Populism is a political position which holds that the virtuous citizens are being mistreated by a small circle of elites, who can be overthrown if the people recognize the danger and work together. The elites are depicted as trampling in illegitimate fashion upon the rights, values, and voice of the legitimate people.
The notion itself is quite subjective of course, but it is definitely very different from "democracy".
[1] http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPPS%2FPPS...
The only reason why it seems more "democratic" is because for most of human history, the wealthy elite had way to much power compared to everyone else.
The common man may think he knows everything, but he really doesn't.
Historical evidence suggests that such leaders tend to move towards to political extremes.
[1] http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPPS%2FPPS...
We already know how easy it is for yellow journalism to sway popular opinion; expecting direct democracy to be able to deal with the subtle nuances of governing a millions-strong society is nice in theory, but simply isn't practical.
Imo it goes down to what your message is - both Trump ans Sanders are populists.
Populism is just catering to the short term needs, even basic ones, just to get attention/votes/support.
Populist example from Romania: get an IMF loan in order to increase pensions. Text-book example of shooting yourself in the foot long term, but a very popular action among pensioners, which are a large voting demographic.
The EU was built on an explicit policy of focus on small treaties, and avoiding creating transnational institutions. This was specifically to ensure that member states kept as much sovereignty as possible. It's why even the largest EU institutions are generally incomplete and only operate with the ongoing cooperation of all the member states. Hence monetary union without fiscal union. Hence the lack of police and military cooperation. Hence no central border or immigration control. These are key functions of government, which the EU has never been able to centralize because of the practice of "small steps."
Its the way the US was supposed to work, only with even less power in the federal government. European federalism is free trade attached to a foreign policy body and a supranational court.
The EU is more than 50 years old, not 15. it was established as a free trade zone first, to "make war unthinkable and materially impossible" - in 1958. That's the core of the EU, and it works very well for the members by every material measure. I don't know what makes you think otherwise. The recession has created a growing movement of Euroskepticism, but that's associated with the extreme political right wing, and remains a minority - outside of Britain, it seems.
What is success? High YOY GDP growth? Or quality of life? Look to America (my country) with very limited worker protections, almost no social safety nets, extremely high income and wealthy inequality; we still only eek out only ~2% GDP growth, and that's on the backs of the poor.
Freedom has a cost, and it seems that the UK populace who voted to leave does not fully understand that cost.
In the US, those are all going the opposite directions.
When countries grow powerful, they begin to forget about the "socio" part of socioeconomics, and just look at dollars.
Clearly a very, very large portion of the country felt underserved by the model.
Nassim taleb sums it up well: http://reason.com/blog/2016/03/15/nassim-taleb-the-global-re...
I'd argue you might be able to have a generous social safety net if you adopted a high tax, low regulation approach.
EU is high tax high regulation, US is medium tax medium regulation.
How about measuring by success by the preferences of the people in the country? Apparently a majority of UK voters preferred leaving.
You can educate someone. You can't fix willful ignorance.
> Gotta hand it to stupid people. They may not understand nuance, secondary effects, or the long term, but dammit, they know how to vote.
https://twitter.com/DavidInglesTV/status/746192676085600256
> This is something we've never seen, chances are you'll never see again Pound just collapses 13% vs. the Yen #Brexit
https://twitter.com/MatthewPhillips/status/74618964684197888...
> Wow. The £ is down 8.4%. Currencies are not supposed to do that. (1% move is considered massive.)
I think the bigger picture is eluding some people in the face of shiny doomsday articles.
Also given the recent proceedings in the course of the EU all member countries are better off with the whole house of cards collapsing. We can always build a new alliance, but this USSR style direction is not the least promising.
Take a look at the Greek, what a success the EU was for them. Take a look at the handling of the Greek dept problem, how well the EU reagated to that. Take a look at the migrant crisis: the western EU members criticized Hungary for defending its borders, which it is obliged to by the schengen treaty. The leaders did not play by the rules they have set, yet they talk about more centralization should do the trick.
The European Council is not elected by the people, and is not accountable. Also does not show ability to control this imbecile of a superpower.
This EU must die for its architectural problems. Just as the USSR had to die. I beleive this will also happen without violence, as there is no common military force under the control of the "leaders".
I also beleive, that the European people, even those voting leave, have a wish to be united. But maybe some beleive we are first British, and second European, and they do not wish to sacrafice their local values for some abstract European or global values. Yet they do not feel bad about the other Europeans.
Europe has longer, and different history than the USA, and most importantly, though often forgotten, most European nations have made huge saccrifices for their freedom, for their very existence as a nation.
In short, to save the EU: "everything must change so that everything can stay the same"
> The European Council is not elected by the people, and is not accountable.
European Council is not elected by people? Please read more about EU before claiming such things which are not true - "The European Council is the institution of the European Union (EU) that comprises the heads of state or government of the member states, along with President of the European Council and the President of the European Commission."
The greek economy and books were audited by EU agencies. If a bug slips through reviews and tests in a software project, than the bug is the responsibility of the author? I think only partly, actually many are involved, and the process is the main problem usually.
> European Council is not elected by people?
True, I have mistaken it for the European Commission.
In case you have a short memory, before the EU there was the League of Nations between WW1 and WW2, to ensure wars would never happen again in Europe (and elsewhere). It did not work out too well.
The fact that we did not get any war in Europe after WW2 has really nothing to do with the EU being there or not. If anything, war did not break out because we were too busy preventing the Cold War from exploding in Europe and having Russia invade or coup every other country, like they did in the whole Eastern part of Europe.
Same values, I beg to differ. The values of a Greek and of a German could be completely different as far as you know. Connected Markets? The EU has become a tariff-heavy zone, the opposite of a Free Market - look at how many trade agreements we have to regulate and impeach free markets. And the TPP, with the blessing of most EU members (in secret).
There's no recipe to avoid war, but political stability is certainly correlated with economic prosperity. The EU is not making this happen, so we should see it slowly desintegrate.
Depend which values you are talking about but Greek signed European Convention on Human Rights, there is a LOT of values written there if you ask me which those countries you mention share.
> Connected Markets? The EU has become a tariff-heavy zone, the opposite of a Free Market - look at how many trade agreements we have to regulate and impeach free markets.
It's not true for most products, but some indeed are regulated because if you have 28 different countries you need to control some of the segments of markets or your country/other countries will suffer, that's why you have for example limits for milk producing etc. Show my any organization exactly like EU which doesn't regulate their common market.
> There's no recipe to avoid war
For sure there is no 100% certain recipe to avoid war but nothing was created closer to that recipe than EU. I live in country that was transformed from communism to democracy in 1989, trust me it can be a lot worse than it's now in EU, you can't imagine.
There are some good arguments for leaving, but this isn't one of them, IMO.