The world where the public good led government decisions was not the outcome of voting or of better leaders.…

The world where the public good led government decisions was not the outcome of voting or of better leaders. It was a world led by the public institutions that surged between 1945 and 1975. Elected leaders were just the public liaison for those institutions. 1/5

Ask people who actually work in government, they know this to be true. The elected came to power and were then guided and led by their institutional expertise. Populist politicians though now believe they ‘run the country’. Their first target? The institutions. 2/5

We’re still stuck inside the mythology that we can elect our way out of this, or that ‘fascism’ is taking over our democracies. It’s not fascism. Fascism LOVES a strong State, it just wants to be in charge of it. Populists HATE the State (the institutions). 3/5

They hate anything that obstructs the unregulated and uncontrolled exercise of popularity as the metric of all power and authority. ‘The unelected’ is their shibboleth. They are literally the jocks from high school, re-activating the schoolyard to dominate adult life. 4/5

Could we have just kept the institutions in charge? Human status games wouldn’t have allowed it. They were only allowed to operate because nations were in ruins, post-WW1, WW2, the Spanish Flu and the Great Depression. Only catastrophe creates a public. /end