Category Archives: Populism

As the times change, and our individual lives are shaped in unfamiliar ways, the underlying trends that make society what it is and us who we are have stood constant. An opinion article titled Professors need to guide Gen Z college students through the stress of the pandemic-controlled world by Grace Seymore details her views, as a college student, of an unchanging college experience during a worldwide pandemic that vastly reduces a students ability to cope with college.

Whats most telling about the article is that while it does argue that the pandemic is the reason for changes to be made, every problem mentioned in the article is rooted in the system of education that her college operates in, and had been present before the pandemic for the duration of schooling as we know it.

Ill include my own opinion on the college experience, how systemic trends many years old are changing society.

In her article, Seymour details the pandemics effect on students as follows: Over the past year and a half, college students have been exposed to a world of continual job-loss, hospitalizations, and deaths due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Covid-19 pandemic is causing some very serious problems for students. Students that cannot work may not be able to service their diet, much less their student loans. And students who are hospitalized/dead dont have very good prospects either. Of course, students suffering from job-loss might be able to land an entry-level job, but even here in Connecticut with a $12 minimum wage, entry-level jobs dont pay enough to survive. Students that depend on themselves will need to take substantial overtime, which means less time for school and their own health.

Balancing college with working overtime isnt made for humans. They cant survive it. If schooling isnt drastically changed to cope with the new pandemic economy, students will drop out for financial and health reasons en masse. College will further be for the lucky students with the most supportive, wealthy families. And college is one of the primary tools for ascending the countrys hierarchy. Access to the more irreplaceable jobs that require years of learning is what separates the middle and lower class. What we are seeing in the pandemic is a consolidation of power driven by the suffering of regular people. Of course, the pandemic will end. But even if we can put Covid-19s crisis back in the box now, the problems of the pandemic are merely a glimpse into the future. Job loss hospitalization death. One day every one of us will face one of these things or more. And we will be met with the same care and consideration as any one of those kids.

The snowball effect of education as it is, where access to education is a requirement for wealth, and wealth is a requirement for education, is just one of many problems that has always been there, yet is always getting worse. Changing more lives, changing more towns. But what about the changes that seem to have come out of the woodwork?

Whenever I talk to either of my parents about the newest crazy political thing, they both say the same thing. It didnt used to be this way. I cant say for sure that theyre right; Ive never known anything different. But Ive only cared about the news for a few years. Ten years ago there was this big event on the news that didnt affect me in any way. Occupy Wall Street. We are the 99%. Their tagline is a reference to income and wealth inequality between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population. Its followed me through pop culture up until today, and recently peaked in the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign.

This us vs them, 99% vs 1% view of things is a type of populism, a term for supporting the rights and privileges of the people in a power struggle with a privileged elite. What supporting the rights and privileges of the people is and who the privileged elite is, is very subjective. For example, the will of the people might be what this guy says and the privileged elite can be whoever disagrees with this guy. Populism ranges from the politics of Gandhi to Hitler, broadly anti-elitist but completely dependent on an individuals truth.

My parents dont say It wasnt always like this like we lost a war because people started hating the rich. In 2017, a conspiracy theory movement called QAnon began in earnest. The theory is that an organization of Satan-worshiping pedophiles run the government, media, and finance of the US. It also states that this organization is mobilizing against then-President Trump, and that a Big Storm is coming for those involved. A poll by the PRRI gives 15% as the percent of Americans who consider this theory to be true. Its hard to imagine that such a drastic change in politics was inevitable. But life for the 99% has been slowly, steadily getting harder since 1979, the last year where wages grew with productivity. Whether this is the product of a flawed constitution, capitalism, or the schemes of powerful goth kid-diddlers, a populist movement was always on the way.

Things are crazy right now, and it looks like theyre going to get crazier. The problems of yesterday are here today, getting worse. The education system will stay just as it always has, rejecting the underprivileged, as privilege is monopolized. As life gets harder, and resentment for the powerful grows, just as it always has, new political movements meet popular demand. Our world is being flipped upside down, and it has been for a while.

James Stallone lives in Newtown.

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Opinion: A student: Our world is being flipped upside down, and it has been for a while. - The CT Mirror

Populism Beyond Fear? Frances right-wing Marine Le Pen and left-wing Jean-Luc Mlenchon

But thinking about the relationship between populism, insecurity, and emotions in this one-dimensional way is insufficient. This line of reasoning often relies on incorrect assumptions.

We tend to equate populist commentary on security, with discourses around crime or law and order. This is arguably an oversimplification. The risk is that despite acknowledging that insecurities and grievances play a role in the success of different right-wing populisms we overlook how the populist left also engages in this kind of discourse.

We also tend to think of populism as a negative phenomenon, exploiting peoples deepest fears and clouding rational thinking. On the contrary and just like any other political phenomenon populism can elicit an array of emotional reaction which including positive ones.

I examined speeches by Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mlenchon during the last French Presidential election campaign in 2017. Le Pen is the leader of Rassemblement National (formerly Front National), a prototypical example of a European populist radical right party. Mlenchon is the founder and leader of La France Insoumise, a prototypical example of a populist radical left party.

Le Pen and Mlenchon both conceive of insecurity through notions of danger, uncertainty, anxiety, and the need to protect the people from various harms. Crucially, however, their ideology informs their identification of sources of insecurity. For Le Pen, ideas of physical violence such as crime and terrorism, or cultural threats such as multiculturalism and immigration are most salient. For Mlenchon it is climate change, international securit,y and neoliberalism that are the threats. The two leaders overlap in identifying the European Union as an accelerator, or the actor, ultimately responsible for this exploding insecurity.

The latent emotional fabric of contemporary French populisms insecurity discourse can be mapped through implicit emotional appeals. Both Le Pens and Mlenchons insecurity narratives weave a story of insecurity, centered on the necessity that some threats should be feared and some enemies deserve anger and hostility while some in-groups should make us proud as we hope for solutions.

Through appeals to fear, anger, pride, and hope, Le Pen and Mlenchon perform emotional governance to guide and regulate public emotions on issues. Fear appeals appear at the start of Le Pens and Mlenchons narratives, setting the stage for a source of insecurity. The two then immediately shift attention to the unfair character of this danger and the dismissive, negligent, or even irresponsible behavior of the elites in power. These themes elicit anger and provide an interpretation of insecurity as the intentional product of the malevolent elites.

The narration of an unfair insecure existence is juxtaposed with positive, celebratory remarks praising the people. By highlighting the peoples positive traits and worth, both Le Pen and Mlenchon try to elicit pride in their audiences, re-energizing them in a call to avoid resignation.

Finally, these actors seize the insecure present by proposing actions to address insecurity in the future. In emotional terms, this grounds insecurity narratives in appeals to hope. After telling their audience what is wrong with society and who is responsible for generating pervasive insecurity, Le Pen and Mlenchon offer a positive outlook through reassurance of security attainment (for Mlenchon) and restoration (for Le Pen).

Contemporary insecurity is a complex phenomenon that is not always immediately intelligible. Identifying the emotional content of populist insecurity communication is vital. It helps us understand how populists can shape peoples understanding by focusing on specific interpretative cues. It also allows us to explore how populists address and respond to the wide range of insecurities linked to that appeal.

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Populism's Exploitation of Insecurity: A Look at France ...

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Humanity is running an unprecedented experiment with Earths atmosphere. The last time atmospheric carbon levels were as high as they are now was in the Pliocene epoch, three to five million years ago. Back then, rhinos lived in North America. Crocodiles and alligators lived in Europe. Trees grew in the Arctic. Ocean levels were 75 feet higher. To put it into context, a 75-foot increase in sea levels puts many of the worlds major cities underwater, including London, Miami, Tokyo, Manila, New York, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Jakarta, Dhaka and Shanghai.

In the past 500 million years, the planet has experienced five mass extinction events, each of which wiped out most of the species on the planet. Only one was caused by an asteroid, with the other four being driven by greenhouse gases. Studying the carbon cycle changes that led to these extinction events, geophysicist Daniel Rothman concludes that the threshold for a sixth extinction event is when more than 310 gigatonnes of carbon are added to the oceans. On a business-as-usual trajectory, human carbon emissions are currently on track to add 500 gigatonnes by 2100.

Extreme meteorological events are bumping up against the limits of existing weather scales. Following record-breaking heat in 2013, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology added two new colors to its temperature maps, raising the top temperature from 50 C to 54 C. After Hurricane Harvey, the US National Weather Service added two new shades of purple to its rainfall maps, raising the upper limit from 15 to 30 inches. Meteorologist Jeff Masters proposes that the existing five-category hurricane scale be expanded by including a category six hurricane what he described as a black swan storm.

In Glasgow, countries are confronting the reality that their announced measures will not come close to meeting the Paris climate targets. According to an assessment by the nongovernmental organisation Climate Action Tracker, only a handful of nations have implemented climate policies that are consistent with 2 C of warming, while a few (such as the European Union) would come close. Most countries policies, the body says, are insufficient, highly insufficient or critically insufficient.

There is a strong economic case for climate action. Once installed, wind and solar provide energy at almost zero marginal cost. Averting dangerous climate change avoids the costly impact of heatwaves that cause premature deaths and restrict outdoor work, hurricanes and wildfires that take lives and damage property, destruction of coastal property and reduced agricultural yields.

If these benefits sound good, they should appear doubly attractive when the prospect of averting a global catastrophe is added to the picture. If future lives matter as much as ours, it is callous not to reduce carbon emissions. The case for decisive action is strengthened still further by recognising that much of the problem has been created relatively recently. As journalist David Wallace-Wells has observed, The majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld.

Climate change is not solely a problem bequeathed to us by our ancestors. Many of those responsible for the carbon emissions that are causing the planet to warm are still alive today.

Yet focusing on catastrophic risk in climate change and other areas is hampered by the growth of populist politics. Not every populist is a climate denier, but virtually all climate deniers are populists. One analysis of the 21 largest right-wing populist parties in Europe found that one-third were outright climate deniers, while many others were hostile to climate action. Right-wing populists make up 15% of the European Parliament, but their votes account for around half of all those voting against climate and energy resolutions.

A recent study in the UK identified voters who held populist beliefs about politics. These populist voters were significantly less likely to agree that global warming is caused by human action and less likely to support measures to protect the environment.

Populism is on the rise. From 1990 to 2018, the number of countries with populist leaders increased from four to 20. The best known was President Donald Trump, who once claimed that climate change is a hoax, and asserted that global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive. In the current Congress, 52% of House Republicans and 60% of Senate Republicans are climate deniers.

In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has loosened controls over land clearing in the Amazon. This has led farmers to accelerate deforestation by logging and burning. In mid-2019, satellite analysis of major fires in the Amazon showed that an area the size of Yellowstone National Park had been burned. At this pace, this additional deforestation could push the Amazon rainforest towards a tipping point.

Populists view politics as a contest between a pure mass of people and a vile elite. Right-wing populists often include scientists in their characterisation of the elite. This has led to a spate of clashes between populist leaders and scientists. Dutch far-right leader Thierry Baudet rails against climate change hysteria. Allies of Hungarys leader Viktor Orbn included scientists on a list of people it brands as mercenaries of billionaire philanthropist George Soros.

By throwing petrol on the political flames, populism makes cooperation harder. Californias 2006 cap-and-trade emissions reduction program was passed by a Democratic legislature and signed into law by Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yet today, two-fifths of Republican voters and Democratic voters think their political opponents are evil, and one-sixth regard them as animals. Thats hardly conducive to encouraging representatives to reach across the aisle.

How, then, do we overcome populism? It requires addressing the key economic grievances that have led many voters to turn in desperation to extremists. That means creating renewables jobs in communities whose employment base currently relies on fossil fuels. It involves building a more equitable education system, and updating democratic institutions to make them more democratic. Defusing populist rage takes empathy, not disdain.

Combating populism will not be easy, but it must be done. Our world depends on it.

Andrew Leigh is the author of Whats the Worst That Could Happen? Existential Risk and Extreme Politics, and a member of the Australian Parliament. This article was first published by MIT Press Reader and has been republished here with permission.

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Populism Is Not Good for the Planet - The Wire Science

I go on this great republican principle, James Madison said in 1788, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.

The notion that a virtuous people will select virtuous representatives to exercise their judgment is at the core of the American experiment. Populismthe notion that the people are always right by virtue of being numerous and ordinaryis utterly antithetical to our national idea. The Founders hoped that America would be led by people of moral and intellectual excellence; they built anti-majoritarian firebreaks into the Constitution precisely to avert sudden and intemperate movements.

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Countries that fall to populism inevitably pay the price of misrule. Populism is an excellent vehicle for motivating an angry population, but its a lousy path to better government. Turkey is the most recent nation to learn this lesson the hard way. Since 2016, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan has purged tens of thousands of civil servants (including judges) from the government. The result, as the Turkish writer Semra Alkan recently noted, is that the Turkish state has fired its way into disaster, with Turkey in free fall in every aspectincluding its economy and its foreign policybecause of a government of incompetent lackeys.

Which brings me to New Jersey.

I genuinely have no idea if now-defeated New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney should have lost his seat. He may well deserve to join the ranks of those such as Eric Cantor and Joe Crowley, members of Congress who thought they were invulnerable until a groundswell against them in their primaries proved otherwise.

But I am not moved by the narratives surrounding the candidate who bested him, a truck driver named Edward Durr. Im absolutely nobody. Im just a simple guy. It was the people, it was a repudiation of the policies that have been forced down their throats, he told reporters on Thursday. Durr says he ran because he was upset about being unable to obtain a concealed-carry permit for a weapon in New Jersey.

The plucky ordinary fellow taking down the mossy old Trenton pol has been catnip for many of my former comrades on the right, including many I greatly respect. But they seem to be acting on the belief that the local voter is always right and the long-serving politician is always wrong.

Tom Nichols: This Republican Party is not worth saving

Or, at least, that the local voter is always right if the challenger is a Republican. This is not a narrative, I should add, that any conservatives seem willing (as far as I know) to apply to upstarts such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Few Republicans applauded the temerity and grit of a young state legislator named Barack Obama, whom they argued was just a pushy gate-jumper.

Inexperienced people who will carry forward your agenda are good; inexperienced people who will oppose you are merely inexperienced and arrogant.

I find this kind of populist celebration of inexperience particularly painful, because I know that local action can be powerful. Some 40 years ago, my working-class city in western Massachusetts was in the grip of its postindustrial slide. Our small neighborhood was tucked up against the polluted banks of the Connecticut River, shining with oil and dead fish, and our view of the water was marred by paper factories on the opposite shore dumping chemicals day and night. Property values, never particularly high, suffered; tidy three-deckers were abandoned and then repopulated by a rough crowd, including drug dealers.

My parents were trying to run a struggling restaurant during the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the short walk from our house to the business took us right past a small drug market. Cars pulled up and sales were made in plain sight. My mother tried to get the city to do something, but there were only so many police, and the landlords of the building seemed immune to zoning or health infractions.

My mother ran for local alderman on the single-issue platform of getting drugs out of the neighborhood. She wasnt trying to run the city, or become the governor, or solve the Soviet-American arms race. She just wanted the drugs gone.

Yascha Mounk: You cant win elections by telling voters their concerns are imaginary

She won. In a year, working with other city officials, she had helped bring a police substation to the area and demanded better enforcement of city ordinances against the landlords. The market was driven from the neighborhood.

But my mother also learned something about governing. In particular, she learned that she was not very good at it. City budgets were complicated; her knowledge of other neighborhoods in the city was limited; she didnt have the experience to do the million small things that constituents demanded. She was trying to run a business with my father at the same time, and she could not juggle the many hours in the day that both jobs required.

After one term, she was defeated by the same machine politician she had unseated. In her honest moments later, she admitted she probably shouldnt have run for reelection, but the race had a kind of grudge-match feel to it, and she let herself be talked into one more campaign, despite having already achieved the one thing she wanted to accomplish. I was no fan of the man who beat her, but he did know how to get potholes filled, and my mother did not.

I sincerely hope this truck driver turns out to be a good legislator. The early signs are not encouraging. His tweets and posts suggest that he might not be the virtuous and patriotic underdog his supporters believe him to be. In December 2019, for example, he tweeted, Mohammad was a pedophile! Islam is a false religion! Only fools follow muslim teachings! It is a cult of hate! His Twitter account is now deactivated. (In a statement issued to several media outlets yesterday, he wrote, Im a passionate guy and I sometimes say things in the heat of the moment. If I said things in the past that hurt anybodys feelings, I sincerely apologize. I support everybodys right to worship in any manner they choose and to worship the God of their choice.)

People who air grievances tend to carry more than a few of them, and so it seems in this instance. I love the David and Goliath stories of politics, but only if David isnt also a Philistinein which case, the contest is a draw no matter who wins.

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, Madison said in his 1788 address, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. Conservatives hammer the gong of a republic, not a democracy when it suits them. If America abandons Madisons warning, we might still be a democracy, but we will no longer be a republic. We should think hard about that distinction before drinking too much of the populist moonshine.

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What New Jersey Truck Driver Edward Durr's Win Reveals About Populism - The Atlantic

Before 2019, the AAP assumed a vocal anti-BJP character, with Kejriwal regularly feuding with the Central government, and particularly with Modi personally, at one point even terming the Prime Minister a coward and a (sic) psychopath. He appeared on TV channels accusing the ruling BJP of being the handmaiden of Ambani and Adani and slaying government policies such as demonetisation. While he was never an outspoken critic of Hindutva like Rahul Gandhi, he could occasionally condemn Modi for his Hindu-Muslim politics in public rallies. The path to expansion then lied, for Kejriwal, in capturing the opposition space by attacking the BJP.

All this changed after the 2019 election when AAP was humiliated by the BJP in all seven seats of Delhi. But for Bhagwant Manns win in Punjab, it would have lost all the forty seats it contested. Almost overnight, the AAP lost its anti-BJP voice, and it has spent the next two years pursuing a thorough course correction.

All of AAPs subsequent politics has been informed by its reading of the 2019 election mandate. The party made two calculations, both valid in this authors estimation. One, the ideological centre-ground of Indian politics has shifted Right, and two, for the foreseeable future, India would be under a BJP-dominant system. Gauging these larger structural shifts, Kejriwal set about refashioning his centrist populism in a distinctive rightward mould.

This is a rather simplistic conclusion. Whatever the moral objections to AAP legitimising Hindutva majoritarian symbols in the public sphere, it is quite possible that this new politics might aid the party in its expansion plans.

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Kejriwal & AAPs Tryst With Hindutva When Populism Trumps Ideology - The Quint

By throwing petrol on the political flames, populism makes cooperation on climate change nearly impossible.

Humanity is running an unprecedented experiment with the earths atmosphere. The last time atmospheric carbon levels were as high as they are now was in the Pliocene epoch, three to five million years ago. Back then, rhinos lived in North America. Crocodiles and alligators lived in Europe. Trees grew in the Arctic. Ocean levels were 75 feet higher. To put it into context, a 75-foot increase in sea levels puts many of the worlds major cities underwater, including London, Miami, Tokyo, Manila, New York, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Jakarta, Dhaka, and Shanghai.

In the past 500 million years, the planet has experienced five mass extinction events, each of which wiped out most of the species on the planet. Only one was caused by an asteroid, with the other four being driven by greenhouse gases. Studying the carbon cycle changes that led to these extinction events, geophysicist Daniel Rothman concludes that the threshold for a sixth extinction event is when more than 310 gigatons of carbon are added to the oceans. On a business-as-usual trajectory, human carbon emissions are currently on track to add 500 gigatons by 2100.

Extreme meteorological events are bumping up against the limits of existing weather scales. Following record-breaking heat in 2013, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology added two new colors to its temperature maps, raising the top temperature from 122F (50C) to 129F (54C). After Hurricane Harvey, the U.S. National Weather Service added two new shades of purple to its rainfall maps, raising the upper limit from 15 to 30 inches. Meteorologist Jeff Masters proposes that the existing five-category hurricane scale be expanded by including a category six hurricane what he described as a black swan storm.

Not every populist is a climate denier, but virtually all climate deniers are populists.

This week in Glasgow, countries are confronting the reality that their announced measures will not come close to meeting the Paris climate targets. According to an assessment by the nongovernmental organization Climate Action Tracker, only a handful of nations have implemented climate policies that are consistent with 2C of warming, while a few (such as the European Union) would come close. Most countries policies, the body says, are insufficient, highly insufficient, or critically insufficient.

There is a strong economic case for climate action. Once installed, wind and solar provide energy at almost zero marginal cost. Averting dangerous climate change avoids the costly impact of heatwaves that cause premature deaths and restrict outdoor work, hurricanes and wildfires that take lives and damage property, destruction of coastal property, and reduced agricultural yields.

If these benefits sound good, they should appear doubly attractive when the prospect of averting a global catastrophe is added to the picture. If future lives matter as much as ours, it is callous not to reduce carbon emissions. The case for decisive action is strengthened still further by recognizing that much of the problem has been created relatively recently. As journalist David Wallace-Wells has observed, The majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld. Climate change is not solely a problem bequeathed to us by our ancestors. Many of those responsible for the carbon emissions that are causing the planet to warm are still alive today.

Yet focusing on catastrophic risk in climate change and other areas is hampered by the growth of populist politics. Not every populist is a climate denier, but virtually all climate deniers are populists. One analysis of the 21 largest right-wing populist parties in Europe found that one-third were outright climate deniers, while many others were hostile to climate action. Right-wing populists make up 15 percent of the European Parliament, but their votes account for around half of all those voting against climate and energy resolutions. A recent study in the United Kingdom identified voters who held populist beliefs about politics. These populist voters were significantly less likely to agree that global warming is caused by human action and less likely to support measures to protect the environment.

Populism is on the rise. From 1990 to 2018, the number of countries with populist leaders increased from four to 20. The best known was President Donald Trump, who once claimed that climate change is a hoax, and asserted that global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. In the current Congress, 52 percent of House Republicans and 60 percent of Senate Republicans are climate deniers. In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has loosened controls over land clearing in the Amazon. This has led farmers to accelerate deforestation by logging and burning. In mid-2019, satellite analysis of major fires in the Amazon showed that an area the size of Yellowstone National Park had been burned. At this pace, this additional deforestation could push the Amazon rainforest toward a tipping point.

Populists view politics as a contest between a pure mass of people and a vile elite. Right-wing populists often include scientists in their characterization of the elite. This has led to a spate of clashes between populist leaders and scientists. Dutch far-right leader Thierry Baudet rails against climate change hysteria. Allies of Hungarys leader Viktor Orbn included scientists on a list of people it brands as mercenaries of billionaire philanthropist George Soros.

Defusing populist rage takes empathy, not disdain.

By throwing petrol on the political flames, populism makes cooperation harder. Californias 2006 cap-and-trade emissions reduction program was passed by a Democratic legislature and signed into law by Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yet today, two-fifths of Republican voters and Democratic voters think their political opponents are evil, and one-sixth regard them as animals. Thats hardly conducive to encouraging representatives to reach across the aisle.

How, then, do we overcome populism? It requires addressing the key economic grievances that have led many voters to turn in desperation to extremists. That means creating renewables jobs in communities whose employment base currently relies on fossil fuels. It involves building a more equitable education system, and updating democratic institutions to make them more democratic. Defusing populist rage takes empathy, not disdain.

Combating populism will not be easy, but it must be done. Our world depends on it.

Andrew Leigh is the author of Whats the Worst That Could Happen? Existential Risk and Extreme Politics and a member of the Australian Parliament.

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How Populism Imperils the Planet - The MIT Press Reader

Photos by Adam Schultz/Biden for President and Gage Skidmore via Flickr

In this Question of the Week podcast episode, College of Arts & Sciences political scientist Lauren Mattioli assesses Joe Biden one year after his election. Promising to jettison Trumpism, the president has lowered the rhetorical thermostat, Mattioli says, but in areas like immigration, he is disappointing supporters with a populist politics, while GOP obstructionism imperils the rest of his agenda.

You can also find this episode onApple Podcasts,Spotify,Google Podcasts, andother podcast platforms.

Dana Ferrante: This is Question of the Week, from BU Today. Has Joe Biden jettisoned Trumpism and populist politics as promised? In this episode, Rich Barlow, BU Today senior writer, talks to Lauren Mattioli, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of political science, about whether Biden has lowered the temperature, as he promised, and abandoned the incendiary style of governance of his predecessor.

One year after the 2020 presidential election, Mattioli discusses which aspects of Trumpism Biden has rejected, and whether there are some aspects he has not.

Rich Barlow: Thank you, Professor Mattioli, for joining us this week.

Lauren Mattioli: Sure. Happy to be here.

Barlow: We are roughly one year after the presidential election of 2020. Has Joe Biden abandoned Trumpism and populist politics as he promised?

Mattioli: I wanted to push you a little bit on your working definition of Trumpism, to see if we have the same one. I think I might have a guess of what your definition of Trumpism is, but if you wouldnt mind explaining a little bit, that would probably make it easier for me to answer.

Barlow: Well, partly, stylistically being the incendiary center of attention 24/7 with tweets in the wee hours that consume the news cycle. And substantively, I guess populist politics would be policies that made up his MAGA platform, from immigration restrictionsand I think, what a lot of people would say, being a window, or a channel, for white grievance.

Mattioli: So yeah, it sounds like were working with the same ideas. I guess I was thinking more about the substance I think the question of whether the Trumpistic style rhetoric has changed is pretty self-evident. Not only do we see a different tone when Biden speaks, but also hes letting the members of his administration do the talking sometimes. And relying on his very competent communication staff and press staff. So I think thats one feature of the rhetoric thats really different. Also, just in terms of the text analysis that Ive done, hes using less incendiary language. Hes not using the types of words that we would normally associate with ideological extremism.

And then substantively, I guess, I thought of Trumpism as having three primary components, at least as far as he and Biden differ. So, the sort of general international relations isolationism, where it was a very America-centric, isolationist policy. And I think Biden, by reengaging in the Paris Climate Accord and with the WHO, reversing the travel ban from primarily Muslim countries, rebuilding our refugee resettlement program, that those are all policy steps that hes taken that I think show a distinct, substantive shift.

Another isI think Trumpism, as you mentioned, is sort of a window, or a sounding board, or a welcome of a set of thoughts around white grievance. And to me, Trumpism was about conserving the status quo around race and gender and anti-progressivism on those fronts. And I think Biden has made some progress on that.

Hes done a couple of things within the administration, like creating this gender policy council and asking the Department of Education to look back over their policies regarding education and sexual violence rules [which Betsy DeVos, Trumps education secretary, had rolled back]. President Trump talked about COVID as being the China virus, whereas the Biden administration has created a task force to combat racism against Asian [Americans] and Pacific Islanders.

So I think thats a big distinction just in policy, and in rhetoric around race, gender, and sexual violence. I forgot to also mention the reversal of the transgender ban on the military. And last, there was this element of Trumpism that was like very pro-business, pro-elite, which is sort of in opposition to what we would normally think of as populism.

But I think if anything, Biden is more populist in that regard, in terms of focusing on labor and the economically marginal, whereas some of the Trump administration policies were actively antagonizing problems that the economically marginal face. But, I wouldnt say complete abandonment is the right characterization of the Biden administration, because theres still lots of rhetoric that is very popular around traditional isolationism, like this Buy American policy within the Biden administration, which is reminiscent of the economic isolationism that was characteristic of the Trump administration.

[Biden has] maintained the steel tariffs that were so controversial during the Trump administration Also, I think the maltreatment of allies, which [has not been] so bad in the Biden administration, but was particularly heightened during this recent debacle with the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And so I dont think its a total abandonment of populist policies and rhetoric, [but] its certainly toned down.

Its definitely a shift away from this individual-centered, charismatic leadership thats vested in ideological extremism. And so, definitely a shift rhetorically and substantively, but maybe not as far as Biden supporters might have hoped.

Barlow: You mentioned [its] not as far as his supporters had hopedcritics would also say that Bidens immigration policy and his fumbled withdrawal from Afghanistan are also reminiscent of Trumpism.

What changes should he make in his approach?

Mattioli: I think I want to take those in turn. So, I think the Afghanistan withdrawal was going to be thorny for any president that tried to do something, instead of just continuing to kick that policy can down the road. But I think this was a particularly poor handling of it.

And policy obviously matters, but how we talk about policy decisions matters [too], and I think Bidens rhetoric around Afghanistan was really problematic. I think it was an Al Jazeera article that described it as humility free, and I liked that because weve come to associate Biden with being almost self-effacing and a humble everyman. But then in discussing Afghanistan, he really isnt owning the mistakes that are very clear to his detractors.

And I think thats sort of interesting, because that was what many people thought was good about Biden as a contrast to Trump. But I think on the Afghanistan thing, the idea of not owning the problemsthere may have been problems inevitablybut I think failing to acknowledge them is undermining the overall effort.

It was going to be difficult no matter what. But the way hes dealt with it I think has exacerbated the problem. And then on immigration, this is the characteristic of democratic infightingthe rhetoric isnt the issue as much as the policy. So in contrast to Afghanistan, yeah, the border has still, I think as of two or three days ago, its still using public health measures to keep people from entering the country, still putting children in cages.

And theres no rhetoric that can excuse that. So I think the change you need to make on immigration is to stop using [Title] 42 [the principal set of public health rules and regulations issued by US federal agencies] to expel immigrants. Its offensive to the public health policy. We cant say we have this new turning point in the administration of a pandemic and then co-opt public health to serve a political agenda.

And then I think, generally, the move after that sort of long-term goal needs to be developing a legitimate process for dealing with asylum cases that can deal with this influx. If the system is overwhelmed, its not the asylum seekers fault, its the systems fault and the system needs to be reformed.

And I think that would require effort and also acknowledgement of the failures of the administration. And I havent seen that decisively.

Barlow: Youre a scholar of the American presidency and American government. So let me play devils advocate and ask you this: you talked about the presidents failures of humility on Afghanistan and policy on immigration, but with Republicans bent on obstruction, pretty much of anything he does, and Democrats bitterly divided among themselves, is quiet and successful governance possible for any president these days?

Mattioli: This is a question that I might steal from you and put on my final exam the next time I teach the presidency. Im not sure if weve ever had quiet, successful governance, I want to push back on that, [but] youre right, the policy for Republicans in Congress has been total obstruction of a Democratic presidents agenda.

And thats forced Democratic presidents and some Republican presidents facing divided government to act unilaterally. And so the source of successful governance comes from the executive branch and to a lesser extent the judiciary. So the prospect for good governance if nothing substantive can come out of Congresswe still have options, maybe less attractive options and less democratic, majoritarian options, but therere still possibilities for governance through unilateral executive action and through case-by-case policy-making, what I call judicial policy-making in the courts.

And Democrats are divided on breadth and depth of policy change, and the sort of exhaustion of effort amongst themselves isI think theyre putting a lot into identifying precisely what policy should look like without an eye towards actually getting those policies through Congress. Not to say that theyre totally not forecasting the possibilities, but I think the focus needs to be on overcoming obstructionism rather than overcoming their own internal factions, which is easier said than done, of course.

And then, probably the better approach politically for them will be focusing on winning a unified government come election time next year. And in the meantime, putting Republicans in a position where they have to make unpopular votes and force them to sort of call the bluff. Thats something thatweve seen [in] the sort of blame game politicking that has been successful to a certain extent in the past.

But whos going to suffer are the people who need policy, like Americans who need health care and need food aid and need unemployment insurance. And so the cost of obstruction then is public good. So a successful governance is going to have to come from someplace other than Congress, I think, so long as trends continue as they have been.

Barlow: And that place would be?

Mattioli: I think the executive branch and the courts. I think the prospects for major policy changesexcept for maybe on infrastructure, which is sort of shown to be the only bipartisan issue thats getting real momentumwell have to see about any major policy advancement; I think thats going to have to happen unilaterally through the executive branch, which will be unpopular, but so will not doing anything.

Barlow: I was going to ask, thats a gamble for the president, right?

Mattioli: Of course.

Barlow: Some pundits are saying that if he cant achieve anything between now and the midterms, or cant achieve much of his agenda, and a lot of his agenda cant be achieved, unless Im wrong, solely by executive action, the Democrats can take a shellacking next year.

Mattioli: Yeah, I think Democrats want to avoid committing the sins of the 2010 midterms, where having a unified Democratic Congress, they were able to get a lot of policies through and were basically saying, we take full credit for everything thats happened, and then sort of got blamed for everything that didnt happen that may have been due to obstructionism.

Unified government doesnt mean complete consensus on everything. So I think if theyre smart, Democrats will have to make it clear what theyre going to really take credit for. And politicians are horrible about this, right? They take credit for successes even if they arent theirs, and they reject their culpability and failures, even if they are theirs.

And then itll be up to voters to decide whos responsible. So its possible, youre right, that Democrats could take a shellacking and could really face defeat in the midterms, if Biden doesnt get a lot of [his agenda] through, with the caveat that if he can successfully blame Republicans, it may not be the case.

Ferrante: Thanks to Lauren Mattioli for joining us on this episode of Question of the Week. If you liked the show, subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and never miss an episode. Im Dana Ferrante; see you next week

Excerpt from:

Has Joe Biden Abandoned Trumpism and Populist Politics? - BU Today

I have been wrong about very many things across many areas of our social world. With the results streaming in as I write this evening, it is clear that I have been wrong about the EFF in the LGE21.

I really believed that it would do outstandingly well in the election. As for having been so wrong, I will paraphrase Cardinal Newman and say that I am perfectly happy to admit to the worst that can be said of me as a writer on current affairs; this occasion being that I was wrong. (Dont ask me where I read that, I only remembered that he wrote something like that)

For what its worth, I have studied the EFF closely for about three or four years, and only Covid-19, my chronic lung problems and a battered immune system prevented me from travelling to remote places, digging into archives and gathering facts to strengthen or support all the information I had collected by the start of 2020 Nonetheless, there remains ample opportunity to make up for lost time.

The EFF is a fascinating study of a leftist organisation and its drift to extremist right-wing politics in the same way that Benito Mussolini started out as a socialist and ended up as a fascist, or the way that Juan Peron used his ersatz progressive political base of labour and the church to establish the ratlines escape routes for Nazis after the World War 2. But thats for another discussion.

With the LGE21 almost fully behind us, all bar the shouting, to which, I am sure, we will return once legislators return, the fact that the EFF seems (at the time of writing) to hover around the 10% mark overall may be a reflection of at least two things.

The first is that South Africans seem to not have the stomach for the EFFs particular brand of contemporary fascism blended as it is with populism, race-baiting, name-calling and scapegoating. The second is that the EFF and its loyalists mistook performance for substance. To these, I would add that South Africa provides fertile ground for Julius Malemas type of populism and politics of revenge, but it may be that South African voters are a lot smarter than we (particularly I) give them credit for.

Populism makes for good soundbites

Everything that the EFF has said and done in the weeks before the election has come from Malema. Its easy to say that the EFF has come to resemble a cult around his personality. But there is an analogy (from my least favourite sport, baseball) I want to try.

Malema has been good at getting his followers on to first base, sometimes to second base, but he just could not bring it home. Not for want of trying.

Lets stretch the analogy a bit. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I watched a few New York Yankees matches. Please dont ask me why I went to watch them play, because I hated the sport. The truth is that I hated the spectacle; the symbols of national pride, triumphalism, gorging of junk food and excessive patriotism. For what its worth, when the Springboks won the Rugby World Cup it had absolutely no meaning or significance to me

Anyway, the Yankees had among their ranks a closer, a pitcher called Mariano Revera. His sole job was to go to the mound for the last two or three innings (I think) when the Yankees had a lead and basically shut down any opposition efforts at beating the New Yorkers. Rivera is sometimes described as the best closer in the history of Major League Baseball.

The EFFs problem, it seems to me, is that it (Malema, actually) was quite brilliant when it came to winning hearts and minds, but it did not have a Mariano Riviera, someone to protect its gains and convert them into wins. We should be intellectually honest, the same socio-economic conditions (poverty, unemployment, distrust of international liberalism and dispute over lost territory) and disaffection with the peace settlement (in 1919) that gave rise to Mussolini, are somehow replicated in South Africa.

We have poverty, mass unemployment, a ready-made enemy in white monopoly capital our own version of 1920s Italys international liberalism, the loss of land and the dissatisfaction with South Africas peaceful political settlement of the 1990s. On paper, then, the country is ripe for populism which may account for Malemas popularity. The problem is that the EFF could not translate that into electability it did not have a Mariano Rivera.

The people necessarily have the ultimate say

Malema has a brilliant way of addressing crowds that verges on shamanistic Im probably being unfair to shamanism. Nonetheless, Malema has a way of almost intoxicating his audience and making it seem delirious with a toxic brew of racial hatred, revenge, vitriol, name-calling song and dance. However, what Malema seems to have misread is that the objective of institutionalising a particular rhetoric, hoping that it will shape a particular mode of thinking which will follow seamlessly into a particular mode of acting has not quite panned out. I hasten to add that there is time, yet.

The EFFs brand of populism, and Malemas drift into contemporary fascism alongside Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte and Victor Orban, should appeal to the poor, the unemployed, the disaffected, the homeless and the anti-globalists and liberal internationalists. But the electorate, small as it may have turned out to be in the LGE21, have had the ultimate say.

In some ways it is business as usual at the top. The ANCs losses/gains, the DAs losses/gains, the EFFs marginal losses/gains, the revival of Herman Mashaba and the mushrooming of small parties may throw up some interesting permutations in lawmaking (and hopefully in governance).

What is clear is that for those who voted for populism and the EFF was just not enough, and any way, Malema could inspire people with rhetoric, but could not translate that into votes. Perhaps he took on too much, maybe he needed a closer, like Mariano Rivera, but it doesnt matter for now.

The basic point I have to make is that I was wrong in thinking that the EFF would at least replace the DA as official opposition or as actual local government in most local government legislatures and municipalities around the country.

I was wrong to think that South Africans would be seduced by Malemas rhetoric, that he would intoxicate them with his oration and that this would lead to votes. I misread the electorate. DM

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Malema and the EFF failed to translate their populism into significant electoral gain - Daily Maverick

We learn most from our critics. Paul Greenberg used to say that all the time. And he always seemed like he meant it. We learn from our failures, he'd tell us. Adding that he hated to brag, but he'd had many.

The best critic of the Republican Party these days might be Bret Stephens, the writer for The New York Times. The paper must've hired him to be the conservative. His columns aren't just well-reasoned, they're wickedly biting. (And his dueling-banjo column with Gail Collins every week is a must-read.) Now that Paul Greenberg and Dr. Charles Krauthammer are gone, if you want the smart conservative point of view, in this day of populism, we point you to Mr. Stephens.

There are others who'd fight the good fight from the inside. To paraphrase LBJ so much that it doesn't sound like him anymore, it's better to have somebody inside the tent spitting out than outside the tent spitting in. For the Democrats, the best critics might be one of its biggest stars.

Some might say that James Carville is a "former" star. That the Day of Clinton has passed, and years ago. But tell that to TV audiences. If the number of his appearances on cable talk shows are a sign, people still want to hear what he says. Or maybe it's the accent.

In the wake of this past week's elections in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere--in which Democratic candidates didn't do nearly as well as predicted, and some even lost--James Carville could be found giving his point of view. And his party would be mistaken to ignore it.

On PBS, the day after the election, Judy Woodruff asked Mr. Carville what happened. How did a first-time gubernatorial candidate, Glenn Youngkin, beat the old pro, Terry McAuliffe, in Virginia's gubernatorial race?

"What went wrong," James Carville said, "is just stupid wokeness. Don't just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island. Look at Buffalo. Look at Minneapolis. Even look at Seattle, Washington. I mean, this 'Defund the Police' lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln's name off of schools. I mean that--people see that!"

And continued: "It's just really--has a suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a 'woke' detox center or something. They're expressing a language that people just don't use, and there's backlash and a frustration at that."

He said, in his style, that the Republican candidate in Virginia just let the Democrats pull the pin and watched as the grenade went off.

"We got to change this and not be about changing dictionaries and change laws. These faculty lounge people that sit around mulling about I don't know what . . . . They're not working."

We learn most from our critics. When we bother to listen.

After his own party was shelled back in his day--and his day was 1958--Whittaker Chambers sent this message to a young man named Bill Buckley, who was just opening up a political journal you might have heard of:

"If the Republican Party cannot get some grip of the actual world we live in, and from it generalize and actively promote a program that means something to masses of people--why, somebody else will. There will be nothing to argue. The voters will simply vote Republicans into singularity. The Republican Party will become like one of those dark little shops which apparently never sell anything. If, for any reason, you go in, you find, at the back, an old man, fingering for his own pleasure some oddments of cloth. Nobody wants to buy them, which is fine because the old man is not really interested in selling. He just likes to hold and to feel."

Substitute "Democrat" for "Republican" and see if the statement still makes sense.

One party in this two-party system has been woke for a few years now. After Tuesday, maybe it's awake.

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OPINION | EDITORIAL: Reading the tea leaves, or maybe the chicken bones - Arkansas Online

WINCHESTER, Virginia In the first post-pandemic election, voters here showed their dissatisfaction with the Democrats, handing victories to GOP candidates running for the top two jobs in the state. In his victorious race for governor, businessman Glenn Allen Youngkin became the first Republican to win statewide in a dozen years, proving Virginia isnt so true blue, after all.

The reckoning happened in a state Joe Biden won in a comfortable landslide less than a year ago, in a place where Republicans have lost their majority in the state chamber over the past four years.

While the Democratic nominee for governor, Terry McAuliffe, insisted the election was all about Donald J. Trump and patted his party on the back for its COVID policies, voters here gave him a wake-up call. Virginians voted on what they think the next problems are: the economy, their childrens education, crime, and definitely not COVID.

McAuliffes strategy of focusing on COVID, Trump, Trump and Trump was wildly out of touch. He and his fellow Democrats missed the most fundamental thing about human behavior, which is that people always vote looking forward. What matters is their lives, their childrens lives, their grandchildrens lives and their community not what happened yesterday.

When the Dems won the presidency, a narrow majority in the House and split the power in the Senate last year, they did so on a promise to return to normal. Yet, on every issue, whether it was shutting down the pipelines on day one, ignoring the crisis at the southern border, dismissing concerns about inflation, failing completely on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, or directing the Department of Justice to address angry parents at raucous school board meetings, voters soured on how they governed.

Even the coveted suburban college-educated voters gave Youngkin 45 percent of their backing in Loudoun County, a multicultural and wealthy string of suburbsconsidered one of the most-educated counties in America.

Voters of all parties and persuasions turned out on Tuesday in record-shattering numbers disproving McAuliffes claim that turnout and enthusiasm for Democrats would be a problem. In fact, McAuliffe received around 200,000 more votes than current Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam received four years ago.

Youngkin, now the governor-elect of Virginia, won with a coalition of working-class whites, evangelicals and the support of 46 percent of suburban voters up a whopping 6 percentage points over Trumps suburban numbers in 2020. He also won 45 percent of college-educated voters, according tostatistics compiled by the Associated PressVoteCast. He and McAuliffe evenly split the Hispanic vote, a culturally conservative voting bloc that has continued to shift further and further right as the Democrat Party keeps lurching toward a progressive socialist platform.

Crime was the issue that first moved Youngkin from six points to less than one point behind his opponent, after McAuliffe said in May he wanted everybody to have access to parole. In the final weeks, Youngkins support grew incrementally as he discussed the economy and parents concerns over their childrens education, which has become increasingly dominated by critical race theory.

What is most remarkable about this election is that Youngkins overall message resonated everywhere in what was thought to be a very blue state, said Bruce Haynes, a Republican and chairman of a Virginia-based public affairs strategic communications firm.

Youngkins proposal to eliminate the sales tax on groceries resonated strongly with people who rely on the public school system, and who are impacted by gas prices and supply chain shortages, Haynes said. And his message on education reflected the reality the parents saw and heard in their own homes during the pandemic. They saw firsthand how their children were taught.

Plus, despite his estimated $440 million fortune, father-of-four Youngkin was not an objectionable candidate. He was a fleece-vest-wearing family man who was as unthreatening as Trump was provocative, Haynes said.

Youngkin served up a plate of traditional Republican economic ideas sprinkled with a dose of educational populism, and voters especially those most vulnerable to and impacted by the pandemic were hungry for it.

The biggest problem for Democrats is they never tried to fix their estrangement from blue collar and rural voters and relied only on hatred of Trump to reap the suburbs. Eventually they were going to have to face an election without Trump.

This is the first one. And it will not be the last.

Salena Zito is the author of The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.

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Virginia election proves voters are sick of hearing about Donald Trump - New York Post