07-23-2020, 04:22 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-23-2020, 04:29 PM by Eric the Green.)
(07-23-2020, 10:42 AM)sbarrera Wrote:(07-23-2020, 02:50 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Hmmm... This thread seems to have been hijacked, concentrating on a cancer by the political right.
Sort of...except the original post claims that a mob of woke leftists is leading us to an eventual socialist police state, when there is an actual right-wing police state led by a Republican president forming (or attempting to form) before our eyes.
To address the original post, I do agree with its statement of the fall of liberalism. I don't know about the assertion that most liberals aren't aware that they are now stuck between the populist right and the populist left. I think this is commonly understood, though perhaps not by the average Democratic voter, who ran to Biden for a safe, comfortable bet against Trump. But certainly it's a theme you encounter in opinion pieces and analysis throughout the journalistic media.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...ra/553553/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/n...-forrester
https://promarket.org/2020/06/09/are-we-...ral-order/
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/aut...iled-26267
I always like to point out that the word "populist" is often misused these days when referring to the political right wing. Right-wing "populists" may stir passions and prejudices that appeal to the lowest common denominator of the people, but using this as a basis for the word "populist" assumes that the "people" must always be liable to reduce themselves to the level of being misled and and deceived in this way. Really, the people should be expected to rise above this. Populist really means that the people, rather than a demagogue or an authoritarian ruler or class, can be trusted to rule, and should rule. "Populist" thus means, and has meant ever since it began in the 1890s, that power is given to the people politically. It means government of, by and for the people, and in the peoples' interest. That can only occur on the left, which always means to bring more power to the people, rather than to traditional authority. Those who appeal to prejudice, the "populist right wing," are always doing this in order to buttress and support traditional authority.
Trump, Bolsonaro, LePen, Orban, Duda, Duterte, Johnson, Sisi, et al, the current crop of these "right-wing populists," are doing precisely that, and nothing BUT that.
