Quotes About Populism

The rise of populism has steadily coalesced movements of millions of people around its divisive us-against-them rhetoric, motivating so many more people to become active political campaigners and party members to champion the case for liberal democracy.

Populism tends to look good from a distance, but close up it can be frightening.

Anti-populism is all about despair. Its attitude toward ordinary humans is bitter. Its hope for human redemption is nil. Its vision of the common good is bleak. Its dark mood gives us books with titles like In Defense of Elitism and Against Democracy.

To be a populist conservative is to be a fatalist; to believe in a world where your side will never win; indeed, where your side almost by definition cannot win. Where even the most shattering electoral victories turn out to be hollow, and the liberal stranglehold on life can never be broken.12

Before we begin on that story, let me make clear that I strongly approve of studying racist, right-wing demagogues and figuring out what can be done to defeat them. I have spent my adult life engaged in exactly this project. Calling such figures "populists," however, is a mistake if defeating them is really our purpose. Opponents of the Right should be claiming the high ground of populism, not ceding it to guys like Donald Trump.

It is my argument that reversing the meaning of "populist" tells us something important about the people who reversed it: denunciations of populism like the ones we hear so frequently nowadays arise from a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation. And it is that pessimism—that tradition of quasi-aristocratic scorn—that has allowed the paranoid right to flower so abundantly.

But it is also true that things that begin in Kansas—the Civil War, Prohibition, Populism, Pizza Hut—have a historical tendency to go national. Maybe Kansas, instead of being a laughingstock, is actually in the vanguard. Maybe what has happened there points the way in which all our public policy debates are heading. Maybe someday soon the political choices of Americans everywhere will be whittled down to the two factions of the Republican Party.

Christopher Lasch, who was Hofstadter's protégé at Columbia, believed Hofstadter's contempt for Populism in fact betrayed his cohort's "cultural prejudices" against the lower middle class.

Today, seemingly every well-educated person in America and Europe knows that populism is the name we give to mass movements that are bigoted and irrational; that threaten democracy's norms with their anti-intellectual demagoguery.

A cartoon in the New Yorker captured the absurdity with a scene of airline passengers in a populist mutiny of their own: "These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us," bellows one of them. "Who thinks I should fly the plane?

Its characteristic goal is not to get banks and monopolies under control, as populism typically does, but to set up a nonprofit, attract funding from banks and monopolies, and then Ã¢â'¬Â¦ to scold the world for its sins.

The people can't find Syria on a map, they think God created humans one day in their existing form, and if you give them half a chance, they will go out and vote for a charlatan like Donald Trump.

Anti-populism is always about the powerful lording it over the weak; the credentialed and the high-born reminding the world that the definitions of goodness and justice and truth are whatever they determine.

What I mean to show is that the message of anti-populism is the same as ever: the lower orders, it insists, are driven by irrationality, bigotry, authoritarianism, and hate; democracy is a problem because it gives such people a voice. The difference today is that enlightened liberals are the ones mouthing this age-old anti-populist catechism.

WHAT THESE EXAMPLES show us is a generation of centrist liberals collectively despairing over democracy itself. After turning their backs on working-class issues, traditionally one of the core concerns of left parties, Democrats stood by while right-wing demagoguery took root and thrived. Then, after the people absorbed a fifty-year blizzard of fake populist propaganda, Democrats turned against the idea of "the people" altogether.17

Populism actually reinforces this elitism, because the celebration of ignorance cannot launch communications satellites, negotiate the rights of US citizens overseas, or provide for effective medications, all of which are daunting tasks even the dimmest citizens now demand and take for granted. Faced with a public that has no idea how most things work, experts likewise disengage, choosing to speak mostly to each other rather than to laypeople.

How did a movement that was defined by its belief in individual liberty and respect for the Constitution, free markets, personal responsibility, traditional values, and civility find itself embracing a stew of nativism, populism, and nationalism?

Perhaps America will one day go fascist democratically, by popular vote.

Consistency and will are, therefore, important dimensions of strategic competence. But our will is diminished. As our foreign policies swung from over-optimism to resignation, identity politics interacted with new forms of populism. That interaction divided us and diminished confidence in our democratic principles, institutions, and processes.

Late 19th-century populists saw bankers and industrialists manipulating markets to enrich themselves at the expense of small farmers and labourers and favoured political candidates promising economic relief through free and unlimited coinage of silver.

The Trump phenomenon might feel both interminable and unprecedented to Republican elites, but of course it isn't.

The rise of Right-wing populism globally has divided not just countries, but families. It has broken relationships and torn apart friendships. It has created social media discord and abuse, and led to unprecedented name-calling.

The most unusual thing about Clinton as a pol is that he listens. Listens and remembers. If he does dance with them that brung him, not them that gave him big money, we will have a populist on our hands.