Populist attack politics were imported from the US and UK by the LNP under John Howard, and they’ve been…

Populist attack politics were imported from the US and UK by the LNP under John Howard, and they’ve been accelerating the use of these methods ever since. It’s destroying what’s left of Australian democracy. Social media is populism’s Trojan Horse and pours petrol on the fire. /1 https://t.co/7bTX3azChj

The LNP has done no meaningful public policy work in 30 years, as a result. Like the US and UK, their passion and intent is to destroy what remains of the public itself, as a methodology of democratic governance, and replace it with populism. /2

An easily manipulated well that never runs dry, as a pathway to ultimate power. It’s just marketing. Anything can be made popular, or unpopular. What are the LNP’s policy priorities? Nothing but populist slogans, designed to generate votes. /3

Right now they’re trying to reverse a catastrophic election loss inside a single term, by abandoning even any pretence of acting as an opposition on critical public issues. Nothing but spoiling, populist wrecking on the referendum, and on every other issue. /4

Older, wiser politicians like some on their own side, who resigned in disgust at this shift (Malcolm Fraser for example) know that politicians historically avoided the cheap power from populism, because its longer-term impacts are so damaging. /5

Not just to countries, but to parties themselves. Look at the US, where Trump is trashing his own Republicans, as they watch helplessly. All populism leads to cults of the Great Leader, like the fascists in the 20th century. Fascism is just populism left to run. /6

It’s laughable that people look on at this and still describe it in terms of Left and Right, the old categories of party politics. Parties are powerless against populism, it will sweep them away with a wave of the hand. Populism already derailed Australia’s Covid response. /7 https://t.co/asb6w6YNsa

Social media internationalises populism, most of Australia’s ‘lockdown’ protests were engineered from places like the US, using social media to weaponise local cookers. Popularity can not, EVER, work as a method for running anything. It is absolutely NOT democracy. /8

Our belief that democracy is what ‘the people’ (never defined) want, measured by the popularity of things, is what will destroy it. The people doesn’t exist, those who use the phrase are attributing their own desires to an amorphous undefinable mass. /9

Unless ruthless action is taken to counter populism, including by heavily regulating the libertarian attack weapons we call social media platforms, centuries of social progress will be lost. Bullies will run societies, engineering anything they like through popularity. /10

Alas we’re already there. The LNP here in Oz is drunk on the fast-power populism gives them to alter the constantly shifting waves of popularity, not content to spend any time in opposition building an alternative policy platform. It doesn’t want a policy platform. /11

It long since became a shopfront for vested interests, its donors and bedfellows in the modern conservative looniverse, with zero interest in government itself. They openly say it, they’re a ‘small government’ party. The enemy to them is government itself. /12

As if government wasn’t something humans invented to escape the bully-led chaos we’re seeing right now. Populism is completely ahistorical, it has no understanding of or interest in history. Unless we recognise popularity as the enemy, we won’t change anything. /end