Populismo

No alimenta pero entretiene. Confieso que me cuesta entender el atractivo que representa para tanta gente. Y no hablo precisamente de un pobre tipo sin escuela primaria completa que depende de un plan social para darle de comer a sus cinco hijos:

At the end of the day, therefore, populism is a double-edged sword. Used pejoratively, it stands for the idea that politicians, to obtain or preserve political power, will appeal to base popular sentiments or mistaken (often economic or legal) ideas. A good example is Obama’s reaction last week to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, rooted in the First Amendment’s guarantee of political speech: He called it “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.” There is an element of truth to that sentiment, of course, because the system of government that has evolved in America under the influence of Progressive “professionals” has endowed those professionals (read: the governing class, in all its reaches) with unprecedented power over “the people,” who often feel powerless as a result. But demagogic appeals like that or like others we’ve heard lately from Obama will only exacerbate that problem. By contrast, a “populist” appeal that seeks to return power to people (N.B.: I did not say, as in the ’60s, “power to the people”) – power to run their own lives, free from unwarranted government regulation or dependency — is a side of the idea we hear too seldom. Yet it’s what our founding documents are about. They established not simply popular government but limited popular government – ensuring the right of the people to govern themselves, not mainly through government but individually or in voluntary association with others. It is that liberty that Progressive elitists who “knew better” — the folks in Cambridge who voted 84 to 15 against Scott Brown — have gradually extinguished.