Our political journalism is hopelessly ill-equipped to understand the world we’re living in, using tired…

Our political journalism is hopelessly ill-equipped to understand the world we’re living in, using tired ideas that date from the 19th century. Facts and logic have NEVER been the currency of politics. This matters for Covid and climate, as much as Trump. /1 #auspol https://t.co/pdUarAUUps

What Leigh Sales misses here is what most political journalism now misses. That we’re living through something that happens repeatedly in history, always with devastating consequences. A surge of populism. /2

You’d think 100 million+ dead in the 20th century via two of these surges, the world wars, would have focused our attention on the phenomenon. But we learned nothing. We label those wars against ‘fascists’, one of our adolescent social media debating terms. /3

The fascists of the 20th century were just populists. Fascism is populism’s endgame. Leaders who appeal to ‘the people’ directly, who attack society’s basic institutions in favour of a popularity cult focused on themselves. ‘The people’ is a fiction, it’s a populist weapon. /4

Used by Trump and others to justify what they’re doing, when in reality populations don’t act as some defined agency that the term suggests, or as the fascists have always liked to call it, the ‘will of the people’. All nonsense. /5

Leni Riefenstahl’s famous ‘The Triumph of the Will’ a classic populist propaganda meme. Self-serving gibberish about the people rising up to take control, how do we not hear the not even hidden resonances with the bullshit people like Trump utter every day? /6 https://t.co/uZOTDoFTt1

None of it is ever about anybody except the Great Leader, whoever the populist blowhard of the day happens to be. Transforming all of the checks and balances and due process of societies into a mono-dimensional orgy of popularity, focused on the Great Leader. /7

This is why I Tweet so often about the lethal danger of popularity as a mechanism for governance. Popularity is a mechanism children use to establish social hierarchies, in schools. Adult life is supposed to move beyond it. It’s the most toxic political poison. /8

Experienced politicians used to have a type of gentleman’s agreement never to use it, they knew it was a way to blow up societies. But the sugar hit of popularity is too tempting, and eventually they succumb. John Howard started the modern surge in Oz, with his race politics. /9

Race was one of those areas politicians in the late 20th century had reached an unspoken agreement never to touch. They knew it was a path to easy votes, but also that it destroys communities. Howard didn’t care. Many in his own party looked on in horror. /10

What followed was *decades* of weaponised immigration politics, which the loon Right of the LNP milked mercilessly for election wins. Populism is heroin for a politician, cheap and fast mass shifts in votes. The community is terminally damaged by this. /11

Short-term wins lead to long-term social collapse. How we don’t see that makes the catastrophes of the 20th century a tragic waste of time, in the we never learn a thing from history sense. Trump and others like him are populists, we know how populism works. /12

Where the only currency of power becomes popularity, with no checks and balances of any kind. Schools fight this hierarchy constantly, and adult life has institutions to do the same. It’s those institutions the Great Leader populists despise and attack relentlessly. /13

Social media has been the greatest of all gifts to populism, its economy of likes is populism in its purest form. It’s allowed populist insanity to mobilise at an exponential rate. Trump more or less took the US Presidency using not much more than Twitter. /14

None of these social collapses will be fixed until we target the root cause. Popularity as a mechanism of governance. Elections are a sad part of that problem, which people won’t admit, seduced by populists into thinking elections ARE democracy. /15

Elections are a mechanism to involve the public in governance. A terrible mechanism, because they assume popularity is a measure of what’s socially important. But popularity is just fads and fashions, it shifts constantly and is easily manipulated. /16

It’s allowed every tinpot Great Leader wannabe in the world to game our complex institutional democracies, and turn them into personal fiefdoms. We’ve been here before. Tens of millions died. We didn’t learn. /end