Populist Promises and (In)action

Populism is the larval stage of fascism.

Populism seems like a good thing. On its surface it’s the “popular sentiment.” It’s supposedly about giving people what they want. Except that right there is the problem. There is an inherent idea in populism that the government has anything to give that doesn’t already belong to the people and that power is concentrated in an undefined “other” who got that power through undemocratic means. Now, all that makes for a great dystopian novel and I think it was the subject of a Doctor Who episode (or all of the Doctor Who episodes), but it’s simply not realistic.

And it usually ends rather poorly.

The issue with populist movements is they’re about status threat. A populist will be obsessed not just with the economy but of their perceived place in it relative to people they deem unworthy or less than them. John Judis had a pretty good definition, really as good as any, in his book the Populist Explosion. He makes a delineation between populist movements on the right and on the left, but I really think such ideological distinctions are arbitrary particularly given the multi-dimensional/factorial nature of political ideology and I’m more or less supported in this opinion by Greenberg and Jonas. Sort of. They’re actually talking about ideological rigidity but they do make a case…