Originally Posted by
jerryleber
Great editorial by David Brooks today.
Populism's American Comeback
See if these paragraphs remind you of anyone.
The problem with populism and the whole 19th-century governmental framework is that it didn’t work. Between 1825 and 1901 we had 20 presidencies. We had a bunch of one-term presidents; voters kept throwing the incumbents out because they were not happy with the way government was performing. The last three decades of that century saw a string of brutalizing recessions and depressions that profoundly shook the country. The light-footprint government was unable to cope with the process of industrialization.
Many populists were ill equipped to even understand what was happening. In his classic book “The Age of Reform,” Richard Hofstadter writes, “Populist thought showed an unusually strong tendency to account for relatively impersonal events in highly personal terms.” In other words, they thought they could solve the disruptions of industrialization if only they could find the evil conspirators who were responsible for every ill (NATO?)
. Their diagnoses were simple-minded, their rhetoric over the top; their proposals, Hofstadter noted, wandered “over the border between reality and impossibility.” Sound familiar?
Here’s how America recovered: Populist indignation finally got professionalized. In the 20th century, members of the progressive movement took the problems the populists were rightly angry about and built the institutions that were required to address them effectively — like the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. Populists had trouble thinking institutionally; the progressives, who were well trained, morally upright, self-disciplined, disgusted by corruption, intellectually rigorous (and sometimes priggish and arrogant) did not have that problem.
There’s a reason the 20th century happened. The United States had to build a stronger central government and a leadership class if it was going to take responsibility — responsibility for the people who were marginalized and oppressed in our own country and, as the century wore on, responsibility to establish a peaceful and secure world order. Americans have a perpetual problem with authority, but for a time — from say 1901 to 1965 — Americans built authority structures that voters trusted.
Now we live amid another crisis of authority. Our system has not managed to keep up with the savage inequalities produced by the information age — especially between the college educated and the less educated. Populists are again indignant and on the march. But, as before, they have no compelling theory of change.
And yet here we are, with populist Trump the undisputed winner of the 2024 election and populism on the rise in most of Europe.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/europe-populism/
While you are reduced to parroting psychobabble.