Populism is a scream

...elections are simply horse races with executive power as the prize, and opinion polls are rarely used as more than a sort of racing form to predict the winners of the next race. The channels seem to be designed to carry very few bits of information.

The only kind of information that such a constrained channel can carry is a scream. Populist politics acts as a signalling system for a population which wants to convey a single bit of information; the message that translates as “HELP! THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS IS INTOLERABLE TO ME”.

Ended up at this piece from a really great video essay about how slop AI content flows from an economy of risk adverse mega-corps who have been producing slop for a while now. All in order to avoid any forms of risk and deliver shareholder value.

It struck me as very correct. A lot of people vote for a lot of reasons and our system, even if it was built for multiple parties, gives very few choices. People, it seems, now only vote for a change. To end the current state of things (or not).

It feels right to understand the last decade-ish of ping-ponging national politics not as any real expression of specific combinations of policy choices or enlightenment or darkness, but as a SCREAM, one that says 'this isn't working, anything but this, please, anything but this'.

While that is a very depressing thought in many ways, it is also somewhat hopeful. Trump is fixing nothing. The scream continues. The current state will not hold.

I think this is what explains the common thread between MAGA, Brexit, Five-Star, Hindutva and all the rest. The populist movements of the 2010s all promised a simpler world; they were, in the words of JK Galbraith, taking on the great anxiety of their people and addressing it. They were also promising to restore the broken communication channels – to make voices heard, to force the managerial class to listen.

But the same analysis tells us that they’re fake solutions. You can’t promise a simpler world – that’s equivalent to claiming to be able to reverse the direction of time.