Populism, explained again

[pbrower2a]

(07-26-2019, 11:47 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(07-26-2019, 02:23 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(07-26-2019, 12:53 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(07-25-2019, 09:26 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Here we go again. Boris Johnson is a "populist," we hear. Donald Trump was too. Maybe even Scott Morrison and Bolsonaro.

NO, they AREN'T...

Yes they are, just not the flavor you like.  Populism is nothing more or less than an emotional appeal directly to "the people", and tends to come from the left or right, but never from the center.  Why?  Because emotional appeals tend to be focused on the best angels of our nature or our most base instincts.  Both are powerful, but appealing to base instincts has had much greater success over time.  It's also tended to create its own counterforce, but even here, some RW populists still manage to outlive their own tyrannical behavior.  Cases in point: Franco is Spain and Pinochet in Chile.

As far as Boris Johnson is concerned, I doubt he'll still be PM in 2 years.  Brexit has all the traits of a self corrective, though not without substantial pain to our British friends.

I don't see that the word "populism" has any connection to "emotional appeals." There should be another word for that. The word demagoguery covers a lot of this. Sometimes current conventional word usage is wrong. It is in this case. The word populism refers to the Populist Party and its platform. No-one today is a populist unless his or her politics is similar to that form of populism. Populism means bringing more power to the people instead of a small group that has seized power. That is quite clear and simple. There's no reason to apply it to fear-mongering except to give such fear-mongering more legitimacy. It has none.

The problem arises when people narrow an ideology to some national variant unless the ideology that the national aspect seeks to hijack (the National Bolshevism of Limonov and Dugin) is suspect in itself. Hitler's fascists called themselves National Socialists in appropriating government control of the economy for reasons opposite those of humanist socialists. National Liberals and National Democrats are neither liberal nor democratic. Francisco Franco's single Phalangist party incorporated the title "national syndicalist" as an opposition to the more democratic anarcho-syndicalist tendency within the Spanish Republic of the 1930s. In an attempt to offer some illusion of purpose to the reactionary snake-pit of collaboration, the Vichy regime of Petain and Laval adopted the appellation "National Revolution". The German Nationalist Party of the Weimar Republic participated in the democratic process but not in democratic government, frustrating the shaky government of a weak political system in Germany. The Nationalist Party was strictly government of, by, and for the privileged white people of Apartheid-era South Africa. Would anyone have cause to trust a "National Conservative" party? OK, the Czech National Socialist party of interwar Czechoslovakia was in no way fascist or antisemitic unlike its like-named German National Socialist Workers' (Nazi) Party, National Liberation Fronts are usually Communist or Communist-sympathizing, and the African National Congress was resistance to Apartheid before becoming the political mainstream and becoming truly democratic.

The solution is humanism which recognizes human divisions by nationality in the sense that all persons and all peoples merit respect for such. Any cause that requires the obliteration of individuality for more than an ad hoc purpose such as winning a war against an imminent threat to impose something utterly inhuman is suspect, and any cause that continues to obliterate individuality after such a danger is past must go down.

Quote:And all politics in a democracy is an appeal to the people. Even if you successfully deceive them into supporting a small elite, and then that small elite succeeds in reducing democracy. Even so-called "elites" are usually just part of the people. Well-educated people, for example, are just as much a part of the people as less-educated people are. And less-educated people are just as potentially wise as voters as well-educated people (just not in today's America, apparently). It's just a question of which people you are appealing to. The word populism only means anything if it brings them more power, instead of a small group like "the 1%". And that always includes wealth, because wealth is power too. Politics is about political power; who has it and who doesn't.

From 1776, and woe be it unto any American government that fails to adhere to this wisdom:

Quote:"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--[81]That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

In a nasty Crisis Era originating in the imposition of dictatorial or despotic government, such language becomes relevant. In the last Crisis America and its allies liquidated governments in Germany, Italy, and Japan that believed that they could deny such self-evident truth through slavery and genocide.

Donald Trump is a real-life Berzelius Windrip (It Can't Happen Here -- but it did) .

Quote:Brexit, like Trump, was a political fluke in 2016. It was decided by a small majority because of immigrant fears. The only corrective to Brexit is to forget it and move on, including pushing for reforms in the EU if the people want them.

Not to say that Brexit is fascist -- but the fascist causes of Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo seemed like flukes until they consolidated power and took command of large nations that waxed powerful and began defeating countries whose peoples did not want to be under the rule of those gangsters. Fascism is a political equivalent of the medieval Black Death.

The supreme irony of immigration in Britain is that much of it has its source in the old British Empire that encompassed India, much of Africa, and the Caribbean basin.  

Quote:I wonder if we can put this whole Trump, Brexit, false "populism" trend at the feet of Assad and those who refused to help the real populists of the Arab Spring when it was needed, and those like Tulsi Gabbard who denied their existence and supported war crimes against them.

The people of Syria who would like their country to better resemble Tunisia, which really is a democracy, instead of the genocidal Ba'ath-fascist regime? Much of the Arab world would do well to heed the political wisdom of Thomas Jefferson, wisdom far more consistent with Islamic virtues than is the rule of gangsters like Bashir Assad.

Boy, when I think of how I predicted decades ago that after 2011 the first world would be overwhelmed with immigrants from climate change and revolution, I am amazed at just how correct I was, and how much it has shaped everything that's going on today.

Climate change will make a mess of things here and elsewhere. If you think desertification is a disaster in Syria, wait 'til you see it in California. In one year of a recent drought, San Francisco, far from the coastal desert of Baja California in Mexico, had a year in which it got less rain than Phoenix usually gets. Even if San Francisco has far milder summer temperatures than Phoenix, such a paucity of rain would qualify San Francisco for a desert climate. That's before I even mention Greater Los Angeles and San Diego. The only really over-populated part of America with respect to water resources is the American Southwest, and that is in its own right a source of much of American agriculture in offering winter fruits and vegetables. Draw a line from about San Francisco to Wichita, and any place south of that line is in potential trouble for exhaustion of water resources.