original article has a lot of good points, especially when it highlights how populism can be an expression of the disaffections and resentments of FAVORED groups in “the majority”. But I t’s a mistake to call whites or white Protestants a “dominant” group in US politics or history. That’s because this “fact” (of *demographic* prevalence) obscures not only the diversity within those groups we call “white” but distracts from the “fact” that most “white” people are not (and do not feel) influential in even local politics and culture — and never did. But the original article does draw a necessary distinction between disaffections and resentments of disfavored minorities versus those of favored groups. The agrarian Populism of the turn of the last century emerged from a particularly favored group at that time when farming was much more labor intensive and farms had not been so capitalistically “collectivized.”
Farmers weren’t necessarily “dominant” even when they were major voting blocks in the South (Democrats) and West (Republicans). Still they were politically and culturally potent. Their numbers and their centrality to America’s self image (even as we were rapidly industrializing and urbanizing) is what made the radical aspects of their policy proposals and economic organizing so terrifying to bankers and industrialists. When immigrant workers agitated for economic democracy, they were easy to demonize as foreigners under the sway of evil (Jewish) ideologues and then massacre them. Between 1870 and 1934 there were at least three major massacres of organized working people per decade (with “major being defined as more than 5 fatalities — and some massacres were many magnitudes larger). But it would be much more costly to unleash Pinkertons, the National Guard, and the US Army against church ladies, preachers, farm hands, and feed store owners even if they were building alternative member-owned cooperatives for wholesale, retail, and banking needs. Mobilizing to prevent them from building a lasting common cause with urban and industrial workers involved building redoubtable armories in every city and almost every large town. But it also required making significant economic and political concessions that were and are labeled as Progressive reforms.
"I don’t agree with this thesis. When you have to qualify populist as much as has been done in this article you wipe out all major interesting movements, and simply redefine populism to mean authoritarian."
I agree with your assertion here...however, I would be interested in hearing your analysis of the author's assertion that "populism is not anti-elitism." I happen to believe that it is an absolutely essential ingredient of populism. The issue doesn't appear to be addressed in your other posts below...just curious about your take on this given, as one poster wrote, your interesting perspective.
Populism is defined a movement based on an assertion that governance by an elite minority doesn’t represent the interests of the majority, the populace. The elite minority is defined by a self-sustaining boundary which is wealth, class, or status. Where everyone is relatively poor, or wealthy, or well-educated, or the society lacks a self-perpetuating hierarchy, or the elite don’t govern, populism doesn’t exist - Many European countries; where governance by an elite maintains congruence to the interests of the populace, the so-called benevolent dictatorship model, populist movements doesn’t really exist: Singapore, Taiwan. To make the assertion that populism isn’t necessarily anti-elite is the same as saying Being Alive isn’t necessarily not being dead, or being female isn’t necessarily not being male. Elite and Populist governance are defined by the exclusionary boundary, and the wish to remove the boundary by eliminating the elite, elite governance, or elite power influencing governance. There is no such thing as a pro-elite populist.
Explain the idea that Trump & trumpism is a populist movement. Trump represents a threat to the average American citizen. His authoritarian instincts smell of fascism and creating a permanent political order where rules are for thee but not for me. The mask of fear that Trump exudes is falling away as I write. He appears to be a hollow shell of a wannabe dictator.
I don’t know that Trump is populist, I mean he lost the last election, he hasn’t received a majority of the popular vote ever, and his supported candidates lose.
We are told he’s populist sometimes but what proof is offered? He’s clearly supported by Republican elite. He is an “elite”. He is authoritarian, in the sense that he thinks violent actions have a place in government.
But tax breaks for the wealthy, insulting the military, constantly telling people he is wealthy, that’s not populist.
Clowns do the same thing and are popular, but not populist, they are entertainers.
His use-by date has expired on the schtick.
But why does the media world keep calling him a populist? He has proven himself to be an elitist, but a poor man’s elitist. In other words, he is crass, unmanageable, bigoted, sexist, and otherwise self-obsessed. He represents disaffected folks that can’t find a place to hang their hats.
Whoever calls him populist doesn’t understand the term, it’s a technique I call “MSU” or “Make Shit Up” and see what sticks. He’s entertaining but I’ve never heard him say a single thing which makes me think he’s a populist. The closest I’ve heard is Bernie Sanders. Compare their language.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply!
But the U.S. Republican Party is trying to enforce permanent minority rule. That must be the function of the « real people. » Immigrants, sexual and gender minorities, and people of color are not the « real people. »
Real people are ones making less than $100,000 a year, have a couple of kids, didn’t realize the Trump administration gave billionaires a tax credit, and miss roseanne and Pat Sajak. My entire family in the south, and I love them to death.
How about a discussion on how the Liberals of today are NOT the Liberals of yesteryear?
The 'Liberals' of today, better known as Marxist neo-cons posing as Liberals can't define what the difference is between a male and a female, have changed the definition of a vaccine to suit something that wasn't a vaccine and now are trying to define populism as a narrow band of people to paint a picture.
The problem is that the far Left used to be considered extremist and are now considered 'centrist' and have moved the goal posts to paint anyone who were centrist as right wing extremists when they are anything but. They are the normal centrists who want family to be the priority.
It's time to admit that the Left is the extremist party, that the Woke movement is a coup of merit based society, which outright destroys everything that made society function willingly, and that they are pro big government, more regulations over society, and the Left are the ones that are inherently authoritarian since that is the inevitable conclusion of the ideology. The Right are now the Liberals of yesteryear. It's apparent to everyone except the Liberals.
There is no “Left” - there are reactionary conservatives and there are authoritarian conservatives.
William F. Buckley (“God and Man at Yale”) conservatives are extinct, and FDR Liberals are extinct, but they both “won” - women can vote gays can get married, there’s a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. What’s left are groups which want authoritarian enforcement of 60-year-old ideas vs groups who want to return to the 1870 gold standard.
Neither is evolving, and they are locked in a struggle to the death over ideas which belong in a museum, in an age when wealth relative to 1870 or 1970 is unimaginable.
One wants America to be poor again, the other wants America to be racist again. Both work towards the bliss of ignorance, the ultimate conservative fever-dream of all ages.
Interesting perspective.
Ideas have to evolve or they don’t model reality and using them to predict solutions to problems fails.
Liberal isn’t meaning free (“liberal arts” - goodness) conservatives want to be agents of Chaos. Neither word accords to the definition.
The Sierra Club has replaced Buckley Republicans as an example of preservation of the past and tradition, Progressives want to trans convert children to 1950’s ideas of female. Everything points to the past e.g. conservative.
Some ideas from the last work very well - marriage. Some don’t - segregation.
Neither authoritarian nor reactionary conservatives have adapted to Internet or globalization, as a start.
Immigration is a “problem” roughly every 30 years - Irish, German, Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Mexican… Although the real jobs transition was via importing work via globalization accelerated with internet.
We keep wanting to “preserve” or revive ways of life that exist only in museums called film. Judy Garland is dead, there are no Rock Stars, nobody cares about Madonna, promiscuity is a laugh, Catholicism and Boy Scouts are collapsing because of pedophilia, it’s all a very 1968 moment without being in an active war.
I'll take the New Deal-thriugh-1964 consensus over what we have now. Heck, I'll take Obama's "No Black America, no White America" -- before it morphed into a bait-and-switch ("Oh, we didn't really mean that; it was only aspirational") during the Summer of Floyd. No wonder we have Obama/Trump voters.
And then we have our nomenklatura -- our caste of "experts" and "social justice warriors" with their oligarch-sponsored foundation money (and the unelected bureaucrats of the Deep State), telling us what to think in their Brave New World of "behavioral health," and prattling away on NPR.
And so we keep picking each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," while the oligarchs keep laughing all the way to the bank.
Perhaps ideas need to evolve, but they've been evolving into a smokescreen.
By oligarchs of course you mean of course Elon Musk and Larry Ellison types or Donald Trump and Sam Walton? Which foundations do they support that drive social justice? Foundations of dead people - Ford Foundation perhaps, Rockefeller - dead for some time, those drive movements which are 60-70-80 years old, and are out of date. They are driving a social justice model that seeks to establish racism as a foundation of society. They will throw a lot of money away because nobody cares. That’s my point - you can’t stamp out pornography (1960-1990) nobody cares. Throw all the money and time you want. You can’t stamp out regulation, that’s a conservative idea from 2500 years ago (read Euripides) because even conservatives drink water. There are few social unknowns left. Hallucinogenic drugs - good? Bad? Army want them for PTSD? What? We’ve been pretending families will just run on autopilot but we’re entering a period where few people will have cousins and aunts and uncles, but plenty of grandparents. Insurance takes care of some old age but all the groups that were around to help raise kids are gone. What happens. None of the conservative authoritarian or reactionary have even the language to talk about these new things. Anyone can fly anywhere in the world. Everyone is on cellphone. Everyone has a computer, oligarchs and the “deep state” which came into place 60 years ago is meaningless except who are over 60. Who cares? TV - who watches TV? Who has a TV? Who has a housephone.
It’s a new century. Old century ideas don’t work except in a few cases.
Which foundations? Listen to NPR for the full rundown: The John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, the James L Knight Foundation, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Foundation, etc. Also see Schumpeter for how capitalism devolves into managerial bureaucracy -- and take that process a step further, to those nonprofits. Or see Ibn Khaldun on the decline of civilizations with sedentarization and the loss of asabiyah. Or read Brave New World.
I'm anything but a Trumpster (I voted for Bernie [as a California write-in] in 2016), but I don't see much going on in public life to recommend this shiny "new century." (Then again, I'm not sure we disagree.) :-)
PS: Sadly, if I had to guess, I'd expect that well within 50 years the human species will no longer be the apex predator on this planet. What happens beyond that is anybody's guess; it's certainly beyond my pay grade -- and in any event, any attempt to control the process would be hubris. If you seek to know who has that sort of agency (on behalf of the entire species), listen for the sound of one hand clapping.
PPS: Re your Substack... I'm gay, but when it comes to nostalgia, I'm more wistful for pictures of Woodstock than of Fire Island -- and don't even get me started on Tom of Finland's fascistic imagery. FWIW, my worldview is somewhere between Allen Ginsberg and Philip Roth (but I'm glad it was Bob Dylan, after all, that won the Nobel Prize). As they say down South, there ain' no accountin' for taste. ;-)
Which is bigger, the Squad or the House Freedom Caucus? Did Bernie win either primary? Yet Trump easily won his. The extremist left is kept in check. The extremist right is not.
I don't understand your string of logic.
How does Bernie losing the Primary prove the extremist left is kept in check?
With this statement, you're assuming Bernie is extremist while Clinton and Biden are not, and yet many of their policies are far worse than any other previous Liberal leader.
Further, Bernie losing the Primary doesn't mean he wasn't popular, it means the Democratic party didn't want him to win.
I watched the Bernie rallies. He was popular. I'm actually close friends with people at the top of his campaign and followed it closely. Bernie just isn't corrupt the way Hilary is, and couldn't be controlled the way Clinton and Biden were, and that's why he wasn't allowed to win. Bernie is too honest for the Democratic part to win anything serious.
If anything, Bernie not winning the Primary shows that the system is broken.
Biden's Zombie presidency and now the country "rallying" behind one of the least popular VPs in history is just another example of how the Democratic party cares nothing about what the people want and just installs it's own malleable puppets at will.
The right needs to crush the Left and the swamp needs to be cleaned out for democracy to be saved. The Left is the greatest threat to democracy in recent times regardless of what they say about the Right.
Your argument is that Biden and Hillary are further left than Bernie? The guy who is an actual socialist?
Calling all Democrats as being Left is a misnomer. The Left is not what it was.
Biden and Hilary are not Liberals. They're co-opted, neo-con, military complex puppets posing as Liberals.
They're proven themselves dishonest because over the course of their careers, they've flip-flop on everything depending on which way the win blows.
I believe Bernie is honest, and is about as close to an old school Liberal, and an old school politician as you can get these days, but because he's honest he'll never get into higher office.
I believe the reason Bernie wasn't pushed as presidential candidate was because he can't be bought and manipulated like the rest.
Regardless of what people have said about me on here, calling me a right wing extremist, a Trumper etc, etc, I don't believe social structures are a bad thing, as long as there are checks and balances to keep them from being abused, and from being used as primary means of support. They're necessary in large societies.
So I think what the Left needs to do is start realizing that not everyone on the Left is a Liberal.
In fact, I don't think anyone knows what a Liberal truly is anymore. It's certainly not what the Democratic party is today.
It is true that “rule of law democracy” (call it “constitutional republicanism” if you will) requires limits against popular passions. Without those limits, no minority (or individual of any persuasion) is safe from majoritarian abuses. Unfortunately so many people (actually practically everybody) are sometimes tempted, willing, or very eager to dispense with the complications and niceties of the rule of law under certain conditions. No one is immune including those on the left, the right, the apolitical, the very wealthy, the middle class, the poor, the religious, the secular, the young, the old, the formally educated, the self taught, those innocent of much dealing with the abstractions of analytic thinking, and especially those intoxicated by their own analytic acuity and ability to synthesize and manipulate abstractions and generalizations. This is only one reason why it may not be too useful to blame populism for rising illiberalism.
There is no legal system that is not based on previous traditional and ancestral injustices. There is no legal system that cannot generate new injustices. There are ALWAYS plenty of additional reasons for ANY of us to feel discontented, deprived, manipulated, discounted, condescended to, ignored, or abused. There are ALWAYS those who seek to exploit such feelings to mobilize popular actions because those feelings can ALWAYS be linked empirically supportable facts and conditions. But as humans we are all prone to lie to others and to deceive ourselves. We can do this for the most altruistic, self serving, high minded, or despicable reasons. NONE of us (no matter how well educated, privileged, unprivileged, socially well balanced, or emotionally unstable, etc.) is immune from temptations to fudge, conflate, exaggerate, minimize, ignore, imagine, contrive, or hallucinate “facts.” This is an inescapable (but potentially manageable) facet of the human condition. Blaming populism for illiberal attacks on epistemic stability is akin to blaming humanity.
Blaming populism is also akin to blaming the cumbersome procedures of constitutional republicanism for those who would exploit those complexities for private advantage and/or to undermine, attack, or to destroy it with popular resentments and furies.
There is another reason why it’s wrong to blame populism for illiberalism, authoritarianism, racism, etc. This is based on the actual historic record of The Farmers Alliance, The People’s Party, and other “Populist” groups in the late 19th century and early 20th century US. Yes, the record is mixed. Yes, some of their leaders later found it politically expedient to exploit racist animosities. But the American Populist Movement made significant positive improvements that endure to this day in the form of rural and local “Co-ops” which include not only farmers’ cooperatives but cooperative banks. Cooperative banks and worker owned corporations are, of course, still marginal to this day. But they continue to exist and offer a “populist” model that remains an anathema to most capitalists and to many formally educated (ideologically indoctrinated?) members of the middle class. In fact the largely middle class “Progressive Movement” was in many ways a reaction to the radically “DANGEROUS!” threat of a relatively well functioning cooperative economic democracy represented by the Populists and their member controlled businesses and banks. The Progressives in the Republican Party and in The Democratic Party were naturally more terrified of white farmers and church ladies than they were of immigrant radicals who were easier to demonize and massacre. That’s why they ended up co-opting(!) so many Populist ideas into legislation and Constitutional Amendments related to currency, the banking system, the income tax etc. If the Populists had succeeded in their attempts to unite farmers with urban workers and overcome racial divisions in the South and West, they would have been a very potent threat to the destabilizing concentrations of private wealth that threatened our constitutional democracy before the Great Depression (which was largely caused by that overly concentrated wealth and its irresponsible misuse) and which threaten it again so mortally now.
Irresponsible concentrations of privately controlled wealth means that a nation’s resources are not being employed productively but are being used in non productive speculations including mechanisms of repression and opporession to generate more wealth inequality. Obscene levels of wealth inequality become dysfunctional as those who control vast concentrations of wealth use it to structure markets, regulations, and laws so that the few are more likely to continue to accumulate wealth at the expense of workers, consumers, communities, and the environment. Risky, bubble producing “Casino Capitalism” (a term coined by the economist Susan Strange) also undermines people’s faith in the economic system and the rule of law leaving the vast masses of the population easy prey to master demagogues and thaumaturges (like trump) as well as all other kinds of (less gifted) grifters, charlatans, bullies, and fascists.
Finally, there is another historical phenomenon highly correlated with the rise of authoritarian populism and the ability of small groups of oligarchs to trample the rule of law. This is “empire.” Of course, imperialism is viciously entangled with the primitive (and sophisticated) accumulation of vast concentrations of unaccountable wealth that can be used to support despots, Bonapartes, Caesars, and Hitlers who, during brief and bloody periods of impunity, can capture the fevered imaginations of a world of desperate, nearly hopeless, victims and onlookers. In the US we call it “military Keynesianism” but the dramas and contingencies of empire require that wealth be invested in the capacity for destruction rather than in health, education or welfare. The urgencies and dangers of empire also require the cultural elevation of military values and habits of mind which can certainly be associated with honor, duty, and virtue, but which can never be fully quarantined from celebrations of violence as well as authority. Wars (especially fiascos like Vietnam that are seen as defeats) generate legions of disaffected and traumatized veterans who are primed to react to conspiracy thinking tinged with violent and apocalyptic imagery. Martin Luther King was not wrong when he proclaimed the US to be the greatest purveyor of violence in the world in his day which means the US was and still is the greatest purveyor of violence in history up to today. The US is different in many ways from previous empires, but MOSTLY it is much more much more well armed, much more sophisticated, and therefore much closer to being an “invincible” world hegemon than any previous world power. The US also is a pioneer in establishing legal frameworks for certain civil liberties that (with social media technology) offer new avenues for messianic fantasies to seize upon frenzied minds. History may someday judge to what extent the US should be credited with creating a future framework for a lasting international rule of law—or if it will be justly condemned for savaging (permanently or temporarily) such a possibility.
The temptation to blame populism for the current upsurge in illiberal authoritarianism also ignores those elites who are not demagogues and rabble rousers. Do a Google search on “post liberalism” and see what you get. There are a number of publications (financed by plutocrats of course) that are drumming up illiberal and anti-Enlightenment trains of thought that are endemic to certain notions of Christianity. This isn’t to say that there are not fine and influential Catholic and Protestant writers who have not only made their peace with The Enlightenment (as it emerged between c 1650 and c 1750), but actively seek to advance the ideas and values embodied by “Liberalism” as it first emerged in reaction to the horrors of the Thirty Years War and other outbursts of carnage that exploited schismatic religious fervors as European imperialism was being launched before the juggernaut of industrial and technological revolutions which continue to accelerate to this day. These thinkers rightly see the separation of church and state as just ONE necessary protection for the development of individual consciences and consciousness so that what they (rightly?) see as the most important values of the Gospels may find fertile ground there.
Blaming populism for illiberalism, authoritarianism, or fascism is actually not just akin to blaming people. It actually IS blaming people (or our human nature) in a way that risks breeding more despair, more contempt, and more irrational fury. I may not be a Christian (anymore) myself, but I honor and value those who see the church and Christian ministries as a way to *humbly* work to “save souls” on an individual level. I may not believe that a “kingdom of God” where pure justice reigns and all contradictions are resolved can ever be established on earth. I may not even believe that the “kingdom of God” is within me. But I would like to believe and try to act as if I believed that there are vast potentials of good within ALL of us (mixed in, of course, with other potentials). Churches, ministries, ideologies, institutions, laws, constitutions, and democracy are all faulty structures that we can neglect, use, abuse, destroy — or build, maintain, and reform as we try to cultivate and celebrate their (and our) best. And we do. And we will.
Long post, Joe, but well worth reading. Bravo!
Hi, thanks writing this post, I enjoyed it. However, I would say that it seems to employ a specific definition of populism and perhaps you should note to people that you aren't (even though many may interpret you as having done so implicitly) referring to other things people refer to as populism. For example, The USA used to be a semi-populist, semi-politically decentralized, semi-economically decentralized, semi-culturally decentralized, and semi-scientifically decentralized republic with semi-democratic governance structures built around its former decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member Republican and Democratic parties of old. This began to undone after the war, that picked up steam at some point in the 1960s and then between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s it was effectively mostly gone. Stuff like that is the sort of thing many people (maybe even most?), at least in some not insignificant amount of geographies, are referring to when the say populism.
You are quite on point for America up to the 1900’s. The two wars started concentrating wealth, and with the advent of mechanized farming (I think building war materiel and farm equipment with similar factories makes “tanks to tractors” more vivid than “swords to plowshares”. The move from agrarian power to factory power kept concentrating more and more wealth. I think the big shift was in the 50’s - everything became “mass” mass media, mass housing, mass distribution. The 70’s were the last period of flattened income distribution - populism still had financial power, but suddenly big oil became so cheap that manufacturing could be done elsewhere and shipped using fuel. If you look at the revenue flattening of the big oil infrastructure builders (Fluor, Bechtel and others) right after that oil made non-US labor super cheap. Populism lost funding relative to concentrated wealth, the 80’s you didn’t have “lifestyles of the rich and famous” even as a concept until after the oil shocks.
Something quite different is happening now. Internets evolution is still not over.
Hi. Yeah, I think what we have now began to be constructed after the war, it just took decades. The centralizations that occurred there in the information ecosystem, media and the education, played a big role, anti-democratic propaganda began to proliferate (ie. curriculums influenced by stuff like the "consensus historians"), I think the 50s were at least partly contrived, at least in the shapes and their details.
A few things occurred with manufacturing (heavily subsidizing Germany, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, domestic consolidation, domestics hit by the Korean then Vietnam wars reqs during important times, most of which was avoidable, and either way it was policy decisions that did it. Only some of what occurred was organic, although there likely would have been losses by the time we had gotten to the 1970s
I'm not sure what you mean by "populism still had financial power", but we ran a populist banking and finance regulatory regime for every single day of the nation's existence until we phased out the USA's internal capital flow inhibitors between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s
Thank you for adding clarity to a difficult term to quantify. I have read many definitions of populist and have always found them wanting. Defining it as an array of different meanings is helpful to those of us that struggle with questions like “How is it possible for a Donald Trump or a Narendra Modi to be called populists and yet have strongman ideas.” In the case of Trump, he represents a ruling minority and pursues power for revenge for personal slights. I suppose there are a lot of people who seek that kind of player, but he ultimately doesn’t really care much about them, though he uses “otherism” to frighten his supporters.As he said, “ I don’t care about you, I just want your votes.” Modi, on the other hand, does represent a majority, but he uses “otherism” to make scapegoats out of the Muslim/Sikh minorities to buy power. Both will collapse under their own weight in time. Let us hope that it is sooner rather than later.
Happy to try to keep my rattling on simple. As Fran Leibovitz said, Trump is the poor persons version of a rich man. He’s the most cynical politician since Stalin, and seems to be a populist simply because he keeps saying he is.
That is what I was getting at and I didn’t expect long-winded esoteric responses. Fran Leibovitz has a unique way of distilling thoughts into every day speech and a keen perspective on things that some of buy hook, line, and sinker.
What I mean is that Leibovitz can yank you into reality by cutting through the bullshit that most of us fall for. The hook, line, and sinker is the daily sludge we get fed and those who feed on that diet alone. She reveals the reality that most of us do not want to perceive.
I can see through bullshit easily, but I type too much ;) I'm learning bettwe how to distil.
I intend to run on with my opinions and my brain often goes faster than my typing so I leave out words and stray off topic from time to time. I didn’t mean to scold. I appreciate your point of view.
This is the best definition/argument against populism I have read yet, thanks!
It's a bit silly to argue about which populist movement is worse, that's a sure way to distract people from the important point, that all populism is bad.
I'll take the New Deal-thriugh-1964 consensus over what we have now. Heck, I'll take Obama's "There's no Black America, no White America" -- before it morphed into a bait-and-switch ("Oh, we didn't really mean that; it was only aspirational") during the Summer of Floyd. No wonder we have Obama/Trump voters!
And then we have our nomenklatura -- our caste of foundation-funded "experts" and self-appointed "social justice warriors" (and the unelected bureaucrats of the Deep State), telling us how and what to think in their Brave New World of "behavioral health," pontificating about the threat to what they've claimed as "our" democracy. You can hear them prattling away on NPR.
And so we pick each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," while the oligarchs keep laughing all the way to the bank.
In the face of this situation, the temptation of populism is obvious -- and if that temptation's not to become irresistible, liberalism needs to get its act (back) together (and repudiate those too-readily-dismissed "woke excesses") VERY quickly.
Except that America doesn't have oligarchs. The people in government don't run the corporations, everything in our system is widely distributed with competing interests. The idea that wealth possession in the US is illegitimate is itself a populist idea. There's too much money in politics, that doesn't mean that the corporations own the government.
The problem is concentration of power, whether the pretext is public or private. Also, see Schumpeter on the ways capitalism devolves into managerial bureaucracy (and extend that farther, to foundation-funded nonprofits and NGOs). As those interests converge, the "competition" becomes mere infighting, and it ceases to be the safeguard one might hope it would provide.
Right. What matters is the extent to which people can run their own lives without undue government interference. When a government is illiberal, when it robs half or more of what people earn, it does not matter much what the name or form of that government is.
Here's a list of countries with the highest income taxes in the world: Belgium, Finland, Portugal, UK, Switzerland. Those all seem like great places to live IMHO. Take a look at countries that collect the lowest amount in taxes. Not places you would want to live, I'm pretty sure.
If a majority votes for the government to collect 50% in taxes, that's not robbery. That's democracy. The tax rate for top earners in 1950 was 92%. That's what the voters wanted and that's what they got. That's liberalism.