How Populism Affects Modern Elections, or Why America is Just Fine with Tyranny in 2024
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The most important conversation we can have is to talk about why America is cozying up to tyrannical braindead babies. Why is the nation that saved the world from Fascism embracing its ideologies and political representatives in a big way right now? From my perspective, looking at all the available evidence and evaluating the yellow shit brick road that brought us here, the answer to this is relatively simple.
And that answer is Populism. No, it's not just for pops and grandpops. It's not the botulism you get from drinking expired soda. It’s a political movement. And it’s the reason that America is sliding relentlessly into authoritarianism. So please goose-step right this way as we journey to find out why, in this case, a lot of the frightening things we’re seeing can be explained by the embrace of a pretty dumb sociopolitical reality.
I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m your host for the full-on fun-lovin’ Fascist takeover of America.
Okay, so what is Populism? It has a long and storied history in the annals of political theory, but its recent adoption looks very different from other instances where it’s popped up in the past. One of the earliest appearances of Populism in practice came about in the Russian Empire during the second half of the 19th century. A group of socialist thinkers of the day, called Narodniki, decided that they couldn’t overthrow autocratic rule all on their own and figured out that it might be a good idea to invite everyone else to the party. The Russian population at the time was largely composed of farm workers, and the Populist Narodniki began spreading propaganda within rural communities to attract those workers to their cause. They said things like, “Hey farmers, you know, dust off those rusty um, farm things, and come with us to storm those onion-domed palaces of the people who forced generations of you into this crap lot in life.” And a lot of the peasantry was actually like, “Eh, I’m good, the poop smell doesn’t actually get to us all that much. After a while, you don’t even notice it.” And it was truly hard going for the Narodniki, but that’s another story. What’s important is that at this moment in time, the movement borrowed extensively from Communist ideology and the writings of Karl Marx. It blended the idea of communal ownership and collectivism with a festering desire to remove the boot of Empire from the necks of people who simply didn’t have the resources to fight back. And also, it was a convenient method for educated bourgeois revolutionaries to recruit help from the peasant class.
In 1892, Populism showed up in the U.S. in the form of the People’s Party, which was itself an aggregate of several other groups working toward similar goals. The People’s Party laid out several progressive policies by way of its Omaha Platform, and although most were not achieved by the party before it was absorbed into the Bryan wing of the Democratic Party, they were successfully realized by later iterations of the U.S. progressive movement. And these Omaha Platform proposals are things that we still enjoy today, like a graduated income tax, military pensions, and the eight-hour workday.
On a related note, they also demanded something called the unperverted Australian (pause for insert of a bright red X over an image of Jim Jeffries) or secret ballot. This is exactly what it sounds like, it’s simply the right of citizens to vote in secret. It may be kind of incredible to come across the fact that people didn’t always have access to a private vote, and that votes were not always kept confidential, even if they were written down in private. But before the advent of the unperverted Australian secret ballot, a literate populace wasn’t always a sure thing, and so some countries had big chaotic parties where people just kind of yelled names and shit. And business owners took note of who everyone voted for so they could use that information to take their money later. And, of course, the actual elected leadership was fairly unhappy with anyone who didn’t vote for them, and they could literally tell who those people were.
The secret ballot went back in recorded history all the way to Ancient Greece and was used in fun ways like to exile people that nobody liked. In more modern times, the secret ballot, which, yes, is also called the Australian ballot, appears to have first been resurrected in 1852 in the country of--and you may have guessed this already if you don’t have any dead worms in your brain--Australia. After that point it began to spread throughout the Western Industrial nations.
The British political movement that first advocated for a secret ballot in England was called Chartism. Chartism, the British protest movement that taught the citizens of England to never trust a fart. Not shart, no, my dog says it’s not shart. It’s chart. Chartism--which was arguably also a populist movement, as it spawned from the dissatisfaction of working class Brits endeavoring to hold their power structures to account. Of course, the current Parliament at the time and the Second Peel Ministry told them to eff off, but eventually those pesky street urchins would win themselves their very own secret ballot.
In the U.S., a secret ballot was established first in the city of Louisville Kentucky in 1888, and later in the same year Massachussetts adopted the first statewide Australian ballot. After that the practice slowly spread throughout the rest of the nation until South Carolina implemented it all the way up in 1950. It wasn’t fully unperverted or Australian at first, because it had to meet several criteria, such as being printed by the government and not at personal expense or employer distributed, the names of every candidate and every proposal had to appear (crazy, right?), and it needed to be filled out in secret at the actual polling place. Lots of jobs were just handing out ballots before this and collecting them right at work, and then doing who knows what with them.
It’s worth noting after all this explanation of Populism that some political scholars don’t believe it’s truly an ideology on its own, and instead is simply one possible manifestation of several existing ideologies. Considering that Populism can be found in contrasting styles of government like Communism, Fascism, and Democracy alike, and competing political ideologies within those systems, like nationalism, collectivism, consumerism, or liberalism, that seems like a fair take.
Now that we’ve taken our magic school bus ride through the political history of several nations to get here, how can we be sure that Populism is really the answer to the current debacle that America finds itself in? Well, current iterations of Populism are decidedly marked by authoritarian leanings, so much so that the very term itself has come to be a pejorative or outright insult for leaders with a lot of charisma who swindle a large uneducated portion of their base. Modern administrations in Turkey and Hungary, for example, have come to be identified as Populist. These days, it’s a term that describes an underlying sleaze just oozing out of a used car salesman type candidate who promises the world while very likely not understanding a fraction of the kind of policy or political capital it would take to meet those promises.
And to be fair, appealing to the people has always been the point of Populism. The word “narod” from the Russian Narodnik, actually means “people.” Populism is a movement that’s deeply anti-establishment at heart, and more importantly, anti-elite. With the Enlightenment era thinkers who grew their political discourse in the Age of Reason, anti-elite meant feeding the French monarchy to the guillotine. Unfortunately, its origins are drastically different than our modern American interpretation. Here it means not listening to people who have lots of degrees and spend their lives painstakingly researching everything there is to know about a particular subject. Contemporary Populism in America villainizes the exact people who initiated the movement, the Enlightenment thinkers who were fighting for the common riffraff as much as they were for themselves, and who were collectively working to take down the nepo baby layabouts in the monarchy. It’s a complete one-eighty in the sense that the word “elite” has become a mean way for dumb people to say “educated.” The whole thing has given America a bit of a Cassandra Complex. Contemporary American Populism is defined by charisma and appearance over substance. It’s a shallow and gross high school homecoming court competition, and it would be amusing to note that real adults are acting this way if the implications weren’t so absolutely terrifying now.
This moment has been a long time coming in American politics. And we know that populism is the answer to how we got here, because all we need to do to confirm this is to take a look at the very first ever televised presidential debate.
When John F. Kennedy took on Richard Nixon in 1960, suddenly the 65 million people watching had access to a brand new set of criteria to evaluate beyond just policy positions. I really think this quote from Purdue University’s analysis of the debate sums up the whole crate of bananas right here: “...the hope of attracting more potential voters and increasing education of the issues was overcome by the interest of politicians catering to public image and using media exposure to build credibility and create more personality.” Like I said, less super important political discourse and careful evaluation of socio-economic mechanisms, and more homecoming court.
Now, there are two very prominent and widely discussed aspects of the JFK-Nixon debate that we know. One is that people who listened to the debate on the radio said they were more likely to vote for Nixon, whereas those who watched the debate on TV said they were more likely to vote for JFK. Does anyone see where I’m going with this? And the second thing we know is that Nixon refused to wear much makeup. I don’t want to speculate, but there’s some barrier here that brings to mind traditional masculinity in a changing era, but I don’t know. From what I’ve read on the topic, Nixon really did know how to use developing media to his advantage, and he did so throughout the campaign and of course later during his own successful campaign for president in 1968. And don’t get me started on Checkers. That actually happened all the way back in 1952. So clearly, he wasn’t clueless, just not as hip to the new media reality as JFK was at the time. Nixon wore a suit that blended into the background set, he sweat a ton and had to wipe his face constantly, he appeared very pale, and had he worn a bit more foundation, some of those problems would have been solved. But he also kept checking a nearby clock the audience couldn’t see, so of course the general impression was that he was just a super shifty-eyed creep. From later accounts we know that he was truly exhausted at this point in the campaign and had lost fifteen pounds by the time of the debate. JFK just looked better. That’s it.
The process of the escalating shallowness of American political discourse has accelerated since the days of the first nationally televised events. But, you know, for a while we still had things like decorum and assholes weren’t running amok in primetime on CSPAN, they were relegated to the wings, on fringe podcasts that only your racist uncle listened to. Now your racist uncle is the president elect. Again. It’s been a wild turn. The Nazis are in government not because America is overwhelmingly in support of Fascism, but because the current iteration of Populism in America is embraced by a movement that embraces authoritarianism.
Nazi is a hard word. It’s going to spur a debate whenever it comes up. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a Nazi. I mean, even the Nazis called themselves socialists. So yeah, no one is going to outright embrace the language and symbolism--well, not many people, there are those out there who lack even that level of functioning brain activity. Most people are going to bristle at being identified for what they are. “I’m not a Nazi,” they say, “the people who want everyone to have rights are the Nazis.”
And those are just the true believers. Because sure enough, the cultists really do exist. And these people are fully lost and there’s no bringing them back. They’re heroin addicts mainlining hate and no one can save them but themselves. The thing to remember is that this is just a small marginal blip of the population.
Most people who are attracted to Populism don’t do it for the idealogy. How do I know this? Because we have the data on what policies the vast majority of Americans support, and we know which way the political wind blows in terms of what U.S. citizens actually want to see their government do for them. We know that the vast majority of Americans consistently support progressive, left-leaning policies. A CNBC survey from 2019 uncovered that the vast majority of Americans are behind supposedly controversial ideas like raising the minimum wage, free college tuition, universal healthcare, paid maternity leave, and government-funded childcare. A 2022 exit poll from the midterm elections found that Americans overwhelmingly support so-called progressive positions like abortion rights, tackling the existential threat of climate change, and making wealthy assholes pay their fair share of taxes. The only real conclusion we can make from this is that, because of the effects of Populism on the electorate, not many of us pay enough attention to be able to identify which policies match up to the candidates running for office. What they do see, though, and what’s shown to them and everyone on the planet 24/7, are the sensational clickbait soundbites and sanewashing of completely pathologically insane behavior and unscientific nonsense that feels a lot like “just telling it like it is.”
Eddie Izzard had a bit about this in one of his stand-up routines. He was talking about how Americans sing the national anthem at baseball games, and a lot of us don’t seem to actually know the words, but that doesn’t matter, because as long as you’re making really confident and belligerent noises that happen to represent the concept of singing, and you’re just really furiously assertive about it, then people will somehow be legitimately impressed.
The same thing happens with the diarrhea that comes out of Donald Trump’s omnipresent blowjob face. It makes absolutely no sense, and no one can decipher or ever explain what he’s talking about at any point in a single one of his batshit multi-hour rants, but he speaks so confidently about sharks and batteries and windmill cancer that people just think he’s telling it like it is. Which is, of course, complete nonsense. Not to mention, he’s the exact kind of elite that his brand of Populism is fighting against. Trump is a wealthy billionaire nepo baby who’s never worked a day in his life. He’s a literal coastal elite. A rich New York City real estate mogul. This is a man who thinks you need an ID to buy groceries, who demanded that opera songs be played at one of his rallies, and who lives in a New York City penthouse made of actual gold for f*ck’s sake. And yet somehow he’s convinced large swaths of blue collar workers that he’s just like them. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in the mountains, and I don’t know a single blue collar worker who thinks you need an ID to buy groceries, listens to Pavarotti, and lives in a house made of gold.
And this is why Populism works. Because if you just run a candidate who has that same feel, the same bluster, the same attitude, the same shucking of norms and polite euphemistic, neutered political non-dialog, but their policies fall on the opposite side of the political spectrum, then the same exact people are going to listen to them, too. And maybe even a bigger portion of the electorate will listen, since Americans are overwhelmingly behind progressive policies.
We are not smart creatures, in the grand scheme. And we will inevitably revert to the opinion that whoever speaks the loudest speaks the truth. We think truth is loud, we think it has nothing to hide. Which is why facts and nuance will always take a backseat to undeservedly confident dumbasses, and why we always think the “elites” are keeping things from us. The problem is, only one side runs those types of people, and the other side suppresses its Populist candidates and political discussions. The last one to succeed in recent years was Obama. And he was actually a very middle of the road political centrist. He was also a president who was obsessed with optics and never wanted to ruffle any feathers, always maintaining avoiding even the appearance of impropriety even though he was villainized at every turn, effectively self-censoring and limiting his own ability to create as much good in the world as he was slinging around with his silky smooth speeches. And that’s the thing about Populism. A strong Populists can push whatever agenda they want and lots of people will vote for them whether they agree with their policies at all, or even their complete lack of policies as in the most recent case.
That’s honestly it, that’s the whole game. Right-wing billionaire oligarchs just figured out how to play it first. The only silver lining is the fact that so far they really have been running people who can’t open doors or drink water like or walk down ramps or understand that passing dementia tests does not put one in the running for the Nobel Prize. But this won’t always be the case. And maybe in the next four years the Project 2025 people and the Heritage Foundation will be able to squeeze through some things they’ve been working very hard to realize for decades now, because their king clown is too self-absorbed and distracted to care. Or maybe this 78-year-old with obvious significant brain loss will fly into a ketchup-chucking rage and give his wealthy hangers-on the boot, just like he has to every single other person who’s ever worked alongside him. Eventually, you’re going to say something that clangs against his narcissistic armor, and instead of allowing his mind to process that information he’ll just shove it away, along with whoever comes with it. The only possible saving grace for America, and, perhaps, the world, is that the Populist candidate we’ve embraced with open arms is simply too stupid and lazy to do much damage.
Because Trump is 100% this type of new American authoritarian Populist. But he’s more of an inevitability than an anomaly. He’s spewing the exact kinds of vile “tells it like it is” bullshit that authoritarian Populists have said who have come before him. He uses the exact language of the Nazi party sometimes, and the language and exact phrases of the America First Nazi sympathizers and Hitler apologists from the 1930s. The Marmalade Menace has said out loud the absolutely horrifying things he fantasizes about doing to his political enemies. He’s said the literal words with his butthole mouth. If he can get off the couch and take a break from his “executive time” we might actually be in trouble. Good luck, America.
So what can any of us actually do about the current dangerous authoritarian thread of American Populism? As a whole, we can pay more attention to policy. The problem that most people face here is that the media makes its living through ad revenue, and so in the field of digital content, we are taught to sensationalize and play on emotional reactivity in order to reel people into a post, or a video, or an article. Negative emotions elicit the strongest reactions, so headlines are carefully crafted to anger people, upset them, to instigate, and incite a one-sided argument that pulls viewers in to rage-read a given piece of content. Politicians use language now that meets the ad revenue model of media in order to get their message across, no matter how insane or watered-down or completely useless it is because of the mode of using soundbites to convey complex policy discussion. People are justifiably exhausted by this situation even as they continue to participate it in. And many drop out of the loop all together because the stress of living on this artificially generated emotional rollercoaster isn’t worth the cost of being an informed citizen that’s honestly just trying to meet their civic responsibilities.
All of this has to stop. Americans need to demand better of their public institutions, and yes, of the media. Once it was a bastion of investigative reporting and speaking truth to power, and now it’s a crippled, fear-mongering shadow, terrified to dig too deep or push too hard because networks and reporters could lose access to sources and whole administrations, and how would they craft those hate-baiting headlines that bring in the ad dollars then? We need a new revenue model for journalism. Right now there aren’t a lot of great answers, and the ad revenue that the billionaire owners of most news networks have hitched themselves to is not very stable. Layoffs and outright shuttering of established and trusted outlets are increasingly common scenarios. The media is hurting, it’s stuck, and it’s not quite serving either the public or its own interests right now.
You aren’t going to like this, but one thing you can do is pay for your journalism. There are sources out there that deserve it. Sources that are bolstered by the traditional subscription model and that try to do good work, but have to play the same game as everyone else in order to compete. Helping to take that burden away by funding through direct subscriptions like the old days could do some good in terms of turning things around. Also, tuning in to publicly funded media that operates mostly through viewer donations and is therefore accountable only to the people, is also a great option.
Public journalism isn’t perfect, either, and lately no one has pushed back much against an increasingly deranged political descent into authoritarian handwaving and a refusal for accountability. With the fear of loss of access and the constraints of the ad revenue model, it’s difficult for any media outlet to fight against the kind of bucking of norms that we’re seeing. It’s honestly a perfect storm that’s happening right before our eyes. Just like a lot of things in political life these days, we’ve seen that even the media is not immune to the damage caused by the disturbing realization that many of our pillar institutions were simply built on the promise of American leadership operating in good faith, and to not cross certain unconscionable lines. The difficulty that both the media and the people watching are having while trying to catch up with the surreal butthole mouth of gish gallop, giraffe handjob dancing, Arnold Palmer lusting bullshit, and the rush to process and make any semblance of sense of this whole derailment is causing the whole system to melt down.
I’ve always said to anyone who’ll listen that the best way to pick a candidate for elected office would be to judge them based on policy alone. Just choose your fighter by sorting through a list of policy points, not professional mugshots. Not debates, or soundbites, or clickbait. Just policy. The potential success of this extremely simple thought is borne out in the evidence, such as with the 1960 debate between Kennedy and Nixon. Because debates are not designed to convince anyone, they play into appearances and the symptoms of Populism that distract people from substance. It’s borne out again in the fact that over half of Americans support progressive policies across the board, but continue to not represent that support in their actual candidate picks. The pull of Populism, the gravity of gravitas, the suckering of hucksters, the shallowness of appearances and quite literally judging a book by its cover are too distracting from the plans and polity a candidate will actually implement when put into office. And yeah, that’s really f*ckin’ sad. It makes me existentially anxious that all my friends, family, and neighbors agree on what needs to be done to make America and the world a better place, and then some of those people are too distracted by a charismatic but financially and morally bankrupt escaped nursing home patient to actually pick a candidate of substance who will enact the policies that would get us there. This utter cognitive collapse of “Oh, he was just joking. He didn’t mean it when he said he was going to shoot the media or launch a bloodbath against his political enemies when he’s reelected,” is just a kind of psychological justification that hedges someone’s brain against the fact that they’ve been pulled in by Populism, they’ve been taken in by the con, that they’re voting not for what they actually want or believe in, but for the glittery fool’s gold of a snake oil salesman’s empty promises and dangerous incompetence.
So what can you do, in the end? If there is, in fact, any more time to do it before the actual end? You can pay attention. I don’t want to tell you what media to consume. I want you to find out for yourself who represents reality to the best of their ability. Yes, that means putting in the work, evaluating sources, increasing media literacy, and even reading studies and searching out raw data that’s cited in the things you see and read. Confirm, don’t blindly trust anything or anyone that simply vibes with how you feel. Feelings aren’t facts. Objective reality is not an opinion. It gets lost in the clickbait and ad revenue agenda, but it’s there, and you really can sort through the trash heap to find it. Remind your friends and family to do the same. Gently remindl them that what they’re watching might not be the whole story, and it might actually be making it more difficult for them to identify candidates for office that align with their values and wishes for the country. I’m not going to lie, communicating with even those closest to you is harder than ever due to the siloed echo chambers that digital content and willful misinformation have shamelessly erected. It’s hard to get through to people. And research shows us that you can’t change anyone’s mind by exposing them to factual information. They have to come by it on their own. The good thing about facts and reality is that it’s always going to be there, just waiting for us to check our egos and look for it, and use it to make the world a better place than we found it, by electing leaders that match up with the policies we actually support.
So tune in in order to generate turn out. Final numbers are still coming in and millions of votes are yet to be counted, but as it stands now, 78% of of registered voters came out to the polls this time. That’s 55% of adults over the age of 18 who could vote, whether registered or not. People like to doom shout this apocalyptic rhetoric that half the country willfully voted for tyranny in American politics. But the reality is, maybe close to a quarter of the American population voted for Donald Trump. Not only that, a lot of those people who were registered Republicans and who voted for down-ballot Republican candidates did not vote for Trump for president, but voted third party instead. The actual truth remains that the vast majority of Americans want their politicians to enact progressive policies. We just have to work harder to get more of the people to actually vote. That means taking away resistance and putting in place effective measures like making election day a national holiday where everyone has time off work to get to the polls. It means bringing access to more people through mail-in voting or even looking into secure digital solutions. If it’s still easier to vote for American Idol than it is for an American president, we’ve really got our work cut out for us. So yes, there are things we can do. They involve effort on all our parts, and awareness, because identifying problems is the first step to solving them. And bringing in our allies and friends on these solutions is the only way to fulfill the promise of a functioning democracy. We all need to work together.
Let’s get together on this. Let’s do some f*cking good about the current state of Populism in American politics.
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