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I think MAGA or something like it was where the Republican party was always going to end up. I likewise think that Communism or something like it was always where the Democrats were going to end up. I would prefer we get the masks off and the cards on the table sooner rather than later; We, collectively, are in a better position to handle the present problem now than we will be in another five years of decline, and we will be in a better position in five years than we will be in ten. I'm not certain that sooner is better; maybe delaying might produce some unexpected, out-of-context perturbation that dramatically shifts the trajectory in a positive direction. But based on the available information, confrontation seems inevitable, and the sooner the better.
I don't know where you doomer types get this sense of unceasing decline from. In the last few years we've cured obesity, gained the ability to catch rockets that went to space, taught computers to speak, built cars that drive themselves and shrunk batteries enough that everything we have can be wireless.
To the degree that we're declining it's almost entirely due to these populist currents causing awful short sighted political decisions. No, it's actually not good that we're going to have brain dead communist populists fighting brain dead right wing populists over who can hold back progress more effectively in 2028. In would in fact be much better for everyone if the communists were kept marginalized.
A lot of people think the 1990s were pretty good years, and they're my personal bet for America's high-water mark. Would you care to make a list of the worst political decisions made since 1990, and see how many of them were populist vs elite, or however you'd frame the dichotomy?
This is where the sense of unceasing decline comes from.
When were they marginalized in the first place?
Family of mine died of disease we now have cures for in the 90s. Populism was less in some ways back then, but I'd much rather live in 2026 than in 1996.
It's hard to really do this without it turning into some point by point relitigation of individual things that read as tit for tat partisan nonsense. I'll put forward many of the politics around BLM and the Trump Tariff fiasco as the kinds of fruits I see populism yielding. I'm not very interested in going point for point on which side was worse or who's tit justified which tat.
I know republicans have accused democrats of being communists forever but they really aren't. They have trouble saying no to their leftist flank for sure, and I've always criticized them for that as a major failure, but there are actual major differences between the DSA crowd and the mainstream democrat crowd. Obama did not make space for people who praise Mao. If the Democrats never marginalized the DSA then how do you understand the current conflict in the democratic party? Why is the DSA primarying long standing members if they were there all along?
Ultimately politics just can't deliver what so many want from it. It's not the source of prosperity, it's not the fount of culture. It does matter and is necessary to settle coordination problems and keep things moving along. But there's this terrible cycle where politicians promise that the government will deliver what is not in its power to deliver, then they fail and populists think the reason for this failure is because the politicians are insufficiently diligent or forceful. The force vector making things worse from politics is founded in your sentiment upstream, that things might as well get worse, we might as well have an actual communist party so that all the masks come off and we can have this end of history battle between the two failed 19th century ideologies. It's a derangement. I'm of the bold opinion that the Democratic party getting worse is in fact bad, that it has been bad that the Republican party has gotten worse under Trumpism.
Is this really true? The #1 worst political decision [ETA: made since 1990] was probably
Is that really a partisan nonsense thing? Can't everyone agree that in hindsight it was a mistake for the Bush administration to decide they had more important things to do than listen to the steady drumbeat of warnings about al-Qaeda?
I am rating this as #1 because the cost-to-benefit ratio of rolling up the hijackers before 9/11 is insanely good. There are obvious downsides to counterfactuals on any of the below but putting a tail on Atta or rolling up al-Mihdhar for his alleged role in the Cole bombing or anything like that potentially dodges 9/11 and all of the mess since entirely, basically for free, and potentially mitigates some of the bad effects of the below as well.
Other candidates:
Changing banking regulations, leading to the subprime mortgage crisis. This was bipartisan!
NATO expansion. This was bipartisan!
Offshoring (and related China policy). This was bipartisan!
Perhaps COVID policy. This was arguably bipartisan, but I will concede that it is very much a partisan nonsense attracter.
Generally speaking it seems to me that the populists either did not care about these issues or were directionally correct (Chinese manufacturing has been a populist bugbear for decades.) There might have been some populist pressure in the wrong way on the subprime mortgage crisis - which I know little about; I seem to recall some accusations that government policy actually pressured banks to give out bad loans, which I don't think is what right-wing populists have in mind when they support "deregulation."
Either way, it seems to me like a lot of the worst decisions were endorsed by bipartisan elites, and I think the case for that is much stronger than the case for the populists getting everything right.
Here's where I point out that I said populism is making things worse, not that it's responsible for most bad events. There is a base rate of bad governance and populism as an influence makes them worse and more frequent. I don't really see the scale to be from populist to bipartisan so much as populist to stability. You can have bipartisan populist slop(no tax on tips, abolishing property taxes) and partisan status quo maintenance(Both sides have decided they like the filibuster when it serves them). Left and right wing populism find a lot of horseshoe like things to agree on, Epstein, Conspiracy theories, scapegoating of rich elites, hatred of the banks ect ect.
It's not necessarily populism to criticize things like Chinese outsourcing, certainly it's not populism to get in the weeds on bank regulation. Populism is when complex topics are collapsed down to simple narratives about how things could be great if not for ${outgroup_schemes} and all we need to do is implement ${simple_fix} and that second order effects are made up by ${hated_outgroup} to prevent good policy.
Okay, but I think that bad events make things worse, too. If you are claiming populism is making things worse (which I have some directional sympathy for), it's fair to ask what bad events it is responsible for. Unless you're suggesting that populists are making things worse by complaining about bad decisions made by non-populists.
Which is part of why a "top ten bad things since 1990" list could be instructive.
The reason I wanted to flag the bipartisaness of the decisions was because you claimed that evaluating those sorts of decisions was likely to get dragged down into partisan bickering. I don't really see it. Do Republicans get mad if you say "yeah I think you know we should have deported the 9/11 hijackers before they flew into the World Trade Center?" I think they would largely agree with me, unless they felt like I was only using it as an instrumental argument against Republicans. Do Democrats get mad if you say "yeah I think Clinton shouldn't have deregulated the banking industry?" I think they would largely agree with me, unless they felt like I was only using it as an instrumental argument against Democrats.
Certainly I agree with this.
I am not sure I agree with this. I don't think (for instance) that the "Russia hacked our elections" narrative should qualify as populism, even though I definitely think it could at times collapse a complex topic (foreign interference in US elections) into a simple narrative about how things could be great if not for Russian schemes and all we need to do is implement counter-disinformation schemes and all free speech concerns were made up by MAGA-types to prevent good policy.
Wikipedia's stab at it is more "political stances that emphasise the idea of the "common people", often in opposition to a perceived elite" and I think I prefer that definition, even with the typo - it seems both less pejorative and less prone to "everything is populism."
Bad events are setbacks. The kind of thing we overcome. The decline I'm arguing against and would justify how we're better at dealing with communists coming to power now than we will be in five or ten years isn't caused by a recession, which while bad will pass.
Populists are making things worse by getting elected and putting pressure on politicians do things like rent control or putting broad tariffs on our allies. By antagonizing and polarizing the country to such a point where we're seriously considering electing people to the senate that deny the legitimacy of our nation or our elections.
This one is borderline, mostly because it doesn't really include a call for some quick fix. "Russia hacked our elections and thus we should disregard them and install me as president" would be populist. If you wanted to call it populist rhetoric I wouldn't argue too hard but it's not central to my reading.
What I'm saying is pretty compatible with this, as basically both populist wings have employed conspiracy theorizing to make some amorphous "elite"(billionaires, Epstein class, coastal elites, Capitalist, fascist, racists, patriarchy, international Jewry ect ect.) responsible for everything while declaring their own leadership as non-elite even if they're the president of the united states or a billionaire. In practice there aren't any two groups in existence you can't force into the plucky rebels vs empire framing that slop loving people won't slurp up if it gives them that "we're the righteous underdogs" tingles.
The decline that is most readily apparent to me relative to 1990 is the decline of the United States as the world's sole superpower relative to other nations. Pretty much everything else can still be argued, but that is a very unambiguous decline in relative standing. Do you disagree?
I agree with this, but it seems to me that there is always someone peddling bad ideas. Why are they gaining traction? It seems to me that all the answers point to some sort of decline (although to be fair that could be something like your setback and not like FC's decline).
Sure, this sort of rhetoric is very real. One of the problems with talking about populism is that while it is not true that "everything is populism" it is true that pretty much everyone makes populist appeals in a democracy, particularly if they don't have anything better to run on.
But why pound the table with this sort of rhetoric when you have a track record of good policies that succeed in making people happier and decreasing their burden of living?
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