[techelite]

I'm more curious what caused the wave of populism in the late 2010s. Was it really Russian propagandists on social media?

COVID will be gone in a year or 2, but the economic damage may cause things to be worse.

My best hope is a reform of the medical cartels, but that is wishful thinking in the face of a billion dollar lobbyist group.

[uniqueid]

  I'm more curious what caused the wave of populism in the late 2010s.

I think it's a combination of three things.

• History has a cyclical pattern (according to many. Toynbee, Hegel, etc) and the West was just rife for such a period. The people who experienced the negative outcomes of authoritarianism back in the 1940s died or entered nursing homes en masse in the 2010s.

• Social networks, and other internet phenomena, advantage sensationalism and division.

• The actual state of the world is bad enough that people stop voting for the status quo. By the 'state of the world', I mean things like the 'forever wars', terror attacks, the migrant crisis, the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of China, etc.

The more I think about it, though, the less I think the actual state of the world matters. My reasoning there is that the way people interpret both their own station in life, and the events of the world, depends largely on the zeitgeist. With a little effort, I could imagine a world where people interpreted the same political and economic situation in vastly different ways.

I should add a disclaimer that, when it comes to this subject, it's possible I have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm not a real historian :)

[mikem170]

It was the great recession.

I remember reading at the time that it is typical for there to be populist right wing movements after economic calamities, same as happened after the great depression.

[techelite]

Is it only right wing? The left elected AOC and gave Bernie a platform.

[mikem170]

>Is it only right wing?

That's what it said. I assumed they were talking about how bad economies led to people like Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, and since then maybe Thatcher and Reagan, also Putin, and more recently Brexit, Le May, Orban, the leaders of Poland, Brazil, Philippines, etc. Nobody's propaganda did all that. Bad economies and folks scared about change and their future did.

A very interesting book I read called "The Republican Brain" posited that people are born with a lot of their left/right thinking as part of their personalities, but that when the shit hits the fan a certain amount of left-thinking people will become more conservative.

[techelite]

Notably absent are your left wing Maos and lenin.

Either you aren't discussing in good faith or ignorant of left wing populism.

[mikem170]

I wondered about Stalin, also.

Sorry, I ended up passing along what I remembered reading, and didn't think enough about your comment. Maybe I misremembered, or it would have been more accurate to say populism, without the left/right qualifier?

I agree, that makes sense to me. Populism is not unexpected after a certain amount of economic calamity.

I'm curious if there's a left/right distinction in this context, but I have no idea.