Trump’s polarising appeal leaves European populists in a tight spot | Europe | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/08/trumps-polarising-appeal-leaves-european-populists-in-a-tight-spot

Very simple, what will it be? Treason and submission to a foreign tyrant or support to your own country and facing the real dangers we are facing... a watershed moment.

Who financed you might be the right question?
What shall it be, nationalism or treason?

Today in “Samuel Pepys’ Diary Reimagined”:

“[…] far too many elections have been rigged by far-right powers who always use fear as the key ingredient to their propaganda. And fear, as neurosciences teach us, makes humans stupider.”

https://babumenos.com/SPDR/#a2025-02-27

"In the early 20th century, the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset warned that such resentment would eventually become the enemy of talent and ability. “The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different,” he wrote in 1930, “everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.” Trump and Musk not only feel this same impulse; they have harnessed it for their personal use.

Eventually, such attacks run out of steam when the costs begin to accumulate. No matter how many times Stalin told his scientists to plant wheat in the snow so that it could evolve to grow in the winter, the wheat (which had no political allegiances) died. Today, vaccine refusal might seem like a brave stand against white-jacketed overlords—until your children are stricken with measles or whooping cough.

Modern societies, as Americans are soon to learn, cannot function without experts in every field, especially the many thousands who work in public service. The first step in containing the damage is to see Trump’s and Musk’s goals for DOGE clearly: It is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/career-civil-servant-end/681712/

I can't believe how defensively German politicians are reacting to #Vance 's infamous speech. What is needed is a clear and unambiguous unmasking of the rhetorical strategy being pursued. It cannot be said clearly enough: Never again is now!

New article

In "Voting green or right-wing populist: Ideological poles of a new cleavage?", Clara Dilger shows that the cleavage between green- and right-wing populist voters does not extend across all attitudes, nor countries, suggesting green and right-wing populist parties are not always complete opposites.

OA https://doi.org/10.1177/00016993241311518

#sociology #politicalscience #voting #rightwing #populism #greenparty #academicchatter #academicjournals
@sociology @politicalscience @academicchatter

Important research investigating politics and misinformation used 32M tweets from politicians in 26 countries, spanning 6 years and several election periods. Radical-right populism was the STRONGEST determinant of those who spread misinformation.

#FarRight #Populism #Misinformation #Politics

When Do Parties Lie? Misinformation and Radical-Right Populism Across 26 Countries - Petter Törnberg, Juliana Chueri, 2025
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19401612241311886#supplementary-materials

#Trump follows a predictable model for a #plutocracy . The rich republicans celebrate!

The added tariffs lead to an indirect tax on consumer goods, payed by the broad population.

The rich ones continue earning tax free on investments.

#populism works…

Producerism: The Homegrown Roots of Trumpism

#producerism #trump #trumpism #fascism #populism #demagogue
Producerism: The Homegrown Roots of Trumpism

The Authoritarian Divide: Populism, Propaganda, and Polarization by Orçun Selçuk, 2024

In the context of the global decline of democracy, The Authoritarian Divide analyzes the tactics that populist leaders in Turkey, Venezuela, and Ecuador have used to polarize their countries.

@bookstodon
#books
#nonfiction
#politics
#authoritarianism
#populism
#propaganda
#polarisation

Proud to be a guest editor for this new special issue of the Journal of Dialogue Studies on "The Possibilities and Limits of Dialogue in a World of Political Populisms" https://www.dialoguestudies.org/journal/the-possibilities-and-limits-of-dialogue-in-a-world-of-political-populisms/ #populism #communication #disinformation #propaganda #discourseanalysis #politics

#populism #socialmedia #internet #algorithm #politics #history

#HankGreen: "The internet is less a machine that devours corruption, and more a machine that devours trust.

Trust in each other, in society, in institutions, in expertise, in tradition, and in our ability to do democracy."

Good vid to watch, #AusPol folk, in the lead up to the 2025 Federal Election:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8PndpFPL8g

"I’ve often found the ubiquity of “populism” in post-2016 discourse to be unhelpful — in part because it’s tended to refer more to a particular kind of political style than to anything more concrete (I went into this in an essay for The Walrus back a few years ago). It’s precisely this quality, however, that attracts Lake to the term: populism might imply a rebellion of some kind pitting “the people against the powerful” but, beyond that, the exact contours of those categories (and others related to them) in effect become a choose your own adventure — a question of attitude, affect, and outlook rather than wealth, social location, or institutional power. In the reactionary imagination, terms like “populism”, “elites”, and “the ruling class” connote vaguely-defined dispositions more than they do coherent analytical categories; their boundaries endlessly malleable; their foundations more cultural than material.

It’s a nifty sleight of hand, in that it allows conservatives to attach the form and rhetoric of class politics to more or less whatever they like while effectively taking the politics out of them. And thus, in one fell swoop, tech oligarchs sitting at the very nexus of corporate power can become the faces of a “populist moment”; a billionaire president ringing in his second term a tribune of the hardworking masses.

The flipside, of course, is the avowedly anti-populist posture taken by so much of the liberal mainstream since 2016."

https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-populism-of-fools

"After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed. Communism had been defeated – and Friedrich Hayek, the spiritual father of neoliberal economics, had just about lived to see it. But in the decades that followed, Hayek’s disciples knew that they had a problem. The rise of social movements, from civil rights and feminism to environmentalism, were now proving roadblocks in the road to freedom, nurturing a culture of government dependency, public spending, political correctness and special pleading. Neoliberals needed an antidote.

In this illuminating new book, historian Quinn Slobodian reveals how, from the 1990s onwards, neoliberal thinkers turned to nature, in an attempt to roll back social changes and to return to a hierarchy of gender, race and cultural difference. He explores how these thinkers drew on the language of science, from cognitive psychology to genetics, in order to embed the idea of ‘competition’ ever deeper into social life, and to advocate cultural homogeneity as essential for markets to truly work. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists that would become known as the alt-right."

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/hayek-s-bastards-the-neoliberal-roots-of-the-populist-right-quinn-slobodian/7807424?ean=9780241774984

Say #no to #populism

[thread 3/x] Transphobia
[thread 2/x] https://mastodon.social/@persagen/113448330077621809
[parent 1/x] https://mastodon.social/@persagen/113126756218775408

#GOP #Trump2 #fascism #Project2025
#ChristianRight #Catholicism #OpusDei #ParentalRightsMovement #populism #CultureWar
#DivisiveRhetoric #SocialMedia #memes #polarization #WedgeTactics #WedgeStrategy
#Christofascism #transgenocide
#WeaponizationOfLanguate #transgenderism
#FamilyResearchCouncil #FRC #HeritageFoundation #LibsOfTikTok #MomsForLiberty #AcPEDs
#WomensRights #misogyny #SelfDetermination