:blue-check: Populism is when you advance the issues of the majority of your constituents except it's somehow a bad thing
That can lead to mob rule and the tyranny of the majority. It needs to be tempered with rights for minorities and marginalised groups.
populism was a distinct movement over 100 years ago, now it's just smeared so that anti-democratic liberals can feel good about their brunch eating PMC bullshit.
I once knew a guy who insisted that anti-aristocrat policies and anti-Roma policies are the same due to both being against a minority group.
It was mostly agrarian and focused a lot on a silver-backed dollar.
It predated socialism being a broad political movement in America, iirc
I never usually see folks self-identify as "populist". I only ever see that as a way for liberals or conservatives to handwave away the fact that a huge number of people want things like M4A.
"Well of course everyone wants free healthcare, if you gave people the chance they'd vote for ponies for everyone. And who's gonna pay for that?!"
“Well of course everyone wants free healthcare, if you gave people the chance they’d vote for ponies for everyone. And who’s gonna pay for that?!”
On the other hand it is quite sensible to want freedom and safety and for values to be enforced all at the same time. :grillman:
I've mainly heard it used by liberals in order to deliberately conflate socialism and fascism to smear the former and whitewash the latter
Wouldn’t that immediately lead to them assuming you’re down anti-trans and anti-immigrant policies? Which is bad?
I've seen plenty of populists that are more Soc-Dem with a dash of nationalism than Socialist. Depends on who it is.
There are right wing populists. Donald Trump is a classic populist. He aims to represent the zeitgeist of the “common man”, he’s a populist for the white majority and a populist for evangelicals and conservatives.
Left populism is more or less a tendency to socialism but not entirely. I could see many or even most Marxists being against UBI for example but I’d also consider UBI to be an example of leftist economic populism. So there’s an example, not all left populism is socialist.
Populism is more opposition to elites and the institutions the elites construct to structure and implement their rule. It means representing the relatively powerless who, being given a leader, become suddenly very powerful.
It’s not necessarily socialist and socialism wouldn’t automatically endorse left populist ideas. Populism can also be extremely conservative when the powerless group self define according to a specific identity, such as conservative evangelicals and their reactionary opposition to cultural modernity.
Doesn't really matter if he's Christian because Supreme Court appointments of the Catholic lady and the frat-bro probable-rapist who both are anti-choice. Charter-school lady with a war criminal brother as secretary of education because more charter-schools means more room for religious state-funded education.
Losing abortion doesn't effect the rich, and the rich want charter schools, so evangelicals get those two big things handed to them.
The holding a bible upside down thing is a token that evangelicals only take seriously in order to be able to have any claim of him being personally godly instead of acknowledging the cynical reality of voting for the guy who has multiple divorce, since marriage for him is a tool to have short term company of a trophy wife before they're replaced. Pointing at Trump holding a bible once is how they resolve this internal conflict.
Republicans throw more culture war bones to evangelism, which is also how you end up with the current anti-trans panic coming from not-very-religious people.
That is a good summary of the liberal definition that has come to dominate usage of "populist" but you can already see in your post how that makes it basically meaningless. Trump is a populist for white people? He tries to say things that appeal to lots of people who might vote for him to secure their votes? But he does that less and with less success than Obama did
demagogue just means a figure who gains support by whipping up the anger of common people against elites.
the idea of a demagogue being a bad thing is profoundly undemocratic as a notion. Trump isn't bad because coal miners like him he's bad because he's racist, sexist, lgbtqphobic, and extremely corrupt.
