2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Steve Leser for VP! [View all]Hortensis
(58,785 posts)I don't know your personal political history, of course, but this general school of thought whiffs of that. That's why I really dislike talking heads characterizing principled liberal positions as populist.
Populist movements always arise after large portions of the electorate, right, middle and left, ignore their duty as citizens for decades, ignore the problems of others, even ignore being screwed over themselves, explaining that no one can do anything anyway -- right up until one day when they realize things haven't gotten better on their own and they're not likely to get more than they have. THEN they finally get mad and start blaming everyone but themselves.
This is happening on both the right and left, with a special soupcon of realization that the screwing over is much deeper than previously admitted. Especially for the right, who invested their entire political philosophy in trusting those who systematically betrayed them.
All this angry, "where's mine" noise from right and left is irritating, even disgusting, but no surprise to those of us who have been trying to effect change on our own and waiting for decades for the next "populist" movement to finally occur.