[Peace-discuss] Democracy vs. populism

[Szoke, Ron]

Some notes on how democracy is being destroyed by populism worldwide —

>  From a  comment on Jan-Werner Muller, What is Populism? (U.Penn. 2016), on Amazon.

[Populism] is a particular moralistic imagination of politics, a way of perceiving the political world that sets a morally pure and fully unified...people against elites who are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior.

This is the core claim of populism: only some of the people are really the people.

At a campaign rally in May, Trump announced that "the only important thing is the unification of the people--because the other people don't mean anything."
— Melanie D. Typaldos, 2017

>  I ask:  Who gets to choose which people are really “the people”?
Am I one of “the people”?  Are you?  What makes you think so?
Same for “the working class.”

How Democracies Die<https://www.amazon.com/How-Democracies-Die-Steven-Levitsky/dp/1524762938/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8><https://www.amazon.com/How-Democracies-Die-Steven-Levitsky/dp/1524762938/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8>
by  Steven Levitsky<https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_pdt_bl_sr?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=Steven+Levitsky>

Cp. other books on populism & the reviews — positive & negative — on Amazon.

~~ Ron

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