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Comment by spaniard89277 | Hacker News Reader

Democracy is essentially populist, because elites fight for votes through media. Parties optimize their selection process for those more suited to deal with public opinion.

Reaching as many votes as possible forces parties to draw their discourses around the lowest common denominator, which dumbs it down a lot.

The competition is fierce, so small by small step parties push the boundaries. There's an inverse correlation between the results in the last election with the incentive to push the boundaries. So if you're losing by a wide gap, dumb it down and appeal to emotions even more. Then your competition is forced to react, hopefully not quick enough.

I've been a consultant in a company for political parties for a brief period of time in my country, and the level of technification and specialization is on par, if not better, with the best marketing campaigns in the private sector. I laughed when I saw the scandal about cambridge Analytica. IDK in the US but in Spain microtargeting and segmented audiences were already being used by that time.

It didn't feel right to me so I left before I made a year in it. It wasn't only my job, it was the people I had to speak with, the feeling after the meetings that we were in the hands of completely idiot sociopaths.

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The level to which mainstream political parties obsess over marketing demonstrates just how desperately they want to "push" policies upon the populace that they've already decided upon rather than listen and adapt.

This is probably because $$ and internal power struggle mostly decides policy, which is A) not democratic, and B) opens the door for political movements which represent policies outside of the elite overton window.

I don't see how that is abnormal. "The level to which mainstream political parties obsess over marketing", as you put it, is certainly nauseating, however anybody who actively becomes involved with politics does so because he wants to "push" towards a specific direction.

If I decide to join the X party as opposed to the Y party, this is supposedly because my mind is already set, and X policies align more with my set of preferences than Y policies.

Failure to listen and adapt, if anything, tells more about how Western politicians are increasingly worse at being politicians, (i.e. at achieving tangible policy goals evaluated according to their own set of preferences).

I dont think thats true at all. Most politicians get into politics out of ambition and a desire for power and status.

Dedicated activists are kind of rare as politicians. I can think of a few but not many, and they normally become politicians precisely because they're fighting for a popular cause that mainstream elites are suppressing.

They aren't mutually exclusive. There exists a multitude of political organizations. All of them want power and status (there's nothing wrong with that; up to a point, egoism is a virtue), but not all of them want the same things.

So yeah, they want power and status because they are humans. They join party X as opposed to party Y because that's their preferred direction.

I wasnt saying that they were mutually exclusive. I dont think that theres anything necessarily wrong with this either.

I was saying that it's more common for ideology to be an afterthought for most high level politicians rather than the primary reason (as you previously asserted) they get into politics.

You'd expect that it would mean less intransigence about policy in the face of democratic pressures, but it doesnt. Probably because money is the real driver.

I personally know one politician who was part of a mainstream party politics for years and his ideology was... fluid at best. He ran for election and lost and was almost immediately shunted into a safe, well paid job at a corporate NGO where he rabbits on about sustainable investment.

After digging into the personal stories of many other people in this "left" party I realized that his story was completely normal. The candidate in my area was a black woman pulled from a public relations company linked to the party elites. She speaks with the veneer of ideology (vaguely and on "safe" topics) but it's obvious that it's ambition that drove her.

Also because power and status are how you push policy.

See, I think modern politicians are very willing to change their policies. They just find it good marketing to appear steadfast in their current policies.

After all, if I want the support of gun rights/abortion rights voters, a clear statement of unwavering support will get it - whereas a wishy-washy "I could be convinced either way" will leave them looking for someone more steadfast.

But that doesn't stop me changing my positions in order to win votes. Plenty of politicians flipped their stances on rowdy protests between BLM and Jan 6th. Plenty flipped their stances on "my body, my choice" during the pandemic. And anyone with a 20+ year political career will have updated their stances in that time.

>After all, if I want the support of gun rights/abortion rights voters, a clear statement of unwavering support will get it

Coincidentally, zero donors to the Democratic party will be inconvenienced by this stance.

If you look at Medicare for all it's supported by 52% of Republican voters and 7/10 of voters in general. It's pretty much the definition of an electable policy.

Now, why do you think it might be such a fringe view in the Beltway? Why did Obama write it off as a non starter?

If a policy became super popular and no donor interests were threatened by it, yea, it has a decent chance of being promoted and passed.

> Why did Obama write it off as a non starter?

Joe Lieberman.

Many of these things can't be modeled from first principles, as nice as it would be to have a simple theory of everything for politics without involving individuals and second, third, etc order effects.

>> Why did Obama write it off as a non starter? >Joe Lieberman.

This... doesnt even begin to make any sense.

There's actually research that supports this. Basically it doesn't matter what American voters want, they'll only get whatever the overlap between what big corporations want and what they want is.

It's heartening to me that 50-70% of American voters generally support every sensible policy you can name. Many of them are in no real danger of getting passed though.

Here's an article that covers the research and some critiques. The criticism seems a bit absurd to me, the bit about the rich being successful in convincing people of what they want only makes things worse, yet is presented as if it undermines the research.

>If you look at Medicare for all it's supported by 52% of Republican voters and 7/10 of voters in general. It's pretty much the definition of an electable policy.

Only because no one can actually agree on what it means. Which goes to it actually not being passable.

"Medicare for all" has essentially turned into a marketing term.

Politicians would love to capitalize on it's popularity, but that would mean fighting over the meaning, and that would reveal that many people are actually very against certain aspects of it, like funding sources, covering controversial procedures, or even where to draw the line of what's "healthcare". Is OTC medicine? Exercise equipment? Healthy food? Housing?

Everytime you include or exclude any particular policy, you lose some support.

So it ends up being this catch 22 where politicians really want to cash in, but can't figure how to do it without causing the stock to crash.

>Only because no one can actually agree on what it means

Take the medicare bill. Strike the words "over 65". Provide funding.

It's not complicated. It can be MADE complicated, but intrinsically it is not.

>Politicians would love to capitalize on it's popularity

Yeah, provided they dont lose their campaign financing doing it - which they will.

those are all just symptoms of the real problem

politics is more intense due to lower standards of living due to the drastic slowdown in technological innovation and more competition for finite resources due to globalization. Both sides are trying to find somebody to blame for that. Right tends to blame immigrants, left tends to blame the rich. Both are just scapegoating essentially, the oldest trick for leadership failure in human history.

when people's lives are getting better and they are doing well they they don't really give a shit about politics. Very few revolutions happen during economic booms, they happen during depressions. People are upset right now because they can very clearly see they are working harder than their parents and grandparents for a lower quality of life.

The other aspect of this is that it's relative, a lot of human happiness is based on who you compare yourself to. With social media everybody can see how the richest really live and it pisses them off. Ignorance is bliss to some degree

> Democracy is essentially populist, because elites fight for votes through media.

Media are just well, a medium to deliver the "offer". The real fight is about handouts, especially the short-term ones. Pork barrelling is still effective at winning the elections.

I don't see how any of this is democracy or stupid people's fault? Generally where it is worst is where democracy is weakest.

There's a reasonable case to be made that anti-democratic propaganda led to World War II and more democracy was one of the safeguards put in place to prevent repeats.

Calling opinions you don’t like propaganda isn’t an argument. I have no idea if democracy leads to less war but given the number of countries the UK and US have invaded I kind of doubt it. England has had parliamentary supremacy since the Dutch invasion/Glorious Revolution and the US didn’t grow from 13 colonies to continent spanning without war.

> I have no idea if democracy leads to less war

The simple answer is yes, it does. "Democratic peace" is one of the most solid empirical results in International Relations. (Of course, "democratic" here has to be understood as including broadly liberal/freedom-promoting norms. Electoral politics on its own is beside the point.)

Completely confounded by the US hegemony since WW2. In that period democracy and US client state are almost synonyms. Why would client states go to war against instructions from the imperial capital?

"Client state" is a confused notion - it misinterprets mutually beneficial cooperative attitudes as forced dependence. One of the best ways of disproving this notion is to look at what happens when the "hegemon" foolishly tries to enforce an "America First, our way or the highway" approach. To no one's surprise, the former "client states" suddenly start looking for alternative arrangements and banding together to counter the supposed "hegemon".

It sounds like you think there have been times the US has pushed real hard on some issue and a coalition of other countries have come together to tell it to go to hell. Given that NATO countries are so dependent on the US for expeditionary capability that when Sarkozy wanted to bomb Libya back into open air slave markets he had to get Hillary Clinton to ask Obama to do it this seems pretty weak. For an example from when there were Western powers that still aspired to an independent foreign policy one could look to the Suez Crisis. The UK and France pursue their interests and the US tells them to stop so they do.

The NATO countries are quite happy to be dependent on the U.S. because military capability is hella expensive. NATO can't even get their own military spending target to be taken seriously, and that's an order of magnitude lower than what the U.S. spends. If by "hegemony" you mean "the U.S. pays for everyone else's defense, and gets some amount of reciprocation (most likely worth a lot less than 20% of GDP, so hardly a fair trade!) in the form of favorable foreign policy from the countries it's paying for" then the U.S. is obviously a hegemon and no one among its "clients" is seeking to change that in the slightest.

Do you have any examples of a group of US client states coming together to tell it no on any issue the US pushed hard on?

Ancient Greeks would disagree. And there's that whole slavery bit, and genocide (did we forget about the Indians already?). And the selective morality of when to choose to go into a conflict. And the whole quasi-imperialist overseas territories bit that democracies enjoy.

It's cultural values that prevent war, not politics. Democracy is a machine for warfare if the people (or its leaders) like war.

> (Of course, "democratic" here has to be understood as including broadly liberal/freedom-promoting norms. Electoral politics on its own is beside the point.)

In other words, "democracy leads to less war" so long as by "democracy" you actually mean the polar opposite of actual democracy, which is electoral politics. It's orthogonal to, and frequently opposed to, those "liberal/freedom-promoting norms" which you correctly observe are actually responsible for peace. If you want peace you can't just introduce "democracy" in the form of elections and voting—you have to change the culture to respect natural rights and value freedom even when doing so in a particular situation may be contrary to popular sentiment.

In a society which endorses "liberal/freedom-promoting norms" the influence of democracy is minimal as power resides with free individuals making decisions for themselves and not the collective, and it makes little difference whether the few remaining issues—which naturally exclude anything which might infringe on individuals' natural rights—are decided by direct vote, elected representatives, or self-appointed leader(s).

> few remaining issues

The issues which are subject to political decision making are anything but "few" or "unimportant". Even in the most freedom-loving society, you're going to need some mechanism to discipline policy makers when they make bad decisions. Electoral politics is one convenient way of doing that - it's anything but perfect, but by and large it's what we're all familiar with.

> Even in the most freedom-loving society, you're going to need some mechanism to discipline policy makers when they make bad decisions.

The point was that there wouldn't be very much in the way of "policy" in a society grounded in a culture of liberty and freedom. A "government" which is bound to respect everyone's natural rights at all times is really nothing more than a corporation or co-op (either for-profit or non-profit). It can't levy taxes or impose regulations on non-members, or force anyone to become or remain a member against their will. Whatever "policies" it might decide on, it can't compel anyone else to follow them. The way to "discipline policy makers" in such a system is simply to cancel your membership, and perhaps switch to a competing organization—and this option is available to you regardless of how the organization makes its decisions.

To be clear, I'm not opposed to employing democracy in this way, just as co-ops may have elected leaders or shareholders may vote on proposals offered by a board of directors. There are times to seek consensus and work through issues as a group, just as there are times for clear, unified leadership. But if someone wants to sign up with an organization with an "autocratic" leader who doesn't care about anyone else's opinion, that's fine too—provided they don't force their system on anyone who doesn't choose to follow them.

It's my opinion, not "propaganda". Don't be ridiculous.

Yep, and the corollary effect of living in a non-democratic country is that the political discourse is far more intelligent, because they're NOT trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Over the past few years I learned Russian and started watching Russian/Ukrainian popular TV and following political writers on all ends of the spectrum. Yes the media environment in Russia is far more authoritarian. But like a tightly-knit academic community, it is also far more intelligent. The nuance and the depth of discourse found on the average popular Russian political talk show (even state channels like Russia 1) is far beyond anything I have ever seen in America, with the exception of some independent podcasters and niche communities like Hacker News and academic think tanks. And the Russian elite lament this[1] because they cannot engage their American counterparts as peers, everything has to be rewritten in the language of CNN/Fox even during high-level state negotiations.

[1] https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2022/01/20/anthony-blinken-and-t...

I mean, leaving propaganda issues aside for a moment, you still have a sample size of two. I'm not sure that qualifies as data.

You know that the U.S. too (and the West more generally, of course) has "tightly-knit academic communities" to discuss things such as the concerns that might come up in high-level state negotiations? In fact, the broad community of "open source intelligence" almost invariably has a markedly better handle on those issues than high-profile parts of USG that ought to theoretically benefit from secrecy and non-public info - despite common claims to the contrary!

Yes exactly, that was my point. High quality political analysis is niche in the US, but it is more mainstream in Russia.

More intelligent does not mean more correct. The way I read OP is that level of discussion among mass population seems to be more intelligent.

In my opinion, even if this hypothesis is correct, these ‘more intelligent’ discussions try to build upon inherently two-dimensional authoritarian picture, with carefully controlled inputs. Results of these discussions have very little touch with actual reality. It’s like existing in parallel reality.

I work on the theory that Fox News is a result of lack of democracy in the USA.

To give one example, the common complaints about the coastal elites and metropolitans. Its harder to get away with that if you have a democratic system that counts peoples votes since those groups include a lot of people.

By your theory, the political conversation should be worst in the countries ranked most democratic, which I don't feel fits the facts as well as the opposite.

https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2020/

> By your theory, the political conversation should be worst in the countries ranked most democratic, which I don't feel fits the facts as well as the opposite.

I didn't say the political discourse was "worse", I said it appeals to the lowest common denominator. The crowds are finicky and have a short attention span, but sometimes they may happen to be correct. And sometimes they're not.

Right, so the political discussion in New Zealand, Sweden etc. appeals to the lowest common denominator even more, because they are more democratic than the US? I don't think that's true.

Yeah, I don’t buy it. I especially don’t buy that link. Blaming American’s concerns about an invasion of Ukraine on a lack of intellectualism is embarrassingly weak tea.

Lack of intellectualism in the American political discourse is a common refrain even among the American left, not to mention the rest of the world, after becoming the laughing stock of the world during the Trump era. Of course this does not mean that American soft power was decreasing, Tyler Cowen (the right-leaning writer at Marginal Revolution) would argue exactly the opposite, but still, intellectualism being relegated to the sidelines and niche communities is a serious concern.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-19/woke-m...

Why does the author pull up Nord stream2 as important to the German economy considering there is no need for increased capacity only a Russian incentive to take away the cards of Ukraine and such?

Other than that the author makes a boatload of assumptions. South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Crimea, Nagarno karabakh, etc in recent memory but somehow he believes the Americans would not consider anything close based on this conjecture?

I don't think Russian state TV insulting past and present NATO and US leaders proves nuance, depth, or belief.

I had a similar reaction to the Cambridge Analytica documentary. There was nothing new about adjusting discourse to a particular audience. It's just that there are new tools to identify groups of people and target them.

I don't think much of Alexander Nix and I think he did a terrible job of defending himself. He just let himself be framed into a defensive position and didn't really question it.

The problem with Cambridge Analytica is that the wrong people benefited.

https://medium.com/@PatrickRuffini/the-medias-double-standar...

> ...microtargeting and segmented audiences...

Asking out loud:

Is voter profiling basically k-means clustering?

Given the USA's FPTP elections, k=2. (Per Duverger's Law.)

Quick peek at wiki wrt Spain's govt, featuring a parliament and using plurality block voting, apparently yielding k=7.

I've also participated in politics (campaigns). But I have zero idea how our consultants do their profiling and targeting. Closely guarded secrets.

I recently read Jill Lepore's book If/Then about the history of Simulatics Corporation and their initial voter behavior modeling efforts and opinion polling. One of my takeaways is that Cambridge Analytica is just the 2016's iteration of the evergreen quixotic effort to model, predict, shape voting behavior. As you said, just like marketing.

I couldn't find the initial research papers online. (I haven't yet made the pilgrimage to my uni's library.) Nor do I know how outfits like dataforprogress.org work.

Would love to find a primer on this stuff. Because I have questions.

What is a wedge issue, really? The stuff Karl Rove is famous for. Did he identify wedge issues? Or did he just recycle tropes and use advanced targeting? Or maybe it's case-by-case? Like racial animus is evergreen whereas angst over abortion became a fault-line over time.

How malleable are the clusters? Ezra Klein in Why We Are Polarized argues there's some kind of feedback loop happening. People sorted, adopted the positions of their new cluster mates to align more closely, then became polarized. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Can we do the opposite analysis? Identify unifying issues to counterbalance the wedge issues?

Sorry, I could go on, but this is enough for now.

Well, I did voter profiling, and in my case I tried some clustering statistical methods, but IMO the best clustering involves a lot of human in the loop, keywords etc. It's a lot of cualitative work, I couldn't find any way to streamline clusters that made sense both in an operational level and understandable for non-tech/stats people.

I was supposedly an assistant with the data pipeline but in the end was pretty much in charge of 90% of it's logic. Devs made the scrapers and some automated data adquisition, that got dumped into a data lake, I took the data from the data lake, I made a huge DB of voters with many columns (+30 don't remember exactly) from which I made a ruleset for initial clustering, based on conversations with creatives and operations and some of my own ideas, and that data got used for Ads people and operations people (basically, the ones that handle campaigns and volunteers). I know that devs eventually made a nice front-end for it, but it was basically ETL work, and instead of "buyer persona" it was kinda "voter persona".

It was fairly sofisticated and honestly, it worked pretty well.

You really should read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

Because what you are saying might be how it is today (especially in america), but it doesn't have to be like that.

The book I mentioned tries to explain why, and I think it does a good job at it.

>Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state control.

In the covid era, we get both!

I don't agree this is an essential trait of democracy. A weak corrupt democracy perhaps. What incentives do politicians have to push policy down the electorates throats? Except that they belong to a privileged class or are bribed by lobbyists.

In a well functioning democracy with more economic equality and less corporate influence this is much less the situation.

But what stops a well-functioning democracy from getting more corporate influence? Or woops-emergency-powers? I've come to realize any government is better than the alternative - until an extreme point. As a result they tend to be stable even when amassing corruption

Nice summary.

I think old school they A/B tested using focus groups and so policy took a long time to get to Policy-Voter-Fit... but now that we have microtargeting, it's compressed these timelines by factors. You see this as politicians can announce something in the morning to then compeletly backflip by lunchtime.

... though I don't see this political hyperism letting up. In fact, I believe it will not only get even faster but will change from a passive targeting of ads to actively manipulating of content to individuals in order to slowly cause an action i.e make a politician or union member think a certain way, get a competitor's employee to perform a certain task etc.

This might be true in the US, but it's not true in coalition/consensus democracies where you always need multiple parties to form a majority.

There will still be some populists, but it's not mainstream. Populists will usually not rule, their points of view cannot be merged into a coalition agenda.

I think most people in the US are completely unfamiliar with this type of politics. It's a type of politics where extremists do not win, and where centrism is the norm.

You need multiple parties (for a rather different notion of "party"!) in the U.S. too. The Republicans and Democrats are "big tents" that aggregate many independent factions. If you can't enlist broad enough support, your policy initiatives will fail. With recent filibuster politics in the U.S. Senate, you might well need a super-majority in many cases for even mildly controversial things.

I get what you're saying, but I still think there's meaningful differences.

The country I'm in currently has a coalition of 4 parties, which still only barely gives a majority.

During campaigns, none of these parties can carry out the extremely aggressive politics as seen in the US where you smear the other at any and all cost. Because if you do, you won't be part of the coming coalition. This dynamic means that campaigning largely means telling the story of your party, instead of mud slinging other parties.

Blocking other parties for the sake of blocking the other party ("owning" them) in the senate or otherwise will be remembered. If you're unreasonable and childish, you won't be considered for the next coalition.

Getting a majority and then intentionally undoing the progress from the previous coalition is also frowned upon. It's another red flag for a future coalition.

So politics is building bridges and finding consensus amidst all players.

I'm from Spain, where there's a multi party parliament with coalitions.

> Reaching as many votes as possible forces parties to draw their discourses around the lowest common denominator

Education and social discourse have decayed such that even so-called elites are ignorant destroyers of civilisation.

"'Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind." -- Shakespeare, "King Lear", Act 4 scene 1

> Democracy is essentially populist, because elites fight for votes through media.

Democracy is by no means essentially populist. It is when it is in its sickly stages, maybe. It's also by no means necessarily dependent on elites; again that is an indication of the failure of democracy (and the arrival of money as speech).

It is very fair to say that few of the older democracies are keeping populism at bay -- India is failing at it, Britain has failed at it, Turkey has failed at it, etc.

What are some examples of democracies that are keeping populism at bay?

I live in a country that became democratic around when I was born. I don't feel that as a young democracy we're doing a particularly good job at keeping populism at bay; I'd go so far as to say we're failing at it.

I don't get the feeling there's much populism in New Zealand, Finland or Denmark, all of which had Womens Suffrage at least somewhat before 1900.

Sweden has been struggling with it recently, and Australia is pretty bad. Isle of Man does fine.

I think you are confusing a lack of populism with homogeneity of thought/culture. Your examples are all pretty small countries with little cultural divides. Even NZ got pretty populist on immigration when the number of immigrants started to increase, and Denmark literally was the harshest on refugees; they literally sent them all back a few months ago now that they say Syria is safe enough. Sweden is another example where populism went through the roof seemingly out of the blue, considering its historically consensus/trust based democratic system, for reasons similar to almost every other country in Europe. If Sweden went that way, I'd think any country could.

If anything, I think your examples prove why populism is inherent to truky democratic systems. To me, it's actually a sign of a well functioning, diverse society not only demographically but also ideologically. And that's imo pretty healthy - at least much more so than a permanent homogenous consensus.

(And in a democracy if elected politicians don't align with voters under the pretext of not bending to populist demands, someone else will do it. The job of politicians in a democracy is to represent the electorate, not the opposite.)

New Zealand surely has a decidedly non-little cultural divide. It manages to avoid populism despite extraordinary pressures.

The problematic part about these discussions is defining what 'democracy' and 'populism' really is.

Democracy is essentially shared, representative decision making based on a set of shared values and rules which every participant subscribes to.

It's perfectly valid to promote your ideas and policies to your constituency with respect to the governing framework which is democracy. The mechanics may seem 'populist' e.g. campaigning, advertising, interviews,... but the fundamentals aren't challenged.

Populism, however, does challenge those fundamentals. And it does so by using the governing rules and values within a democratic framework to challenge that framework itself. Examples of that is relentlessly attacking press and journalism itself, or antagonizing political adversaries, rather then challenging ideas and policies in a respectful public debate. The really insidious part are leveraging tactics that veil these as paramount to the sustainability of democracy.

In that regard, democracy is innately flawed. It doesn't nor can't stop the rise of populists who push democracy out of the door. Ultimately, it's a social construct which people actually have to subscribe to. And if environmental circumstances change - e.g. economic recessions, social inequalities, existential threats,... - a critical mass within a population can grow which no longer is willing to subscribe to that construct.

Or, worse, assumes that the alternative they subscribe to is democratic by nature when it is anything but democratic. History has an abundance of autocratic states who use 'democratic' or 'people' in their own naming e.g. the German Democratic Republic.

Democracy is always at odds with the social-economic dynamics and the formation of cultural and economic elites which hold de facto power and have plenty incentives to leverage political power in order to retain a status quo. Democracy doesn't overcome that, and never will.

However, what democracy does have going for itself is that it enshrines and protects an important set of fundamental freedoms and rights which apply to everyone regardless of their position in society.

I really like your analysis. I think the fundamental reason why is democracy so vulnerable is that in practice, there is a lot of socioeconomic inequality in societies, and that really erodes the core democratic concept that everyone should participate equally in decision-making.

So in very unequal societies with a semblance of democracy, like in South America (and it's slowly coming to USA as well), you get these right and left populist oscillations, as different classes (upper and lower) seek to gain all political power. I don't think anybody has figured out an effective way yet how to dampen these oscillations in a society, and equalize it, so it would return to the ideal democratic mode.

> Britain has failed at it

I don't see that (I live here).

The UK has had a two-party system for at least 60 years. The Conservative Party is much the same as it was under Margaret Thatcher: xenophobic, opposed to public expenditure. The Labour Party is currently in the grip of people who admire Tony Blair's policies (interventionism, focus groups, and triangulation).

Labour had a brief phase of mass-movement socialism under Jeremy Corbyn, who might be tagged "populist", but didn't deserve that tag. The current Conservative Party is led by a would-be populist; but the rest of the party doesn't seem to admire him very much. The only real populist much in evidence recently was Nigel Farage, who seems to spend more of his time in US TV studios than on UK TV.

"India is failing, Britain has failed" makes it sound as if UK politics is dominated by pogroms, temple-burnings and riots - as if British society is in a worse state than Indian society. That's far from the truth.

> I don't see that (I live here).

I also live here.

Brexit is evidence of a failure of democracy to contain populism. It is absolutely not in our national interest, is already harming us, was almost certainly bankrolled by dark money and foreign influence campaigns, used unlawful tactics and above all was driven by systematic populist xenophobia.

As you live here you will also have received the leaflet that tried to show the threat of Turkey joining the EU (with a map that didn't mark out Turkey but did mark out Iraq and Syria) even though Turkey is no closer to achieving membership now than it ever was -- this was vile populist manipulation.

Boris runs Number 10 as if it is unaccountable to parliament. He flings out bread-and-circuses distractions when his mendacious lying is exposed. He deliberately deployed a populist smear in parliament for which he won't apologise in parliament, and people around him rallied to support it as he doubled down.

We are heading into a criminalisation of dissent and protest that even Maggie wouldn't have tried. We have a government implementing serious voter suppression based on untruths.

And we have a populist leader of a government that is increasingly corrupt, who rode into power on a Brexit wave who does not believe the rules apply to him (and who has evidence to support it, given how many last-last-last-chances he's been given to "shape up") and a ruling party that appears to be swimming in Russian influence money in a manner so severe that our "special relationship" partner has openly rebuked us for it, and so damaging that our prime minister buried a report into it.

Boris is engaging in Trumpian tactics and his party seem unable to do a thing about it; the frog is being boiled just the same way as it (still) is in the USA.

We're in enormous trouble.

(And what is really striking to me is that the bulk of the criticism I have typed above is apolitical; members of his own party have levelled essentially all of these criticisms).

> was almost certainly bankrolled by dark money

Look at the bright side of it, now we can spend some of that money on the NHS!

> Brexit is evidence of a failure of democracy to contain populism.

There seems to be a tendency here to contrast "populism" with "democracy".

I don't think either term is well-defined. "Democracy" is usually taken to mean electoral democracy, whether PR of FPTP; "populism" is a vaguer term, commonly used as an insult to hurl at your adversaries. But I take it to refer to the espousing of policies that appeal to ignorant people, but don't make sense.

Those two things are orthogonal; if populists win the most votes in a democratic election, the winner is both democratic and populist.

I completely agree that the PM is a populist, and that his government is corrupt.

For what it's worth, I think it's a good thing that his party has so far been unable to unseat him. He is the Labour Party's greatest asset (especially so, given that Keir Starmer's main spiel is attacking Johnson and his antics and lies).

I'm no admirer of either the Tories or Starmer's centrist Labour. I'm just saying that while I don't think Labour can win under Starmer, I think the Tories can lose, if they don't dump Boris soon. Regrettably, I don't think there's any prospect of Labour dumping Starmer.

> For what it's worth, I think it's a good thing that his party has so far been unable to unseat him. He is the Labour Party's greatest asset (especially so, given that Keir Starmer's main spiel is attacking Johnson and his antics and lies).

I hear this from people a lot, and if you'll allow me to be blunt, I think this position is insane, when the country is heading into exactly the kind of omnicrisis that birthed people like Orbán. The longer we have a prime minister and a cabinet of loyalists who are happy to serve up bigoted, lunatic "red meat" strategies to "Save Big Dog", the less recoverable our situation is.

And the longer he stays around, the greater the chance of the kind of staff turnover that leads to kakistocracy. Why would anyone who is actually good at their job and keen to carry out a public service stay around to take the blame and get even more dirty with scandals not of their making?

It's like Trump didn't happen.

> I think this position is insane

So who do you think is most likely to replace Boris as PM, if he is kicked out? Truss? Sunak?

Frankly, I prefer incompentent corrupt Tory leaders to competent corrupt Tory leaders. Boris is an albatross around the Tories' neck, and if they do remove him, it'll be because they can see that he's a liability. It's good if the Tories are encumbered by a clown.

Sunak is the likely winner isn't he; it's in the ordinary progression of things. But there are competent, non-corrupt people in the party who are in the running, like Tom Tugendhat, who is obviously the stalking horse but has more of a chance if the contest becomes truly divisive. I'd sleep much better if either of them were in the job, but I am more comfortable with the idea of a Tugendhat Cabinet.

It's important to internalise that Boris is not a clown. That is the wrong way to look at him, not least because clowning requires empathy.

> but I am more comfortable with the idea of a Tugendhat Cabinet.

Good luck with that! I don't think he has a snowflake's (and I don't think he'd run). Sunak will bring back austerity and handouts for bankers (Sunak is a banker).

> It's important to internalise that Boris is not a clown.

I agree that he's not so green as he's cabbage-looking. He's not stupid. But he does treat everything as a joke, including his own hair. At any rate, I don't think it's important to internalise anything about Boris; I'm pretty sure he's finished.

Tugendhat has already announced that he will run in that contest.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tom-tugendhat...

As to a snowflake's, as of a week ago when the prospect of a contest really emerged, the betting markets thought his chance was 16/1 and now his odds are between 6/1 and 9/1 depending on where you look. Not far off Truss's odds.

Not a snowflake's -- he's in fourth place and it's more like we need to see whether Jeremy Hunt will run or endorse. Tugendhat has pull in the national party (even if half of the parliamentary party hate him for being a "swot" -- i.e. actual public service instead of a PPE degree and some time at a hedge fund). I think if Hunt decides not to run, there is a good chance he gets to take it to the country.

I would observe that Jeremy Corbyn started out with longer odds in the 2015 Labour leadership campaign.

Boris's hair is not a joke. Nothing about his appearance is a joke. It is carefully crafted to maximise his innate characteristics and play up to a distracting stereotype. He had his flat done up for £100,000 by an exclusive designer, his wife is a smart dresser, and he is surrounded by PR people. Everything about the way Boris looks and acts is planned. Understand that he's a sociopath. And sociopaths do what they do. This will be a rough contest.

P.S. I enjoyed this disagreement; it has helped me assemble my thoughts :-)

And I should add that for the sake of clarity, in a second comment here, that I don't for a moment believe all of these failures started with Boris; many started with Blair. Not least the pipeline of dark money that flowed into politics with gambling deregulation and policies friendly to Russian oligarchs. Some were worsened under the coalition government, some modestly reversed.

But the acceleration of the problems in just two years of Boris's regime is a failure of democracy to repel populism and the attacks on institutions that populism demands.

> Democracy is essentially populist, because elites fight for votes through media.

That's not really what populism means. The essence of populism is deep distrust for deliberative mechanisms and, more generally, for any efforts at endowing political decision making with desirable qualities such as intellectual depth, moderation, nimble adaptation to circumstances, compromise among opposing views, etc. etc. Populism is, in many ways, a clear failure mode of politics.

Your definition fits the circumstances of most places I've lived. (Not Singapore, which had its own particular democratic shortcomings...) Can you give us another example of a "democracy" that does not qualify as populist?

it's hard for me to tell from the toke of your writing, but is this suppose to be a bad thing? data collection and targeted ads aren't great even in the context of politics, but that seems more like a societal wide issue. everything else sounds just like democracy

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