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I find it funny that when we talk about something like the constitution and how you can't change it even with popular support people talk about democracy, how d

I find it funny that when we talk about something like the constitution and how you can't change it even with popular support people talk about democracy, how democracy is important, how a people should be able to change the rules with a 51% majority, but as soon as they don't like wyat the people want its no longer democracy, its populism.

tptacek 3y ago
That's not what populism means. If we're restricting ourselves to the United States (the article is overwhelmingly not about the US), it's a 50/50 polity. The people want an incoherently overlapping set of ideas from an incoherently-left-liberal party and an incoherently-conservative-right party. It's what you'd expect as an organically reached steady state based on Duverger's Law. Populism is a philosophy that looks at that set of circumstances and says, nah, fuck that. It's obvious what the people want: precisely X, Y, and Z set of policies. If the people are voting in obstacles to policy X, it's because the system is corrupted by elites. There aren't competing ideas of the good of the people; there is only the good of the people and the interests of those elites. If you could put 200 people selected at random for all around the country in a room and expect them to work out the principles of an economic system and come up (1) with something coherent and (2) without bruises, that would be evidence of a valid populist argument. But you can't do that, because those 200 people will disagree sharply on everything from economic protectionism to the importance of university educations.
- colinsane 3y ago
  > If you could put 200 people selected at random for all around the country in a room and expect them to work out the principles of an economic system and come up (1) with something coherent and (2) without bruises, that would be evidence of a valid populist argument. i read this as saying not that populism is bad, but that it doesn't _exist_. to someone trying to intuit the meaning of "populism", encountering the word for the first time, it looks like "populism" means "the will of the people". both from its root and from the things which it's used to label (movements with popular support). and there's no correction for this misunderstanding. you just see more and more leaders critiquing popular movements simply _for being popular_ ("populist") and that _amplifies_ the impression that those in power wish to suppress the will of the people. it's just a bad phrase. another commenter positioned populism as contrary to pluralism, which was helpful for me to understand the negative connotation. the actual problem with these "populist" movements is that they _appear_ to represent a unified will of the people, but the unification doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. if (following your example) you could put the whole populace in a room and hammer out policy from start to finish without disagreement or compromising, then we could have an actual unified will of the people; populism would be true, and good. populism doesn't really seem like a thing i should be against in the extremely rare circumstance i find it, _illusory_ populism seems to be the actual thing i should fight against.
pessimizer 3y ago
My favorite thing is when they demand that democracy not be a "popularity contest."
Analemma_ 3y ago
What you're describing is more accurately termed majoritarianism (or anti-majoritarianism). Populism refers to something else: specifically, when one party goes, "we have decided that this policy is the Will of the People, and that is not up for debate or discussion. Because this policy is the Will of the People, anyone opposing it is ipso facto an Enemy of the People and must be destroyed."

tptacek 3y ago

That's not what populism means. If we're restricting ourselves to the United States (the article is overwhelmingly not about the US), it's a 50/50 polity. The people want an incoherently overlapping set of ideas from an incoherently-left-liberal party and an incoherently-conservative-right party. It's what you'd expect as an organically reached steady state based on Duverger's Law. Populism is a philosophy that looks at that set of circumstances and says, nah, fuck that. It's obvious what the people want: precisely X, Y, and Z set of policies. If the people are voting in obstacles to policy X, it's because the system is corrupted by elites. There aren't competing ideas of the good of the people; there is only the good of the people and the interests of those elites. If you could put 200 people selected at random for all around the country in a room and expect them to work out the principles of an economic system and come up (1) with something coherent and (2) without bruises, that would be evidence of a valid populist argument. But you can't do that, because those 200 people will disagree sharply on everything from economic protectionism to the importance of university educations.

colinsane 3y ago
> If you could put 200 people selected at random for all around the country in a room and expect them to work out the principles of an economic system and come up (1) with something coherent and (2) without bruises, that would be evidence of a valid populist argument. i read this as saying not that populism is bad, but that it doesn't _exist_. to someone trying to intuit the meaning of "populism", encountering the word for the first time, it looks like "populism" means "the will of the people". both from its root and from the things which it's used to label (movements with popular support). and there's no correction for this misunderstanding. you just see more and more leaders critiquing popular movements simply _for being popular_ ("populist") and that _amplifies_ the impression that those in power wish to suppress the will of the people. it's just a bad phrase. another commenter positioned populism as contrary to pluralism, which was helpful for me to understand the negative connotation. the actual problem with these "populist" movements is that they _appear_ to represent a unified will of the people, but the unification doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. if (following your example) you could put the whole populace in a room and hammer out policy from start to finish without disagreement or compromising, then we could have an actual unified will of the people; populism would be true, and good. populism doesn't really seem like a thing i should be against in the extremely rare circumstance i find it, _illusory_ populism seems to be the actual thing i should fight against.

pessimizer 3y ago

My favorite thing is when they demand that democracy not be a "popularity contest."

Analemma_ 3y ago

What you're describing is more accurately termed majoritarianism (or anti-majoritarianism). Populism refers to something else: specifically, when one party goes, "we have decided that this policy is the Will of the People, and that is not up for debate or discussion. Because this policy is the Will of the People, anyone opposing it is ipso facto an Enemy of the People and must be destroyed."