this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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me_irl
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Populism is basically about simple solutions for complicated problems, and blaming every problem on a certain group of people.
From the right, the most prominent example is immigrants, while from the left, it's mostly rich people.
well not all but most of our societal problems comes from their decisions, so i get it.
yeah, immigrants really are destroying our planet.
i think your joke went over their heads
Seems like it
Or those problems come from us and they just represent our own flaws, like a good representative democracy should do.
except its not really us being represented up there. we just choose the lesser evil they put up to us dont we?
what i mean is that its not a good representative democracy
Is the majority of your country really better than its representation?
yes, take for example taxing the rich. majority of people want it, most politicians wont even touch the subject. at best they will lie about it and then not even try.
there are many many other issues like this, just took the low hanging example.
I am not sure the majority of the country, if they were put in the same position of power, would not do the same.
why
Because I think the majority of people are easy to corrupt, it takes exceptional people to resist the temptation of an easy life for you and your relatives.
yes! thats exactly why i say rich people are to blame for most societal issues, and the model of democracy we currently have is very flawed. both of these things concentrate too much power.
But you agreed most people would do the same in their place, didn't you? So it's a general human issue rather than only rich people's fault, isn't it? Agreed that most democracies are flawed, but I still think social democracy is the best we have for now.
not really. if we didnt allow people to get so rich in the first place, it would not be that much of a problem.
socialism has a better track record when it comes to this of course there are exceptions either way. a lot of the good stuff in socdem comes fron socialists anyway.
of course we dont have a 100% solution, just a possible step forward as it always is with humanity.
Better track record to avoid rich people, but not to allow general population quality of life and prevention of an authoritarian government. I'll take European social democracy and its rich people over it.
in general the soviet union (and china for that matter) has been on the vanguard of quality of life for the common people. even vietnam is doing much better than east asians in general.
most of the good workers rights you see in europe came first for the soviets.
the problem with social democracy is that it doesnt address the rich people and they take it right back over time, as you can see in the US for example.
Not all left ideas come from the Soviet or communist China although they participated to the experiments. Most socialist parties in EU split from USSR and communist China from the revolutions or when the economical catastrophes (Chinese famines) or atrocities (military repression of opposition and gulags) they committed were revealed. From then, it split between social democrats and communists, social democrats are simply called socialists in those countries (at least France and Spain).
Apart from Sanders, I think American democrats are very far from European social democrats, they rather correspond to our traditional right, which indeed doesn't care much about rising inequalities. I think the median people live better in European social democrat countries than they ever did in communist countries.
nobody batted an eye on china when famines were caused by the british, just on the specific post-revolutionary period they were still struggling. nobody bats an eye to the us prision system which is worse than the soviet prision system was either, shit i think my country currently has a way more cruel prision system.
overall, when you look into it, the atrocities either were exaggerated or didnt happen. shit, some of these psyops were even admitted later by the CIA.
i think the chinese standard of living is quite comparable to europe, on average too, and its quite impressive how fast they went from one of the poorest to one of the richest countries out there.
social democracy is barely left wing tbh, they barely made progress outside of europe, and are still tainted by the red scare. even then they seem to be sliding back, since they are losing the colonial power over africa, which is a big part if what keeps them rich.
Centrists just blame wealthy immigrants!
Centrists blame everyone for not understanding all the complicated problems.
"You see, it's a spectrum. Yes I'm a fascist, but I'm an equal opportunities fascist."
I blame society.
That's not what I read in the dictionary. Is that one of those things that the right twisted to mean something else, or...?
No it's just something the above idiot made up.
Good to know.
The original meaning is opposing the people with the elite, but it has slid to include the demagogy (telling people what they want to hear rather than the truth) to please the targeted people.
The definition from the comment above includes left wing and right wing populist main demagogy subjects. Although there may be a difference between European and American political culture on this, I am not certain.
It is not specific to right wing, left leaning newspapers use it this way too, it has become normal politics vocabulary. I think that's left leaning: https://jacobin.com/2024/03/left-populists-working-class-voters.