[Peace-discuss] Democracy vs. populism

[Carl G. Estabrook]

A more accurate account: "Populism is the cure, not the disease,” by Thomas Frank.

<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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss