Let's talk a little bit about social democracy and populism.
Today, many of you know that my political leanings are towards social democracy.
Social democracy is, of course, a mixed economy.
It is a capitalist system in the sense that you have private ownership of businesses.
Some people are richer than others, et cetera.
But it is a capitalist system that is actually well regulated.
It's used the profits, the fruits of capitalism are used to ensure that nobody standard of
living falls too low to ensure everyone has health care, to ensure people have access
to education, et cetera.
And this is a system that sometimes has overlap with populism and sometimes it doesn't.
And what I want to talk about today are the concerns I have that the move towards populism
over the last few years within the left may lend itself to people being bamboozled and
to the perversion of wing goals, ideals and most importantly, of actually getting wing
stuff done.
Increasingly, we are seeing populism become popularized.
And there's a really interesting article in the Journal of Democracy called Populism and
the Decline of Social Democracy.
It's by Sherry Berman and Maria sniggered via.
And it argues that it's actually a danger to democracy and to the left to see populism
replace social democracy.
And it outlines some of the risks that are implicit in that.
So let's start to dig into it.
And the main concern I have with populism is that it's too easy to use populist rhetoric
to bamboozle or trick people because there is left wing populism and right wing populism.
Where is social democracy is decidedly left a much clearer cut set of ideas and policy
prescriptions and much more straight forward as a means for achieving progressive change.
To put it simply, populism is a political approach that wants to appeal to ordinary
people who feel that their concerns, their priorities are ignored or disregarded by established
elite groups.
Elite groups could be those in government.
It could be those in positions of power, in corporations, et cetera, rich people, whatever.
So as you can already see, that is a broad enough movement that that could be a left
wing or a right wing movement.
Now, there's an academic expert on the issue of left versus right wing populism.
His name is Federico Finkelstein.
He is a fellow Argentinean like me.
Hilariously, his dad has known my dad for like decades from Argentina.
We've interviewed Federico on the show before and he has expertly drawn the distinctions
for us between left wing and right wing populism.
But it is very important to understand that although there is no question of a huge divide
between left and right wing populism, the rhetoric is often very similar and right wing
ideology can be cloaked and hidden as generic populism in some very deceptive ways.
Look at Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.
That was a right wing populist campaign.
And here is why it can be a great tool for deception.
Left wing and right wing populism both take advantage of economic insecurity and cultural
anxiety of different kinds to justify their own existence.
Both left and right wing populism often will point to corruption and cronyism as a source
for what needs to be changed in our societies, not wrongly and in principle.
Both left and right wing populism often push this idea of us versus them, but they are
very different us and very different them, right?
For someone like Bernie Sanders, us versus them, is we instead of I.
It's a politics of let's break up the big banks.
It's the people against the big banks.
Let's deal with health insurance companies.
Let's deal with big corporations.
And it's a good message.
There's no question about it.
For someone like Donald Trump, us versus them is awesome Americans instead of those Mexican
rapists and Middle Eastern terrorists.
It's rich businessmen like me who will fix her problems instead of career politicians.
Even if Trump ends up hiring a lot of those same career politicians, it's trade deals
that are good for us instead of trade deals that are good for China and Mexico.
Except when he passes those trade deals, they're terrible for American workers.
So indeed, when you look at the history of populism, populism is rooted in her comes
from.
Totalitarianism.
That doesn't mean populism is totalitarianism, please don't misquote me, but populism can
turn authoritarian much more easily than social democracy can.
Look, for example, at Venezuela, where the Chavez regime now Maduro has turned the rhetoric
of left wing populism into authoritarianism, where the country cannot trust the judiciary.
The country's resources have been raped and pillaged for the benefit of the few and the
persistent Paul poverty of the many.
You know the story.
So what's my point?
My point is not that left wing populism is bad.
In fact, it's not bad.
The point is that populism is very easy to pervert and to trick people with because the
rhetoric of left and right wing populism is often similar in many ways.
And the line between true progressive populism and centrist populism and right wing populism
and getting into authoritarianism, it's often blurry and gray.
And we're seeing that with Donald Trump.
We've seen it in other places as well.
Now, let's contrast this with social democracy.
It's much more difficult to pervert social democracy.
It's much more difficult to trick people with social democracy.
You can run on social democracy and then just abandon it.
But it would be very, very obvious.
There's really no way to do the rhetoric of social democracy, run on the policies and
social democracy and then slide into authoritarianism without people noticing.
We're also seeing, unfortunately, some on what we call the revolutionary left actually
fuel the shift away from social democracy into populism, which can be very quickly turned
against us and end up dividing the left very badly.
And the risk is populism can go in very undemocratic directions.
Social democracy really can't.
I mean, okay, we can imagine some way in which it might, but for as long as it remains social
democracy, it's not going to become undemocratic.
And then let's go beyond that.
Not only do I think that replacing social democracy with populism can be dangerous to
the democratic underpinnings of society.
I don't think that it will really help the left long term in the United States to move
in the direction of populism and away from social democracy.
Very often you'll hear people on the left say, you know, Right-Wing populism has been
on the increase.
You see this in its nationalistic implications implementations in Europe.
You see it under Donald Trump.
Social democracy has just failed.
It's been tough to get it going in the United States.
Let's adopt our spin on populism, but do it with different prescriptions.
We blame the problems on different actors, of course, but the prescriptions that we often
see from left populism aren't really great ones.
It's stuff like let's reclaim nationalism and make it something good for everyone, for
people of all races and ethnicities.
We'll do nationalism, but the progressive way, it hasn't worked and I don't see any
indication that it will.
It's too easy to pervert that and for bad actors to take advantage and you end up in
this revolutionary rabbit hole that hurt Bernie in 2020, hated or like it.
It did not help Bernie Sanders in 2020.
Social democracy is specific policies less wrapped up in an ideology that can be perverted
health care to everyone.
Let's figure out how to do it.
Paid parental and sick leave.
Universal early education increased the child tax credit, make it more affordable to go
to college and trade school, reduce incarceration, legalize cannabis, expand government infrastructure
spending, tax capital gains at a higher rate, and create some higher tax brackets.
It's much more difficult to pervert that stuff because it has less rhetoric around it, which
becomes this fluid, squishy thing, which is the case with populism.
So my feeling right now is not that populism is bad when it's actual progressive populism.
My feeling is the left has more to gain from social democracy than it has to gain from
the rhetoric of left populism, which so far has not gone very far.
Disagree with me.
This is an important discussion to have.
And when we think about, you know, everybody's talking about why did Bernie lose and who
should be the torch bearers of the progressive movement going forward?
And there's a little bit of discussion of, you know, maybe democratic socialist wasn't
a good term for Bernie to adopt.
Maybe the revolutionary language wasn't useful.
But we actually should go further and we should have a deeper conversation about the move
away from social democracy, from the progressive left and towards the rhetoric of populism,
even if not the implementations of any policy.
I have.
I'm open to having my mind changed.
This is where I am right now.
I want to hear from you.