There were actual problems with immigration, crime, and trade that were aggressively ignored by both parties perhaps one more than the other. The problems grew and grew in the collective minds of the public until enough of the public started to support "let's solve it like fascists".
The lesson is that you can't manifest a perfect political reality by pretending problems don't exist.
Political "reality" is rarely objective.
I used to live in Oakland, CA...about a mile from MLK. I can tell you plenty about the amount of crime there over the last decade. I've known lots of people from the suburbs that will try to tell me that crime is down, meanwhile I saw my neighbors getting robbed during the day (not just at night anymore).
If your only experience with these things is watching the news, you really shouldn't be talking about them. And taking police services away from the poorest parts of town is despicable.
PS It was the votes from those high crime districts that got Trump elected last year. The people down there don't watch the news. Your take is just copium because you don't want to do the real work of looking at your side's policies and fixing what is costing you voters and elections.
You have a weird way of spelling libertarian.
PS There is a reason why political scientists never talk about left or right. Those terms only have meaning in one place at one time. They change meanings between places.
Actually I did and I'm quite good at it. However, not all classes are the same.
> Of all the major political ideologies, the one that is the least like fascism would be libertarianism.
Only if you haven't thought about it long enough or haven't taken the right classes.
> Now if a specific person or party is actually libertarian, that's another story.
It's not another story, it's where libertarianism always ends, it's in its DNA. In other words, cute baby-libertarianism has nothing to do with the finished product.
Well said, and there's no indication that obtaining dictatorial powers hasn't been the original goal all along.
> The lesson is that you can't manifest a perfect political reality by pretending problems don't exist.
There are a lot of lessons here, but this is a good start.
The dislocation of the West: what threatens us - Emmanuel Todd
My conclusion is that populism comes about when the "elites" perform badly. The author can't or won't admit this is happening even while unknowingly demonstrating it happening. Populism goes away when either the populist politicians don't improve things or when the elites get their act in order. If either of these happens, things go back to the previous situation. If neither happens, the elites are slowly replaced. We will see what happens going forward.
That's only half true, or maybe a quarter. Actually, populism comes about when the people (are led to) believe that the (patsy) "elites" perform badly.
Without that clarification, we would miss the most likely explanations for present day populism.
> Populism goes away when either the populist politicians don't improve things or when the elites get their act in order.
This is manifestly false today, the elites are now consolidating power for themselves, removing competitors left and right, mostly left because the right surrendered without a fight. In the end, they not only retain power but get more of it while acting materially worse.
gsf_emergency_4•4h ago
(The populism here on HN might be tempered by this mechanism too!)