Why aren’t we interested in *why* populism works? And why it’s so toxic to the checks and balances we call…

Why aren’t we interested in *why* populism works? And why it’s so toxic to the checks and balances we call democracy? What is popular under populism is the destruction of those same checks and balances. How could ‘the people’ like that? Nothing is more popular. /1

Because ‘the people’ is a fiction. It was never real. It’s a hopelessly abstract idea of how populations live and feel and think. The checks and balances were never about the population either. They were introduced by rival powers to Kings. By his barons. /2

Democracy will continue to fail and collapse while we maintain the fictions that underlie it. While we pretend entire populations are some undifferentiated mass with a single will. While we pretend the checks and balances are there to protect that population. /3

Humans HATE being homogenised. It’s our really bizarre attempt to make a governance system where there is no distinction, no differentiation, no hierarchy, that gives birth to populism. Where people will fight to restore those hierarchical distinctions. /4

It’s our 1960s countercultural revolution that gave us such a fundamentalist hatred of all hierarchy. The anti-establishment revolution. Couple that to a much more longstanding identical hatred at the root of the formation of America itself, and you get a powder keg. /5

Even those who call themselves progressive in the US simply focus their revolutionary, hierarchy-destroying anger elsewhere. Mostly into things like anti-trust movements, fighting ‘oligarchs’. Nothing can be allowed to create a distinction between people. /6

And so millions and millions of people, fed up with the daily pile-on this causes, as people fight each other for status and identity, flock to anybody who can offer them relief from it. Anybody who offers them a stabilised hierarchy again. A King. /7 https://t.co/WshD8HwpuM

Trump isn’t launching an authoritarian takeover of America. He’s the logical and inevitable endgame of the entire culture. Look around at the populists. They’re often called stupid or dumb, because they don’t understand the complex workings of society. /8

But nobody understands that. Societies wouldn’t work if they had to, the quantity and complexity of the information is too vast. They’re farmers, or teachers, or plumbers, or whatever. That’s what they understand and do. /9

They don’t want to have to come home from work and somehow digest and synthesise the astronomical volume of information needed to keep the entire country running for another day. An ‘informed citizenry’ is a laughable fiction invented by armchair theorists. /10

You can be the most highly educated, intelligent person and not be one millimetre more advanced on your nightly ‘running the country’ homework. The task is astronomically vast, impossible. That this was ever an idea is almost unbelievable. From much simpler times. /11

What is popular under populism is hierarchy. Not because people are sheep and love to be dominated. But because they’re busy, and have an intuitive understanding that societies work by *delegation*. It’s not elitism to recognise expertise is distributed widely. /12

Ultimately hierarchy simply reflects that. Some people are good at some things, others aren’t. That creates hierarchy, in that area. Society is full of hierarchies. Or was. Until social media populism made everybody a supposed expert in everything. /13

Finally the democratic delusionals and their free speech fantasies say, democracy at last! Look at the fucking mess right now. Nothing but eternal fights for status and identity. /end