[Peace-discuss] Democracy vs. populism

[Carl G. Estabrook]

Ron’s subject line is misleading: populism is democracy, but not the simulacrum of democracy of modern capitalist states, controlled in the interest of the economic elite (the one percent, the ruling class). 

We see today a tendentious use of ‘populism’ to denigrate democratic demands that have slipped out of the control of the political organizations (Republicans and Democrats in this country) meant to contain them, in the interest of the ruling class.

Populist impulses include the Sanders and Trump campaigns, Brexit and Corbynistas, Le Pen and Mélenchon, the Lega and M5S, even the AfD. 

Much effort is spent trying to divide populist movements into 'left' and ‘right,’ but as the new Italian government shows, that’s largely an attempt to force the populist genie back into the bottle of ruling-class-controlled categories.

Chomsky wrote a generation ago, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

Populist movements depart from that spectrum, and the political establishment is desperate to force them back into it. Heaven forfend that ‘left populism’ and 'right populism' get together. But that’s what they're doing, as Italy shows. Meanwhile, orthodox leftists are losing it over the threat of a ‘red-brown alliance.’  Won’t people on the left learn to stay in their lanes?! 

‘Populism' is worth recovering as an analytic category (and not a term of abuse), not easily translated as 'left' or 'right.’ In "Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy" (2008), Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell say populism "pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice.”

Only by establishment convention are these movements frequently described as 'right-wing,' which normally means support for the wealthy. But populism supports the opponents of wealth.

The US political establishment (the major party organizations, the ‘intelligence community,’ the leading media [NYT, WaPo et al.] and their pundits) understands this, as their sneers at ‘populism’ shows…

Se now <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/23/thomas-frank-trump-populism-books>.


> On May 24, 2018, at 10:58 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> 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
> by  Steven Levitsky
> 
> Cp. other books on populism & the reviews — positive & negative — on Amazon.  
> 
> ~~ Ron
> 
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