Good piece from Yglesias, who argues that Trumpism is the opposite of populism — because it is actually unpopular, not popular — and that what’s called for to stop GOP power grabs and gerrymandering is good old civil protest and action, even action which violates the law, so long as it’s peaceful.
I may be wrong, but isn’t populism a “real people” vs. “elites” dynamic? It doesn’t have to be popular, but rather a method through which one attempts to harness political power. One could even have opposing populist approaches. For instance:
- A highly educated leader asserts redistributing the wealth is what’s best for a country because the concentration of power in the hands of the few is wrong, as they’ll just work to maintain what they have instead of the nation providing to those in need.
- An anti-education leader asserts being out of touch with the “real people” of a nation is intrinsic to higher-education, and therefore such so-called brilliant leaders should be mocked and their views opposed.
edit - just to clarify, the article is interesting, but the wordplay also fascinates me
Matt_W
5739
That article is fantastic. This right here is why I was arguing above that Trump is merely a symptom of Republican pathology and not a novel aberration:
Trump is, of course, a big part of this story. If Hillary Clinton were in the White House, things would be going differently. But this is not a personalistic story about Trump at all. The attacks on democracy are consensus views in the institutional Republican Party and the larger conservative movement. The trouble comes not from a populist demagogue trampling on institutional constraint but from countermajoritarian institutions being deployed to stymie popular will.
The steady erection of a system of minority rule that Republicans are implementing is not as dramatic as a populist putsch. But it’s actually happening before our eyes. And it’s led not by the rabble-rousing president or the unwashed masses who thrill to his rallies, but by the elite network of donors, operatives, and politicians who run the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
This month, as Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan were working to undo the people’s will as expressed at regularly scheduled elections, the elder statespeople of the Democratic Party were gathered in Washington for the funeral of George H.W. Bush — a funeral that, as such funerals do, served as a bipartisan sanctification of the American political system.
. . .
The face of anti-democratic rule in America is President George W. Bush appointing Supreme Court justices who handed down a Citizens United ruling whose substance would have been far too unpopular to enact legislatively. It’s the flood of money unleashed by Citizens United increasing the average GOP share of seats in state legislatures by 5 percentage points. It’s GOP state legislatures using the conjunction of that bonanza with the 2010 census to redraw maps in a way that lets them continue to hold power with a minority of votes. And it’s gerrymandered, minoritarian legislatures restricting the voting franchise and aggrandizing their power over popularly elected statewide officials.
But, there’s an impulse to rebuke the Trump-specific aspects of the contemporary political crisis while bolstering the overall legitimacy of the American political order, and it’s counterproductive to the actual crisis facing American democracy.
The really interesting question is why the ostensibly anti-Trump press all agreed to call the oligarch–and-racist minority-rule coalition “populism.”
Sure, but the current groups being called “populists” deify Trump and Putin and revel in the idea that the 1% are the natural rulers of the masses. They don’t want to wrest power from the elites: they want all power to be concentrated in the hands of the “correct” elites.
This. And the counter is for the masses to use popular appeal and protest to gum up the works until the elites cave. That, or the lampposts.
I don’t even know where to put this. Pat Robertson collects money to aid people in Rwanda, then uses the money to pay for cargo planes to carry his diamond mining equipment…
First I’ve heard of this. Ought to be a bigger story.
Man, I’d love to see Pat Robertson go down in flames because of this stuff.
ShivaX
5744
When he dies there will be plenty of flames in hell.
Wont get to see it, but still.
rowe33
5745
The worst part is that there is no Hell so shitheads like Robertson don’t have to worry about any sort of eternal torment for their blackened souls. Sucks.
Timex
5746
But this is how many populist movements actually end up going. Whether it be Russia, or Cuba, or Venezuela, or China… All of those movements clothed themselves in the garb of “the people”, while essentially deifying leaders who were then given absolute power.
It doesn’t necessarily have to go this way, but populism and authoritarianism often seem to go hand in hand, because there are always groups who oppose the populism, and the authoritarianism becomes necessary to crush those dissidents.
You could achieve populist end results via more democratic means, but the process would likely be much slower. And in the situations where this stuff boiled over, the people weren’t willing to wait. They were promised a populist utopia, and in order to get there fast, they had to cede all control to the people selling them the snakeoil.
Some populist movements, like the civil rights movement, avoided the authoritarian aspects, but again… much slower change over time.
Worst case, is if there is one, and he goes in for being a shit, and I go in for being an atheist, and I have to sit next to him for an eternity of demonic pitchfork disembowelment.
But in this case there’s not even the fig leaf of “The Czar/Stalin understands the will of the people, because he understands the people and embodies them through a mystical connection.”
It’s just, “Rich people deserve to be in charge, because screw you peasant.”
Seems like it would kill his tax exempt status at least…
Timex
5750
Have you ever talked to Trump supporters?
Because that is in fact exactly what they think.
Hell, there’s literally a show on Fox news currently about “the populist revolution” that loves Trump.
What it actually is, is a movement where racists can tell each other that their racism is what everyone thinks, but is afraid to say out loud for to political correctness.
It’s yet another similarity to the beginnings of Nazi Germany.
ShivaX
5752
This is nearly every racist I’ve ever interacted with, so it doesn’t surprise me.
Timex
5753
A lot of it is that they are old too, and their views didn’t change… And no one used to call them racist.
None
5754
Wait, I thought it was Obama that made racism great again? Besides, we know racism wouldn’t exist except that folks keep bringing it up all the dang time.
And those folks are the real racists.
MrGrumpy
5756
Krugman in the NYT echoes the same sentiment.
[trump is] also lazy, undisciplined, self-absorbed and inept. And since the threat to democracy is much broader and deeper than one man, we’re actually fortunate that the forces menacing America have such a ludicrous person as their public face
… in recent decades a number of nominally democratic nations have become de facto authoritarian, one-party states. Yet none of them have had classic military coups, with tanks in the street.
What we’ve seen instead are coups of a subtler form: takeovers or intimidation of the news media, rigged elections that disenfranchise opposing voters, new rules of the game that give the ruling party overwhelming control even if it loses the popular vote, corrupted courts.
The classic example is Hungary, where Fidesz, the white nationalist governing party, has effectively taken over the bulk of the media; destroyed the independence of the judiciary; rigged voting to enfranchise supporters and disenfranchise opponents; gerrymandered electoral districts in its favor; and altered the rules so that a minority in the popular vote translates into a supermajority in the legislature.
Does a lot of this sound familiar? It should. You see, Republicans have been adopting similar tactics — not at the federal level (yet), but in states they control.
Which is why we should be grateful for Trump. If he weren’t so flamboyantly awful, Democrats might have won the House popular vote by only 4 or 5 points, not 8.6 points. And in that case, Republicans might have maintained control — and we’d be well along the path to permanent one-party rule. Instead, we’re heading for a period of divided government, in which the opposition party has both the power to block legislation and, perhaps even more important, the ability to conduct investigations backed by subpoena power into Trump administration malfeasance.
But this may be no more than a respite. For whatever may happen to Donald Trump, his party has turned its back on democracy. And that should terrify you.
The fact is that the G.O.P., as currently constituted, is willing to do whatever it takes to seize and hold power. And as long as that remains true, and Republicans remain politically competitive, we will be one election away from losing democracy in America.
