You asked, “When was the last time you heard a mainstream Democrat welcome anyone’s hatred?”
I heard it yesterday from California Governor Gavin Newsom. And I read it in HCR’s August 14 letter encapsulating his words and intent in yesterday’s speech in LA.
Perhaps Newsom isn’t a mainstream Democrat. I don’t care “what” he is. And I’m not saying that the Dems have found their voice and leader in him. But if his words and advocacy are unable to rally our better angels to fight for our democracy, we are the ones who lack the spine.
We need to stop expecting other people - a political party - to save us. We must each turn our frustration, anger and despair outward, in whatever ways represent us and give us personal agency.
The easy thing is to give up and grow still. It is the hard path that leads to change. At this point, what do any of us have to lose by taking it?
And so ours must evolve. We are such a unwise, naive, self-focused and superstitious nation, a teenager. I suppose every country endures this phase. It is a hard time for the sighted and the gentle of spirit.
Thanks for keeping the light on things. Thought this was salient. It’s from an August 6, FB post by Mike Greenburg:
“The MAGA movement isn’t just about Trump. It’s about rejection—of expertise, institutions, education, science, government. Democrats often interpret this as ignorance or manipulation, the result of disinformation or cultural backlash. But there’s another way to understand it, one that anthropology and years of applied research have made difficult to ignore.
What if this anger is rooted not in a refusal to know, but in a history of not being heard?
Across rural, working-class, and marginalized communities, there’s a long record of programs, policies, and reforms—often designed by professionals and launched with confidence—that arrived uninvited and left resentment in their wake. These were not abstract debates about truth or data. They were lived experiences of being overruled, bypassed, or told what was good for you by someone who never asked what you needed.
This didn’t just happen in Washington. It happened on the ground, in counties, watersheds, school districts, tribal lands, farming cooperatives, and urban neighborhoods. And when you’ve been treated that way long enough, you start to distrust the entire system that produces these so-called solutions. That’s the soil MAGA grew in.
This pattern isn’t new. One of the most durable lessons from applied anthropology is that development efforts—whether abroad or at home—fail most often because they don’t listen. They assume. They impose. They evaluate themselves on their own terms. And when people don’t comply, the system blames them.
Consider the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies. For biologists, it was a landmark achievement. But for many ranchers, it was a federal imposition—made without consultation, disruptive to their livelihoods, symbolic of a deeper loss of control. Cooperation eroded. Poaching rose. The wolves were real, but they became proxies for something else: decisions made by others in the name of a common good that didn’t feel common at all.
You see the same dynamic in coastal fisheries, where conservation zones were drawn without input from local fishers, many of whom carried generations of knowledge about tides, migration patterns, and sustainability. They were treated not as stewards, but as risks to be managed. Resistance followed.
In the Midwest, conservation programs promote buffer zones and no-till practices. But many of them are designed without regard for tenancy patterns, equipment costs, or crop insurance structures. To many farmers, they read as prescriptions from people who’ve never been on a tractor. Participation is low not because the goals are wrong, but because the process is. Again, no one asked.
In cities like Detroit and Los Angeles, tree-planting campaigns and green infrastructure projects often arrive in neighborhoods that have faced decades of neglect. But residents quickly recognize that these programs aren’t always for them—they’re signals to real estate developers and planning commissions. Beautification isn’t benign when it’s followed by eviction notices.
These efforts may look different on paper, but they follow the same template: solutions designed in absentia, community knowledge devalued, local adaptations dismissed as noncompliance. When people deviate, it’s called a problem. When programs fail, the blame rarely travels up.
And there’s a deeper issue at work. It’s not just a failure to listen—it’s a refusal to recognize other forms of knowledge. What gets counted as expertise is shaped by institutions that credential, formalize, and standardize. A logger’s seasonal sense of snowfall and thaw, a mother’s knowledge of neighborhood safety, a farmworker’s observations of soil change—none of these pass as “data.” But that doesn’t make them wrong. It makes them inconvenient.
This isn’t just a design flaw. It serves power. When only formal expertise is valid, institutions get to define the problem and its solution. Those on the receiving end are not collaborators. They’re implementation targets.
The consequences are everywhere now: widespread institutional distrust, a rejection of science and public health, school boards turned into battlegrounds, government viewed not just with skepticism but contempt. Trump tapped into that. He didn’t invent it—he exploited it. The rage that animates MAGA isn’t just cultural. It’s rooted in long histories of exclusion from decision-making, especially when the decisions were made in the name of progress.
And yet, there are other ways to work. In the 1990s, I was one of the principal investigators for a research project that came to be known as the Funds of Knowledge approach [1]. It began with a simple question: What if, instead of seeing working-class, immigrant, and minority families as lacking what schools need, we asked what they already know?
What we found wasn’t deficit. It was abundance. Through labor, migration, language, caregiving, and survival, these families had developed deep practical knowledge that schools had failed to recognize. We brought teachers into homes—not to assess, but to learn. One brought a student’s father, an auto mechanic, into the classroom to show how compression ratios and conversions work. The math lesson came alive. The family’s knowledge wasn’t a supplement. It became the curriculum.
This wasn’t charity. It was pedagogy rooted in respect. It changed how teachers saw their students. And it changed how families saw the school—not as a distant authority, but as something they had a stake in.
That kind of work isn’t limited to education. It can apply anywhere. Conservation, health, infrastructure, climate adaptation—every field that touches people’s lives needs to ask not just what we want to accomplish, but who needs to be part of the conversation from the beginning.
Because when people are excluded, they don’t forget. And when someone finally comes along who says, “They’ve lied to you, ignored you, used you,” that story lands. Even when it’s false, it lands.
This is the part many progressives still miss. You can’t counter authoritarian populism with fact sheets and better branding. You can’t fix the trust gap with another rollout. You have to build relationships, redistribute authority, and start by acknowledging the ways institutions have failed—not just materially, but relationally.
Democracy is not sustained by procedures. It lives or dies by whether people believe the system sees them, values them, listens to them. If they don’t believe that, they will turn elsewhere. And they have.
We’re not going to repair the damage until we stop treating listening as symbolic and start treating it as foundational. Otherwise, we’ll keep handing the microphone to those who claim to speak for the unheard, even when all they offer is grievance.
Endnotes
[1] Greenberg, James B., Luis C. Moll, and Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez. “Community Knowledge and Classroom Practice: Bridging Funds of Knowledge with Pedagogy.” In Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms, edited by Norma González, Luis C. Moll, and Cathy Amanti, 115–132. New York: Routledge, 2005.”
I am looking at the TOC (Table of Contents) of the referenced book, edited by Gonzalez, Moll and Amanti. I see nothing in the TOC that shows James Greenberg as an author. No section starts with page 115. Yes, the copyright is 2005. The text you have shown above is very meaningful. Can you help out and clarify the source? My AI assistant says it is from Christopher A. Bail of Duke University. I can find him but not this article.
I remember seeing Clinton supporters snobbishly dismissing the populist energy behind Bernie Sanders, then claiming afterward that Sanders would've done even worse than she did. (Never mind that polling regularly showed him doing better than her.)
And then there was this admission years later about 2020:
This myth, that only Joe Biden could've beaten Donald Trump ... Joe Biden was not picked in 2020 because he was the only person who could beat Trump. He was picked because he was the only person who could beat Bernie Sanders. Rightly or wrongly. And by the way, for the Sanders fans out there, I'm not judging. But that conclusion was made, OK, oh my gosh, coming out of Nevada, Bernie Sanders is going to be the nominee, and people, just like they are now, back then, said, "Ugh! I don't think that's gonna work!" so they were looking for an alternative, and tip of the hat to Joe Biden, he had the record. Eight great years as Vice President, you know, thirty-whatever years as a very able United Stat--he was the right person at that time, and that's great. He's not the right person now.
(There are things to criticise about Sanders' own conduct in 2020; most notable in my mind was his refusal to say that he would accept a contested convention if he won a plurality, but not a majority, of pledged delegates, even though he chose part of the committee that rewrote the rules after 2016 which, among other things, specified a contested convention if no candidate won a majority of pledged delegates!)
Maybe Sanders' brand of populism would not have been the liberal populism that is necessary to push back right-wing authoritarianism, perhaps it would have just been its own form of authoritarianism but with policies that appeal to a different segment of the population, but seeing what sure looked like a coordinated effort to crush his campaign twice (the media counting superdelegates toward Clinton's total early in 2016, though as her supporters rightly pointed out that happened in 2008 as well and Obama still won; candidates dropping out en masse right before the first big batch of primaries in 2020) left a very bitter taste in a lot of people's mouths. (And even then, as I recall, about seven-eighths of Sanders' support proceeded to vote for Clinton in 2016, while only about three-quarters of Clinton's support proceeded to vote for Obama in 2008, and despite this there were still screams from Clinton supporters that Sanders somehow cost her the 2016 election, which only embittered his supporters further against the centre-right of the Democratic Party.)
This has also, I would add, as I've noted before, led a lot of people on the left to conclude that the main aim of liberalism is not what Mike has argued for but rather to run into the arms of fascism every time the (unacceptable) left looks like it might take power, since we've seen that happen a number of times (Hitler over Thälmann in the 1930s, Macron and Le Pen against Mélenchon now, just for instance) and, as Stafford Beer observed, "the purpose of a system is what it does"--and thus the purpose of liberal systems, from these examples, is to crush the left and enable fascism.
I think yet further to this is that something a lot of liberals fail to appreciate is that in politics, perception is often more important than reality.
The starkest summation of this might be Rand Paul describing Donald Trump a decade ago, as a truth-teller without the truth and an insider pretending to be an outsider. It didn't matter that he was a consummate liar and a big donor to many political candidates; he delivered his lies with the ease and confidence of someone just speaking plain, obvious truth and turned the latter to his advantage by pitching to voters that they should cut out the political middlemen.
The reality may be that trade liberalisation has left people on the whole better off, but the perception is one of abandoned factory towns and closed steel mills as having been the main effects. The perception is that all the good jobs went to places with lower labour costs, even if they were replaced by better jobs at home.
The reality might be that the balance of fauna in parks might be better for the reintroduction of wolves, but the perception is that it disrupted an ecosystem to which local farmers and ranchers had grown accustomed (and, further, without any significant consultation or opportunity to adjust).
The reality might be that technocratic experts were choosing outcomes that genuinely did benefit the people as a whole and preventing actively harmful ones, but the perception is that they imposed upon the people policies that caused economic pain for unclear or distant gain, and often were perceived to result in self-enrichment while stifling (rather than channelling and gently checking) the democratic will.
I would add one more element: honesty. The word “populism” has become associated with spin and deception, but I don’t think that’s what Mike has in mind. If liberal populism is to succeed, it needs to satisfy a craving that people still have for being able to trust what they are being told.
FDR and his well selected competent advisors knew what the objectives were and didn’t get hogtied by concerns about donors, bigwigs, etc. They managed through, over, and around those obstacles. It could be done again.
I’ve studied these problems for decades, which gives me useful knowledge, but you live these problems every day, which gives you essential wisdom. Let’s figure this out.... "(TOGETHER)"
Good editorial. Some provocative comments as well. Here's my point of view (POV).
▶︎ Accessibility of the citizen to "others" making key decisions is near zero.
How do we reach those in office, in power, to provide input or feedback on "things that matter." "Our lives begin to end the day that we become silent about things that matter."
-Martin Luther King
In my experience, I have found this to be increasingly difficult. I recall that while living in Nevada City, CA, and plagued by wildfires (the Paradise fire was not that far away), sharing meaningful input about the thinning of heavily forested areas in my neighborhood was nearly impossible.
I could not reach/contact anyone with authority. It turned out that the spotted owl was more important than human life. And when there is a major forest fire, guess what- the spotted owl either loses their habitat too, or their life.
I can think of multiple areas involving everyday living where the ordinary man's input could effect major changes in countless areas (e.g., water conservation, light toxicity, solar energy, community-size thorium molten lava reactors, screening for colorectal cancer, peer-reviewed papers relating anti-COVID efficacy that could be easily and cheaply initiated, etc.
▶︎ Empowerment of the Citizen
Empowerment: taking responsibility for, and authority over one's outcomes based on education and knowledge of the consequences and contingencies involved in one's own decisions. This focus provides the uplifting energy that can sustain in the face of a crisis. From A Primer on Prostate Cancer, The Empowered Patient's Guide by Strum and Pogliano. See http://tinyurl.com/y7mokfr8
When we do not involve the citizen, the consumer, the client, or the patient, we diminish the value of empowerment and the health of the society. What we end up having, instead, is a frustrated community, patient, constituency, etc. The Civil War was fought to preserve the UNION. Lincoln clearly stated this. But what we have now is an unresolved Civil War that is tearing this country apart.
This is not the total story, but thousands of interactions with fellow men and women confirm it.
My community, like many others, has a very robust policy of encouraging public engagement with all matters of government policy. One preferred solution to the crisis of housing affordability was to re-zone and facilitate more housing starts. They got a lot of negative reaction - less than a majority - but in the end, they did the right thing and re-zoned anyway. The hostile NIMBY reaction has been strong and has limited the effectiveness of that policy, exploiting unlimited public comment (and lawsuits!). This has only become a prescription for NOT solving problems and it happens everywhere.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wrote a book about getting things done more effectively called Abundance and started an movement in frustrated meritocratic circles. I don't think the abundance agenda will be able to avoid resentment from those who feel (or are *encouraged* via social media to feel) the resentment you describe.
On the other hand, insisting on maximal populist democratic engagement and input on all matters of policy very often causes stagnation and inefficiency.
I don't know how to square that circle, but I do believe that trending in one direction or another in the handling of policy decisions will either make half the people very angry or make all the people kind of angry. I'm hoping someone smarter than me can come up with some kind of Hegelian synthesis that would actually work.
As almost always, Mike Brock nails it! I hope it is ok to translate the post to portuguese because it would be very, very useful here in Brazil. It would help us to understand why PSDB, the centrist party, is in shambles while the country is torn between the fascism of the ex-president Bolsonaro and the cripto-communism of PT, party now in power.
In conversations with young Americans, I am astonished by their ignorance and apathy about taking personal responsibility for their government. Nearly 1/3 of registered voters even bothered to show up at the polls despite being warned of the stakes involved.
"The center cannot hold because there’s nothing at the center but hollow institutionalism and exhausted expertise. It needs to be rebuilt with populist energy channeled through liberal principles toward egalitarian ends."
Americans love to think of themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." "Nearly three-quarters (72%) of Gen Zers believe they’ll become wealthy one day, making them the most financially optimistic generation. Overall, 44% of Americans think they’ll be wealthy in their lifetime.. We are surrounded by extremes of wealth and poverty, and I think younger folks naturally gravitate to the more positive extremes. What’s more, the concept of investing is so much more accessible today, and I know many Gen Zers believe they can harness the power of the market to build wealth.” https://www.magnifymoney.com/news/wealthy-survey/
We have created an illusion that success is easy and a birthright. Politics and becoming an informed voter are difficult, and incompetent politicians are an easy foil for our lack of success. AI is going to feed this mania even more, and the hard work of democracy may atrophy. Performance populism is easy and addictive. It will be difficult to break that habit.
You asked, “When was the last time you heard a mainstream Democrat welcome anyone’s hatred?”
I heard it yesterday from California Governor Gavin Newsom. And I read it in HCR’s August 14 letter encapsulating his words and intent in yesterday’s speech in LA.
Perhaps Newsom isn’t a mainstream Democrat. I don’t care “what” he is. And I’m not saying that the Dems have found their voice and leader in him. But if his words and advocacy are unable to rally our better angels to fight for our democracy, we are the ones who lack the spine.
We need to stop expecting other people - a political party - to save us. We must each turn our frustration, anger and despair outward, in whatever ways represent us and give us personal agency.
The easy thing is to give up and grow still. It is the hard path that leads to change. At this point, what do any of us have to lose by taking it?
Esme, truth.
Remember, every single country has the exact type of government that the people deserve to have.
And so ours must evolve. We are such a unwise, naive, self-focused and superstitious nation, a teenager. I suppose every country endures this phase. It is a hard time for the sighted and the gentle of spirit.
True. You'd like to think we could just get along. Or, that after 300,000 years humans could, at the least, tolerate one another.
Thanks for keeping the light on things. Thought this was salient. It’s from an August 6, FB post by Mike Greenburg:
“The MAGA movement isn’t just about Trump. It’s about rejection—of expertise, institutions, education, science, government. Democrats often interpret this as ignorance or manipulation, the result of disinformation or cultural backlash. But there’s another way to understand it, one that anthropology and years of applied research have made difficult to ignore.
What if this anger is rooted not in a refusal to know, but in a history of not being heard?
Across rural, working-class, and marginalized communities, there’s a long record of programs, policies, and reforms—often designed by professionals and launched with confidence—that arrived uninvited and left resentment in their wake. These were not abstract debates about truth or data. They were lived experiences of being overruled, bypassed, or told what was good for you by someone who never asked what you needed.
This didn’t just happen in Washington. It happened on the ground, in counties, watersheds, school districts, tribal lands, farming cooperatives, and urban neighborhoods. And when you’ve been treated that way long enough, you start to distrust the entire system that produces these so-called solutions. That’s the soil MAGA grew in.
This pattern isn’t new. One of the most durable lessons from applied anthropology is that development efforts—whether abroad or at home—fail most often because they don’t listen. They assume. They impose. They evaluate themselves on their own terms. And when people don’t comply, the system blames them.
Consider the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies. For biologists, it was a landmark achievement. But for many ranchers, it was a federal imposition—made without consultation, disruptive to their livelihoods, symbolic of a deeper loss of control. Cooperation eroded. Poaching rose. The wolves were real, but they became proxies for something else: decisions made by others in the name of a common good that didn’t feel common at all.
You see the same dynamic in coastal fisheries, where conservation zones were drawn without input from local fishers, many of whom carried generations of knowledge about tides, migration patterns, and sustainability. They were treated not as stewards, but as risks to be managed. Resistance followed.
In the Midwest, conservation programs promote buffer zones and no-till practices. But many of them are designed without regard for tenancy patterns, equipment costs, or crop insurance structures. To many farmers, they read as prescriptions from people who’ve never been on a tractor. Participation is low not because the goals are wrong, but because the process is. Again, no one asked.
In cities like Detroit and Los Angeles, tree-planting campaigns and green infrastructure projects often arrive in neighborhoods that have faced decades of neglect. But residents quickly recognize that these programs aren’t always for them—they’re signals to real estate developers and planning commissions. Beautification isn’t benign when it’s followed by eviction notices.
These efforts may look different on paper, but they follow the same template: solutions designed in absentia, community knowledge devalued, local adaptations dismissed as noncompliance. When people deviate, it’s called a problem. When programs fail, the blame rarely travels up.
And there’s a deeper issue at work. It’s not just a failure to listen—it’s a refusal to recognize other forms of knowledge. What gets counted as expertise is shaped by institutions that credential, formalize, and standardize. A logger’s seasonal sense of snowfall and thaw, a mother’s knowledge of neighborhood safety, a farmworker’s observations of soil change—none of these pass as “data.” But that doesn’t make them wrong. It makes them inconvenient.
This isn’t just a design flaw. It serves power. When only formal expertise is valid, institutions get to define the problem and its solution. Those on the receiving end are not collaborators. They’re implementation targets.
The consequences are everywhere now: widespread institutional distrust, a rejection of science and public health, school boards turned into battlegrounds, government viewed not just with skepticism but contempt. Trump tapped into that. He didn’t invent it—he exploited it. The rage that animates MAGA isn’t just cultural. It’s rooted in long histories of exclusion from decision-making, especially when the decisions were made in the name of progress.
And yet, there are other ways to work. In the 1990s, I was one of the principal investigators for a research project that came to be known as the Funds of Knowledge approach [1]. It began with a simple question: What if, instead of seeing working-class, immigrant, and minority families as lacking what schools need, we asked what they already know?
What we found wasn’t deficit. It was abundance. Through labor, migration, language, caregiving, and survival, these families had developed deep practical knowledge that schools had failed to recognize. We brought teachers into homes—not to assess, but to learn. One brought a student’s father, an auto mechanic, into the classroom to show how compression ratios and conversions work. The math lesson came alive. The family’s knowledge wasn’t a supplement. It became the curriculum.
This wasn’t charity. It was pedagogy rooted in respect. It changed how teachers saw their students. And it changed how families saw the school—not as a distant authority, but as something they had a stake in.
That kind of work isn’t limited to education. It can apply anywhere. Conservation, health, infrastructure, climate adaptation—every field that touches people’s lives needs to ask not just what we want to accomplish, but who needs to be part of the conversation from the beginning.
Because when people are excluded, they don’t forget. And when someone finally comes along who says, “They’ve lied to you, ignored you, used you,” that story lands. Even when it’s false, it lands.
This is the part many progressives still miss. You can’t counter authoritarian populism with fact sheets and better branding. You can’t fix the trust gap with another rollout. You have to build relationships, redistribute authority, and start by acknowledging the ways institutions have failed—not just materially, but relationally.
Democracy is not sustained by procedures. It lives or dies by whether people believe the system sees them, values them, listens to them. If they don’t believe that, they will turn elsewhere. And they have.
We’re not going to repair the damage until we stop treating listening as symbolic and start treating it as foundational. Otherwise, we’ll keep handing the microphone to those who claim to speak for the unheard, even when all they offer is grievance.
Endnotes
[1] Greenberg, James B., Luis C. Moll, and Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez. “Community Knowledge and Classroom Practice: Bridging Funds of Knowledge with Pedagogy.” In Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms, edited by Norma González, Luis C. Moll, and Cathy Amanti, 115–132. New York: Routledge, 2005.”
I am looking at the TOC (Table of Contents) of the referenced book, edited by Gonzalez, Moll and Amanti. I see nothing in the TOC that shows James Greenberg as an author. No section starts with page 115. Yes, the copyright is 2005. The text you have shown above is very meaningful. Can you help out and clarify the source? My AI assistant says it is from Christopher A. Bail of Duke University. I can find him but not this article.
https://www.facebook.com/james.greenberg.5/posts/pfbid02rsVqJsuVnaaLKTw6C3dfh6XXh4jk2DCVZ7L2HRfpcD2V59yt44vx15xNs7U6svftl
Agreed I would like to see the original source
I remember seeing Clinton supporters snobbishly dismissing the populist energy behind Bernie Sanders, then claiming afterward that Sanders would've done even worse than she did. (Never mind that polling regularly showed him doing better than her.)
And then there was this admission years later about 2020:
https://www.msnbc.com/ana-cabrera-reports/watch/democrats-have-substantially-better-chance-against-trump-with-a-different-nominee-rep-smith-214564933888
This myth, that only Joe Biden could've beaten Donald Trump ... Joe Biden was not picked in 2020 because he was the only person who could beat Trump. He was picked because he was the only person who could beat Bernie Sanders. Rightly or wrongly. And by the way, for the Sanders fans out there, I'm not judging. But that conclusion was made, OK, oh my gosh, coming out of Nevada, Bernie Sanders is going to be the nominee, and people, just like they are now, back then, said, "Ugh! I don't think that's gonna work!" so they were looking for an alternative, and tip of the hat to Joe Biden, he had the record. Eight great years as Vice President, you know, thirty-whatever years as a very able United Stat--he was the right person at that time, and that's great. He's not the right person now.
(There are things to criticise about Sanders' own conduct in 2020; most notable in my mind was his refusal to say that he would accept a contested convention if he won a plurality, but not a majority, of pledged delegates, even though he chose part of the committee that rewrote the rules after 2016 which, among other things, specified a contested convention if no candidate won a majority of pledged delegates!)
Maybe Sanders' brand of populism would not have been the liberal populism that is necessary to push back right-wing authoritarianism, perhaps it would have just been its own form of authoritarianism but with policies that appeal to a different segment of the population, but seeing what sure looked like a coordinated effort to crush his campaign twice (the media counting superdelegates toward Clinton's total early in 2016, though as her supporters rightly pointed out that happened in 2008 as well and Obama still won; candidates dropping out en masse right before the first big batch of primaries in 2020) left a very bitter taste in a lot of people's mouths. (And even then, as I recall, about seven-eighths of Sanders' support proceeded to vote for Clinton in 2016, while only about three-quarters of Clinton's support proceeded to vote for Obama in 2008, and despite this there were still screams from Clinton supporters that Sanders somehow cost her the 2016 election, which only embittered his supporters further against the centre-right of the Democratic Party.)
This has also, I would add, as I've noted before, led a lot of people on the left to conclude that the main aim of liberalism is not what Mike has argued for but rather to run into the arms of fascism every time the (unacceptable) left looks like it might take power, since we've seen that happen a number of times (Hitler over Thälmann in the 1930s, Macron and Le Pen against Mélenchon now, just for instance) and, as Stafford Beer observed, "the purpose of a system is what it does"--and thus the purpose of liberal systems, from these examples, is to crush the left and enable fascism.
I think yet further to this is that something a lot of liberals fail to appreciate is that in politics, perception is often more important than reality.
The starkest summation of this might be Rand Paul describing Donald Trump a decade ago, as a truth-teller without the truth and an insider pretending to be an outsider. It didn't matter that he was a consummate liar and a big donor to many political candidates; he delivered his lies with the ease and confidence of someone just speaking plain, obvious truth and turned the latter to his advantage by pitching to voters that they should cut out the political middlemen.
The reality may be that trade liberalisation has left people on the whole better off, but the perception is one of abandoned factory towns and closed steel mills as having been the main effects. The perception is that all the good jobs went to places with lower labour costs, even if they were replaced by better jobs at home.
The reality might be that the balance of fauna in parks might be better for the reintroduction of wolves, but the perception is that it disrupted an ecosystem to which local farmers and ranchers had grown accustomed (and, further, without any significant consultation or opportunity to adjust).
The reality might be that technocratic experts were choosing outcomes that genuinely did benefit the people as a whole and preventing actively harmful ones, but the perception is that they imposed upon the people policies that caused economic pain for unclear or distant gain, and often were perceived to result in self-enrichment while stifling (rather than channelling and gently checking) the democratic will.
👍👍👍
I would add one more element: honesty. The word “populism” has become associated with spin and deception, but I don’t think that’s what Mike has in mind. If liberal populism is to succeed, it needs to satisfy a craving that people still have for being able to trust what they are being told.
Love this. What would populism in liberalism look like? Do democrats have someone who can put this cape on?
Who would be the face of the enlightened populist movement? Who would inspire cohesion?
Yes! Yes! Yes!
FDR and his well selected competent advisors knew what the objectives were and didn’t get hogtied by concerns about donors, bigwigs, etc. They managed through, over, and around those obstacles. It could be done again.
He managed it with the help of World War II. Socio-economic change generally happens as a crisis response of major proportions.
I’ve studied these problems for decades, which gives me useful knowledge, but you live these problems every day, which gives you essential wisdom. Let’s figure this out.... "(TOGETHER)"
HEAR, HEAR!
Good editorial. Some provocative comments as well. Here's my point of view (POV).
▶︎ Accessibility of the citizen to "others" making key decisions is near zero.
How do we reach those in office, in power, to provide input or feedback on "things that matter." "Our lives begin to end the day that we become silent about things that matter."
-Martin Luther King
In my experience, I have found this to be increasingly difficult. I recall that while living in Nevada City, CA, and plagued by wildfires (the Paradise fire was not that far away), sharing meaningful input about the thinning of heavily forested areas in my neighborhood was nearly impossible.
I could not reach/contact anyone with authority. It turned out that the spotted owl was more important than human life. And when there is a major forest fire, guess what- the spotted owl either loses their habitat too, or their life.
I can think of multiple areas involving everyday living where the ordinary man's input could effect major changes in countless areas (e.g., water conservation, light toxicity, solar energy, community-size thorium molten lava reactors, screening for colorectal cancer, peer-reviewed papers relating anti-COVID efficacy that could be easily and cheaply initiated, etc.
▶︎ Empowerment of the Citizen
Empowerment: taking responsibility for, and authority over one's outcomes based on education and knowledge of the consequences and contingencies involved in one's own decisions. This focus provides the uplifting energy that can sustain in the face of a crisis. From A Primer on Prostate Cancer, The Empowered Patient's Guide by Strum and Pogliano. See http://tinyurl.com/y7mokfr8
When we do not involve the citizen, the consumer, the client, or the patient, we diminish the value of empowerment and the health of the society. What we end up having, instead, is a frustrated community, patient, constituency, etc. The Civil War was fought to preserve the UNION. Lincoln clearly stated this. But what we have now is an unresolved Civil War that is tearing this country apart.
This is not the total story, but thousands of interactions with fellow men and women confirm it.
Nice. FWIW, this is what my 2020 book "Democratic Theory Naturalized: The Foundations of Distilled Populism" is focused on.
My community, like many others, has a very robust policy of encouraging public engagement with all matters of government policy. One preferred solution to the crisis of housing affordability was to re-zone and facilitate more housing starts. They got a lot of negative reaction - less than a majority - but in the end, they did the right thing and re-zoned anyway. The hostile NIMBY reaction has been strong and has limited the effectiveness of that policy, exploiting unlimited public comment (and lawsuits!). This has only become a prescription for NOT solving problems and it happens everywhere.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wrote a book about getting things done more effectively called Abundance and started an movement in frustrated meritocratic circles. I don't think the abundance agenda will be able to avoid resentment from those who feel (or are *encouraged* via social media to feel) the resentment you describe.
On the other hand, insisting on maximal populist democratic engagement and input on all matters of policy very often causes stagnation and inefficiency.
I don't know how to square that circle, but I do believe that trending in one direction or another in the handling of policy decisions will either make half the people very angry or make all the people kind of angry. I'm hoping someone smarter than me can come up with some kind of Hegelian synthesis that would actually work.
As almost always, Mike Brock nails it! I hope it is ok to translate the post to portuguese because it would be very, very useful here in Brazil. It would help us to understand why PSDB, the centrist party, is in shambles while the country is torn between the fascism of the ex-president Bolsonaro and the cripto-communism of PT, party now in power.
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In conversations with young Americans, I am astonished by their ignorance and apathy about taking personal responsibility for their government. Nearly 1/3 of registered voters even bothered to show up at the polls despite being warned of the stakes involved.
"The center cannot hold because there’s nothing at the center but hollow institutionalism and exhausted expertise. It needs to be rebuilt with populist energy channeled through liberal principles toward egalitarian ends."
Americans love to think of themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." "Nearly three-quarters (72%) of Gen Zers believe they’ll become wealthy one day, making them the most financially optimistic generation. Overall, 44% of Americans think they’ll be wealthy in their lifetime.. We are surrounded by extremes of wealth and poverty, and I think younger folks naturally gravitate to the more positive extremes. What’s more, the concept of investing is so much more accessible today, and I know many Gen Zers believe they can harness the power of the market to build wealth.” https://www.magnifymoney.com/news/wealthy-survey/
We have created an illusion that success is easy and a birthright. Politics and becoming an informed voter are difficult, and incompetent politicians are an easy foil for our lack of success. AI is going to feed this mania even more, and the hard work of democracy may atrophy. Performance populism is easy and addictive. It will be difficult to break that habit.
Bravo.
Sending to my daughter in law who is a (traumatized) public health professional and would deeply appreciate the content you articulate. Thank you
This is excellent - inspiring and helpful
Precisely.