Chesterton said: “Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord…

Chesterton said: “Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.” Public health similarly used to be us following the advice of trained and experienced professionals, on matters we knew nothing about. /1 https://t.co/nwgqEx3zv4

We’ve forgotten that model, populism now makes us think the entire population has to become expert at something to act in appropriate ways. We’re terrified of a hierarchy of expertise, populism makes us think that’s elitist. Horseshit. You won’t find a single area of life…/2 https://t.co/fOspuurXE0

…where there isn’t a hierarchy of good and bad. We don’t get on a plane and all vote on what the pilot should do next. This is the real cancer of populism, yes I Tweet about it a lot. The destruction of generations of expertise, embedded in public institutions. It’s not even…/3 https://t.co/gbSUGGV6Ev

…a hierarchy of present-day people. It’s a hierarchy of accumulated wisdom from multiple generations, overseen by a current group of people. Populism strips it all away, with its idea of ‘the people’ flying the plane. The people is a fiction. All that fiction does is allow…/4 https://t.co/1ZAhVc3ZcD

…nutters to mobilise whatever bullshit they like, and say that’s reality. A tiny handful of powerful people encouraged this shift, because they knew how to mobilise, and realised this was a way to bypass all of the institutional due process of actual democracy. You can spot…/5 https://t.co/pTXxbUdS3s

…them easily, they’ll talk about ‘mandates’ for what they do, meaning they marketed some crazy rubbish well enough that people voted for it. And that then became their licence to do whatever they want, and to describe it as ‘the will of the people’. /6

Get rid of elections, and all of our political problems disappear immediately. Only populism makes people think that would remove democracy itself, because elections=democracy is another of their mobilising nutter ideas. It’s the one they used to steal democracy from us. /end