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Why are the terms "populism" and "populist" so often used in the pejorative sense? What are the antonyms of these terms?
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Oct 5, 2017 22:15
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Well, right-wing populism is bad. But yes, the terms are very clearly being used by elite liberals/media types to shut down any and all opposition In a dictionary definition the antonym is "elitist", which is why it's so loving dumb that the liberals have latched onto this word as a term of abuse In an American historical context referring to the late 1800s/early 1900s the contrast is between the Populists and the Progressives, both left-leaning ideologically but the former being impoverished tenant farmers from the American interior, and the latter being Ivy-educated East Coast WASP elites. Thus the word 'progressive' being aggressively pushed as a label for the modern left, in order to implicitly exclude nasty populists To be fair, in the European historical context I think it does generally refer to right-wing populism and proto-fascism, though I'm not as familiar with that as with the American context This is why I think the term 'liberal' is the best general-purpose name for the center-left, or at least that part of it that doesn't identify as radicals or far-left. Euro goons might get mad at this but nobody knows what a social democrat is in America icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Oct 5, 2017 22:29
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Because the people are fuckin' dumb and not to be trusted. On the other hand the elites are evil, and can be trusted to do evil stuff. So really what populism means in the colloquial sense is "A lot of people like this but I don't, and I would like to make myself sound smart by having an unpopular opinion." Rent-A-Cop fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Oct 5, 2017 22:31
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icantfindaname posted:To be fair, in the European historical context I think it does generally refer to right-wing populism and proto-fascism, though I'm not as familiar with that as with the American context "Populist" is frequently used in the UK to describe left-wing policies of e.g. Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, often by the socially liberal Economist/Financial Times. If "Liberal" is the best general-purpose centre-left term we have, then there's a problem.
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Oct 5, 2017 22:56
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Halisnacks posted:If "Liberal" is the best general-purpose centre-left term we have, then there's a problem. It's better than 'progressive', I think, because of the elitist connotations that word has in America (not to mention the stuff about race science and eugenics) Of course socialist is better than either, but baby steps icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Oct 5, 2017 23:01
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I think this is a bit of a no-brainer. If you're a politician, you're supposed to be doing good. If the only reason you're doing something is to get the most votes (eg death penalty for marijuana users, barcode tattoos for Hispanic immigrants), you're not really doing your job, are you?
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Oct 5, 2017 23:05
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Have Sanders, Warren and co. (and Clinton's loss) not made socialism a politically viable term? Liberals in Europe would tend to find themselves in the business-friendly contingent of the Republican Party if mapped to a US context; this mapping is probably more in keeping with the philosophical tradition of liberalism than any centre-left interpretation.
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Oct 5, 2017 23:06
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In my experience Populism goes hand-in-hand with demagoguery.
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Oct 5, 2017 23:09
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Are Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn populists?
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Oct 5, 2017 23:10
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Since the Second World War (earlier, really, but for the sake of simplicity we'll start with WWII) there's been a tendency among intellectuals to view populist movements as the first step on the slippery slope to fascism or communism. As our society has become increasingly stratified between white collar professionals and everyone else this intellectual tendency has been weaponized and turned into a catchall excuse for beating back challenges to the status quo.
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Oct 5, 2017 23:17
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Triskelli posted:In my experience Populism goes hand-in-hand with demagoguery. Do you think Sanders and Corbyn are Populists? Halisnacks posted:Are Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn populists? Yes IMO Halisnacks posted:Have Sanders, Warren and co. (and Clinton's loss) not made socialism a politically viable term? America's not Europe. I don't think the term 'progressive' is in common usage in Europe, maybe excepting Britain. Ideally it would be nice for the terminology to be the same, but it's not that important. In an American context people do not think the word liberal means free-market rear end in a top hat, they think it means center-left social democrat
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Oct 5, 2017 23:36
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icantfindaname posted:Do you think Sanders and Corbyn are Populists? Nah, in my book the Gracchi bros and Ben Tillman are Populists.
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Oct 5, 2017 23:44
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The Gracchi were good, though?
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Oct 5, 2017 23:48
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My take, probably wrong. In a population: 90% are masses who are emotionally or dogmatically blind to their self interest. (If I don't have guns the bad people will get my family!) 9% are technocrats, or at least impartial/secure enough to seek overall best practices for policy, regardless of self interest. (I am an alcoholic but I understand I shouldn't drink and drive. I can afford a cab ride.) 1% who realize the easiest path to wealth is just to manipulate the masses to achieve their own self-interest. (If I promise to build a wall to keep bad people out, the masses will vote for me. Once elected, I cut my own taxes.) Populism is when the 1% rules by manipulating the masses to marginalize/silence/threaten the technocrats. edit: Beaten quote:In my experience Populism goes hand-in-hand with demagoguery. fritzgryphon fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 00:07
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icantfindaname posted:The Gracchi were good, though? They were good insofar as they tried to address wealth inequality, but they violated Roman traditions on term limits in pursuit of it and inadvertently made violence a part of the Roman Senate.
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Oct 6, 2017 07:12
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fritzgryphon posted:9% are technocrats, or at least impartial/secure enough to seek overall best practices for policy, regardless of self interest. (I am an alcoholic but I understand I shouldn't drink and drive. I can afford a cab ride.) Halisnacks posted:Liberals in Europe would tend to find themselves in the business-friendly contingent of the Republican Party if mapped to a US context; this mapping is probably more in keeping with the philosophical tradition of liberalism than any centre-left interpretation.
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Oct 6, 2017 08:06
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Technocracy gets a bad a rap. Using scientific models and data to help construct effective tactics for dealing with the challenges of governance is super good. It can help us achieve the best possible outcomes while maximizing the value of finite resources. It may reveal techniques for helping people that wouldn't be thought of otherwise. The problems arise when technocrats believe in efficiency over morality, or worse become professionally entangled with specific methods of governance so that they promote those methods regardless of effect because it helps their careers. To my mind that's what really needs to be targeted for destruction. Careerists who are in government more to serve themselves than to do the work. I will admit that it's idiotic when people claim technocracy as their governing philosophy. "I'm believe in running things in a smart, efficient way." So does loving everybody! Your concept of governance should be about what you hope to be effective doing, not that you hope to be effective.
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Oct 6, 2017 09:13
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In my experience people don't know what demagogy actually means. If you ask the average person to define it they'll come up with something closer to sophistry or a fallacy, so it's no wonder someone came up with a synonym that's more leftist-sounding and can be used to dismiss political opponents by implying they're equivalent to demagogues like Trump. Populism is the opposite of elitism. It's not bad, it's what we need right now. Not that there's any reason to use the term given its connotations and the fact that Socialism exists.
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Oct 6, 2017 09:41
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The Puppy Bowl posted:I will admit that it's idiotic when people claim technocracy as their governing philosophy. "I'm believe in running things in a smart, efficient way." So does loving everybody! Your concept of governance should be about what you hope to be effective doing, not that you hope to be effective. Exactly. I don't see a term like "technocratic populism" as inherently contradictory. You can have an effective policy-making/delivering apparatus that is used for populist/left-wing/right-wing ends.
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Oct 6, 2017 09:44
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The Puppy Bowl posted:I will admit that it's idiotic when people claim technocracy as their governing philosophy. "I'm believe in running things in a smart, efficient way." So does loving everybody! Your concept of governance should be about what you hope to be effective doing, not that you hope to be effective. Yeah that's the problem with technocracy though. :P It's like people who describe their position as rational. I think being rational is very good, but if you're pointing out how rational your position is then it's likely you're selling something lovely. Same thing for pragmatism, race realism, etc. Everybody should seek to be rational, pragmatic, and realistic, and make use of scientific methods and solid data. But if you describe your position using any of these you're just invoking it as a totem to defend your position without having to actually defend it on merit. Also the bigger problem with technocracy is gatekeeping. It's all very well relying on experts but those experts are not picked out of a vacuum or chosen entirely based on merit. Elites are not particularly inclined to listen to experts that disagree with them, especially not on a fundamental level, and it's hard to rise high in a field if you disagree with the orthodoxy. Technocracy doesn't automatically have an establishment bias, but the way experts are chosen and consensus formed means that it holds a very heavy establishment bias in practice. Futuresight fucked around with this message at 10:03 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 09:57
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That's actually something I hadn't thought about but you're right. You see this gate keeping effect play out a lot in the defense sector. I bet you can't even get an interview at the top 10 best funded think tanks on defense if you ever wrote a paper that questioned anything Israel has done. And god help you if you're anti intervention in the ME.
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Oct 6, 2017 10:39
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The Puppy Bowl posted:Technocracy gets a bad a rap. Using scientific models and data to help construct effective tactics for dealing with the challenges of governance is super good. It can help us achieve the best possible outcomes while maximizing the value of finite resources. It may reveal techniques for helping people that wouldn't be thought of otherwise. The problems arise when technocrats believe in efficiency over morality, or worse become professionally entangled with specific methods of governance so that they promote those methods regardless of effect because it helps their careers. To my mind that's what really needs to be targeted for destruction. Careerists who are in government more to serve themselves than to do the work. None of this means anything. Virtually everyone wants to achieve their goals in the most efficient manner. Science and data are obvious tools to use to achieve this efficiency. But efficiency on its own doesn't mean anything. Efficiency is a measure of how many resources are expended to achieve a goal. Politics is about deciding what the goals are in the first place. And just in case I need to spell this out, most people absolutely do not agree on what the goals ought to be. Technocracy as a proposed system of governance is, as a Buttery Pastry points out, an ideology pushed by ideologues who are so blinded by their ideology that they claim not to have one at all. It reminds me of the Dutch prime minister who is on record as saying he thinks ideology is a dirty word and he just wants to implemenent good policies free from ideology. He's possibly the most ideological political leader in the Dutch political landscape as a result of this, and there's plenty of competition. Just as an example, he's obviously a massive liberal and his new cabinet which is going to get formed any day now is going to cut corporate and income taxes and will make up for the lost income by raising the lowest VAT rate from 6% to 9%. I struggle to think of a more naked form of liberal class war. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 11:06 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 11:00
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Sanders and Corbyn aren't half as populist as Trump. Trump frames almost everything from an us vs them world view although his narcissism spills over and just talks about himself and his current personal beef. There's always someone or a group to blame. The only time he sounds diplomatic is when someone else has written his words.
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Oct 6, 2017 11:32
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It's bad because of its association with fascism. Otherwise populism would seem to be good because it would stem from being a democratic consensus
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Oct 6, 2017 11:59
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Lots of bad things have democratic consensus. Tax cuts for the middle class, for instance.
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Oct 6, 2017 12:00
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Being technocratic means you're more data- or results-driven than value- or ideology-driven. And yes, that's a meaningful distinction. E.g. I've argued with conservatives on drug policy who are like, "I don't care if decriminalization or centers where people take drugs under supervision result in reduced government spending and less crime. Drugs are bad and we need to punish people who use them, not look the other way or hand them out." That's a very values-driven stance: they're not looking at the outcomes they want (because obviously conservatives do want less government spending and less crime), they're looking at whether the method to handle the issue passes an ideological purity test. Or just look at Trump's performance in rural counties. No serious proposals for solving their economic woes (quite the opposite, as everyone here knows), but people voted for him because he appeared to share their values. Obviously nobody is 100% driven by values or 100% driven by data, but people can lean more one way or the other. Cicero fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 14:31
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Cicero posted:Being technocratic means you're more data- or results-driven than value- or ideology-driven. And yes, that's a meaningful distinction. E.g. I've argued with conservatives on drug policy who are like, "I don't care if decriminalization or centers where people take drugs under supervision result in reduced government spending and less crime. Drugs are bad and we need to punish people who use them, not look the other way or hand them out."
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Oct 6, 2017 14:50
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Technocracy is the methodology I use to create processes that encourage socialism. The problem is bad people can use the scientific method too and for all public policy purposes put their finger on the scales because all most of us can manage to do is keep them from completely obliterating the system at the expense of the people.
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Oct 6, 2017 15:26
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if you begin with the presumption that a mass population can be said to have a set of internally consistent higher values - despite knowing, as any good technocrat does, that by Arrow's theorem this is highly unlikely to be true - then you have already proceeded down the merry garden path that leads to a technocratic ideology. You have asserted that there are such values, and that the legitimate purpose of government is to realize them. This is hardly universal - e.g., there are actually-existing countries that are governed by consociationalist systems where the colour of legislation (and, ahem, its legislators) are more jealously guarded than contestations about how and why. if you tack on a materialist notion that these higher values are predicates on, in the main, the quantity and distribution of material wealth, then you are nearly all the way there. Virtually every religious society is thus omitted (noting that we live in a world with actually-existing theocracies and actually-existing controversies over the legitimacy of blasphemy). if you assert the notion of a professional civil service to quiescently and incorruptibly reify your plans on this quantity and distribution into a set of uniform and written laws and regulations, then you have dispensed with a good number of radicalisms and have talked your way into a policy prescriptivism that would comfortably fit in any number of global conferences. It's been a thing since the postwar consensus. if you tack on a instrumental presumption of the atomic unit upon which to weigh political claims over the wealth as the individual or household, rather than region or tribe or cultural group or (cough) socioeconomic class, then you might well be .... a neoliberal ??? pick up your bernke sticker at the door.
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Oct 6, 2017 15:35
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ronya posted:if you begin with the presumption that a mass population can be said to have a set of internally consistent higher values - despite knowing, as any good technocrat does, that by Arrow's theorem this is highly unlikely to be true - then you have already proceeded down the merry garden path that leads to a technocratic ideology. You have asserted that there are such values, and that the legitimate purpose of government is to realize them. This is hardly universal - e.g., there are actually-existing countries that are governed by consociationalist systems where the colour of legislation (and, ahem, its legislators) are more jealously guarded than contestations about how and why. I'm having trouble following this. My ideology such as it is, is that generally speaking if I build a system that is highly resistant to corruption knowing full well immunity is impossible, that has the stated goals of egalitarian society, the world will have a net benefit from it. I feel like people are most assuredly convinced how the world works already and aren't really accounting for the fact that the whole concept of a deep state and career government people causing policy calcification is uh, an illusion at best.
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Oct 6, 2017 15:43
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RuanGacho posted:I'm having trouble following this. my point is that by prioritizing 1) system-building, i.e., laws and regulations, in order to realize 2) egalitarianism, materially and nationally assessed, 3) quantifiable and measurable and legible by the center, you have not only ruled out any number of actually-existing countries and societies, but also a good number of radical ideologies and, ahem, populisms Populism was at its zenith in the long 19th century, simply because mass politics as we know it was possible, but yet terribly few people went around doing the stuff that national statistical agencies do today, namely go out there and count things. The number of houses, the number of urban poor, the number of the unemployed? - matter of confident speculation. Thus, what the great masses of the people know that the great masses of the people know that the, etc cetera, was itself a kind of self-supporting belief. There are limits to how far this can go in a contemporary Westernized liberal democracy, simply as legacy of the house that social democracy built half a century ago. People actually collect national aggregates now. It's hard to turn back that clock. If populism seems anaemic today, this is why. but when it leans in that direction, well, perhaps it is not populism qua Populism but we could say that there are some populist elements. There are a great number of well-documented divergences between what voters believe and what statistical agencies say is the case; the actual and perceived level of welfare fraud, violent crime, foreign aid, etc. are quite well-known on the left but we could also include e.g. actual and perceived profit as a percentage of revenue, actual and perceived intra-company/intra-regional/intra-national inequality vs inter-s etc. for the right. Or actual and perceived laws and due process (there is almost always an impressive level of ignorance on how existing laws and regulations function). All of these are quite stubborn in the face of perennial voter education efforts. So what happens when the political wind hinges on one of those divergences? ronya fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 16:07
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ronya posted:my point is that by prioritizing 1) system-building, i.e., laws and regulations, in order to realize 2) egalitarianism, materially and nationally assessed, 3) quantifiable and measurable and legible by the center, you have not only ruled out any number of actually-existing countries and societies, but also a good number of radical ideologies and, ahem, populisms Trump. Thanks for the reply I'll think on it.
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Oct 6, 2017 16:21
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Classism, OP.
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Oct 6, 2017 16:32
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It's almost always good for systems to have damping terms. Undamped things tear themselves apart
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Oct 6, 2017 16:36
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Most examples of populism in the US are either explicitly right-wing racist (Tea Party, Trump) or were economically left-leaning but quad turbo racist even for the time Whites Only populists. I mean, that's what the pre-LBJ Democratic Party basically ran on. 100% of the Southern Democrat populists were also Jim Crow segregationist human garbage, and before that literally pushing herrenvolk democracy based on human slavery. The history of rabble rousing populism in the US is basically economic populism for whites, the rope for nonwhites, or outright Nazi in all but Name poo poo that's right wing top to bottom. Bernie Sanders actually being a Left*-Populist with no creepy KKK/Nazi subtext was cool and good, but also uncommon on the national stage here. Edit: I assume because both the center-left and right want them to gently caress off. *By US standards anyway. sean10mm fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 16:55
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sean10mm posted:or outright Nazi in Name Only poo poo that's right wing top to bottom.
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Oct 6, 2017 16:58
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A Buttery Pastry posted:You mean Nazi in all but name? Nazi in name only would really be an improvement on a Nazi. Yeah I left out the "in all but name" part, fixed it (I think.)
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Oct 6, 2017 16:59
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ronya posted:
Populism was at its zenith in the 19th century because mass politics had become possible, but countries were still largely controlled by an oligarchic elite which justified their inherited rule by reinventing themselves as technocrats and imagining that they were the smartest and most rational people who were best situated to rule according to science without getting caught up in popular fervor. On top of that, the science those elites ruled by was often of poor quality, deeply flawed, or had serious shortcomings in values or priorities. It's just not as widely taught or remembered as anti-science stuff. For example, the Scopes Trial, in which Kentucky's ban on the teaching of evolution, is widely remembered as a significant milestone in the anti-science movement...but at the same time, the eugenics movement was in its heyday, considered to be at the forefront of the science of the time and the obvious practical application of evolutionary theory and related subjects. The same technocrats who derisively called Kentucky juries "yokels" and "morons" cheered at Virginia's eugenics laws and considered compulsory sterilization to be a great scientific measure for pulling society forward. Ultimately, it embodied four of the great weaknesses of technocracy: the tendency of the elite rulers to see themselves as superior to the masses in some way, the tendency to get too bogged down in macro-scale data and forget about the perspective of the individual, a tendency to dismiss ethical or regulatory concerns as just needless worries driven by outdated views or distrust of science, and a tendency to prefer scientific conclusions that favor whatever they already wanted to believe.
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Oct 6, 2017 17:12
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Honestly, it probably boils down to what one fears most in society: "mob rule" or a "self interested aristocrats." The easy Aristotelian answer is "the golden mean." As for as 19th century American populism, much of resolved around which metal to use as a currency (silver v gold) ...essentially a question of inflation with volatility (more favorable to farmers/the poor in general) versus stability/deflation (favored by the emerging middle class/the traditional elite). However, there is a broader question of how much power should elites have over the public at large. (Right now, I think people have a real right to question their elites.) The honest answer that unrestricted technocracy or populism is probably going to lead to terrible results, but the benefits/drawbacks of both need to be acknowledged. Sometimes the public is honestly enraged by real social/economic issues that need to be addressed and you very well mean a long-term technocratic strategy to address them. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 17:33
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 13:32 |
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Cicero posted:Being technocratic means you're more data- or results-driven than value- or ideology-driven. And yes, that's a meaningful distinction. E.g. I've argued with conservatives on drug policy who are like, "I don't care if decriminalization or centers where people take drugs under supervision result in reduced government spending and less crime. Drugs are bad and we need to punish people who use them, not look the other way or hand them out." The problem with your logic is you're assuming some sort of trade-off where being more "data-driven" means being less "values-driven." In reality, those things are completely independent of one another. Someone who is more data-driven is still driven by values to the same extent as someone who is less data-driven. If the goal is less crime and drug use, that goal is itself a value which is part of a greater ideology. Someone who is data-driven might be more effective at achieving the goals of their ideology, but they're still just as ideologically driven as someone who isn't. edit: Generally speaking, people who emphasize being data-driven over being "ideological" have an ideology that is more or less "polish the edges of the status quo." In practice these people tend to be heavily risk averse towards large changes to society (often due to being relatively secure/comfortable themselves) and have ideological goals of "plugging the leaks" in the status quo without shaking things up too much. A Buttery Pastry posted:The distinction disappears if you (rightly I think) assume that they value the punishment of "bad people" higher than less government spending/crime, where a liberal values less government spending the highest, and a leftist values less punishment/need to resort to crime highest. You're calling them less result-driven because you misidentify the result they're going for. The difference is not between rational/data-driven and irrational/ideology-driven, it's what a given persons' ideology makes them see as good results. This is also true, though there are some people who explicitly want to, for example, reduce crime and actively pursue methods that wouldn't effectively accomplish that goal. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 17:38
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