Thank you for that somewhat encouraging Ping @Emjay. If being a Conservative that opposes Populism in the Electorate brands me as a NT'er, I am guilty as Charged, your Honor, cuff me! (pretty please).....
So, you oppose "
support for the concerns of ordinary people" and/or "
the quality of appealing to or being aimed at ordinary people."?
That's the dictionary definition...at least two primary definitions.
Then there is this In his book on American populism, The Populist Persuasion, the historian Michael Kazin describes populism as
“a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not bounded narrowly by class; view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic; and seek to mobilise the former against the latter.[/i]â€
Kazin states our situation perfectly...the Noble Assemblage of the ordinary people vs a self proclaimed Elite who are self serving and undemocratic. In our current crisis, Populism is simply an uprising of the "ordinary" folks against the oppression of a bureaucratic government structure that is serving and being directed by elites....and those elites are coming from both parties. Layered on top of that, is liberal dominance of those "government structures", a fact that exacerbates the problem but is not its root.
Populism can be mob rule....or...it can be something more necessary, even noble. It is, in our current crisis, a people's way of saying "enough, we will not be ruled by bureau-tyrants any longer".
The "mob" version of populism, which we SHOULD all fear, is what Bernie Sanders was advocating...he would make government massive and synonymous with "the mob", essentially government would become an expression of mob rule. What the President's supporters are demanding is a reformation of the bureaucracy, and a general diminishment of its powers and scope...with a return of power to the local level whenever feasible.
A dose of conservative populism is a good thing Corbe...why would you be against that?
