Explaining to a starving orphan (or more pointedly: veteran legionnaire) that they can’t have food because of the constitutional system of consular veto is basically unwinnable, which is why that situation is checkmate: if you fight for principles you’re heartless, and if you fight for what seems right you must become a dictator. Roman politics, by the late Republic, has reached this level of gridlock and imbalance where the only factions were a conservative establishment unwilling to accept any change and a populist wing populated with strongmen.
Put another way, Sulla and Caesar failed where Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR succeeded.
There are high norms and low norms. (My terminology.) Low norms range from basic corruption to which sexual orientation is in vogue. High norms subvert how power is wielded. Equating these two is page one of populism. (You have a broad point in that crossing the Rubicon was a generational affair by Caesar’s point. But nobody was happy about it when Sulla did it either.)
> until wages start to tick up then all of the sudden we have to do something about all this inflation
This cannot be a serious reading of the data. Wages rose precipitously for a decade [1]. Even during the pandemic, while wages rose and stimulus reigned, measured inflation was low as were rates. When inflation started rising, rates remained low because the Fed thought it transitory. It’s only when it surged that the FOMC stepped in. The Fed was not only fine but thrilled with rising real wages.
Investors have been walking away with more and more of the productivity since about 1970 or so. Young people are less likely to own a home due to insane asset price increases during that time and the fed kept lowering rates in spite of this. They raised interest rates specifically to prevent a "wage price spiral" but had no problem with the price spiral around housing because wages weren't going up as well.
If CPI was accurate you'd have the same standard of living your grandfather had. A decent house on a single salary, pension, new car in the driveway. The modern young professional class lives in overpriced apartment blocks, a lot of them don't even own a car. The iPhone doesn't make the mandatory two income household with no assets lifestyle equivalent to what we had previously.
CPI speaks to price levels. It says nothing about standards of living, just cost. Nobody argues that if you were on the winning team, life in the 50s wasn’t great. Naturally, if you poll folks from different backgrounds, that rose tint fades a bit. Unfortunately, we don’t have fine-grained economic statistics from the 50s to today.
Living standards are not down over ten years. Statistically and, for me, anecdotally. I’m making no comparison over lifetimes because we haven’t been collecting e.g. real median household income over that stretch.
Fortunately, it’s beside the point. You alleged “wages start[ed] to tick up then all of the sudden” rates were raised. That’s demonstrably untrue. Wages were rising for a decade, including precipitously through the pandemic, before we did anything about it.
Go around at talk to some of the young people you know, are they willing to trade a few years at the end of their life and their iPhone to get out of student debt and own a home?
This is incorrect.
> talk to some of the young people you know
We’re paying down our debt and buying homes. We’re more stretched than our grandparents were at our age, but our objective quality of life is far superior. I wouldn’t give up modern telecommunications for a bigger house.
I own assets and am happy. (The home owning is often a source of stress that competes with my happiness.) The last ten years saw my prospects increase materially. I’ve also noticed as much in my friends with more blue-collar jobs. Statistics show a similar trend: broad gains with pockets of instability.
It's an important part that this isn't a genuine concern, it's 100% manufactured by the populist for their own benefit. Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, two populists, are both very much part of the "elite" they claim to rage against.
It's also important that this is done specifically to cause social problems they can exploit. They have no intention of actually fixing the problem they "identify" and will continue to blame new "elite" groups to obtain or maintain power.
Obviously this is dangerous to those in power, and is therefore demonized by them.
Your last paragraph is simply wrong: populists have effected major development and social change. Huey Long in Louisiana is a good example.
> Obviously this is dangerous to those in power
This is a disgusting falsehood and I genuinely think you need to be ashamed of yourself for saying things like this. This "popular anger" is regularly directed against the most powerless in society. Look at the demonisation of LGBT+, ethnic minorities, refugees, Jews and traveller communities to name just a few.
To hold any notion that this "only a danger to those in power," you'd have to completely ignore huge swathes of recorded history. You'd also have to completely ignore the actual examples I gave of populists like Nigel Farage. The man who right now makes his career out of demonising refugees drowning in the English Channel.
Yes, certainly populists can be dangerous to all of those groups, as can elites. Political violence is certainly not limited to populists: indeed their contribution is small in historical terms.
This is why you should be ashamed: that use of the word "can."
Populists always target vulnerable people. They're the easiest groups to direct public anger without fear of reprisal against themselves.
> indeed their contribution is small in historical terms.
You then follow up with this gem. This, again, is to completely ignore multiple genocides that populists directly caused. Simple example: The Holocaust.
Democracy is what the people want. Majoritarianism is blindly doing what most people want. Populism involves majoritarianism, and both imply the failure of democracy. (This happens fast in a system of elections with no checks and balances.)
Is democracy what most people want or just the people?
People, broadly. (And unfortunately, ambiguously.)
It is not what most people want, that’s majoritarianism, a known failure mode for democratic systems. The majority voting to execute the 10% whose views they don’t believe in is fine, electorally, but bankrupt, democratically.
No, it’s not.
Um, what? "The people" is not a single entity, and does not "want" things. Individual people want things. So if democracy is "what the people want", then democracy does not exist.
Congratulations, you’ve found the fatal flaw in millennia of thinking on the topic.
What “the people” want is unknowable. That is the point and paradox. Democracy is a system for balancing individual wants against individual needs, enabling each majority while protecting every minority. It’s a system of trade-offs which eludes poetic summation. It dies when we get caught up in word play over pragmatic concerns, or when someone claims to speak singularly for what “the people” want.
In other words, as I said, democracy does not exist--since no actual system has ever actually done these things.
It exists as much as Newtonian gravity. It’s an ideal because we’re defining it in its idealised form.
Political systems aspire to sets of ideals. Some emphasise stability; their leaders are Machiavellian. Some aspire to democratic ideals. Democracy per se is a simplification, as all political systems must be to fit into a textbook, but that doesn’t make it less real. Just difficult to summarise.
It’s a deep debate beyond a quip or HN comment. I wasn’t trying to define democracy, just delineate it from majoritarianism, with which it’s unfortunately commonly confused.
They claim to, but I have yet to see one that actually does, except for the Machiavellian case you mention, where the leaders are quite open about the fact that they're looking out for their own interests and let the chips fall where they may as far as the impact on anyone else. If you can call that an ideal.
Even if I take your idealized form as you state it and put aside my previous objections, when I ask myself what kind of system in human history has actually come closest to doing what you describe, what I get is an ultra-libertarian free market system with a government that is as weak as possible--at any rate, in which any government that exists does not have a monopoly of force and cannot expect to enforce its edicts against people that disagree with them. Historical examples include Saga period Iceland and some of the American colonies in the late 1600s and early to mid 1700s, before the British decided to tighten up on the colonies after the French and Indian War.
In other words, if your ideal really is "democracy" as you describe it, historical experience shows that governments take you away from that ideal, not towards it.
> a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.
I find the more educated you are (read: elite) the less you like populism. Funny that.