If we want to go full throttle with the analogues to today, Ceasers journal entries would be read out loud in the public forum where large crowds gathered to hear it (as good a tweet as you can get). He specifically tried to reach the plebs.
This is exactly like what we’ve seen in recent years (really it’s been seen time and time again.) I tried to leave out any names or obvious events other than to explain the rhetorical behavior they usually share.
I will say that it doesn’t take an ignorant person to fall victim to populism. I initially went head first into Bernie as “my guy” (not that I’m some genius, mind you.) Coming from a lower middle class white family he basically told me everything I wanted to hear in 2016.
It’s easy identifying a given problem but one thing I’ve come to try and understand is that if I ever have an idea that seems simple, it’s best to try and figure out why it is it hasn’t been solved yet. For any given issue (be it enterprise or political) there have probably been incredibly intelligent people, smarter than me for sure, who’ve tried to solve it and were unable to.
> he basically told me everything I wanted to hear in 2016
...
> it’s best to try and figure out why it is it hasn’t been solved yet
Stroking the plebs is not a new thing. Trump exists for this reason, AOC literally strokes the left with every tweet, so does Bernie.
The only reason I mentioned my own believes was because I used to consider myself fairly well educated, having been a huge history nerd my entire life alongside the CS stuff we all do here, and yet I didn’t even realize Bernie was a populist until after Trump was president and the election was over.
It’s easy to get sweeper up in emotions, that’s my point.
i think i agree, populist messaging can be a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands... on the other hand, i wonder how else politics of change can work without it?
it seems very hard to get a message through when theres such a huge low-pass filter... maybe there are other ways?