Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, a sign of the president’s strength in uniting his party to have the backing of one of its most liberal members
Populism is the appeal to the basest of human emotions, exploited by demagogues to seize power and, at absolute best ignore their mandate and consolidate power for themselves and at worst, the Terror of the French Revolution or its parallels in China during the Cultural Revolution.
It is never, ever, guided by reason, sound policy, or best practice. It is what led to the USSR. It is what led to the Trail of Tears. It is what led to the secession of Southern states during the US Civil War. Populism didn’t just give us Trump, it consistently gives us the worst society can be, because it is based off of the worst of society’s emotions - fear, jealousy, anger, and resentment.
Please, author any defense of populism. I’m all ears.
I understand this is argument probably coming from some Sandersite-progressive “we only have good intentions” place, but that just makes you an enabler, not enlightened.
If good ideas can stand on their own, they don’t need to be driven by resentment or fear of an “other.”
What you’re arguing is based on the assumption that populism is and has always been used by demagogues, and as populism is rather more accurately described as a political campaign strategy, it only requires one example to tear down the always assumption. All I need to point out is Bernie Sanders and the results of his works makes it so that understanding the questionable aspect of our own society is not to be seen as taboo, and making healthcare more accessible as well as reducing wage gaps is not a bad thing. In fact, he alone enabled a faster rate of political shift to that direction and removed the taboo of those stances. Your stance should be that populism is questionable, rather than a firm always bad as that can be teared down by examples of people trying to raise the flaws of socio-economic structures.
One could argue anything as bad if it has been used by demagogues. Moderation is even a example. You could argue that moderates enables a form of negative peace by allowing structure of society to retain gaps between people, and arguably leads to increase of gaps by simply pushing asides forces that wants to address those gaps. Moderates could be argued to lead to Trumpism due to those observation.
At the end of the day, what matters is the impact of political strategies and whether they have been used to benefit others. It is how they’re used that matters at the end of the day.
Bernie Sanders is a perfect example of terrible policies supported by fiery rhetoric, yes. Sanders is not an effective legislator and his policies are DOA. He preys upon people’s financial insecurity and frustration to “other” all wealthy people.
He is absolutely part of the problem.
From the brief looks in congress.gov, so many legislature that has been voted on by Bernie Sanders also has passed, so there has been some of his policies that aren’t dead on arrival. The DOA legislature thing is like criticizing a legislator for not getting things done when political atmosphere prevents said legislator from getting things done. So, I’m not seeing a good jab here. At the end of the day, he opened the floodgates to discussion of socio-economic structure of our society, and nothing should be closed unless there’s a very good reason to do so, and that is indeed a positive result, and yes, it shows populism isn’t always a bad thing.
Who exactly isn’t a problem to you or haven’t been a problem? Given that you haven’t really responded to the observation that even moderation can be a problem, I’m guessing a moderate, and it would be very easy to spot a policy that is conservative which leads to Trumpism. And you know you want me to avoid pointing that out, and you probably want me to avoid pointing out negative peace issues.
