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Frank Lee's avatar

There is a lot of splitting hairs and mental masturbation in this article with the clear goal of positive branding, for example, the #MeToo, BLM and We Will Resist "movements" as popular and MAGA as populist and negative.

I think there is a distinction without a difference. Trump and his followers are more like Brexit. It is interesting to me that the working class, proletariat, uprising against the elite bourgeois, having been through it before and resulting in milestone progress like the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, is labeled as a negative populist movement by left people outside of the actual bourgeois class. Are these left people mistaken that they do somehow belong in the bourgeois class? Or are they sleepwalking to their own destruction having been brainwashed by establishment-owned media and their tech algorithms? Because, from any rational historical political categorization perspective, the left people would be aligned with the proletariat... and be motivated to not negative brand what is a popular uprising against THE MAN.

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Nickerus's avatar

Just struggling to agree with much of what is written here. This is an academic treatise which comes down to earth with the gun, locked and loaded, aimed at Trump.

Only my opinion, but one sees explained here the corrosive effect of what is actually "identity politics," the culpability for which is blamed on the populist of the right, and exonerates the populist of the left.

Identity politics is seen today and blatantly practiced by the woke, "the enemy within" which is successfully destroying western culture and liberal values as this "fifth column" sweeps through our institutions.

It is difficult to comprehend that candidates of a major party can be excused as "not populist" when expounding their ideology when seeking nomination, but as being populist when democratically elected my the majority, when enacting their ideology when in power. Maybe one has missed the point?

But again in this article only mentioned, is Trump as a vile perpetrator of populism, but never a mention of Harris as being "rebranded" by the Democrats, to erase all her previous utterances and support for far left ideologies.

The author unconvincingly describes why "Right populist leaders are more dangerous than "Leftist populist leaders?" This reasoning is just explained by false ideological beliefs, in my opinion, the left- good; the right-bad.

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