I’m not convinced that the left-wing populism is a thing in exactly the same way.
I am not sure it’s consistent to say both “of course there’s left-wing populism” and “I’m not convinced that the left-wing populism is a thing”, but never mind.
Jeremy Corbyn and UKIP
I think you misinterpreted me. Of course there are populists of different sorts. But who they are doesn’t depend much on exactly how you define “populist”. Corbyn and UKIP both appeal more to the less-educated than the more-educated, appeal more to the poor than to the rich, etc.
That actually depends on his profession.
For sure. I think the typical underwater basket-weaving student is less “elite” than the typical computer science student, precisely because the latter is likely to be well off in 10 years and the former isn’t. (Well … for that exact same reason, maybe it’s the more-elite-to-start-with people who can afford to go into underwater basket weaving; I’m not sure.) But I think all you’re pointing out here is that “elite”-ness isn’t the exact same thing as wealth, which I already agreed with.
If the distinction doesn’t matter, there’s no way to appeal to the masses and annoy the elites at the same time
Either you’re equivocating between two notions of “mattering” or I misunderstood you the first time. With the notion you’re apparently using now, I think it’s obvious that the masses/elites distinction “matters”, and—one man’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens—the fact that it’s possible to identify “populists” and distinguish them pretty well from other politicians is good evidence for that.
So what makes positions populist is not that the masses like them, but that the elites dislike them?
No, it’s both. A position disliked by both the masses and the elites is not populist. (A politician who espouses too many of those won’t last long, but I expect it’s possible to survive with one or two, and having them doesn’t constitute populism.)
the left wing nowadays defends the elites and denigrates the stupid masses
Not all of it. You yourself drew attention to Jeremy Corbyn not so long ago, and in the US there’s Bernie Sanders. And by and large all that’s happening is the same thing that always happens whoever’s in power: their opponents attack them with whatever stick is ready to hand. If it happens that the people in power are on the right, their opponents will mostly be on the left; if it happens that the people in power can credibly be accused of stupidity and pandering and whatnot, their opponents will make those accusations.
If you mean there’s some particular inconsistency when lefties denigrate “the masses”, I’m not really seeing it. Sure, left-wing politicians tend to claim to be the defenders of the Ordinary People. But so do right-wing politicians; as you’ve pointed out more than once in this discussion, politicians of all stripes want to be popular. So I’m not sure why complaining about “the stupid masses” is any more inconsistent with leftists’ avowed principles than with rightists’.
The concept of populism certainly exists in the map. People talk about it, they point fingers at things and say “this is {right|left}-wing populism”. My issue is whether this concept found a good joint in the territory to carve along.
For example, consider how you can treat a shadow as a thing in itself, or you can treat it merely as absence of light.
I think the typical underwater basket-weaving student is less “elite” than the typical computer science student
Well, yes, you do. I suspect the underwater basket-weaving student doesn’t. Especially if his basket-weaving is called something like “How Picking Your Nose Is A Transformative Genderqueer Activity That Subverts Patriarchy-Imposed Rules”.
the fact that it’s possible to identify “populists” and distinguish them pretty well from other politicians
But that is exactly what I contest. See the map/territory distinction above.
I’m not sure why complaining about “the stupid masses” is any more inconsistent with leftists’ avowed principles than with rightists’.
Because liberté, égalité, fraternité is a left-wing, not a right-wing motto.
My issue is whether this concept found a good joint in the territory [...] consider how you can treat a shadow [...]
Ah. That would have been clearer to me if you’d found a different way of expressing your concern than by saying ‘I’ve heard a lot about that “rise of right-wing populism”, but remain unconvinced that it actually exists.’ I mean, if you want to say—as you should! -- that shadows are better understood as regions where there’s less light because of occlusion rather than as separate objects in their own right, I don’t think “Shadows don’t exist” is the best way to say it. (But it probably works better than doing the same for “right-wing populism” because it’s more obvious that shadows at-least-kinda-exist, and therefore your audience is more likely to think “hmm, he probably means something cleverer than what he seems to”.)
Well, yes, you do. I suspect the underwater basket-weaving student doesn’t.
Quite possibly. Again, I’m not claiming (and so far as I can tell no one is claiming) that there is a single metric for “eliteness” that everyone completely agrees on, any more than there is for right-wing-ness or intelligence or good musical taste—so I’m not sure how what you say is meant to be a counterargument to anything I’ve been saying. (It is meant to be a counterargument, right?)
But that is exactly what I contest.
Thought experiment: We pick 100 people from (let’s say) the population of adult Americans and anglophone[1] Europeans with an IQ of at least 100 as measured by some arbitrarily chosen standard test. We give them all a brief description of populism, but attach some other name to it in the hope of avoiding pre-existing associations. The description does not name specific politicians or movements. Then we show each of these people a list of the 10 most prominent politicians in several Western countries, and give them a summary of their policy positions and a sample of their speeches (with translations as appropriate). We ask each person to say for each politician how well they fit the profile of Sneetchism or whatever we say instead of “populism”.
[1] Anglophone so that we can give them all the same description. We could equally well pick just francophones or something, but there are more anglophones and I wanted to be able to include reasonably representative Americans too.
I claim that if we did that, we would find (1) good agreement between experimental subjects about how to score each politician and (2) good agreement between typical scores given by our subjects and actual general perceptions of politicians as “populists”. Our subjects will rate Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as more Sneetchy than Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. They will rate Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn as more Sneetchy than Teresa May and Gordon Brown.
(These two are what I mean by saying that it’s possible to identify “populists” and distinguish them from everyone else. Note that that’s not the same as saying that doing so is actually a good idea; as I said before, one can apply the distinction even if it doesn’t “matter”.)
I claim, further, that our subjects’ “populism” scores will not be the same as their own approval scores (e.g., both Trump-lovers and Trump-haters will agree that Trump is highly “populist”) nor the same as the politicians’ actual popularity (e.g., Trump is one of the most “populist” recent US presidents but one of the least popular as measured by vote fraction or approval ratings).
Which of these things, if any, do you disagree with?
Because liberté, égalité, fraternité is a left-wing, not a right-wing motto.
I’m not sure it’s exactly either left-wing or right-wing. In any case, what’s relevant is surely not whether one particular slogan that mentions equality is a left-wing one, but whether the left makes much more claim than the right does to identify with The Ordinary People. I don’t think it does, I’ve said why I don’t think it does, and quoting a single allegedly leftist slogan that talks about equality is in no way responsive to my reasons.
Thought experiment: … Which of these things, if any, do you disagree with?
I don’t know. First, the setup isn’t specific enough (e.g. an awful lot depends on the formulation of your “brief description of populism”), and second I don’t know. I think the outcome of this poll can go this way or that way or sideways or make a nice pirouette or something else. I am surprised you feel so certain about the outcome.
whether the left makes much more claim than the right does to identify with The Ordinary People. I don’t think it does
I think it does. I think the history of the two movements makes it very clear. And notice how the left has a habit of accusing the right of being in the pocket of the rich and the powerful (in other words, elites), but the right does not accuse the left of this.
So you want me to guess how would you set up this hypothetical and then guess again what would be the outcome?
Is the idea that we can argue afterwards about what the outcome of that imaginary situation could be, using words like “realistic”? X-D
What, never? Well, hardly ever.
Individual politicians, sure. That’s just the accusation of being a traitor to the “masses” or, alternatively, of being a LINO (Left In Name Only, see RINO and DINO). Plus, of course, you just throw all the mud you have and see what sticks :-/
But I don’t recall many accusations of Democrats (or Labour) as a political movement of being just a front for the elites, other than from the certifiably extreme left.
So you want me to guess how you would set up this hypothetical and then guess again what would be the outcome?
Not if you think the answer is highly sensitive to the details of how you guess. I don’t think it is, but evidently you do.
(Which is, as I said two comments upthread, an answer to my question of which of my guesses about the outcome of this hypothetical experiment you disagreed with.)
Individual politicians, sure. [...] But I don’t recall many accusations of Democrats (or Labour) as a political movement of being just a front for the elites
Ah, I see. Yup, I’ll agree that that accusation is sometimes made by lefties about the Right as a whole (or at least big chunks of it) and very rarely if at all by righties about the Left as a whole (or big chunks of it). I’m not sure this makes for an actual compelling argument—the context, recall, was whether it’s more unreasonable for lefties than for righties to complain that their political opponents are pandering to the masses instead of listening to the wisdom of the elites. Remember (not that I expect you need reminding) that “the elites” and “the rich” are not the same thing. The people some lefties are accusing some righties of not listening to are not really the same people as those some lefties are accusing some righties of being in the pockets of.
(Note, by the way, that if someone on the right accuses someone on the left—or indeed anyone at all—of being ‘a traitor to the “masses”’, then unless they’re just saying “of course I have no problem with that, but you guys should” they are in fact claiming to speak for those “masses”.)
By the way, you said that the left and the right changed over the past 20 years so that there is no “by default” association of the left with the masses any more. Why do you think so? It sounds like an unusual position to me.
I think the political right tries harder than it used to to appeal to those masses. The left says to the masses “Unlike those bastards on the right, we are going to look out for your economic interests”. The right says to the masses “Unlike those perverts on the left, we are going to respect your values”. (Of course I am caricaturing in both cases, and of course both sides say a little of both those things, and of course the Left/Right dichotomy is a simplification, yadda yadda yadda.)
So, if Team Blue claims to act in the interests of the masses and Team Red claims to share the values of the masses, which one is acting more hilariously/hypocritically if it criticizes its opponents for ignoring the opinions of the elites?
Well, people like Thatcher or Reagan were popular—notably, with the masses—and they predate the shift that you are talking about.
In the US context that would imply that during the Clinton years the Republicans decided they needed to “appeal to those masses” and the result was the success of Bush Jr. That doesn’t look terribly persuasive to me—Bush wasn’t that appealing to the lower classes. The rightist rants for family values and against the degeneracy of the left were also pretty standard fare for more than a couple of decades.
In the UK context this means that after Tony Blair came to power the Tories decided they need more mass appeal and again, I don’t see much evidence for this suggestion. Just like Bush, Cameron was a fairly standard conservative leader.
I am not sure it’s consistent to say both “of course there’s left-wing populism” and “I’m not convinced that the left-wing populism is a thing”, but never mind.
I think you misinterpreted me. Of course there are populists of different sorts. But who they are doesn’t depend much on exactly how you define “populist”. Corbyn and UKIP both appeal more to the less-educated than the more-educated, appeal more to the poor than to the rich, etc.
For sure. I think the typical underwater basket-weaving student is less “elite” than the typical computer science student, precisely because the latter is likely to be well off in 10 years and the former isn’t. (Well … for that exact same reason, maybe it’s the more-elite-to-start-with people who can afford to go into underwater basket weaving; I’m not sure.) But I think all you’re pointing out here is that “elite”-ness isn’t the exact same thing as wealth, which I already agreed with.
Either you’re equivocating between two notions of “mattering” or I misunderstood you the first time. With the notion you’re apparently using now, I think it’s obvious that the masses/elites distinction “matters”, and—one man’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens—the fact that it’s possible to identify “populists” and distinguish them pretty well from other politicians is good evidence for that.
No, it’s both. A position disliked by both the masses and the elites is not populist. (A politician who espouses too many of those won’t last long, but I expect it’s possible to survive with one or two, and having them doesn’t constitute populism.)
Not all of it. You yourself drew attention to Jeremy Corbyn not so long ago, and in the US there’s Bernie Sanders. And by and large all that’s happening is the same thing that always happens whoever’s in power: their opponents attack them with whatever stick is ready to hand. If it happens that the people in power are on the right, their opponents will mostly be on the left; if it happens that the people in power can credibly be accused of stupidity and pandering and whatnot, their opponents will make those accusations.
If you mean there’s some particular inconsistency when lefties denigrate “the masses”, I’m not really seeing it. Sure, left-wing politicians tend to claim to be the defenders of the Ordinary People. But so do right-wing politicians; as you’ve pointed out more than once in this discussion, politicians of all stripes want to be popular. So I’m not sure why complaining about “the stupid masses” is any more inconsistent with leftists’ avowed principles than with rightists’.
The concept of populism certainly exists in the map. People talk about it, they point fingers at things and say “this is {right|left}-wing populism”. My issue is whether this concept found a good joint in the territory to carve along.
For example, consider how you can treat a shadow as a thing in itself, or you can treat it merely as absence of light.
Well, yes, you do. I suspect the underwater basket-weaving student doesn’t. Especially if his basket-weaving is called something like “How Picking Your Nose Is A Transformative Genderqueer Activity That Subverts Patriarchy-Imposed Rules”.
But that is exactly what I contest. See the map/territory distinction above.
Because liberté, égalité, fraternité is a left-wing, not a right-wing motto.
Ah. That would have been clearer to me if you’d found a different way of expressing your concern than by saying ‘I’ve heard a lot about that “rise of right-wing populism”, but remain unconvinced that it actually exists.’ I mean, if you want to say—as you should! -- that shadows are better understood as regions where there’s less light because of occlusion rather than as separate objects in their own right, I don’t think “Shadows don’t exist” is the best way to say it. (But it probably works better than doing the same for “right-wing populism” because it’s more obvious that shadows at-least-kinda-exist, and therefore your audience is more likely to think “hmm, he probably means something cleverer than what he seems to”.)
Quite possibly. Again, I’m not claiming (and so far as I can tell no one is claiming) that there is a single metric for “eliteness” that everyone completely agrees on, any more than there is for right-wing-ness or intelligence or good musical taste—so I’m not sure how what you say is meant to be a counterargument to anything I’ve been saying. (It is meant to be a counterargument, right?)
Thought experiment: We pick 100 people from (let’s say) the population of adult Americans and anglophone[1] Europeans with an IQ of at least 100 as measured by some arbitrarily chosen standard test. We give them all a brief description of populism, but attach some other name to it in the hope of avoiding pre-existing associations. The description does not name specific politicians or movements. Then we show each of these people a list of the 10 most prominent politicians in several Western countries, and give them a summary of their policy positions and a sample of their speeches (with translations as appropriate). We ask each person to say for each politician how well they fit the profile of Sneetchism or whatever we say instead of “populism”.
[1] Anglophone so that we can give them all the same description. We could equally well pick just francophones or something, but there are more anglophones and I wanted to be able to include reasonably representative Americans too.
I claim that if we did that, we would find (1) good agreement between experimental subjects about how to score each politician and (2) good agreement between typical scores given by our subjects and actual general perceptions of politicians as “populists”. Our subjects will rate Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as more Sneetchy than Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. They will rate Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn as more Sneetchy than Teresa May and Gordon Brown.
(These two are what I mean by saying that it’s possible to identify “populists” and distinguish them from everyone else. Note that that’s not the same as saying that doing so is actually a good idea; as I said before, one can apply the distinction even if it doesn’t “matter”.)
I claim, further, that our subjects’ “populism” scores will not be the same as their own approval scores (e.g., both Trump-lovers and Trump-haters will agree that Trump is highly “populist”) nor the same as the politicians’ actual popularity (e.g., Trump is one of the most “populist” recent US presidents but one of the least popular as measured by vote fraction or approval ratings).
Which of these things, if any, do you disagree with?
I’m not sure it’s exactly either left-wing or right-wing. In any case, what’s relevant is surely not whether one particular slogan that mentions equality is a left-wing one, but whether the left makes much more claim than the right does to identify with The Ordinary People. I don’t think it does, I’ve said why I don’t think it does, and quoting a single allegedly leftist slogan that talks about equality is in no way responsive to my reasons.
I don’t know. First, the setup isn’t specific enough (e.g. an awful lot depends on the formulation of your “brief description of populism”), and second I don’t know. I think the outcome of this poll can go this way or that way or sideways or make a nice pirouette or something else. I am surprised you feel so certain about the outcome.
I think it does. I think the history of the two movements makes it very clear. And notice how the left has a habit of accusing the right of being in the pocket of the rich and the powerful (in other words, elites), but the right does not accuse the left of this.
I’d have thought the rest of the thread would give a pretty good idea of the sort of thing I would put in a brief description of populism.
OK, so that in fact is a thing we disagree about: I would be extremely surprised to see much disagreement, and you wouldn’t. I wonder why.
I’d probably agree with you about the left and right of, say, 20 years ago. But political movements change.
What, never? Well, hardly ever.
So you want me to guess how would you set up this hypothetical and then guess again what would be the outcome?
Is the idea that we can argue afterwards about what the outcome of that imaginary situation could be, using words like “realistic”? X-D
Individual politicians, sure. That’s just the accusation of being a traitor to the “masses” or, alternatively, of being a LINO (Left In Name Only, see RINO and DINO). Plus, of course, you just throw all the mud you have and see what sticks :-/
But I don’t recall many accusations of Democrats (or Labour) as a political movement of being just a front for the elites, other than from the certifiably extreme left.
Not if you think the answer is highly sensitive to the details of how you guess. I don’t think it is, but evidently you do.
(Which is, as I said two comments upthread, an answer to my question of which of my guesses about the outcome of this hypothetical experiment you disagreed with.)
Ah, I see. Yup, I’ll agree that that accusation is sometimes made by lefties about the Right as a whole (or at least big chunks of it) and very rarely if at all by righties about the Left as a whole (or big chunks of it). I’m not sure this makes for an actual compelling argument—the context, recall, was whether it’s more unreasonable for lefties than for righties to complain that their political opponents are pandering to the masses instead of listening to the wisdom of the elites. Remember (not that I expect you need reminding) that “the elites” and “the rich” are not the same thing. The people some lefties are accusing some righties of not listening to are not really the same people as those some lefties are accusing some righties of being in the pockets of.
(Note, by the way, that if someone on the right accuses someone on the left—or indeed anyone at all—of being ‘a traitor to the “masses”’, then unless they’re just saying “of course I have no problem with that, but you guys should” they are in fact claiming to speak for those “masses”.)
By the way, you said that the left and the right changed over the past 20 years so that there is no “by default” association of the left with the masses any more. Why do you think so? It sounds like an unusual position to me.
I think the political right tries harder than it used to to appeal to those masses. The left says to the masses “Unlike those bastards on the right, we are going to look out for your economic interests”. The right says to the masses “Unlike those perverts on the left, we are going to respect your values”. (Of course I am caricaturing in both cases, and of course both sides say a little of both those things, and of course the Left/Right dichotomy is a simplification, yadda yadda yadda.)
So, if Team Blue claims to act in the interests of the masses and Team Red claims to share the values of the masses, which one is acting more hilariously/hypocritically if it criticizes its opponents for ignoring the opinions of the elites?
Well, people like Thatcher or Reagan were popular—notably, with the masses—and they predate the shift that you are talking about.
In the US context that would imply that during the Clinton years the Republicans decided they needed to “appeal to those masses” and the result was the success of Bush Jr. That doesn’t look terribly persuasive to me—Bush wasn’t that appealing to the lower classes. The rightist rants for family values and against the degeneracy of the left were also pretty standard fare for more than a couple of decades.
In the UK context this means that after Tony Blair came to power the Tories decided they need more mass appeal and again, I don’t see much evidence for this suggestion. Just like Bush, Cameron was a fairly standard conservative leader.