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 -
Thanks for asking these important questions. The easiest question is question 1 - the answer is "mu" because there are not, in fact, drastically fewer populists than there used to be. We see this, because political appeals to the populist quadrant of the Nolan chart repeatedly overperform elite expectations. This is true for both appeals reaching out from the rightist quadrant of the Nolan chart (Trump, Boris, Le Pen etc.) and appeals reaching out from the leftist quadrant (2016 Bernie, Syriza, Podemos etc.) In fact, you can make a case that there are more populist voters than there used to be because the Overton window has moved in a libertarian direction since Reagan/Thatcher and has left the median voter behind. Dominic Cummings wrote about this a lot on his blog before the EU referendum - one of his catchphrases for getting through to politicians who are not paying attention is "Relative to the status quo, the median voter is a National Socialist" (I think he would be marginally more accurate if he said "Relative to the Overton window"). He has said that if he could get away with it, his campaign slogan would be "Hang the paedos, save the NHS".
The next easiest question is question 3 - the populists are on Boomer Facebook, or propping up the bar at your local golf club. The key fact about the populist vote is that it skews older, less educated, and almost certainly less intelligent than the other three quadrants. There are three things going on here
The upshot of this is that populists are less online, less interested in the type of substance-heavy discussion of political issues that we do here, and in general less politically engaged - in both the post-Trump US and the post-Brexit UK we have seen people being surprised that low turnout no longer helps the right. Non-targetted voter suppression by the right has backfired multiple times, with the Ohio I-can't-believe-it's-not-abortion off-cycle referendum being the most recent example. Jacob Rees Mogg made the unusual mistake of saying the quiet part out loud on this point.
The other important point that fits in here is the nature of modern populism. Given that we are at the tail end of 40+ years of increased globalisation (trade, cultural exchange and migration) during which the economy was not great for poor people in rich countries, the thing that holds modern populism together is anti-establishment xenophobia. The modern populist message is:
For left-populists, the foreigners in question include foreign investors expecting to make profits. For right-populists, they are mostly immigrants. Both sides are happy to attack multinational companies offshoring to cheap labour sweatshops in the Third World. Right-populists wear their xenophobia on their sleeve, left populists try to dog-whistle it. But if you look at the anti-Englishness of the SNP, the anti-Germanism of Podemos and Syriza, or the anti-Americanism of Latin American populists, it is obvious that xenophobia is core to their appeal.
Turning now to question 2, the reason why this question is difficult is that populist voters are less likely to have intellectually coherent political views, so movements appealing to them are less likely to be based on an intellectually coherent ideology that merits naming. In European politics, the ideology that lived in the populist quadrant post-WW2 was called Christian Democracy, but most Christian Democratic parties (including the German CDU, which is the de facto standard-bearer of European Christian Democracy because of its size and electoral success - the Dutch CDA is the most obvious exception) drifted into the empty space on the right left open by the demise of throne-and-altar conservatism. (Throne-and-altar conservative parties across Europe generally disbanded after being useful idiots for Hitler). A lot of mostly-defunct populist political parties had a support base of rural smallholders and are called things like "Agrarian", "Country" "Farmers'" or, surprisingly often "Centre". But in the Anglosphere populist movements tend to be associated with charismatic leaders (William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump) and not ideologies or permanent mass-membership political parties. Back in the pre-Trump era, there were people who called themselves "paleoconservatives" who definitely lived in the populist quadrant - their biggest electoral success was under Pat Buchanan (and arguably Ross Perot, who they supported from a distance), and their house journal was The American Conservative. "One Nation Conservatism" was a British tendency with deep roots (the term goes back to Disraeli) and lives in the populist corner of the Nolan chart, but like Christian Democracy it doesn't have the anti-establishment connotations of modern populism. Boris Johnson has called himself a One Nation Conservative, but he has also called himself a libertarian, a populist, and a Thatcherite. In general, the term was hijacked by pro-establishment centrists in the Thatcher era. I don't know what the current American terminology is, but in the UK modern populists are called "Blue Labour" if they are coming from the left and "National Conservatives" if they come from the right. See this sympathetic article about why the actual populists in national conservatism are struggling to reconcile with the fake-anti-establishment rightists like Jacob Rees Mogg who they are forced to work with by FPTP.
I think question you may have meant to ask is a slightly different take on question 1: Why are there so few political movements appealing to the voters in the populist quadrant of the Nolan chart given the obvious opportunity? I see three big reasons for this:
Are they though? I've spent time on Boomer Facebook, and the people who post there seem overtly in favor of laissez-faire economics. Is there evidence they're becoming more fiscally left?
They are fiscally left where it benefits their subpopulation: "work harder for my Medicare, but don't touch my 401(k)"
Precisely the point I was making about Boomercons - I think of them as the "Keep your big government out of my Medicare" crowd. The politics is functionally economic-right and anti-worker but appeals to non-rich pensioners with the same kind of story that a populist movement would use to appeal to workers.
The heavily subsidised farmer complaining about how all their taxes go to supporting welfare bums in the cities is the same species, though mostly relevant as a vibe rather than a political bloc given the continuing decline in smallholding.
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