#populism

I really should. He was exactly who he presented himself as - a violent, hateful person whose remorse was yet one more lie. We said it constantly, and everytime we were told to sit down and shut up. Well, you got what you wanted. Your little gremlin finally broke under the weight of scandal. Forgive me for not shedding a tear for the lying little assnugget.

But honestly? This is exhausting. There's no achadwnfraude watching people fall over themselves simply to embrace the shittiest assholes on the planet. The conclusion I'm coming to, that is just fucking depressing, is that fundamentally, populists in America these days don't actually want to better the country - they just want to inflict misery on those they see as lesser. They'd burn the house down as long as the flames on the other side were slightly hotter.

It's really sad that this is the only input legitimacy in politics these days are outsiders with massive psychological damage.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

musician Michael Jochum elucidates why trump has a cult that voted for him and - even now (despite everything) - still supports him:

I’ve been watching an absolutely heroic amount of pearl-clutching lately from people who insist that J.D. Vance would somehow be “worse” than Trump once Trump’s inevitable political and biological expiration arrives.

Let’s get something straight: it has never been about Trump, not for one second.

Trump is just the mascot. The real story is the people who finally saw themselves in him and felt validated by what they saw.

I actually believe most of them will drift away when the cult collapses, like embarrassed fans of a one-hit wonder. Many of them will swear they were never really into him at all. The MAGA amnesia is going to be epic.

I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016 and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic, morally vacant, and psychologically mangled he is.

I don’t wonder anymore.

I think he won for that exact reason.

He wasn’t a candidate. He was a mirror.

If you were a racist, you found your guy.

If you were a misogynist, you found your guy.

If money was your only religion, you found your guy.

If your heart was armored shut, you found your guy.

If you mocked disabled people, you found your guy.

If you hated intelligent people, you found your guy.

If you were a rapist, you found your guy.

If you enjoyed golden showers with Russian sex workers, you found your guy.

If you’d done absolutely nothing to confront your emotional wreckage, you found your guy.

If you were a serial cheater, you found your guy.

If you were a perpetual bankrupt, you found your guy.

If you stiffed honest workers, you found your guy.

If you were a conman, you found your guy.

If you mocked people’s appearances, you found your guy.

If you longed for a toxic Daddy, you found your guy.

If you were dissociated and disembodied, you found your guy.

If you were unconscionable in every economic dealing, you found your guy.

If you lied as naturally as breathing, you found your guy.

If you’d never eaten a green vegetable, you found your guy.

If you were a white supremacist, you found your guy.

If your ego contained a hole so large not even the presidency could fill it, you found your guy.

If you were a sociopath who cared not one molecule about other humans, you found your guy.

If he had only two of these traits, he never would have won. He won because he had hundreds of them, and millions of people recognized themselves in at least one.

This has never been about Trump. It has always been about the people who finally had their worst instincts validated.

Trump didn’t create the cruelty, he licensed it. He handed out permission slips for hate.

He is merely a symptom of a far deeper disease: collective toxicity.

If there is one sentence that explains Trump’s power, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.”

That’s the part that should chill the spine.

Who knew that tens of millions of Americans were thinking such unconscionable things about their fellow citizens? Who knew how many white men felt so threatened by women and challenged by minorities that they were ready to torch democracy to feel big again? Who knew that after decades of apparent progress on race and gender, so many people were living in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to legitimize their worst selves and convert their bitterness into political power?

Perhaps we were living in a fool’s paradise.

We aren’t anymore."

- Michael Jochum

Populism just means any kind of mass politics that:

1.) is based on the basic antagonistic friend-enemy distinction (us vs. them) of politics being framed as the people vs. the elites,

2.) ties many different demands together (for example, universal enfranchisement + reproductive justice + affirmative action) under some sort of popular political symbol: identity (for example, “the poor”), ethic (Juan Perón’s Justicialism), or project (the New Deal),

3.) derives the authority of its leaders from their claim to speak to the deepest sentiments of “the people” rather than their obedience to institutional procedure or legal rationality. This phenomenon is how you get anyone from Joseph Stalin to Donald Trump denouncing their personal competitors as “Enemies of the People,”

4.) seeks to collapse the distance between the masses of everyday people and political decision making, bypassing the authority of experts and bureaucrats. In a lot of cases this just means that followers want the leader they emotionally identify with to come to power regardless of whether they are qualified,

5.) forges a coalition out of people from many walks of life based on shared feelings (usually their emotional investment in their leaders and the narrative that they tell about the movement in their speeches) as much as shared goals (often defined just as emotionally even if tied to specific institutional changes, for example with rhetoric about the restoration of revitalization of democracy).

All of these characteristics are pretty universal to mass politics, but I think that’s what makes populism distinctive in our age of technocratic/bureaucratic expert management—populists promise to jumpstart mass politics again, for better or worse (and for both right and left alike). Many Marxists criticize populist politics for being multiclass and putting hope in “the people” instead of the working class, but historically this is true of every single mass political movement from the French Revolutionary Enragés to immediateist abolitionism to Social-Democracy and even capital-C Communism. That is historically the style of politics that best creates the conditions for mass working class participation in politics. And it’s best for us to figure out how to carve out a space for independent populism (independent from bourgeois institutions and opportunistic charismatic leaders) if we wish to grow the real working class gains made under the banners of left populism (for example, democratic protections for militant unionism) into weapons for uncompromising class struggle and social revolution.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/13/occupy-the-democrats/#manchin-synematic-universe

The GOP says it's the "party of the working class" and indeed, they have promoted numerous policies that attack select groups within the American ruling class. But just because the party of unlimited power for billionaires is attacking a few of their own, it doesn't make them friends to the working people.

The best way to understand the GOP's relationship to worker is through "boss politics" – that's where one group of elites consolidates its power by crushing rival elites. All elites are bad for working people, so any attack on any elite is, in some narrow sense, "pro-worker." What's more, all elites cheat the system, so any attack on any elite is, again, "pro-fairness."

In other words, if you want to prosecute a company for hurting workers, customers, neighbors and the environment, you have a target-rich environment. But just because you crush a corrupt enterprise that's hurting workers, it doesn't mean you did it for the workers, and – most importantly – it doesn't mean that you will take workers' side next time.

Autocrats do this all the time. Xi Jinping engaged in a massive purge of corrupt officials, who were indeed corrupt – but he only targeted the corrupt officials that made up his rivals' power-base. His own corrupt officials were unscathed:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181222163946/https://peterlorentzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Lorentzen-Lu-Crackdown-Nov-2018-Posted-Version.pdf

Putin did this, too. Russia's oligarchs are, to a one, monsters. When Putin defenestrates a rival – confiscates their fortune and sends them to prison – he acts against a genuinely corrupt criminal and brings some small measure of justice to that criminal's victims. But he only does this to the criminals who don't support him:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/29/1088886554/how-putin-conquered-russias-oligarchy

The Trump camp – notably JD Vance and Josh Hawley – have vowed to keep up the work of the FTC under Lina Khan, the generationally brilliant FTC Chair who accomplished more in four years than her predecessors have in 40. Trump just announced that he would replace Khan with Andrew Ferguson, who sounds like an LLM's bad approximation of Khan, promising to deal with "woke Big Tech" but also to end the FTC's "war on mergers." Ferguson may well plow ahead with the giant, important tech antitrust cases that Khan brought, but he'll do so because this is good grievance politics for Trump's base, and not because Trump or Ferguson are committed to protecting the American people from corporate predation itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy

Writing in his newsletter today, Hamilton Nolan describes all the ways that the GOP plans to destroy workers' lives while claiming to be a workers' party, and also all the ways the Dems failed to protect workers and so allowed the GOP to outlandishly claim to be for workers:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/you-cant-rebrand-a-class-war