Sorry for the stupid question. I was researching it and it’s mainly “us vs them” Why is that bad? Is it not how it is? Why does populism pose a threat to democracy?
Sorry for the stupid question. I was researching it and it’s mainly “us vs them” Why is that bad? Is it not how it is? Why does populism pose a threat to democracy?
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Sorry for the stupid question. I was researching it and it’s mainly “us vs them” Why is that bad? Is it not how it is? Why does populism pose a threat to democracy?
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Sometimes We are the problem, not They.
It tends to place the blame for things squarely at the feet of some out group who tends to suffer for it
The perception of legitimacy that results from acting for the popular will gives easy cover to authoritarians and lets them consolidate power
Minority protections are critical to a truly free society and populism puts stress on them
“Common sense”, mass popular policy often isn’t very good
We do not live in a zero-sim country, or a zero-sum world. The us-versus-them mindset leads to a violent, unstable, poverty-stricken world where problems fester instead of getting solved.
In any case, Trump is giving us an unintentional demonstration of the downsides of populism. The dangers of that approach will be a lot more obvious two or three years from now.
It is anti-intellectual. It offers simplistic, unworkable, “common sense” solutions to complex problems. It is divisive. It leads to things like the cultural revolution in China.
It’s about what feels good at the moment.
The main problem with populism is that it often promotes overly simplistic solutions to difficult and complex problems, which can result in problems getting worse. Most people don’t care to listen to or evaluate complex solutions to problems, so if you just listen to exactly what they want, you get weird solutions that don’t actually fix the problem
>it’s mainly “us vs them” Why is that bad? Is it not how it is?
Even if there exists a “they” who is against “us”, there’s no reason to believe that a populist has any sort of special ability to uniquely be able to tell you who “they” are. “They” tend to conveniently be whatever group the populist doesn’t like, such as immigrants or Jewish people.
Because group decision making is almost always worse than individual decision making, due to phenomena like groupthink.
So while a person might be smart and well meaning, a mob isn’t. Mobs don’t think critically and are full of prejudice and reactionary behavior.
Trump is a populist… People are stupid and easily deceived, they don’t know what is best for themselves. Populism is intrinsically linked to pandering to the lowest common denominator, inflaming passions, being dishonest, and feeding into people’s prejudices, not rationality, logic, evidence, and the actual well being of the masses. We are seeing the consequences of populism and now our country is being made into a white and Christian nationalist autocracy. Do you think everything we are seeing Trump do is a threat to democracy?
It’s based on a few things:
They think the average person is smarter than experts. If you’ve ever had to become an expert, or even learn basic proficiency in something and then had someone with zero experience try to explain it to you … you’ll realize how dumb this is. Economics and Public Policy is no difference. Certain policies “make sense” but are utterly grounded in nothing at all, and will actually backfire spectacularly.
It creates an us vs. them mentality. It could be elites vs. the common folk. It could be immigrants vs. natives. It could be religion A vs. religion B. It creates an easy out-group to blame while ignoring real causes. The world is complex and blaming entire groups is going to miss the real problem while causing hatred and strife.
It often requires a strong-man to sweep in and be the hero. The average Joe might claim that the elites are out of touch and the common people are the real heroes, but the common person doesn’t have enough power to create change, so they need a “common man” to take power. However, that person is never an average person, but a member of the elite and powerful. In the name of fixing problems will try to break laws and ignore democracy because… after all… anyone who opposes him is a member of the evil outgroup and you need to save society from them, even if it means ignoring the law.
It puts trust in personalities rather than institutions, laws, and critical thinking. It’s hard for me to explain why this is bad, because intitutions can be flawed, laws can be poor, and critical thinking can make mistakes. That I admit. But some people think, “my guy” will fix it if he just has power, imagine if that power is flipped to someone you despise. They can do horrid and stupid things. And if you think only “they” can do horrid and stupid things, you’re failing to see that you (and I) are flawed as well. Better to be smart and methodical about it.
It dumbs down the world. They think people don’t need to learn and fact check themselves, they can just work blindly on common sense (which can be massively flawed). And as a teacher, I have to say not knowing something is fine. But purposefully refusing to learn and then saying you already know everything is personally offensive to me, hahaah. But seriously, I teach Current Events in a university as I did a ton of social science classes in undergrad and grad school. It’s incredibly frustrating to see the really confident kids who think they know everything come to class day 1 and get so many extremely basic things wrong because they are “smart”, while the less condfident kids fact check things from multiple angles and actually learn more. The problem is populism puts power in the lazy confident kid’s hands rather than the hard working people’s hands.
It’s a fantasy that “the elites” are the problem at the root of everything.
Let’s look at racism for example. Left populism tells us that racism is something cooked up by the elites and spread to the masses to divide the working class. They point to Bacon’s rebellion in the 1600s, the Civil War in the 1800s, and Fox News today.
That’s nothing but a comforting fairytale. In reality, racism is not some top-down conspiracy deployed by the rich for material gain. It is far deeper of an issue.