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Pope Francis Decries Populism and Says There’s a ‘Cancer’ Ailing Democracy
(www.thedailybeast.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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Populism is demagogy, it's repeating people's complaints back to them, to amplify them and place yourself as an apparent leader, but without actually bringing any solution - and when it does, it's immediately far right "beat everyone out". Democracy is actually creating policy and voting on it, which by definition implies people disagreeing in that vote. Populism is rounding up everyone with the same mind, excluding everyone else (not voting on anything) and trying to crush opposition with numbers and no policy. It's the antithesis to democracy.
Edit - it might depend on the region of the world, I don't think I've seen a lot of left wingers be called populists. Originally it just means the opposition between the people and the elite, so that would match what you say, and apparently some left parties are trying to return to that definition for some reason, but it seems the Pope is taking the other version that has become much more common.
Neoliberal types definitely called Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren "populist". Trying to equate it with rightwing demagoguery seems like it's a deliberate poisoning of the term by people who are aligned with the very status quo power structure that populism attacks. In a choice between the status quo establishment and racist rightwing populism, of course the status quo is better, but the rightwing populism is a problem exactly because the establishment is so distrusted for their lack of responsiveness to people's needs.