When it comes to the spicier cultural issues that generate flame wars online, I tend to find myself falling on the side of the conservatives. The exceptions to this are LGBT rights and drug use, but these days, these issues seem to divide more on old/young lines than conservative/liberal lines anyway.
I'm strongly against all forms of gun control. I believe that nations often have the responsibility to get involved in the affairs of other nations, including militarily. My diet consists mostly of red meat and I have a longstanding beef with vegans. I find media that overtly panders to minorities irritating whether or not I'm in said minority. I believe that wealthy liberals are intentionally and maliciously fanning the flames of race and gender conflicts to break down community bonds to make people easier to manipulate. Yadda yadda.
In short, when it comes to cultural views, I'm a milquetoast example of exactly what you'd expect to find from a young, online, cultural conservative, or at least libertarian.
And yet, despite all of this, I'm a Socialist. Not a Socialist-lite or Social Democrat in the vein of Bernie Sanders, but a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist.
I believe corporations are fundamentally evil to the core. I believe the overwhelming majority of working people in the US (and probably the world) are being ruthlessly exploited by a class of nobles we'd all be better off without. As a result, I believe we have an ethical responsibility to favor trade unions, strikes, and literally anything that protects workers from corporations. I believe the only realistic long-term result of unchecked Capitalism with rapidly improving technology is a dystopia. Yadda yadda.
Now, neither my cultural beliefs nor my economic beliefs are particularly unusual. The proportion of people in the US identifying as an Economic Leftists or Socialists has gone up every year since 1989, and the cultural conservatives, reactionaries, anti-progs, and anti-woke types are growing rapidly as well. Yet, I've never met anyone else in the overlap.
The combination of cultural Conservatism and economic Socialism is what's historically been called Populism, so that's how I'll be using that word. (I'm clarifying this because some people call Trump a "populist", but he's about as anti-socialist as someone can be, so I'm not using that word the same way as these people.)
Looking to the past, I can see lots of examples of this kind of Populism, especially in the first half of the 20th century, but practically nothing in the present. Libertarians are culturally liberal and economically conservative, and there's loads of them, so you'd think the opposite would also be true, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
With this in mind, I have 3 questions for this community:
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Why are there drastically fewer Populists today than there were in the past?
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Besides "Populist", what are some other names for the belief system I'm describing?
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Where are all the Populists that are left? I assume there's not literally zero, and that some of them hang out online together somewhere, so where are they? Are there populist blogs? Populist forums? Populist subreddits?
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Notes -
I half reject this premise. Something like a third of the electorate have crosscutting economic and social preferences. Most people are highly statist and believe that government is morally obliged to help people and run the economy. You can see this when for instance polling asks Americans what they think of cuts to specific government programs: they are almost always highly opposed to it.
As you define it though, I think Rightist-Socialist Populists are rare because at its very heart, socialism is about taking away people's freedom to live as they choose and the people who do the choosing are Progressives. As you run along the spectrum of actually existing advanced countries toward the socialist end, you'll find places like Sweden which operate a high-tax welfare state that takes huge shares of people's money and redistributes it, partly to the poor, but also back to the taxpayer themselves in state-sanctioned consumption. University is free, healthcare is free, pensions are highly generous. That is just your taxes coming back to you in a way that everyone else has deemed acceptable / laudable. It isn't as coercive as communism, but the principle is that you should only be allowed to direct a fraction of your income to the ends you choose and that a lot of your money should be spent for you by institutions of the state. And who runs the state and all institutions? Liberals and Progressives.
I think social conservatives rightly see the modern state as being highly aligned to socially leftist goals and therefore it is the enemy of their social preferences. I think it is perfectly natural that its rare to find someone who thinks the current government should be all powerful and holds views that government hates.
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