Knives are out bigly for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this weekend. Democrat establishment don't like this populist stuff. They don't like it at all.

You sure you want to say "populist" instead of "leftist"? Because Trump has given me more than my fill of populism.

Trump is not a populist. Him losing the popular vote is your first clue.

He's a phony populist in that he puts up a front of appealing to the common American.

People like Bernie are populists.

I remember a professor suggesting I take populist/populism out of my vocabulary for being too widely defined and antiquated. I would have argued but he was an easy A. He was probably right though it’s obviously back in a big way.

I've heard authoritarian and populist described as synonyms.

Sure the Sanders left has momentum and seems all sexy right now but let's check in with the pragmatic Third Way Democrats. You may remember the Third Way group from their road trip to the heartland where everyone said everything but what they wanted to hear but they wrote their own version anyways

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/ele...w-they-n893381

They literally just rehashed the idea of a 401k plan. I'm assuming recreating it as a pension essentially just means taking what would be an account full of cash and forcing everyone to buy an annuity with it. I wonder who might benefit from that?

Yes, can you possibly imagine if a political party kept reusing the same idea, over and over and over again? They would just never win a single seat in office, I'm sure.

noun
1.
a member or adherent of a political party seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people.

Yeah maybe the centrist dip**** Dems should've pushed back on that but you know they were too busy going high.


But also, iron, you're an authoritarian! You love the cops and military, man, so if you think those are the same not sure what the issue is.

Specifically here we would be reusing an idea from a guy who was so good at winning elections they changed the rules about how many elections in a row you could win.

Yeah. Pretty much all authoritarians who obtain and hold power say they are doing it for the people, opposing the elite. All the while creating a new class of elite based on loyalty.

Debating the pros and cons of populism is inevitably semantic. If you define populism simply as you did, then no one should find it objectionable. But a lot of commentators and academics define populism in a more nuanced and negative way (see this article from The Atlantic). And if you adopt the latter definition, populism is almost impossible to defend.

https://www.theatlantic.com/internat...-trump/516525/

The Third Way is a ****ing joke. Here are some excerpts from the article you're referring to:

Amazing how The Third Way is basically a religion. Even when faced with clear, conflicting information that goes against their ideology, they cling to it even harder.

Thus, square and rectangle are synonyms?

I dislike the use of the word populism because it doesn't anything about the person's political ideology. It only says who the politician appeals to. For example, both Donald Trump and Barack Obama used rhetoric that emphatized with downtrodden people and promised a new type of politics that would help them rather than special interests. Yet, they couldn't be any different from each other.

I think an additional adjective should be added to distinguish the type of populism rather than just saying populism in general because there's nativist populism similar to what Trump has and then there's more egalitarian populism such as what Obama presented.

They pretty much are in everyday usage.

I should've known that was coming but ok take "dog and animal" instead or "cheese and food" or whatever. Point being, saying "all authoritarians are populists" does not indicate whether all populists are authoritarians. I wouldn't make this nit for most other posters, mainly you, because I know your intent is to deliberately obscure the distinction to discredit clearly non-authoritarian, populist leftists that you despise.

My dude, you don’t get to come in and say “populism = authoritarianism” and complain that the other side is using oversimplified semantics.

https://twitter.com/pixelatedboat/st...18825159626752

As the guy responsible for inserting "populism" into the discussion, I would like to quietly point out that I used it with context, in a way that makes this whole derail a pointless argument about a thing that never happened. I know that's pretty much the foundation of the whole forum, but I feel obliged to speak up in this instance.

The conversation started when people were trying to ludicrously redefine populist to where somehow Trump isn’t one.

Trolly, I never said populism = authoritarianism. You have me confused with someone else. And I wasn't complaining about other people using oversimplified semantics. I merely was pointing out that one's support for populism inevitably depends on how you define populism.

Unless you try to fill a rectangular hole with a square peg.