The
vilest slur in Brussels, the insult to end all insults, is “populist.”
Eurocrats spit it out, rather in the manner of a teenager at a party who
mistakenly takes a swig from a beer can that was being used as an
ashtray. Yet, monstrous as the word is in a Eurocrat’s vocabulary, he is
surprisingly vague about its meaning.
The one thing that he unequivocally understands
populism to signify is “something that other people like, but I don’t.”
Thus, calling for a referendum is populist. Accepting the result of a
referendum is populist. Free speech for Eurosceptics is populist. Tax
cuts are populist. Cutting waste is populist....
Umnnhh humnnnhhh.. In fact, it's a rather delicate balance.
...My point is that populism is not intrinsically a bad thing. It may be
either positive or negative according to context. The essential feature
of all populist movements is their belief that an elite is governing in
its own interests rather than that of the general population. To make an
obvious point, the validity of the populist argument depends on the
extent to which that assessment is accurate....
Some populist movements rely on scapegoating, on attributing every
misfortune to a privileged or powerful minority. These are the ugly
movements, the ones that offer anger and division rather than solutions.
“Are you poor? Are your children jobless? It’s not your fault! It’s all
the fault of international financiers/powerful foreigners/Jews/the one
percent!”...
Such populist movements depend on what we might call a piece of faulty
circuitry in the human brain: a tendency to see patterns where none
exist....
It is fair to state that the AltRight bunch is playing in the above sandbox to an uncomfortable degree.
[William Jennings] Bryan set the tone for every populist insurgency that was to follow in
the democratic world. Misfortune was not a part of the human condition;
it happened because someone somewhere was being selfish....
Here he presents the 'other side':
...Equally, though, let’s not pretend that oligarchy
is unknown in democracies. Many polities, from the Roman Republic
onwards, have retained the outward forms of representative government
while being captured by cliques. The Roman precedent was, indeed,
vividly in the minds of America’s Founding Fathers and informed many of
the checks they put in place to prevent a similar decline in the United
States.
Those checks worked. Unlike, say, the
near-contemporary French Republic, the American Republic did not follow
Rome into autocratic rule. But, even in an open democracy, there is a
natural tendency for people in power to rig the rules in their own
favor, to give themselves an institutional advantage....
Yes.
...Established political parties passing laws that
make it harder for newcomers to challenge them; big corporations using
the regulatory regime to erect barriers to entry; public-sector workers
ensuring that the system favors producers over consumers; mega-banks
persuading politicians to bail them out with taxpayers’ money—all these
are, in their ways, examples of oligarchy. And all of them are intrinsic
to modern politics, because human beings are naturally self-interested.
To the extent that they trigger a populist backlash, that backlash
might be considered a proportionate and necessary antibody.
To put it another way, a measure of populism is
inherent in any democratic system. The intensity and validity of the
phenomenon depend upon circumstances....
Ahh. That "delicate balance" thing!
Hannan sees 1) the Iraq War; 2) the bank-bailout; and 3) the Mass Immigration as the trigger(s) which began the successful Trump Revolt. Personally, I think that the Queer "Marriage", same-sex bathroom mandates, and ridiculous "global warming" bullshit regulations added fuel to the fire; but even more influential were the McConnell/Boehner cave-ins and the imbroglios of Hillary which seemed to go un-remarked by most of the Establishment (and yes, I'm looking at the Senate and House.)
...Put it all together and what do people see? A
political class that will send boys to die in distant lands on the basis
of, at best, a half-truth; that taxes the poor to bail out the rich;
and that supports an immigration policy designed for big business at the
expense of ordinary people.
Hannan sees the EU as a far more significant threat to Ordinary Europeans than the US Government is to Ordinary Americans, by the way. But, in either case, "populism" is not necessarily the pariah that the #NeverTrump/Communist Left" would want you to believe it is.
