In Europe, populism is sort of a dirty word, but we have this wonderful history of populism in America, including the abolitionist populists and the white and black populists working together in the nineteenth century.
The ability of people to reach their own news sources now, and create different views, is really unbelievable, and [populism] may be part of this.
Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and a cosmopolitan. But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism, too, is less racist than is populism. A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from the community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years, but a populist will always remain suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe.
One thing that's important to point out is that this kind of populism has a long and mixed history. It's part of this tradition of problematic anti-elitism where the elites are always the liberal class - the intellectuals, the professors, the artists - and not the economic elites. Why are we so mad and aggrieved at newspaper editors but not at corporate executives? I think we need to look more at the latter, at economic elites.
In 1976, Jimmy Carter - peanut farmer; carried his own suitcase, imagine that - somewhat tapped America's durable but shallow reservoir of populism. By 1980, ordinariness in high office had lost its allure.
I think the people like myself who are in the center ground of politics and who think that center left and center right can cooperate and work together. Who don't like this sort of insurgent populism because we think it's not really going to deliver for the people, I think there's a big responsibility on us in the center to get our act together. And to work out radical but serious solutions to the problems people face.
The surge in right-wing populism and the phenomenon of Trump are related. You can think of them together as the same problem.
You see a wave of populism in the world. There is something wrong. This maybe because of technology. The ability of people to reach their own news sources now, and create different views, is really unbelievable. There is a desire for change. There is a millennial generation that doesn't like what they're seeing, but doesn't quite know what the solution is.
There are two forms of populism, left-wing populism and right-wing populism. Right-wing populism requires the denigration of an "Other. " Left-wing populism tends to be about the haves and have-nots.
Trump is a hybrid phenomenon as I see it. He is somewhat like UKIP and Le Pen with his right-wing populism that espouses some fascist overtones, but he's also partly just the old neoliberalism in disguise, especially if we look at some of the people he appointed to his cabinet.
The problem is some of the populism on both the far left and the far right, it can make a Tweet but not make a policy. And, you know, when you are dealing with issues that are as important and serious as this, I understand why people search for simple solutions.
Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.
You see a wave of populism in the world. There is something wrong. This maybe because of technology.
I think a Donald Trump presidency raises a new kind of version of conservatism which more closely resembles a kind of Father Coughlin, America first populism and nativism and isolationism, than the confident, modern, cosmopolitan, thoughtful, engaged conservatism of Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan.
This work is either useless or harmful, because there is nothing good about populism. If you wanted to hear my opinion on this issue, that is what I think.
Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
Populism is dangerous.