NigeeBaby lays it out pretty well. If the question about whether we should enforce Sharia Law is about the U.S., I would say absolutely not. The U.S. has a lot of problems it needs to sort out before it can start acting like World Police. So long as the U.S. remains this corrupt, all wars fought will end up like Iraq and Afghanistan. Kind of hard to enforce democracy in foreign countries when you're killing all the civilians.

Mobocracy - if every vote is equal and everyone's knowledge is different, knowledge is not rewarded while opinions are.

I think Mark Twain wrote that "democracy is the idea that my ignorance is as valuable as your knowledge".

Also if you consider that each person's prejudices multiplied together makes a society more prejudiced. Crowds lynch people, not single individuals. Nations can do even more terrible things. The rule of the majority means the rule of the sum of prejudices.

Democracies are terrible for selecting good leaders but are typically the only way for a society not deeply steeped in traditions opposing authoritarian, oppressive regimes to avoid devolving into an authoritarian, oppressive regime.

Populism is one of several problems with democracy, since the average person not only tends to be a terrible leader but tends to be pretty terrible at identifying a good leader; movements then that increase populist power lead to ineffectual leadership. At the same time occasional waves of populist sentiment and unrest are ultimately healthy for a democratic society, since they prevent power from becoming entrenched in the incumbent ruling class (which creates its own brand of ineffectual leadership).

Education is the enemy of populism. Western democracies with highly educated populations are far better equipped to shrug off the appeal of populist leaders than their third world counterparts. Interestingly our established democracies tended to extend the right to vote gradually, with only a select few having the right initially to almost all having the right now. As unpalatable as this initially feels, it seems to have worked better than the dictatorship to full democracy route we have encouraged new democracies to follow.

Can we have a definition of populism because I don't think people are talking about what I thought they would be talking about?

Populism is a political doctrine that appeals to the interests and conceptions (such as fears) of the general people, especially contrasting those interests with the interests of the elite.

Populism is a very ambiguous concept but seems to generally mean a movement or attitude which appeals to the "people" in opposition to a corrupt "elite". Some of the people condemning populism come off as strange to me because their attitudes thus far have tended to reflect populistic sensibilities. There is a near constant railing against the political class who don't reflect the people's wishes, etc.

Populism can undermine democracy if it's associated with an impulse to overturn democratic institutions because they're seen to be ineffective or unrepresentative. I think populism doesn't undermine democracy per se but it does tend to undermine liberalism, which people often conflate with democracy. Populism has tended to be associated with movements to make the representative system more inclusive, so historically it has helped promote democracy rather than vice versa.

I interpreted the concept in the appeasement thread to mean that conciliation with an adversary makes easy fodder for populistic appeals because the 'people' tend to be more belligerent than the political class. Indeed, this is the theory behind diversionary wars - that political elites sometimes wage war to produce a rally around the flag effect among the belligerent masses.

Sorry bootmii, thanks for that definition. As you can see I agree with it.

agree with bootmii's definition

I see it as a problem because the purpose of any ruler-selection system (like a democratic government) is to select a good leader, and broadly speaking, IMO, the average person is terrible at recognizing leadership qualities in a candidate and electing based on that. Populism tends to lead to people being selected based on how rhetorically in-tune they are to the temperature in the room. At best, if the candidate is actually in-tune with that temperature, they meet one of several criteria for being a good leader; even still populist sentiments tend to cloud the selection process on the whole, by way of promoting this one criterion to the deficit of others. At worst, if the candidate is not actually in-tune with that temperature, and only matching it in rhetoric, you end up selecting a candidate on no particularly sound basis of leadership.

At the same time, though, entrenchment in the political class creates its own inefficiencies in leadership, and its own cronyism. Just because the average man is terrible at selecting a leader doesn't mean the members of the elite class are any better. They tend to be very good at selecting people who will maintain their own power; whether they actually select good leaders is largely due to circumstance rather than design. Populist sentiments lead to upsets in the established order, and so act as a necessary check or balance against entrenchment among the elite.

Populism is to politics much like a Louisiana summer afternoon rain is to our local ecosystem: fleeting, fickle, and frustrating to get caught up in, but crucial to maintaining a healthy system and to avoiding a slow, dry suffocation of life and growth.

If the average person is terrible at selecting leaders then doesn't this undermine the central tenet of democratic theory? Should we limit the franchise or otherwise replace democratic institutions?

it does undermine it, but it's a problem fundamental to any selection mechanism and there's no easy solution

I wouldn't advocate tossing democratic institutions altogether, for their flaws nothing else that's been tried has worked better than a healthy democracy

What about a political literacy test? Octavious claimed educated voters don't select populists. Perhaps that's a better formula. You still get a broader pool of people than the political class itself but not so unlimited that the average person votes.

The problem with autocrats is that you don't get to know if they are good or bad leaders until it's too late to replace them. Reminds me of:

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." (Churchill, from a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947)

Political literacy tests, if made viable, would obviously benefit the elite in spite of the masses, thus being unsustainable in the long run. Maybe in more egalitarian societies they might work.

Is this dicotomy elite x general people (e.g. class warfare) widespread over the world?

The biggest problem I see with any sort of political literacy test or other form of restricting the eligibility to vote is where the line gets drawn, and who decides it. Could it be implemented by a general vote? Possibly, but even the idea would likely be thrown out before it got that far. Then there's the possibility of abusing said tests to exclude certain otherwise eligible groups unless the process is transparent enough.

well, theoretically a "leadership literacy" test is fine. like strictly theoretically, in an ideal society one could plausibly have such a thing

realistically any such test would
(a) likely fail to test voters on the appropriate subject/content matter
(b) be rigged to support incumbents in the first place
(c) be very prone to being abused in discriminating against relatively disadvantaged minority groups

so, despite its intuitive merits, I can't really recommend that as an alternative

@glisbao The conflict between the empowered few and the masses (class warfare) is afaik based on an understanding of the universal human condition. Viewing it as a part of history is also what led to Marx's manifesto. It takes many different forms, but I believe it's generally considered to be a fact of any society that is not egalitarian to Utopian levels.

I don't think it's about class as it is about power. The UKIP, for example, seems to be a fairly middle class populist movement, especially compared to the BNP.

But yeah I think populism is widespread, especially in times of economic crisis. You see that with the problems incumbent administrations face with getting re-elected these days, as well as the growing number of people who are willing to vote for non-mainstream parties. There is general disaffection with the political classes among the western democracies. The problem I think stems from the muddling quality of democracies in dealing with crisis. They seem incapable of acting decisively when it matters.

"The biggest problem I see with any sort of political literacy test or other form of restricting the eligibility to vote is where the line gets drawn, and who decides it."

The various secretaries of state of the US states. Just like with any licensing or citizenship test, except this one is for voting. Seems fairly straight forward.

"Then there's the possibility of abusing said tests to exclude certain otherwise eligible groups unless the process is transparent enough."

Appoint a bi/multi-partisan commission to review the test and require bipartisan approval to implement it.

"Is this dicotomy elite x general people (e.g. class warfare) widespread over the world?"

more or less. good, stable, enduring leadership is fleeting, and in its place dysfunctional elite classes continually push the limits of what the common classes will allow until shit goes way south

Reading PE's posts can be a truly depressing affair ;)

The people are bad. Elites are bad. The voting process is bad. There's nothing we can do about it. It's astounding we've made it this far!

"The problem with autocrats is that you don't get to know if they are good or bad leaders until it's too late to replace them."

Yes but on the other hand autocrats are more sensitive to the costs of losing power than democrats, so they want to avoid uprisings because autocrats tend not to survive them. Also if democracies are ineffective it's usually not because of any one leader but because of the institutional framework itself, so it's just as difficult (perhaps more so) to enact change if the system is not working.

A political literacy test would be an interesting development. I personally don't think anyone should be allowed to vote without first at least knowing a few of the policies of the major parties. Fortunately we are blessed with optional participation so the willingly uninformed can watch tv and do no harm. How democracies with mandatory voting function I have no idea.

Scrap the test idea. Just make the queue to vote at least an hour long by law. That way only people who actually care will bother voting.

We have a very populist movement in the UK at the moment, it is the anti-EU movement led by Nigel Farage called the UK Independence Party or UKIP.
In mature democracies these movements can still exist without rioting or civil war. A sophisticated electorate may toy with these populist parties to send a message to the govt of the day as a bit of a wake up call, knowing that the slightest hint of extremism will have the electorate scuttling back to the safety of the more established and centre thinking parties.
Now it is an anti-European movement, previously it has been green issues.
The beauty of such ideas/movements is that they can come and go relatively quickly and can achieve a lot without ever getting an elected majority in politics.
Successive govts of both left and right oppose referendums unless they believe it is a vote they just can't lose. Having referendums could give a great boost to populist movements without ever affecting the general control of the country by the established political parties. Populist movements tend to lack the structure and management required to achieve long-term political success unless they get some kind of funding to sustain them, they tend to be one policy movements and can fail miserably if they attempt to seek broader political appeal by watering down their fundamental core message. This is one reason why populist movements can be relatively short-lived.

Well Australia doesn't have UKIP problem, so maybe they're not doing so bad. Perhaps the problem is highly politicized people selecting bad leaders, not the average person.

"Scrap the test idea. Just make the queue to vote at least an hour long by law. That way only people who actually care will bother voting. "

Filtering people by how much they care versus how much they know has the potential of doing much more harm than good, don't you agree? The populists we see all have the ability of rallying the masses to their cause, however uninformed and stupid said masses are.

"How democracies with mandatory voting function I have no idea."

They don't. Welcome to Brazil :D

ha, well, I remain pretty bearish about the prospect of governmental solutions to problems, for sure.

but I focus my energy these days a lot more on improving the lot of people I know personally, anyway. I'm pretty bullish about mankind's hopes! and I try to do my part on a much smaller scale. there's a happy ending and an optimistic outlook in the end, it's just in a different avenue

What about political, personality, and stress tests, not as a bar that must be passed, but just as information that is passed to the electorate?

"Filtering people by how much they care versus how much they know has the potential of doing much more harm than good, don't you agree?"

Actually, no. I don't think populist parties would stand up to the inspection that voters would give them if they had to make a real commitment in order to vote. And if they did stand up to inspection, maybe they deserve their vote.

I am basing this entirely on how I feel things should be and no evidence whatsoever, of course, but sometimes you should start with what you think should be and encourage reality to follow. ;)