Comment by somenameforme
Comment by somenameforme 7 hours ago
Contemporary issues have on novel nuance you aren't considering - globalism. Many political leaders, particularly in Western democracies today, are much more at home among other globalists than amongst their own people. And these people tend to be extremely unpopular. For instance Germany's Merz's approval rating is 30%, a rating France's Macron and his 17% approval rating would love. It's extremely dysfunctional.
In the past such unpopular leaders could never have been able to maintain power. So you have this weird dissonance growing where countries are ruled by people who don't particularly care for their country, and people who don't particularly care for their leaders. The 'populist' rhetoric isn't some veiled proxy for supremacy, but simply getting rid of this really weird state of affairs. The entire point of a representative democracy is for the people who lead to be representative. And in many countries around the world, that's no longer the case.
I would take myself as an example of the problem. I am an advocate for free speech, against war/screwing around in other countries/military industrial complex, against political correctness, and strongly support equality of opportunity. In other words I'm pretty much a textbook liberal of 20 years ago, yet these values leave me far closer to contemporary "conservative" populist parties, worldwide, than to liberal parties, again - worldwide.
I find many of the values that "liberal" parties espouse now a days are rather illiberal and extremely similar to conservative policies of some 20+ years ago. Censorship, war, deplatforming, political correctness, and so on. I think we may actually be living through a 'flip' akin to what happened in the early 20th century in the US.
Populist denotes leaders who say anything the people want to hear - in other words, leaders who are very effective at propaganda. A populist will say they want to reduce the debt. People will vote for him, because they want the debt to decrease. That populist will increase the debt more than any other president in history and his followers won't find out - he'll tell them some different propaganda. He might even say he lowered the debt even though he obviously didn't.
A populist will say he supports free speech, then make it illegal for certain people to speak on TV, cut funding to universities where people are allowed to say things he doesn't like, take ownership of the largest social media platforms and ban everyone who disagrees with him, all while repeating the claim of supporting free speech.
A populist will say every other politician is corrupt and he's the only one who can end the corruption. When elected, he'll be more corrupt than anyone else ever, while proclaiming there's no corruption any more, and we have always been at war with Eastasia.