To escape the team sports that infect our understanding of ‘politics’, you have to look to history. Take the…
To escape the team sports that infect our understanding of ‘politics’, you have to look to history.
Take the two most famous ‘autocrats’ in the world right now. Putin and Xi. Said to be running ‘systems of government’ opposed to our ‘liberal, free democracies’. /1 https://t.co/3VPJq5Z8BZ
What was the origin of the Russian autocratic regime, and the CCP? Both came from the same source.
From social movements in the earlier 20th century. Social movements passionate about freedom. /2 https://t.co/92qxUFTjou
Both were populist movements. Set up to oppose perceived authoritarian tyrannies in each country.
All authoritarianism and the fascism it can lead to has its origins in populism. It’s endgame populism. /3 https://t.co/Fj1P1X3OiI
What we call democracies are ‘freer’ places to live, absolutely. But we attribute that to the wrong cause.
It’s not because we have a democratic ‘system’ that protects those freedoms. It’s because we have public institutions. /4
Those institutions are the checks and balances on populist power. Populist power unleashed *always* leads to authoritarianism, and then fascism.
And those institutions of checks and balances are fragile. We only have them because of catastrophes in the early 20th century. /5
Two world wars, and a pandemic. That smashed our existing social hierarchies, our populist ‘structures’.
Allowing space to re-build societies purely on practical terms, to survive, post-war. That’s what those institutions were for. /6
We’ve been basking in the freedoms these institutions provided ever since, attributing it to elections!
Exclamation point there because mass elections only emerged in the 20th century as well. And they’re pure populism. /7
They’ve been gutting democracies from the inside out ever since. Allowing populism to hijack and destroy the same institutions that gave us our freedoms.
What the fuck do we think this scene represents, if not that? Look at Trump’s re-election platform. /8 https://t.co/kssl5x0zLz
Where’s the ‘liberal, free democracy’ policies? Ha. It’s all spiteful ‘authoritarian’ revenge politics, about smashing what’s left of US institutions.
Allowing the Great Leader to become the sole reference point for all things. /9 https://t.co/sCyPJQuSNO
It’s populism, freed from the institutional shackles that provide our freedom. Edmund Burke saw the same thing at the time of the French Revolution.
How’d that end again?
With an authoritarian Great Leader. /10 https://t.co/FSsxv12iKI
This isn’t rocket science. Governing using popularity as the main mechanism ALWAYS leads to tyranny. In the school yard, and at the national and international level.
There are no systems of government, those are projections. Fairy tales. /11
There are people doing what people do. Living, socially, following some basic social rules. They imitate one another, they form teams based on that imitation, and then those teams clash. Imitative rivalry.
The ‘politics’ we see is just that mechanism, rebranded. /12
The task of good government is a single task. To protect society from naked popularity. To do things that are the right thing to do, rather than the most popular thing.
Like good parenting.
Anything can be made the most popular thing to do. It’s just marketing. /13
That’s what these ‘autocrats’ are, schoolyard bullies who found a way, through revolutions and elections, to impose high school culture on the world, with them on top.
Popularity culture. Populism. Culture/nation-agnostic. /end https://t.co/yoSoBsuQQf
