Populism Fast and Slow
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The article 'Populism Fast and Slow' discusses the concept of populism and its implications, sparking a nuanced discussion among commenters about its causes, effects, and relation to social and economic factors.
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There were actual problems with immigration, crime, and trade that were aggressively ignored by both parties perhaps one more than the other. The problems grew and grew in the collective minds of the public until enough of the public started to support "let's solve it like fascists".
The lesson is that you can't manifest a perfect political reality by pretending problems don't exist.
Political "reality" is rarely objective.
I used to live in Oakland, CA...about a mile from MLK. I can tell you plenty about the amount of crime there over the last decade. I've known lots of people from the suburbs that will try to tell me that crime is down, meanwhile I saw my neighbors getting robbed during the day (not just at night anymore).
If your only experience with these things is watching the news, you really shouldn't be talking about them. And taking police services away from the poorest parts of town is despicable.
PS It was the votes from those high crime districts that got Trump elected last year. The people down there don't watch the news. Your take is just copium because you don't want to do the real work of looking at your side's policies and fixing what is costing you voters and elections.
I know that the crime stats say crime is down. But that's not the lived experience for a lot of people. And unless politicians are willing to acknowledge there are issues, and do the work to tackle them, you get demagogues. Right-wing ones will use it to extol the virtues of cracking down, left-wing ones will use it to talk about the plight of the downtrodden.
Meanwhile, you still have people for whom crime is the best option, and you have people who suffer from crime. We could choose to solve those problems (independent of political leaning), and we could choose to solve both sides of the coin. But that'd probably be too rational to sell at the voting booth.
> It was the votes from those high crime districts that got Trump elected last year. The people down there don't watch the news.
[citation needed] They do get enough info through various channels to decide "Trump might fix it". And a good chunk of that is news. We can debate the veracity of info they derive, and how they make their decisions, but let's not go "poor people don't watch news". Mass media exists and has effects, across all demographic strata. Mass media is a tool of demagogues, willing or unwilling.
But that's really also the point of the article - "if people just had better info" isn't actually a workable answer to demagogues. And so debates about media consumption are mostly useless waffling. See above re "what if we instead thought about fixing real issues"
I'm not sure the 'people for whom crime is the best option' is really the right way to look at it. The vast majority of people in West Oakland never commit any crimes. And ignoring these realities is what is driving populism. Articles like this one say a lot more about the author than they do about political science or populism.
When I say the people in that neighborhood don't watch the news, I'm not making a value judgement. I'm just stating a fact. They don't really care about politics. They do care if the police come when they call and they do care if they can walk the streets at least some part of the day safely.
If Dems really wanted to win an election, they would change policy. Until they do that, they will continue to lose elections. That's Democracy working, not some new or different politics at work.
"A large chunk of those repeat offenders have serious mental illness" -> 25%. A bigger problem is substance abuse, at 52%.
Your "Most of the rest view crime as either a job or a lifestyle" and my "people for whom crime is the best option" are saying the same thing. So I'm not clear why you say you're not sure it's the right way to look at it. We both agree that there are subgroups that choose crime deliberately, and based on the stats, it's still a fairly significant group.
"And ignoring these realities is what is driving populism". -> Yes. That is exactly what the article is saying. Quote: "This gives rise to a set of views among those elites, [...] which are basically out of sync with the views of the majority". You're 100% aligned with the author here.
My point is that what is driving populism is poor performance by the elites. The other side of this coin is regular folks noticing the bad performance while understanding (in this case correctly) the problem. The populism only happens when both of these things are happening at the same time (bad performance, and normies noticing the bad performance).
Fix the policy and the populism fades. But in this situation that is unlikely to happen because the author believes something that is just false. That's why he keeps going in circles about the wrong fixes, because he doesn't understand that he is just wrong in his understanding. Ironic no?
PS The stats you quote, are they all offenders or repeat offenders? Because that's basically the same mistake the author is making by confusing those two categories. I'm not sure that matters for you because you seem to understand policing is effective. For him, it breaks his entire analysis. I hope this explains my point. Edit: the reason why your way of looking at it isn't all that helpful is that its based in economics instead of policy. There are always rich and poor, there isn't always a big increase in crime.
You have a weird way of spelling libertarian.
PS There is a reason why political scientists never talk about left or right. Those terms only have meaning in one place at one time. They change meanings between places.
Actually I did and I'm quite good at it. However, not all classes are the same.
> Of all the major political ideologies, the one that is the least like fascism would be libertarianism.
Only if you haven't thought about it long enough or haven't taken the right classes.
> Now if a specific person or party is actually libertarian, that's another story.
It's not another story, it's where libertarianism always ends, it's in its DNA. In other words, cute baby-libertarianism has nothing to do with the finished product.
Solving a problem like a psychopath might also include lying about the existence of a problem to scare people into putting you in charge. And then not solving it but abusing your position to get rich.
As part of policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/crime/general/dc-quietly-settles-l...
This is what's public and easily searchable.
We know about deliberately ignoring reports of crime (shoplifting, burglary, mugging, pickpocketing) because of the BLM protests (and the associated increase in black deaths in the area where He Floyd died), drops in funding and Animus between government and police.
The idea of pretending no one's faking records in these areas is quite fascinating as well as the idea it's only happening where covered or researched.
You probably know where to look for your fenced items if they are stolen from your home too. Yet those places remain open.
Well said, and there's no indication that obtaining dictatorial powers hasn't been the original goal all along.
> The lesson is that you can't manifest a perfect political reality by pretending problems don't exist.
There are a lot of lessons here, but this is a good start.
My conclusion is that populism comes about when the "elites" perform badly. The author can't or won't admit this is happening even while unknowingly demonstrating it happening. Populism goes away when either the populist politicians don't improve things or when the elites get their act in order. If either of these happens, things go back to the previous situation. If neither happens, the elites are slowly replaced. We will see what happens going forward.
That's only half true, or maybe a quarter. Actually, populism comes about when the people (are led to) believe that the (patsy) "elites" perform badly.
Without that clarification, we would miss the most likely explanations for present day populism.
> Populism goes away when either the populist politicians don't improve things or when the elites get their act in order.
This is manifestly false today, the elites are now consolidating power for themselves, removing competitors left and right, mostly left because the right surrendered without a fight. In the end, they not only retain power but get more of it while acting materially worse.
HN itself is a kind of popu-elitism. Look at the other comments here. We're a crowd of self-identified “slow thinkers” who often post fast, intuitive reactions. The irony is that our intuitions here are shaped by analytic habits, not moral ones.
The real goal isn’t to think faster or slower, but to build a society that makes a virtuous life first possible, and then easy.
The dislocation of the West: what threatens us - Emmanuel Todd
https://substack.com/home/post/p-175377338
(The populism here on HN might be tempered by this mechanism too!)