This is a strong structural analysis of conservative populism, particularly in how it frames the movement less as an anomaly and more as a predictable response to economic and institutional strain. The sections on coalition constraints and electoral systems are especially effective in explaining why populists can be simultaneously powerful and excluded.
What I found most compelling is the forward-looking argument around AI as a potential realignment shock, extending the logic of globalization from blue-collar to white-collar voters. That’s a sharp and underexplored point.
That said, the piece leans heavily on material-economic explanations, which are clearly central, but perhaps underplays the role of cultural and temporal narratives, like how populist movements construct a sense of loss, decline, and restoration. I've explored this angle in a recent piece, “Why populist leaders love nostalgia”, where I argued that these narratives aren’t just rhetorical tools but core to how populism mobilises support across different classes, even where material conditions diverge - do give it a read it this angle interests you.
A question that follows from your analysis: if economic disruption (whether from globalisation or AI) is the trigger, what determines whether that discontent is channelled into right-wing populism, left-wing populism, or something else entirely?
The definition of populism can mean TWO things: "a political philosophy or movement that represents OR CLAIMS TO REPRESENT the interests of ordinary people against the Establishment". Trump CLAIMED to represent our best interests. He certainly represents HIS best interests, like no other president in history has dared to.
- you are college educated and live in a neighborhood with a median home price of $900k. For you, open borders means cheap landscapers. For native-born landscapers, it means lower wages and higher rents as illegals crowd their neighborhoods.
- you probably make $130k per year or higher. For you, doubling energy prices for the Green New Deal is a way to show you care. For the working class, it erodes their budget.
- for you, spending more money on the homeless than the median salary of where the homeless live "shows that you care." For people who work their butts off to make the median wage, it's a slap in the face AND a waste of their taxes.
- for you, more government spending "shows that you care." For the working class, it means even more migration to red states where people who work and stand on their own two feet don't have inflated costs of living from your do-gooderism.
The Liberal Patriot gave me confidence that the Democratic Party that forms from the current cloud of debris would be a viable alternative to whatever follows Trump after he broke the Republican Party. This is as bad to our body politic as the void left by Charlie Kirk.
I have yet to understand why "populist" is formally a bad thing. It is used as a pejorative by the left - but it is not logically one. Populist means responsive to the people. All good.
Leftists used to be for government that reflected the desires of the common people - when they thought those desires suited them. Why the hypocrisy now?
Perhaps because leftism is now just a collective of the power-hungry elites and the takers from whom those elites buy the votes - all paid for by "the people" who are looking to get some relief.
Funny, because, through their new word "woke", the MAGA right has tried to mutilate the historically excellent word: liberal. Plus, probably, 95% of your so-called "power hungry elites" are likeliest the highest paid corporate executives and inheritors of great wealth and largely conservatives (fiscal conservatism is a good thing); probably only 5% are liberals, but the elites don't have any time for surveys. Also the definition of populism can mean TWO things: "a political philosophy or movement that represents OR CLAIMS TO REPRESENT the interests of ordinary people against the Establishment". In the MAGA world the responsive people have been totally fooled by their twisted, lying leaders' CLAIMS.
> "through their new word "woke", the MAGA right has tried to mutilate the historically excellent word: liberal."
Leftism is not liberal. Please own that leftists have rejected liberalism as an authoritarian mistake and stop lying about your own intellectual history and what your own movement believes.
- liberal means impartiality under the law. Leftism rejects this for group-based quotas such as DEI.
- liberal means belief in individual rights. "We hold these truths ...". Leftists means redefining freedom away from individual rights and to the "General Will" (Rousseau etc.)
- liberal means belief in open debate in the public square. Leftism rejects open debate as "repressive tolerance" (Marcuse etc.), or as the "woke" call it "cancel culture" or "consequence culture".
Not so funny this time Bubba. I didn't call you any names. I just argued with your definitions, logic and anger, the last which which you express even more clearly in your reply. At least you didn't attack the word "liberal". I can live with "leftist" P.S. My ahole is not where my brain is. Cheers!
Thanks for asking, Foosball. I'm working on solutions every day: Everyone has a responsibility to do something to better our future. May I guide you to “a third way” path? Please, join me at EthicalGovtNow.org. Only $12 annually (3.3 cents a day). Our Republic is in a much more complicated place than most of us think. We need a longer view of solutions to our inherited societal and political complexities and need to look for them with priorities. CLICK to delve into: EthicalGovtNow.org; aggregate by joining today or, what we are experiencing, our grandchildren are very likely to inherit.
I don’t know that populism itself is bad as much as human beings have a history of not handling populism well, often channeling legitimate economic grievances into cultural scapegoating.
Humans have lots of unpleasant traits related to being essentially sheep.
So why do the populists specifically get the smear campaigns?
What communists and socialists did with their sheep has been 100x worse and I see the leftists praising and emulating them.
How is the cultural revolution's cultural scapegoating skipped over casually to harsh on Trump or Orban trying to limit third world and illegal immigration (not REMOTELY scapegoating anybody - just sane policy for a welfare state)?
More immediately how is the demonization of innocent and young heterosexual white men not cultural scapegoating to the max? Why is the left somehow innocent of everything they very clearly do to others?
Reign of terror was leftists specifically - not populists.
The witch trials were not directly political (so odd example) but would have been leftists if they had existed at the time (arrogant, self-righteous, emotional, envious, etc).
I think your examples show us that LEFTISTS are particularly nasty. Nothing to do with populists (James Weaver, Huey Long, William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Jackson, Ross Perot).
I think we are over-analyzing "populist nationalism."
For the last century or so the west has been ruled by the educated class. All the experts agree that the educated class knows how to legislate and regulate the world to create justice and prosperity and peace.
We wise ones know that this is a lie. Mises: socialism cannot compute prices; Hayek: administrators don't have a clue; Stigler: "regulatory capture." Nick Shirley: it's all fraud.
"Populist nationalism" is an inchoate, organic movement of the ordinary middle class against the Smart Set. Who really are clueless.
As for AI. If you look back at all the technological revolutions, starting with machine textiles, nobody had a clue.
Branding as Right Wing Populism ignores the fact that irrational Left Wing politics is also nothing but Populism as well, giving an air of permanence and respectability. Both of them are extremes and reactions to bad politics. What is normal is left or right leaning center political thinking to which we desperately need a return. That would be liberal politics and governance. Too bad most can't avoid the hate of the left and the reactionary thinking of the far right.
Trump's overall governing record is harming the right in a way the left could only dream of.
Tariff chaos (and a failure to communicate the need to think/plan long term) is driving countries towards more free trade agreements.
Immigration chaos is giving people second thoughts about deportation methods and goals (Trump could have focused on employer enforcement, welfare benefits for the children of illegal immigrants and payments for self-deportation, but instead he chose spectacle that backfired).
The War in Iran is reminding people of the risks involved in dependence on fossil fuels.
These 3 developments level the playing field for the left, to the point that the right's sole remaining advantage comes down to transgender issues.
If you look at the governing philosophy of the European right it couldn't be further away from the American one. Their success is actually based on expanding the welfare state, the only difference being that most new programs are targeted at families with children.
The US right is still mostly libertarian, while the European one is more firmly anchored in crony capitalism (specially farm subsidies).
While Trump is also moving in the direction of crony capitalism it does this mostly via a deregulatory approach.
Both the US and European rights are favoring prior incumbents and legacy industries. The result of this is making China stronger and the West weaker. The left barely talks about this because the left hates the notion of Western geopolitical power, while the right is in denial because of the highest levels of corruption in decades (if not a century).
Trump's record shows the importance of actually allowing the right to govern. The European "cordon sanitaire" has been a failure that only improves the allure of parties that fail to deliver when in government (eg Netherlands).
Nice. likely aspects of AI will continue, broaden and accelerate industrial obsolescence in advanced countries to something like analytic obsolescence and the political trends will shift around as noted in this post. more interesting than how each trend will arrange remedies to build coalition logic is how they will address underlying dynamics and problems with remedies, which requires an art of suppressing impulses popular with their trend, and pragmatism for trial and error.
like integrating global economy, AI will relentlessly deploy regardless of political trend - we will transition to automated economy just as certainly as we transitioned to industrial economy. This will elevate the conceptual and autonomous ethical ability demanded from modern labor, which will in turn demand family procreative practice to supply such labor. in parallel the west formation is toast and multi polar relation will be constructed on the basis of the prosperity of a majority of countries. at present in the west only the nativists have a glimmer of remedy in their planks, the other trends babbling ancient mantras as if mentally ill. but that will likely shift as problems become more pressing.
Somewhere I would like to read an evaluation of Conservative Populism's performance (Hungary, perhaps) rather than just its appeal. Does it resolve the issues that bring it popularity or is it just churning through grievances and scapegoats without actually making its supporters lives better?
And just maybe we could have an assessment of leftism's current successes - or lack thereof, as well.
Criticism of others is pretty easy. Introspection not so much.
Are the Canadians or the British a model society (with massive censoring and 3rd world replacement by welfare leaches) that deserve to be followed? Be honest. If you can.
I think Hungary is unlikely to be comparable with large European nations, let alone the US. It is tiny. Fewer than 10 million people and an economy about the size of Nevada. A history of Communism is also difficult to overcome.
The left loves to point to small, homogenous European countries as the example to which the US should aspire. Look at Finland! A country with a population half of NYC, more akin to a mutual aid society. Like a giant Elks Club. Why can’t the US be like that?
My definition of conservative populism is “The ordinary people of the nation are being ignored or harmed by powerful elites, and we need to restore control, tradition, and national strength.” (from AI)
Which Americans are being harmed by this governance? It looks like the elites and those with a lot of time on their hands, thinking up things to change about the US, have lost influence.
The verdict will be whether conservative populism stimulates economics prosperity and safety for citizens to live their life, raise their families, attend church, temple or mosque, and help neighbors who have fallen on hard times.
Your analysis is missing a very important factor: the Old Left was in favor of broad-based prosperity, meaningful work and a rising standard of living for working class people. The contemporary globalist Left only knows how to speak in terms of redistribution and refers to the disruptions of globalization in the passive voice, as if they are inevitable and therefore unchangeable. I have read more proposals for UBI among “left”-leaning economists than I have analysis of America’s seemingly perpetual trade deficit. This is really not a mystery at all and the cultural stuff is framing, a distraction for the upper middle classes who might feel guilty if they recognized they were voting for the disposession of their fellow countrymen. Both “sides” are simply voting their economic interests, and “conservative populism” will continue to rise as globalization does what it does: create a smaller and smaller class of winners and a wider base of precarity.
It’s not hard to be in favor of broad-based prosperity. Who doesn’t favor it? It’s the theme of almost every political campaign.
The hard part is deciding on and implementing policies that actually move us to that goal. We followed the left’s prescriptions for most of the years after WWII. The New Deal. The Great Society. Even bigger welfare states in Europe.
When those ideas failed, the left turned to structural racism as the excuse, and identity politics as the solution. And here we are.
This is a really strong analysis, both the idea that coalition systems act as a buffer and the point about AI’s potential impact on populism.
What your article brought into focus for me is a broader pattern. Populism seems to surge when elites mismanage large economic transitions. You can see that beginning in the 1990s with globalization. It wasn’t just disruptive, it was perceived as unevenly managed, with concentrated losses and limited accountability. The gains were often framed as lower prices and efficiency, but that didn’t offset the loss of stable jobs, benefits, and long-term security for many people.
Then 2008 made that dynamic visible in a much more concrete way. A lot of people absorbed real damage, while it appeared that very few decision-makers faced meaningful consequences. That’s where I think the deeper trust breakdown took hold. Once that trust breaks, people don’t evaluate each new issue in isolation. They start asking whether the people in charge can be trusted to make good decisions at all, and that’s where economic, cultural, and institutional issues begin to stack on top of each other.
That’s why your AI point feels so important. It has the potential to be a similar kind of inflection point, but this time affecting groups that have largely been insulated so far. If it’s managed in the same way, I think you’re right, it could significantly accelerate populism, even in systems where coalitions currently slow that process down.
I sure wish we'd stop calling the right "conservative" and the left "liberal". This made sense only as long as political poles extended from center right to center left. But now the right is anything but conservative and the left is anything but liberal, and use of these old terms only confuses the reality of our situation. We now have two competing forms of totalitarianism, and both existentially threaten the entirety of centrism, spanning liberal conservatism to conservative liberalism.
This is a strong structural analysis of conservative populism, particularly in how it frames the movement less as an anomaly and more as a predictable response to economic and institutional strain. The sections on coalition constraints and electoral systems are especially effective in explaining why populists can be simultaneously powerful and excluded.
What I found most compelling is the forward-looking argument around AI as a potential realignment shock, extending the logic of globalization from blue-collar to white-collar voters. That’s a sharp and underexplored point.
That said, the piece leans heavily on material-economic explanations, which are clearly central, but perhaps underplays the role of cultural and temporal narratives, like how populist movements construct a sense of loss, decline, and restoration. I've explored this angle in a recent piece, “Why populist leaders love nostalgia”, where I argued that these narratives aren’t just rhetorical tools but core to how populism mobilises support across different classes, even where material conditions diverge - do give it a read it this angle interests you.
A question that follows from your analysis: if economic disruption (whether from globalisation or AI) is the trigger, what determines whether that discontent is channelled into right-wing populism, left-wing populism, or something else entirely?
Learn to coal
The definition of populism can mean TWO things: "a political philosophy or movement that represents OR CLAIMS TO REPRESENT the interests of ordinary people against the Establishment". Trump CLAIMED to represent our best interests. He certainly represents HIS best interests, like no other president in history has dared to.
- you are college educated and live in a neighborhood with a median home price of $900k. For you, open borders means cheap landscapers. For native-born landscapers, it means lower wages and higher rents as illegals crowd their neighborhoods.
- you probably make $130k per year or higher. For you, doubling energy prices for the Green New Deal is a way to show you care. For the working class, it erodes their budget.
- for you, spending more money on the homeless than the median salary of where the homeless live "shows that you care." For people who work their butts off to make the median wage, it's a slap in the face AND a waste of their taxes.
- for you, more government spending "shows that you care." For the working class, it means even more migration to red states where people who work and stand on their own two feet don't have inflated costs of living from your do-gooderism.
Zero data. Zero evidence. 100% emotional rant. With a TDS icing on top.
And you wonder why people are abandoning the Dems and their leftist insanity.
The Liberal Patriot gave me confidence that the Democratic Party that forms from the current cloud of debris would be a viable alternative to whatever follows Trump after he broke the Republican Party. This is as bad to our body politic as the void left by Charlie Kirk.
Good riddance. Let the door hit you on the way out ...
Huh?
She is referring to the fact that this specific Dem propaganda push (the LP) failed.
Probably failed because they allowed comments. Meaning sane points of view.
But on the announcement they prohibited any comments.
True leftists at the very end...
I have yet to understand why "populist" is formally a bad thing. It is used as a pejorative by the left - but it is not logically one. Populist means responsive to the people. All good.
Leftists used to be for government that reflected the desires of the common people - when they thought those desires suited them. Why the hypocrisy now?
Perhaps because leftism is now just a collective of the power-hungry elites and the takers from whom those elites buy the votes - all paid for by "the people" who are looking to get some relief.
Funny, because, through their new word "woke", the MAGA right has tried to mutilate the historically excellent word: liberal. Plus, probably, 95% of your so-called "power hungry elites" are likeliest the highest paid corporate executives and inheritors of great wealth and largely conservatives (fiscal conservatism is a good thing); probably only 5% are liberals, but the elites don't have any time for surveys. Also the definition of populism can mean TWO things: "a political philosophy or movement that represents OR CLAIMS TO REPRESENT the interests of ordinary people against the Establishment". In the MAGA world the responsive people have been totally fooled by their twisted, lying leaders' CLAIMS.
Define liberal
> "through their new word "woke", the MAGA right has tried to mutilate the historically excellent word: liberal."
Leftism is not liberal. Please own that leftists have rejected liberalism as an authoritarian mistake and stop lying about your own intellectual history and what your own movement believes.
- liberal means impartiality under the law. Leftism rejects this for group-based quotas such as DEI.
- liberal means belief in individual rights. "We hold these truths ...". Leftists means redefining freedom away from individual rights and to the "General Will" (Rousseau etc.)
- liberal means belief in open debate in the public square. Leftism rejects open debate as "repressive tolerance" (Marcuse etc.), or as the "woke" call it "cancel culture" or "consequence culture".
Leftists invented and popularized the word woke.
They bragged endlessly about being woke. While also doing all the nasty racist things leftists do.
The fact that everybody on the planet now associates "woke" with nasty is a leftist issue.
MAGA didn't do that. YOU earned that through your actions.
Leftism invariably destroys everything it touches - even its very own bragging words.
For any normal group that would be a giant hint that you yourselves are the aholes.
Not so funny this time Bubba. I didn't call you any names. I just argued with your definitions, logic and anger, the last which which you express even more clearly in your reply. At least you didn't attack the word "liberal". I can live with "leftist" P.S. My ahole is not where my brain is. Cheers!
What are your solutions?
It’s a good place to start
Thanks for asking, Foosball. I'm working on solutions every day: Everyone has a responsibility to do something to better our future. May I guide you to “a third way” path? Please, join me at EthicalGovtNow.org. Only $12 annually (3.3 cents a day). Our Republic is in a much more complicated place than most of us think. We need a longer view of solutions to our inherited societal and political complexities and need to look for them with priorities. CLICK to delve into: EthicalGovtNow.org; aggregate by joining today or, what we are experiencing, our grandchildren are very likely to inherit.
I don’t know that populism itself is bad as much as human beings have a history of not handling populism well, often channeling legitimate economic grievances into cultural scapegoating.
Humans have lots of unpleasant traits related to being essentially sheep.
So why do the populists specifically get the smear campaigns?
What communists and socialists did with their sheep has been 100x worse and I see the leftists praising and emulating them.
How is the cultural revolution's cultural scapegoating skipped over casually to harsh on Trump or Orban trying to limit third world and illegal immigration (not REMOTELY scapegoating anybody - just sane policy for a welfare state)?
More immediately how is the demonization of innocent and young heterosexual white men not cultural scapegoating to the max? Why is the left somehow innocent of everything they very clearly do to others?
It's wild to watch in real time.
Responsiveness to the people led to Witch trials and the French Reign of Terror.
Interesting you bring those two up as examples.
Reign of terror was leftists specifically - not populists.
The witch trials were not directly political (so odd example) but would have been leftists if they had existed at the time (arrogant, self-righteous, emotional, envious, etc).
I think your examples show us that LEFTISTS are particularly nasty. Nothing to do with populists (James Weaver, Huey Long, William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Jackson, Ross Perot).
Thanks for proving my point to everybody.
Happy to be of service.
100%
I think we are over-analyzing "populist nationalism."
For the last century or so the west has been ruled by the educated class. All the experts agree that the educated class knows how to legislate and regulate the world to create justice and prosperity and peace.
We wise ones know that this is a lie. Mises: socialism cannot compute prices; Hayek: administrators don't have a clue; Stigler: "regulatory capture." Nick Shirley: it's all fraud.
"Populist nationalism" is an inchoate, organic movement of the ordinary middle class against the Smart Set. Who really are clueless.
As for AI. If you look back at all the technological revolutions, starting with machine textiles, nobody had a clue.
People are fickle and, like the wind, they will change direction to what appears an easier path to self comfort.
Branding as Right Wing Populism ignores the fact that irrational Left Wing politics is also nothing but Populism as well, giving an air of permanence and respectability. Both of them are extremes and reactions to bad politics. What is normal is left or right leaning center political thinking to which we desperately need a return. That would be liberal politics and governance. Too bad most can't avoid the hate of the left and the reactionary thinking of the far right.
Trump's overall governing record is harming the right in a way the left could only dream of.
Tariff chaos (and a failure to communicate the need to think/plan long term) is driving countries towards more free trade agreements.
Immigration chaos is giving people second thoughts about deportation methods and goals (Trump could have focused on employer enforcement, welfare benefits for the children of illegal immigrants and payments for self-deportation, but instead he chose spectacle that backfired).
The War in Iran is reminding people of the risks involved in dependence on fossil fuels.
These 3 developments level the playing field for the left, to the point that the right's sole remaining advantage comes down to transgender issues.
If you look at the governing philosophy of the European right it couldn't be further away from the American one. Their success is actually based on expanding the welfare state, the only difference being that most new programs are targeted at families with children.
The US right is still mostly libertarian, while the European one is more firmly anchored in crony capitalism (specially farm subsidies).
While Trump is also moving in the direction of crony capitalism it does this mostly via a deregulatory approach.
Both the US and European rights are favoring prior incumbents and legacy industries. The result of this is making China stronger and the West weaker. The left barely talks about this because the left hates the notion of Western geopolitical power, while the right is in denial because of the highest levels of corruption in decades (if not a century).
Trump's record shows the importance of actually allowing the right to govern. The European "cordon sanitaire" has been a failure that only improves the allure of parties that fail to deliver when in government (eg Netherlands).
I am from New York and I can with 100 percent clarity that President Trump is not a conservative.
So many people forget that he was invited to President Clinton’s daughter’s wedding I believe her name was Chelsea,.
Never thought of Trump as being "of the right", and I'm fairly confident neither does he.
Nice. likely aspects of AI will continue, broaden and accelerate industrial obsolescence in advanced countries to something like analytic obsolescence and the political trends will shift around as noted in this post. more interesting than how each trend will arrange remedies to build coalition logic is how they will address underlying dynamics and problems with remedies, which requires an art of suppressing impulses popular with their trend, and pragmatism for trial and error.
like integrating global economy, AI will relentlessly deploy regardless of political trend - we will transition to automated economy just as certainly as we transitioned to industrial economy. This will elevate the conceptual and autonomous ethical ability demanded from modern labor, which will in turn demand family procreative practice to supply such labor. in parallel the west formation is toast and multi polar relation will be constructed on the basis of the prosperity of a majority of countries. at present in the west only the nativists have a glimmer of remedy in their planks, the other trends babbling ancient mantras as if mentally ill. but that will likely shift as problems become more pressing.
Somewhere I would like to read an evaluation of Conservative Populism's performance (Hungary, perhaps) rather than just its appeal. Does it resolve the issues that bring it popularity or is it just churning through grievances and scapegoats without actually making its supporters lives better?
And just maybe we could have an assessment of leftism's current successes - or lack thereof, as well.
Criticism of others is pretty easy. Introspection not so much.
Are the Canadians or the British a model society (with massive censoring and 3rd world replacement by welfare leaches) that deserve to be followed? Be honest. If you can.
I think Hungary is unlikely to be comparable with large European nations, let alone the US. It is tiny. Fewer than 10 million people and an economy about the size of Nevada. A history of Communism is also difficult to overcome.
The left loves to point to small, homogenous European countries as the example to which the US should aspire. Look at Finland! A country with a population half of NYC, more akin to a mutual aid society. Like a giant Elks Club. Why can’t the US be like that?
My definition of conservative populism is “The ordinary people of the nation are being ignored or harmed by powerful elites, and we need to restore control, tradition, and national strength.” (from AI)
Which Americans are being harmed by this governance? It looks like the elites and those with a lot of time on their hands, thinking up things to change about the US, have lost influence.
The verdict will be whether conservative populism stimulates economics prosperity and safety for citizens to live their life, raise their families, attend church, temple or mosque, and help neighbors who have fallen on hard times.
Your analysis is missing a very important factor: the Old Left was in favor of broad-based prosperity, meaningful work and a rising standard of living for working class people. The contemporary globalist Left only knows how to speak in terms of redistribution and refers to the disruptions of globalization in the passive voice, as if they are inevitable and therefore unchangeable. I have read more proposals for UBI among “left”-leaning economists than I have analysis of America’s seemingly perpetual trade deficit. This is really not a mystery at all and the cultural stuff is framing, a distraction for the upper middle classes who might feel guilty if they recognized they were voting for the disposession of their fellow countrymen. Both “sides” are simply voting their economic interests, and “conservative populism” will continue to rise as globalization does what it does: create a smaller and smaller class of winners and a wider base of precarity.
Quality comment, coldsummer1816
It’s not hard to be in favor of broad-based prosperity. Who doesn’t favor it? It’s the theme of almost every political campaign.
The hard part is deciding on and implementing policies that actually move us to that goal. We followed the left’s prescriptions for most of the years after WWII. The New Deal. The Great Society. Even bigger welfare states in Europe.
When those ideas failed, the left turned to structural racism as the excuse, and identity politics as the solution. And here we are.
This is a really strong analysis, both the idea that coalition systems act as a buffer and the point about AI’s potential impact on populism.
What your article brought into focus for me is a broader pattern. Populism seems to surge when elites mismanage large economic transitions. You can see that beginning in the 1990s with globalization. It wasn’t just disruptive, it was perceived as unevenly managed, with concentrated losses and limited accountability. The gains were often framed as lower prices and efficiency, but that didn’t offset the loss of stable jobs, benefits, and long-term security for many people.
Then 2008 made that dynamic visible in a much more concrete way. A lot of people absorbed real damage, while it appeared that very few decision-makers faced meaningful consequences. That’s where I think the deeper trust breakdown took hold. Once that trust breaks, people don’t evaluate each new issue in isolation. They start asking whether the people in charge can be trusted to make good decisions at all, and that’s where economic, cultural, and institutional issues begin to stack on top of each other.
That’s why your AI point feels so important. It has the potential to be a similar kind of inflection point, but this time affecting groups that have largely been insulated so far. If it’s managed in the same way, I think you’re right, it could significantly accelerate populism, even in systems where coalitions currently slow that process down.
Very sound analysis, KDB.
I sure wish we'd stop calling the right "conservative" and the left "liberal". This made sense only as long as political poles extended from center right to center left. But now the right is anything but conservative and the left is anything but liberal, and use of these old terms only confuses the reality of our situation. We now have two competing forms of totalitarianism, and both existentially threaten the entirety of centrism, spanning liberal conservatism to conservative liberalism.