Populism Fast and Slow | Hacker News Reader

Populism Fast and Slow

josephheath.substack.com

I regard swissinfo.ch as basically propaganda but they once made the point that direct democracy can be faster than populism at addressing citizens' (cognitive) needs: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/democracy/direct-democracy-seri...

(The populism here on HN might be tempered by this mechanism too!)

I feel like a lot of people are only just discovering history and that this is absolutely nothing new. Ancient Greeks had a word, demagogue, that isn’t used much but captures certain past/current political figures so well.

My reductive take on populism is that it is a consequence of majority of people being unhappy. If the unhappiness is a result of economic struggles, you get right wing populism. If it is a result of social struggles, you get left wing populism. And more often than not, the source of unhappiness is economic struggles.

It's what happens when the ordinary politicians ignore problems until the "let's solve it like psychopaths" get a critical mass of support.

There were actual problems with immigration, crime, and trade that were aggressively ignored by both parties perhaps one more than the other. The problems grew and grew in the collective minds of the public until enough of the public started to support "let's solve it like fascists".

The lesson is that you can't manifest a perfect political reality by pretending problems don't exist.

Or maybe their actual problems are caused by automation, tax cuts on the rich, and a lack of social safety net that lets people live in dignity, but the media they consume mostly blames immigration and crime.

Political "reality" is rarely objective.

In the US, we spend about $3T on social safety net programs at the federal level, that's half the federal budget or about 12% of the GDP.

I used to live in Oakland, CA...about a mile from MLK. I can tell you plenty about the amount of crime there over the last decade. I've known lots of people from the suburbs that will try to tell me that crime is down, meanwhile I saw my neighbors getting robbed during the day (not just at night anymore).

If your only experience with these things is watching the news, you really shouldn't be talking about them. And taking police services away from the poorest parts of town is despicable.

PS It was the votes from those high crime districts that got Trump elected last year. The people down there don't watch the news. Your take is just copium because you don't want to do the real work of looking at your side's policies and fixing what is costing you voters and elections.

As somebody avowedly on the left-hand side of the political spectrum - yep. I know the crime stats. I also have seen friends of mine get robbed 3 times in 4 years, once with them in the house. (LA, not Oakland. And in the nice suburbs.) And it's not an isolated incident.

I know that the crime stats say crime is down. But that's not the lived experience for a lot of people. And unless politicians are willing to acknowledge there are issues, and do the work to tackle them, you get demagogues. Right-wing ones will use it to extol the virtues of cracking down, left-wing ones will use it to talk about the plight of the downtrodden.

Meanwhile, you still have people for whom crime is the best option, and you have people who suffer from crime. We could choose to solve those problems (independent of political leaning), and we could choose to solve both sides of the coin. But that'd probably be too rational to sell at the voting booth.

> It was the votes from those high crime districts that got Trump elected last year. The people down there don't watch the news.

[citation needed] They do get enough info through various channels to decide "Trump might fix it". And a good chunk of that is news. We can debate the veracity of info they derive, and how they make their decisions, but let's not go "poor people don't watch news". Mass media exists and has effects, across all demographic strata. Mass media is a tool of demagogues, willing or unwilling.

But that's really also the point of the article - "if people just had better info" isn't actually a workable answer to demagogues. And so debates about media consumption are mostly useless waffling. See above re "what if we instead thought about fixing real issues"

First I want to say the last election wasn't people electing Trump, it was people rejecting the Dems. Second, this entire argument from the left on crime is based upon a false reading of the stats. When people quote the single recidivism rate, they are misunderstanding how that rate is measured. The majority of people that go to prison for the first time, never go back again. A fraction of cons go back over and over again and that skews the recidivism rate. A large chunk of those repeat offenders have serious mental illness. Most of the rest view crime as either a job or a lifestyle.

I'm not sure the 'people for whom crime is the best option' is really the right way to look at it. The vast majority of people in West Oakland never commit any crimes. And ignoring these realities is what is driving populism. Articles like this one say a lot more about the author than they do about political science or populism.

When I say the people in that neighborhood don't watch the news, I'm not making a value judgement. I'm just stating a fact. They don't really care about politics. They do care if the police come when they call and they do care if they can walk the streets at least some part of the day safely.

If Dems really wanted to win an election, they would change policy. Until they do that, they will continue to lose elections. That's Democracy working, not some new or different politics at work.

"this entire argument from the left on crime is based upon a false reading of the stats" -> Not sure whom you're debating here. I'm aware of the stats, and don't think I've made points that disagree with your view of them.

"A large chunk of those repeat offenders have serious mental illness" -> 25%. A bigger problem is substance abuse, at 52%.

Your "Most of the rest view crime as either a job or a lifestyle" and my "people for whom crime is the best option" are saying the same thing. So I'm not clear why you say you're not sure it's the right way to look at it. We both agree that there are subgroups that choose crime deliberately, and based on the stats, it's still a fairly significant group.

"And ignoring these realities is what is driving populism". -> Yes. That is exactly what the article is saying. Quote: "This gives rise to a set of views among those elites, [...] which are basically out of sync with the views of the majority". You're 100% aligned with the author here.

The author explicitly says that punishment doesn't work. He implies heavily that only the academics and elites know this because its counter-intuitive.

My point is that what is driving populism is poor performance by the elites. The other side of this coin is regular folks noticing the bad performance while understanding (in this case correctly) the problem. The populism only happens when both of these things are happening at the same time (bad performance, and normies noticing the bad performance).

Fix the policy and the populism fades. But in this situation that is unlikely to happen because the author believes something that is just false. That's why he keeps going in circles about the wrong fixes, because he doesn't understand that he is just wrong in his understanding. Ironic no?

PS The stats you quote, are they all offenders or repeat offenders? Because that's basically the same mistake the author is making by confusing those two categories. I'm not sure that matters for you because you seem to understand policing is effective. For him, it breaks his entire analysis. I hope this explains my point. Edit: the reason why your way of looking at it isn't all that helpful is that its based in economics instead of policy. There are always rich and poor, there isn't always a big increase in crime.

Crime has been trending down for decades.

Solving a problem like a psychopath might also include lying about the existence of a problem to scare people into putting you in charge. And then not solving it but abusing your position to get rich.

Crime measurement has been trending down.

As part of policy.

If you have proof a whole bunch of academics would be glad to see it as they're all arguing about the cause:

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

This is in the realm of JAQing.

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/crime/general/dc-quietly-settles-l...

This is what's public and easily searchable.

We know about deliberately ignoring reports of crime (shoplifting, burglary, mugging, pickpocketing) because of the BLM protests (and the associated increase in black deaths in the area where He Floyd died), drops in funding and Animus between government and police.

The idea of pretending no one's faking records in these areas is quite fascinating as well as the idea it's only happening where covered or researched.

You probably know where to look for your fenced items if they are stolen from your home too. Yet those places remain open.

> The problems grew and grew in the collective minds of the public until enough of the public started to support "let's solve it like fascists".

Well said, and there's no indication that obtaining dictatorial powers hasn't been the original goal all along.

> The lesson is that you can't manifest a perfect political reality by pretending problems don't exist.

There are a lot of lessons here, but this is a good start.

> "let's solve it like fascists".

You have a weird way of spelling libertarian.

Nothing says libertarian like federal soldiers being sent into cities.

A distinction without a difference.

Never took a political science class I see. Of all the major political ideologies, the one that is the least like fascism would be libertarianism. Now if a specific person or party is actually libertarian, that's another story. In case you wondered why people just ignore your talking points, that's why. In Spain, you might have a point. In the US, you are just showing your ignorance.

PS There is a reason why political scientists never talk about left or right. Those terms only have meaning in one place at one time. They change meanings between places.

> Never took a political science class I see.

Actually I did and I'm quite good at it. However, not all classes are the same.

> Of all the major political ideologies, the one that is the least like fascism would be libertarianism.

Only if you haven't thought about it long enough or haven't taken the right classes.

> Now if a specific person or party is actually libertarian, that's another story.

It's not another story, it's where libertarianism always ends, it's in its DNA. In other words, cute baby-libertarianism has nothing to do with the finished product.

There is a lot of irony in this article. There are points he makes where he assumes his political belief is 100% right. On at least one of those points, he is just wrong because of a tiny detail in how the paper he is referencing was setup. Specifically, he doesn't understand how recidivism is calculated. This leads him to think a counter-intuitive thing which is wrong. The simplistic POV is actually right on this specific topic. That leads some some ironic conclusions.

My conclusion is that populism comes about when the "elites" perform badly. The author can't or won't admit this is happening even while unknowingly demonstrating it happening. Populism goes away when either the populist politicians don't improve things or when the elites get their act in order. If either of these happens, things go back to the previous situation. If neither happens, the elites are slowly replaced. We will see what happens going forward.

> My conclusion is that populism comes about when the "elites" perform badly.

That's only half true, or maybe a quarter. Actually, populism comes about when the people (are led to) believe that the (patsy) "elites" perform badly.

Without that clarification, we would miss the most likely explanations for present day populism.

> Populism goes away when either the populist politicians don't improve things or when the elites get their act in order.

This is manifestly false today, the elites are now consolidating power for themselves, removing competitors left and right, mostly left because the right surrendered without a fight. In the end, they not only retain power but get more of it while acting materially worse.

Populism isn’t just bad elites or gullible masses. It’s what happens when both sides lose the virtues that once held them together. Elites forget humility and justice, turning reason into arrogance; populists forget prudence and temperance, turning righteous anger into resentment.

HN itself is a kind of popu-elitism. Look at the other comments here. We're a crowd of self-identified “slow thinkers” who often post fast, intuitive reactions. The irony is that our intuitions here are shaped by analytic habits, not moral ones.

The real goal isn’t to think faster or slower, but to build a society that makes a virtuous life first possible, and then easy.

"More profoundly, the negative dynamic of fragmentation is cultural: mass higher education creates stratified societies in which the highly educated – 20%, 30%, 40% of the population – begin to live among themselves, to think of themselves as superior, to despise the working classes, and to reject manual labour and industry. Primary education for all (universal literacy) had nurtured democracy, creating a homogeneous society with an egalitarian subconscious. Higher education has given rise to oligarchies, and sometimes plutocracies, stratified societies invaded by an unequal subconscious. The ultimate paradox: the development of higher education ended up producing a decline in intellectual standards in these oligarchies or plutocracies!"

The dislocation of the West: what threatens us - Emmanuel Todd

https://substack.com/home/post/p-175377338

There are only two political systems at the end of the day: authoritarianism (everyone knows who is in charge) and oligarchy. Populism, in a liberal democracy, is basically authoritarianism-lite representing the interests of a particular faction of oligarchs. There's no "populism" in China, that's an American & European invention. Populism is ugly but it's a useful tool that can get things done in an oligarchy.

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