I see Donald Trump and Brexit more as a protest against the status quo--which does not mean that the entire system is terrible. It could just mean that people want reforms that benefit the public good and not just some Senator's home state.
Populism is the result of global economic failure
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Re: Populism is the result of global economic failure
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no lack of education that makes people accept other people that don't share your values (like secularism) and are against what you stand for. Unless by "education" you mean brainwashing, which is something totalitarian states excel at (horseshoe theory and all)
Nobody gives a damn about values. Otherwise the British nationalists wouldn't care about the Polish immigrant workers, but they do get a certain amount of hate.
Yes they do.
But there will always be racists who will dislike people for any petty reason
Re: Populism is the result of global economic failure
#13Basically: neoliberalism is shit and everyone hates it. People who are deeply invested in this ghastly status-quo quake at the prospect of the proles finally demanding a less insane mode of economy, hence all the blithering about populism.
USA "proles" fell for populism and elected the worst neocapitalist team possible, against their own interests, that's what we're talking about when we talk about "populism". By and large people (demographically) who voted for the democrats won't be much affected by the GOP gov, but the people who voted for the GOP will be badly affected. If a mod comes here, I vote for closing this post, I feel it is very very prone…
I agree this post is prone to a flame war, but it's also a really important conversation for people to have. Many people don't understand why the election went the way that it did. How can we discuss this important topic correctly?
Re: Populism is the result of global economic failure
#14Basically: neoliberalism is shit and everyone hates it. People who are deeply invested in this ghastly status-quo quake at the prospect of the proles finally demanding a less insane mode of economy, hence all the blithering about populism.
> neoliberalism is shit and everyone hates it.
Is this similar to how democracy is the worst system of governance except for all the others? What's terrible about neoliberalism that a more populist route will fix without being worse in other ways?
Re: Populism is the result of global economic failure
#15I find it extremely amusing when one side bashes the other for being anti intellectual and then goes on to bash economists. Anyway, I stopped reading at wage slave, what a load of crap.
Re: Populism is the result of global economic failure
#16This is the same argument left academics have been using to excuse the repeated failure of electorates to vote for socialism for a century. It's not a new argument. And it nicely avoids left wing thought ever having to take responsibility for its own electoral failures.
That's true. In the Netherlands the centre-left just lost a huge amount of seats. People voted for socialism when socialists had good ideas like building the welfare state or reforming healthcare to make it more inclusive. Nowadays they don't want to deviate from the same economic policies that the centre-right proposes. So then what's the point of voting for them?
Re: Populism is the result of global economic failure
#17This is the same argument left academics have been using to excuse the repeated failure of electorates to vote for socialism for a century. It's not a new argument. And it nicely avoids left wing thought ever having to take responsibility for its own electoral failures.
Can you give any more references to the sort of thing you're talking about? I believe it's lack of significant class consciousness and the large-scale remnants of propaganda from the Cold War (on which many if not most people are misinformed about Socialism) which are the biggest obstacles to electing a Socialist candidate.
Re: Populism is the result of global economic failure
#18Basically: neoliberalism is shit and everyone hates it. People who are deeply invested in this ghastly status-quo quake at the prospect of the proles finally demanding a less insane mode of economy, hence all the blithering about populism.
USA "proles" fell for populism and elected the worst neocapitalist team possible, against their own interests, that's what we're talking about when we talk about "populism". By and large people (demographically) who voted for the democrats won't be much affected by the GOP gov, but the people who voted for the GOP will be badly affected. If a mod comes here, I vote for closing this post, I feel it is very very prone…
Sharing your country and resources with immigrants is also against one's self-interest, but we don't label that as irrational.
Re: Populism is the result of global economic failure
#19Populism is the failure of compulsory education and the beginnings of the fall of the 20th century western nation-state. The system favours the more-popular over the objectively-superior, and the biased, ancient mass schooling makes that the rule instead of the exception. We'll have to abolish nations and any sort of tribalism---how sophisticated might it be---or it'll decay by itself hurting everybody until it disap…
So you're suggesting more indoctrination and the abolition of states aka. conquest and colonialism? Because the way we're going, there's going to be another world war long before people willingly succumb to a global state...
I'm not suggesting those, nor am I suggesting anything at all. I just say what I think the reasons and the future trajectory is.
No need to be binary about the potential political changes. I only say that nation-states are bad, I din't say that states per se are bad.
Also, the next world war won't be before anything but the end of all of us. I didn't ever say anything about a global state, but what I think indeed is that, analogous to programming, state should be contained in the smallest possible context, that is, I think that smaller, more focused states with more direct democracy and with more (respective to today's nation-states) people that indeed share common values, would be more stable and peaceful. I know that such an idea will get many objections (even I do have my objections), but I believe such a political situation would be better for everyone.
Re: Populism is the result of global economic failure
#20Basically: neoliberalism is shit and everyone hates it. People who are deeply invested in this ghastly status-quo quake at the prospect of the proles finally demanding a less insane mode of economy, hence all the blithering about populism.
> neoliberalism is shit and everyone hates it. Is this similar to how democracy is the worst system of governance except for all the others? What's terrible about neoliberalism that a more populist route will fix without being worse in other ways?
I think the problem is that neoliberalism is an ideology and suffers the same problem as all other ideologies - their advocates only care about purism of concepts and not whether things work or don't work in the real world.
e.g. I'm rather happy with our socialist NHS in the UK - I don't want socialism in many other areas but for health it seems to have made sense. I don't want an ideologue coming along and trying to dismantle it just because they disagree with the founding concepts rather than how it actually works.