Successful journalism is less likely to be measured by objective truth, clarity, and illumination than by clicks and shares. Clicks and shares are generated by outrage and fear mongering. If your first response to an article is outrage or vindication, put it aside for a few days; you are being played.
Read More“The more elite institutions fail to do their basic jobs, and the more they abuse their positions at the commanding heights, the more room they create for populist demagoguery..”
Read MoreWhether you are a Democrat or a Republican you cannot incite a mob and expect to control it for long. The French learned this long ago.
Read More“The Founders understood this, which is why they wanted a republic that was designed to filter and check populist passion when necessary. That’s why we have institutions and mechanisms that are supposed to ensure the survival of liberty and liberalism when populist passions are empowered by democratic majorities. The notion that one person can be evil, idiotic, ignorant, or irrationally angry, but a million people can’t, strikes me as logically absurd.”
Read More“Nothing separated Progressivism from Populism, or for that matter from all previous American democracy, more sharply than this faith in the presumptive expertise, integrity, and political authority of the academic mandarins.”
Read MorePopulism on the right has risen from the neglect of the values that uphold the market and lack of recognition of the market’s effect on our social values.
Populism on the left has risen from an unfulfilled promise of more democracy and then frustrating it with the administrative state, executive orders and judicial decrees.
Read MoreFrom the first progressive era the left has preached democracy but delivered a credentialed new aristocracy with increasing contempt for the voters who do not acquiesce. It is called democracy when the mass abides the elite, populism when they do not.
Read More“when there is already a federal program for almost every imaginable social problem—what is “populism” supposed to do?”
Read More“Populism, which always wants the national government to solve local problems, is in vogue on left and right precisely because local institutions and civil society generally no longer do their jobs. “
Read MoreToday’s populists are resentful of being called racist and intolerant while they watch intellectuals such as Charles Murray being physically attacked for speaking at an elite liberal arts college with an annual tuition price tag of $60,000 a year.
Read MoreProgressivism sought to accomplish many of the populist goals of its day. In doing so it created a political class that was removed from the whims of the voters. It preached more democracy while it created less democratic accountability. The political class practiced diversity of every sort except intellectual diversity, and became increasingly isolated. Populists need demons and their demon today is the elites, created in the laboratories of Progressive ideology.
Read MoreAt some point ideology does matter. sound ideology must yield results but also requires commitment and patience. This requires the clarity of leadership that can balance ideology and pragmatism. Pragmatism without ideology is a an unmoored ship that will eventually crash on the rocks. Having a sound ideology, while acknowledging its imperfections, is a map that assures that detours do not become destinations.
Read MoreWhile identity politics claims a diversity of ethnic and sexual components; it is not intellectually pluralistic and shows remarkable intolerance for other political ideas or even the idea that political ideas that unite us should take priority over ethnic and sexual differences. The left champions the incomplete diversity of identity politics, but rejects the pluralism of competing political ideas.
Read More
Passion and Conviction
The refusal of most of the liberal political and intellectual class to balance the frustrating against the optimistic was as much deference to the loudest voice in the room as anything else.
Read More