In a long survey paper, Sergei Guriev and Elias Papaioannou write,
While there are many definitions of populism, there is a consensus on the lowest common denominator: “anti-elitism and anti-pluralism”. While scholars are often adding features, such as authoritarianism, nativism, identity politics, the minimal definition remains a useful reference point.
To deal with populism, the authors’ suggestions include
The mainstream parties should invest in communications especially online. Political selection could change — with greater opportunities of politicians without elite backgrounds to rise through their party ranks. Finally, governments should promote a broader use of deliberative democracy (e.g., citizens’ assemblies) that promote ownership of the reforms and reduce the gap between voters and elites.
I suspect that Martin Gurri would approve. And for further research, the authors suggest
there is an emerging consensus (at least ex-post) that populists have pursued successful communication strategies, often via social media and the internet. Why can’t mainstream parties and politicians follow suit? Is this because establishment politicians are complacent or because the very nature of internet 2.0 is conducive to propagating the populist message? Tackling such questions will most likely entail an inter-disciplinary approach, blending insights from marketing, cognitive psychology, and economics.
Populism is just a pejorative label that the in-group gets to place on the out-group.
It’s a lazy intellectual shortcut known as name calling.
The end.
Right. It’s what Orwell wrote about ‘fascism’ in “Politics and The English Language”, already in 1946, only months after defeating literal fascists, he said, “The word ‘Fascism’ has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words ‘democracy’, ‘socialism’, freedom’, ‘patriotic’, ‘realistic’, ‘justice’ have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.”
That’s the right way to interpret Guriez and Papaioannou’s “While there are many definitions …”, that is, the consensus is not even a consensus because elitism and pluralism are not well-defined (is Facebook being pluralistic when booting Bret Weinstein?), and the only actual consensus is “undesirable deplorables”.
Even Pope Francis recently said in “Fratelli tutti”
Thank you very kindly for adding some much needed intellectual rigor to my statement!
However, I do start to get a little concerned when I see Pope Francis agreeing with me. Uh oh…did I mess up somewhere or did we finally find an area of common ground?
Populism is anti-elitism. It only become anti-pluralism when pluralism is a major support of elitism. Reducing ‘the gap’ between ‘the elites’ and ‘everyone else’ is populism, so the recommendation for deliberative democracy to do just that – is populism, not a counter-weight to it.
+1
“Populism” is when the rabble vote the wrong way.
Our elites have no shame, and no accountability. Far from being better than most Americans, they don’t even have to meet the same standards as most Americans.
What has been called “populism” is basically a healthy response. I don’t see that it involves anti-pluralism, at least in the U.S., unless that includes the push to limit immigration.
Devil’s Advocate: the vast majority of today’s populists aren’t authoritarian or nativist, and probably aren’t even really anti-elitist or pluralist, either. Instead, a broad swathe of elite opinion itself has turned authoritarian. Much of the rest of it has turned into a class marker, in a manner similar to modern art. Put simply, the less pleasant a painting is to actually look at, the more “sophisticated” the viewer must supposedly be to appreciate it. Likewise, the more idealistic and detached from reality your political opinions are, the more you can lay claim to moral superiority, which is part of what separates you from the hoi polloi. You’re not like them; you care about justice or world peace or the ice caps or whatever. Your elite status also shields you from dissent and from the ill-effects of your favored policies, should they be enacted.
With this paradigm in place, elites and the masses were bound to become alienated, and compromises hard to come by.
I should add this thread from James Lindsay has a lot going for it, in my opinion:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1310408147396423681.html
While this Lindsay article is sort of good about who working people hate
What the working class hates with great hate are fake elite posers … who pretend to be people’s betters without producing anything of any real value
He’s wrong to call them … (the bourgeois)
They are posers, they are fake elite; I call them elite wannabees. Yet most of them do own (are buying) their own houses, property — one good def. of “bourgeois”. What the fake elite don’t have are “attitudes and behavior marked by conformity to the standards and conventions of the middle class.”
One of the annoying things fake elite folk want to do is control and change definitions, so words that meant one thing before, mean something else. Lindsay is displaying some fake elite behavior in calling them the bourgeois.
He’s correct that rich conservatives and working middle class conservatives hate the fake elites and their arrogant, unwarranted “moral superiority”.
“or because the very nature of internet 2.0 is conducive to propagating the populist message?”
If you define the populist message, as the most popular message, then by definition it’s the one that propagates the best and reaches the most. So yes, the populist message propagates the best.
Internet is just information on demand. When you empower the individual to pick their own information, and give incentive to the sources of information to attract a larger audience, then the feedback loops just create polarized bubbles of belief systems, with increasingly intricate language and cultures. We also need each other less and less, so there will be less of a need to bridge the bubbles. In the absence of an existential reason for us to merge the bubbles, we won’t. It’s hard to hope for an existential threat, so I guess we’ll just need to accept that this is how things are going to be. Internet is good. But we need innovations in journalism/cryptography, to bring in correctness as a factor. I do think people care about facts, I don’t think they are given the right tools to determine that.
For example, if every politicians public statements were certified and you could simply verify using their public key then at least we wouldnt have the he said she said problem. If you’re quoting someone, you’ll need to do a “verified quote” instead of using quotation marks.
There can be more. Like statistics and numbers; they can be certified and linked to the source. Sure, you can always come up with factual numbers that tell a bad story, but even that aspect of it can be certified. (e.g. using the number of tests to justify increases case numbers isn’t correct. ) So whenever people want to us a certified statistic to draw a conclusion, then should need to provide a certified verification that it can be done.
Anyway. My point is, someone better innovate fast. It’d be similar to fact checks but on a grander scheme, and baked into the internet itself. similar to how we have hyperlinks, you can have hyperquotes, or hyperstats. And similar to how we have SSL enabled certification next to a URL in our browsers, we can have little check marks showing that a quote is certified or stats are correct.
I believe people do actually care about facts, and the sooner we tether our believe systems back to facts the sooner we merge our belief bubbles and stop fighting.
That’s what Don Lavoie wrote about some of the aspirations of hypertext for The Agorics Projects (also AMIX and Xanadu) but it didn’t take off that way except 30 years later there are some new add-ons trying to offer similar functionality.
The trouble is “who fact-checks the fact-checkers” and also that control over information is very valuable in terms of money and power, and so it turns out no one wants to lose control and expose themselves to undermining of influence or status or to robust mechanisms of accountability, refutation, opposition.
Indeed, in the last 10 years we have gone far backward in this respect, with many platforms such as twitter and facebook trying everything they can to prevent people from getting direct links without going through them, or being able to embed text from potentially-ephemeral and controlled content inside walled gardens. We have also gone backwards in terms of the vision for news articles, which will often mention some supreme court opinion or executive order or report and provide no links to any of them anymore, which is something that used to be routine.
The problem again is one of control and metrics and advertising revenue, and clicks and collecting tracking info, and keeping people on your site for as long as possible, without them leaving, without them being able to share in ways that aren’t profitable because they don’t generate extra clicks, etc.
We have also gone backward in terms of the simple norms of not re-writing history, not deleting old stories, announcements, articles, or not editing them, without at least a note indicating what had been done and why, and NYT has been increasingly guilty of this lately, e.g., 1619 project. In retrospect it was kind of silly to think that the Stalinesque tactic of airbrushing people out of photos or telling people to cut out pages of encyclopedias wouldn’t be replicated in Orwellian memory-hole fashion by those who seek the same kind of control over opinion.
Indeed, as you have probably noticed, and especially enabled by (not “due to”) smartphones, everything is being replaced will walled-garden apps (which can track and listen to you much more efficiently), and the whole idea of “the web” with its open browsers in which anyone can connect to anything looks like just another one of the naively optimistic cyberpunk ideas that was only ever possibly true for a short period of time until the established players understood that they were losing control, that this was extremely dangerous, and figured out how to regain that control, forever.
Re certification and who gets to fact check.. I do realize that’s an issue, which is why I mentioned one can simply start by signing their public statements, and for quotations to include the digital signature. That’s a first step. Then numbers and stats (as subsets of public statements) can be certified, by the person stating those. This might sound trivial, but at least people would stop making up numbers or misquoting people. Being able to verify who said what is a first step. For pundits and analysts, we can then come up with scores on verifiable bets. (good judgement project style) Once statements and bets are verifiable, then people who are actually good at modeling and predicting will get the attention they deserve, not the loudest people.
Anyway. Global coordinated governance on existential threats is one reason we might go extinct. But I think unstable information feedback loops and belief bubbles will probably get to us first.
Who fact checks the fact-checkers?
There should at least be lots and lots of C-Span and other videos, and transcripts, and official statements by politicians on what they mean.
With official US gov’t servers holding these multi-mega bytes of text data, and separately some multi-tera bytes of video data, for future historical reference.
And all politicians, especially Reps, should be videotaping all their interviews with newsfolk.
So are antifa and BLM considered populist by the authors? And I doubt Guriev considers anti-Putin movements populist.
Isn’t a lot of the anti-Putin energy in Russia coming from a nationalist direction? I thought that Navalny was an avowed nationalist. More liberal than Putin, but specifically more liberal for Russians.
Leftist populism is definitely a thing. I consider myself a progressive, but I’d consider AOC as a populist politician. Just yesterday her twitch event got record breaking views. Not every popular policy is popular, but populist policy is populist, and maybe so, just because it is.
“Leftist populism is definitely a thing.”
It won’t be a thing until there is a generally accepted definition of what “populism” actually means. Until that time, you’re just engaged in lazy name calling. Instead of the ad hominem, why not just devote your time to refuting the ideas in the movement?
Hint: “You’re a leftist populist!” isn’t very compelling and it’s probably not really an argument at all. And, it’s actually kinda boring.
Yes to anti-elitism.
NO to anti-pluralism.
Where is the link?
Right after Trump was elected, but also with Brexit, there was a lot about populism.
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2016/12/19/what-is-populism
DONALD TRUMP, the populist American president-elect, wants to deport undocumented immigrants. Podemos, the populist Spanish party, wants to give immigrants voting rights. Geert Wilders, the populist Dutch politician, wants to eliminate hate-speech laws. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the populist Polish politician, pushed for a law making it illegal to use the phrase “Polish death camps”. Evo Morales, Bolivia’s populist president, has expanded indigenous farmers’ rights to grow coca. Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’ populist president, has ordered his police to execute suspected drug dealers. Populists may be militarists, pacifists, admirers of Che Guevara or of Ayn Rand; they may be tree-hugging pipeline opponents or drill-baby-drill climate-change deniers. What makes them all “populists”, and does the word actually mean anything?
The elites, and especially the elite wannabees (= fake elite), want to use “populist” as a convenient negative word for any politician who opposes any of their policies. Which, themselves, are inconsistent.
It seems most uses of “populist” are vague yet negative, and intellectually flabby. Like Brooks & Fukuyama were in defending Liberal values with multiple insults to Trump without specifics, yet not mentioning illegal Clinton emails with no punishment as a violation of “rule of law”.
It would be good to have a greater store of gov’t “official” video and audio tapes, as well as transcripts, on-line. As well as all laws, including all IRS written decisions.
Trump, the billionaire anti-elitist was prepared for 60 minutes to make a negative interview of him – so he made a whole copy of it himself. I expect to watch it soon.
The fake elite news folk only had value when they could faithfully reproduce 80-90% of the meaning, into only 20% of the time. If they can’t, or won’t, be honest in their cutting and their comments, they should lose trust, and audience. The reason most politicians up to now haven’t done this more is because they want control, too. And the ability to edit out what they don’t like.
Trump, at least, tells the truth – more so than any other big name politician, insofar as he avoids weasel words. Even if one should not take his exaggerations too literally – he’s serious about what he thinks is good.
Populism has a long and storied history. One could point, for example, to Livy’s treatment of Gaius Canuleius’s notion that the class division between the Roman patricians and the plebs should be broken down, to allow intermarriage between the castes.
Personally, of most interest to USA denizens, the national origins of the USA rooted in the populist Leveller movement of the English Civil War. The hallmarks of Leveller populism, the excellent Rachel Rocket writes in her great book The Levellers was popular sovereignty and consent of the governed: “The Levellers were unequivocal believers in the original political power of the people. For them, political power was simply that power which was inherent in the people, now exercised on their behalf by government. Parliament’s power was ‘the same Power that was in our same Power that was in our selves, to have done the same’.”. Thus, “Leveller politics was remarkably inclusive”
which gets translated by the anti-populist imagination into purity and anti pluralism. The left likes the name but the Levellers were not specific about particular policies outside equal rights:
But populism boils down to two base factors: “a fundamental popular sovereignty and government based on consent.”. The populist – anti-populist divide even today at its core is about these two factors.
We see this in the tension between popular sovereignty and the republican institution s designed to control and express it:
“The hallmark of Leveller thought was its populism. Not only was Leveller theory pervaded by the persistence of equal natural rights which must shape political life, but the Levellers’ practice of popular politics through print, petitioning, and the crowd became notorious. Leveller populism evidently meshed with some republican notions of active citizenship, but republicans were often quite as concerned as others to repudiate the potentially uncontrollable involvement of the mass of the people. Given the consistency with which critiques of the Levellers were couched in anti-populist terms, often of a very alarmist kind, this republican caution also made for a difficult adoption of Leveller ideas into republican language.”
And so the debate on the proper balance between popular sovereignty and institutions meanders onwards. On the one hand we have the likes of Theodore J Lowi in The End of Liberalism ” writing:
“The insignificance of the Commerce and Labor Departments is a monument to the overwhelming innocence of the liberal spirit in America, which had justified the tangle of government controls as necessary for maximum flexibility, maximum expertise, and maximum insurance for keeping control out of politics. The real economic powers of government are non political if Humpty Dumpty is your lexicographer They seem flexible only because they are numerous. They seem rational only because they are specialized. Control over the American economic economic system is split up among the Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers through the president, the Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation, the Federal Reserve Board, the Social Security System, the ten or more agriculture systems, the many specialized regulatory agencies, the Office of the Secretary of Defense–and others. All of them exist separately and independently. And there is hardly a scintilla of central control because no such control could ever be entrusted to any one of them. No governing institution possesses central control, because in a liberal state a virtue is made of its absence.”. An anti-populist utopia in which real reform, say national referenda, would be condemned as “anti-democratic” and “anti-pluralist.”
The anti-populist marvels that populists lack an Elizabeth Warren encyclopedia of policy prescriptions, forgetting Madison: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Apparently elections are too dangerous.
Besides Lowi, one could turn to James R. Copland’s The Unelected out this year or a few years earlier to F.H. Buckley’s The Once and Future King for a formulation of the problem of balance between preserving popular sovereignty and preventing it from birthing governments that are inimical to basic human rights.
Perhaps the people of Chile will afford us an example to emulate.