Neoliberalism was always such a stupid set of ideas that you have to look deeper to understand how it wasn’t…

Neoliberalism was always such a stupid set of ideas that you have to look deeper to understand how it wasn’t a laughing stock from Day 1. It got up because popularity-based politics is content-free. It has no test of the empirical reality of anything. /1 https://t.co/kMZzgbeuoE

Truss will be gone by Christmas. Populism cycles leaders in a last desperate attempt to fix the mess it causes by its belief that elected leaders actually know or do anything meaningful. It’s the high school playground, shifting popularity hierarchies. /2

We don’t even wait for elections now, leaders are replaced with shifting (popularity-based) polls. You can wish for a better leader to fix this merry-go-round, but that’s what populism wants you to believe. It wants us to try to fix popularity, with more popularity. /3

The actual cause of all of the mess we face IS popularity, as a foundation for running a country. You don’t hire employees or even CEOs using that principle, because unsurprisingly competence is seen as important. But we also shouldn’t be seduced into thinking all we need…/4

…is some new Great Leader. That’s how what some call fascism starts. It’s not the ‘Right’, it’s the endgame of all populism. Saviour politics. We need to get rid of elections and popularity as a mechanism for choosing who should run countries. /5

The actual expertise to do it is already there, the Victorians in the early 19th century set up what we now call the bureaucracy of government, to bring expertise to the complexity of running a modern society. Thousands of smart people, not beholden to popularity. /6

In fact the most UNpopular of all people. Because the populists have thrown them under so many buses over the past 50 years while clambering over each other to replace them with their own idiot politics of schoolyard popularity. Journalists are no better, nothing excites them…/7

…more than reporting the daily gossip and machinations of the popularity machine. They’re ‘insiders’ to this whole pathetic adolescent game. When they went to the moon, did the US say ‘ok who’s the most popular person in the country, we’ll get them to build the rockets?’ /8

No, they found people who knew how to build rockets. It’s time for expertise and problem-solving politics to replace all popularity politics. Try to think of just one current political problem that doesn’t trace back to some popularity-based process. Good luck. /end