Sep 15, 2025 11:27 PM
(This post was last modified: Sep 15, 2025 11:59 PM by C C.)
(Sep 14, 2025 08:40 PM)Yazata Wrote: Isn't it the whole point of democracy that the people themselves decide what kind of society they want to live in? Then they vote for representatives who will champion their vision in the halls of power?
What we've seen in recent years on both sides of the Atlantic are various self-appointed elites appointing themselves Plato's Republic-style Philosopher Kings, with the power to decide for themselves what the people should want if they were only less bigoted and more educated. Then they present various elite visions to the people to choose among at election time. So in Britain both the Conservatives and Labour offer the people variations on the same theme (the end of British nationalism, unrestricted third world migration etc.) In Germany, it's the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats offering the people variations on the same thing. It's the vision that's captured the unelected EU bureaucracy in Brussels as well. Here in the United States, it's the Democratic party and establishment Wall Street Journal style Bushite Republicanism.
Ultimately it's the philosophy of China (not just communist but imperial as well) which helps explain the fondness of Western elites for China, that many see as their model of a well-run top-down state.
So that being the case, more and more of the "common people" both in Europe and the United States become convinced that the elite-captured established political parties no longer listen to them or represent them.
Which, while vestiges of democracy still remain, creates an obvious opportunity for candidates who actually do represent the things that the people want. Candidates who speak to the actual concerns of the voters, not the concerns of lobbyists, celebrities and faculty clubs. It was the brilliance of Donald Trump to perceive that opening here in the United States.
So you get candidates and parties which are more nationalist than the globalist elites can accept. That are more resistant to the erasure of historic peoples and traditional cultures, and hence are hostile to globalist open borders. We are seeing it everywhere as older parties are transformed (like MAGA seizing hold of the American Republicans) or new insurgent parties appear in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and many other places. And we are seeing that same process playing out in the United Kingdom too. It's what powered Sunday's huge demonstration.
Of course it alarms and is inevitably condemned by the establishment outlets: offering the people what they want is dismissed as "populism", which is supposedly a bad thing (when it's actually the essence of democracy).
The idea that underlies the dismissal of the whole democratic vision of the people deciding for themselves (instead of those on top deciding for them) is contempt (driven ultimately by fear) for what is perceived as the common herd. The people of each country are perceived from on-high as ignorant, violent bigots, the last people who you would want setting the vision for the country. These atavistic "deplorables" (to steal Hillary's memorable phrase) clinging tightly to "their religion and their guns" (Obama's) need to be educated until they agree with their enlightened leaders, and kept silenced and suppressed until they do.
And independent of the issue of what system or approach is actually best (granting that there could be such a thing in nature). It's a matter of consistency -- if one believes in direct democracy, then both "popular democracy" and unadulterated "populism" seem amenable to that.
• Direct democracy or pure democracy is a form of democracy in which the electorate directly decides on policy initiatives, without elected representatives as proxies, as opposed to the representative democracy model which occurs in the majority of established democracies.
• Popular democracy emphasizes the active participation of citizens in decision-making processes and governance, often through direct voting and referendums. [...] Popular democracy is a notion of direct democracy based on referendums and other devices of empowerment and concretization of popular will. The concept evolved out of the political philosophy of populism, as a fully democratic version of this popular empowerment ideology, but since it has become independent of it, and some even discuss if they are antagonistic or unrelated now.
• In contrast, populism is a political approach that seeks to represent the interests of the "common people" against a perceived elite, often using rhetoric that simplifies complex issues and can undermine established democratic institutions. [...] The concept of the general will is presented in the ideational approach as central to populist rhetoric, aligning with a critique of representative democracy in favor of direct forms of decision-making such as referendums.
Yet that allows the establishment to demonize populism as always consisting of leaders who merely claim to be defending and executing the will of the common people.
Perhaps the establishment even needs "populism" as a pejorative label for disparaging even genuine instances of popular democracy, since any form of direct democracy is a threat to an administration of delegate spokespersons and lawmakers mediating between the wishes of the masses and the results of government. (Albeit, again, we're surely better off with a republic; but the common people can still be dominated by an elite class within that context.)
In particular, the frequent conflation of populism with far-right nativism has drawn criticism for misrepresenting the ethos of historical self-described populists, while also providing a euphemistic gloss for racist or authoritarian political actors seeking legitimacy by claiming to represent "the people."
As the ideal of popular democracy came out of prepositions of Populism (ex: popular rule in democracy is fairer than elitist parliaments; decisions by general referendums are fairer than decisions by limited groups like parliaments and governments), and as platforms of certain groups claiming to be popular democratic are very similar to those of various democratic and undemocratic populist movements, there is discussion on the relation between both political philosophies.
Types of democracy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_democracy
