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