Yazata
Valued Senior Member
I didn't want to make this a poll, so you can pick your own issue.
For me, I'd say that the biggest problem facing the United States is how it's rapidly turning into an increasingly totalitarian one-party state. By that I mean how the federal civil service is populated overwhelmingly by adherents of one political party, and how everything from the intelligence agencies to the court system are being weaponized, Putin-style, against perceived political enemies. To say nothing of the partisan control of higher education and the "news" (actually opinion) media. We have the attempts to censor social media, the plague of "wokeness" infesting even private institutions...
For me, I'll say populism.
There's no way that I can agree with that.
For me, "populism" is an often perjorative synonym for 'democracy'. It's the idea that people decide for themselves how they would like to live their lives and what direction they would like their communities to take. Then they elect representatives who promote the agendas of those who elected them in the halls of power. The essence is that decision-making is bottom up, arising from the will of the people.
It's opposed to what we might call neo-aristocracy, where the self-defined "superior" people up on top make all the decisions that are then enforced on all the "little" people down below. That's precisely why the American Revolution was fought, in hopes of escaping from that kind of system so prevalent in Europe.
That's why I'm proud to call myself a "populist".
I'd definite that as as anti-intellectual movement or emotion over facts and reality.
Is there really a superior neo-aristocratic class ("intellectuals") able to discern 'facts', 'truth' and 'reality' while the common herd are blind to them? That raises obvious philosophical questions. It's very reminiscent of Plato's totalitarian "philosopher kings" (those trained to perceive the eternal Forms/ideas in the mind of God) and his opposition to democracy in the Republic. Do we really want to be ruled by a self-appointed and self-perpetuating elite with total control over our lives while we have no say in the matter? (As we saw with the Marxist "vanguard party", whose rule was supposedly justified by its mastery of Marxist theory and hence the inevitable unfolding of history?)
It's even worse when we realize that most of our disagreements aren't really about questions of 'fact' and 'reality' at all, they are about opinions and value-judgments, ethical questions where there's probably no objective truth of the matter to be found. Our disagreements are about what kind of world we want to live in. When it comes to issues of 'right' and 'wrong', when we start throwing around words like 'should' (which presupposes an agreed goal), we seem have abandoned the realm of expertise for the realm of intuitions.
I'd consider both Trump (obviously) and Biden as populists rather than as traditional centrists.
I agree about Trump. His brilliance in 2016 was recognizing that none of the rest of the candidates were speaking to many of the issues that a very large segment of the voters considered most important and really wanted addressed. While reflexively-elitist Hillary simply dismissed those voters (whose votes she sorely needed) as "deplorables".
So despite his New York City billionaire roots, Trump emerged as the Voice of the People. Isn't that how democracy is supposed to work?
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