Sunday, August 20, 2017

Much indeed in what he says …

 IASC: The Hedgehog Review - Volume 19, No. 2 (Summer 2017) - Populism .

Mark those words: “and even hope.” Woodward was of course well aware that one of the problems with populism is that it has often served as the false-bottomed box within which policies that favor not “the people,” but an insurgent counter-elite speaking in the people’s name, are concealed. We can and should apply that insight to all the varieties of populism—left, right, Trumpist, Warrenist, up, down, and tutti quanti—that proclaim themselves to us in the present day. We ought to be wary when listening to any person or group that claims to speak for “the people.”
This is why we should be wary of abstractions and the categories that go with them. Someone should write something about the dangers of essentialism.

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