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Putting the "interests of their nation and the citizens of that nation" first is the meaningless populist rhetoric part, that always appeals in a racist, bigote

Putting the "interests of their nation and the citizens of that nation" first is the meaningless populist rhetoric part, that always appeals in a racist, bigoted populous (so every nation ever pretty much). That's like people suffer economically from neoliberalism, so you redirect to unrelated scapegoats, that's trivial, happened a million times. Historically the fascist then, will use economic populist policy. That's like when Hitler built the Autobahn, you alleviate the economic grievances, support for the autocrat cements and then the real fascist stuff begins, that's when term limits go away and their enemies go in the oven. But they don't do that economic populist part do they? These new right-wing movements in the west aren't doing this part of the equation. Because we are now in the "interesting", novel case where the autocrats themselves are also just more neoliberals, the real power hasn't really moved an inch, like they are all paid by the same set of oligarchs, power is already fully consolidated. So I suspect nothing much will happen, it will just swing back to the center that shifted the overton window a bit more to the right in the meantime, the status quo didn't change so people are perpetually unhappy with no idea why. > I feel politics is like this perpetual motion machine where you reach some absolute extreme on end Yeah man! Totally! It's like when we move from Reaganomics in the 80s to Clintonomics in the 90s, from one "absolute extreme end" to the other! TF

somenameforme 1y 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.
- immibis 1y ago
  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.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    [flagged]
- lyu07282 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    Neither Macron nor Merz are far left, or even left really. It's not clear they really have any political ideology whatsoever besides a mixture of 'whatever's convenient' and globalism. If they were far left, they'd have far higher approval than 30, let alone 17. And that's the problem. With the "populist" candidates, you know what you're getting and if that's cool with you, then they actually make pretty decent candidates. But with these globalists, they seem to regularly behave in irrational ways that often are even self destructive. But again I think that's because most of them don't even particularly care much for their countries, or at least it's secondary to 'global' concerns. And that really doesn't appeal to many people even if they think it might, at first.

somenameforme 1y 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.

immibis 1y ago
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.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  [flagged]
lyu07282 1y ago
[flagged]
- somenameforme 1y ago
  Neither Macron nor Merz are far left, or even left really. It's not clear they really have any political ideology whatsoever besides a mixture of 'whatever's convenient' and globalism. If they were far left, they'd have far higher approval than 30, let alone 17. And that's the problem. With the "populist" candidates, you know what you're getting and if that's cool with you, then they actually make pretty decent candidates. But with these globalists, they seem to regularly behave in irrational ways that often are even self destructive. But again I think that's because most of them don't even particularly care much for their countries, or at least it's secondary to 'global' concerns. And that really doesn't appeal to many people even if they think it might, at first.