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posted by on Wednesday March 29 2017, @10:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-one's-leaving-until-we-have-unanimous-agreement dept.

The rise of populism has rattled the global political establishment. Brexit came as a shock, as did the victory of Donald Trump. Much head-scratching has resulted as leaders seek to work out why large chunks of their electorates are so cross.
...
The answer seems pretty simple. Populism is the result of economic failure. The 10 years since the financial crisis have shown that the system of economic governance which has held sway for the past four decades is broken. Some call this approach neoliberalism. Perhaps a better description would be unpopulism.

Unpopulism meant tilting the balance of power in the workplace in favour of management and treating people like wage slaves. Unpopulism was rigged to ensure that the fruits of growth went to the few not to the many. Unpopulism decreed that those responsible for the global financial crisis got away with it while those who were innocent bore the brunt of austerity.

2017 Davos says: The 99% should just try harder.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:07PM (5 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:07PM (#485897) Journal

    To my mind whenever discussions of so-called "populism" ever come up, the question really becomes: what's your alternative? Because really an argument against "populism" is generally also an argument against democracy, or at least the forms of it that are common today. "Government-by-mob" as you put it is just another name for democracy, something recognized all the way back to Plato. (Though Athenian democracy was less extreme than the modern versions in terms of suffrage -- democracy comes from demos, effectively rule by the collective will of all the paterfamilias figures from the various landed estate divisions; only a small minority of adults in ancient Greek democracies were granted suffrage.)

    So what are you advocating as a solution? "Populism" just seems a convenient term to invoke when democracies go off the rails, but those trends are inherent in democratic systems for the most part. The Founders of the U.S. sought to limit the influence of the people through things like Senators being elected by state legislatures, the Electoral College, appointments to many other federal offices, etc. We've gradually watered all that down over the centuries.

    And the biggest shift arguably began under FDR (a rising patrician star from a party which used to be a coalition of northern elites and southern racists), whose populism was probably helpful in instituting aid to the masses during the Great Depression, but it broke the Constitution in the process by removing all semblance of a federalist division of power with the states. And many of the "Ponzi schemes" as you put it weren't originally created that way -- Social Security, for example, was originally an insurance program (as it stated in its name). What was it insuring? Well, mostly against living too long. It was never intended to be a "retirement program" or substitute for pensions. When it was instituted, the average lifespan was around 65 years, so Social Security was a backup income for people who lived longer than average. Most people were still expected to basically work until they died.

    Now, decades later it seems like a "Ponzi scheme" only because it was subsequently represented as something about "retirement" when it was never intended to be such. And even then, we had chances to fix it -- in the early Reagan years during a SS crisis, Alan Greenspan had a plan to fix SS at least for a several decades, because they anticipated the Baby Boomer growth in required funds. So they started collecting more taxes -- but then the government spent that money instead of saving it like the plan originally intended. All of this is to say that SS started out with good intentions, as did a lot of government boondoggles.

    And we've seen the legacy of populism from Reagan's "trickle down" through Obama's chants of "Yes, WE can..." It's all about convincing the populace that they're getting something while mostly screwing them over further. The current populism isn't only a reaction against the "governing elite"; it's also a reaction against previous poor choices by the populace in electing leaders who also were populist in their rhetoric and behavior.

    TL;DR -- to say "populism is a very dangerous thing" is basically to say that "democracy is a very dangerous thing."

    But what's the alternative? That's always the next question. The Founders seemed to believe that isolating more decisions among the landed elite, but also distributing the decision-making power through oodles of checks-and-balances seemed the way to go. At least then you'd have mostly more informed people making the big decisions or at least having a voice of veto to the people (e.g., through Senators elected by state elites, and the President elected by an elite Electoral College). This was the theory of the Roman Republic for several centuries too, until it was gradually undermined by allowing officials to consolidate power under popular demand. But putting more power in the hands of the elite also allows them to consolidate even more power for themselves, so do we just end up with the problems of an oligarchy instead?

    It's all well and good to point out the evils of "populism," but what's the fix for that? History tells us again and again that the people vote in oligarchs, they vote in dictators, they vote in tyrants. The long legacy of the 20th-century move toward greater "power to the people" is now bearing fruit.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:32PM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday March 29 2017, @02:32PM (#485911)

    democracy comes from demos, effectively rule by the collective will of all the paterfamilias figures from the various landed estate divisions

    Tsk tsk, mixing Greek and Latin legal terms! The Athenian equivalent of a Roman pater familias (literally, "the father of the family") would be kyrios (master), who was legally in charge of the oikos (household).

    That said, Athenian democracy was controlled by about 15% of the population, while the problem with western democracies right now is that they by all appearances are controlled by about 0.1% of the population.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:22PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:22PM (#486062) Journal

      Yeah, yeah... I know the terms. Just using ones that might be somewhat likely to be at least familiar to people without a background in Classics. But yes, I was being a bit loose with terms. Point is that the Greek demos was a small administrative subdivision from which democracy derives. Democracy was about the representation of those subdivisions (at some point effectively landed households completely with ruling families, slaves, etc.), and demos came to figuratively mean "the people" even though most of the population wasn't actually voting.

      Anyhow, the U.S. has a scaling problem too. The Founders intended representatives to represent a few thousand people, not hundreds or thousands or millions. (Well, a few thousand landowners who were voters; originally they represented about 30000 total people.). That shift in scale which happened since the Constitution was drafted is bound to create significantly greater divisions between the people and their representatives.

  • (Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:42PM (2 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Wednesday March 29 2017, @06:42PM (#486079) Homepage Journal

    You make some really excellent points. One of the best comments I've read on Soylent :-)

    I just want to respond to a couple of points. Populism isn't, in my mind, democracy. Populism is stupid democracy, a knee-jerk reaction of the population, without much thought behind it. In this sense, it what the founders of the US were trying to prevent through checks-and-balances, through restricting the vote to an educated subset of the populace. This brainlessness is also what lets populism so easily be derailed, or degenerate into rioting and violence.

    The alternative? There really isn't one. As some unknown person said (famously quoted by Churchill): "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.". Democracies normally only survive a couple of centuries before the concentration of power and associated problems destroy them. It's increasingly looking like much of Western civilization is reaching senescence. Can we roll back the clock this time? Remove the ever-increasing concentrations of power? Unlikely, although Brexit is (imho) an unexpected step in the right direction.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday March 29 2017, @08:58PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday March 29 2017, @08:58PM (#486172) Journal

      Thanks for your comment -- and actually, I should say that I share many concerns with your first comment as well (if that wasn't clear).

      I guess one of my issues is with the definition of "populism," which always seems to be problematic. We can see it in other comments on this story -- some people want to claim "populism" is the reason behind many good things in government; others see it as you do, as a pejorative for when democracy gets screwed up.

      The "brainlessness" you mention is basically what Plato and others meant by "mob rule" or whatever, and I guess if anything my point is that it's a problem endemic to democracy. Everyone wants to say they are "democratic" (not in sense of party, but in sense of supporting suffrage for common people) until some "populist" movement comes along that causes a tyrant to be voted into power or whatever. But that's part of what being "democratic" will entail. The masses are inevitably going to make decisions sometimes that work against their best interest, and very frequently they will endorse leaders who promise them what they want to hear, regardless of what they do (or even if they do something to support popular sentiment, they'll ignore boatloads of accompanying corruption, etc.).

      I don't see how you separate those tendencies of democracy (your "populism") from the "good" democracy. It's all democracy. It's a feature of the system, for good or for ill.

    • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday March 29 2017, @09:01PM

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Wednesday March 29 2017, @09:01PM (#486175) Journal

      Careful with those assertions on the supposed stupidity of democracy. Democracies can be lead astray with propaganda and lies. That's not the fault of the democracy, except for being too credulous. Populism is the garbage out from the garbage fed in to the swarm intelligence by propagandists. Bonus that they also get to malign the very concept of democracy which they're trying to subvert.

      Democracy can also be cheated, for instance by rigging elections. Trump did not win the popular vote. There is doubt whether he really won the Electoral College. The rust belt states handed him the election by very slim margins, and there are lingering questions about vote suppression. There's also FBI director Comey's October surprise, and possible Russian interference. But the US doesn't seem to have any provision for pausing and taking stock. The machinery has to grind on and swear in someone to be president on Jan 20. Full speed ahead and damn the very real questions about the integrity of the vote. Seems to me no one should have been anointed POTUS elect for at least a month.

      I certainly hope that this time around, the public remembers the 2003 Gulf War, and will make it impossible for the Republicans to pull a stunt like that again and get us to invade another nation. The most likely targets right now seem to be Syria or Yemen. They're small and weak, with weak friends, easy pickings for a show of military might and glory. But there's no telling. The entire Islamic world is a potential target. Or, who knows, maybe the Republicans will hoke up reason to invade some leftist country in S. America such as Venezuela. They may shy away from Iran, as it's bigger and stronger and has lots of mountains. N. Korea is protected by China, so that may be out too.