I am writing this on November 4th 2024.At the moments of writing this, we live in troubling political times. About a decade ago I watched both the UK and the US populaces make some pretty staggeringly poor choices, and we are now watching some of those same ideas reach into Europe. Or perhaps it started here in Europe (I am constantly reminded about how happy I was when Italy’s Five Star Movement was first elected, only to be very disappointed once again after they entered office and showed us all how stupid they really were), and then moved over there, in the same way that Trumpism looks to me to be a gaudier American version of Berlusconi’s own politics.
But what I never felt as an Italian who lived under Berlusconi was what I saw happen in the US after Trump and the UK after Brexit: that the people were condescended to and outright blamed for what happened. It’s the people’s fault for voting in Trump! It’s the racist, horrible, dumb people who voted for Brexit. It’s our fault. The people, unwashed as we are, are to blame for all our political woes. We are so dumb we fall for demagoguery, and don’t even think to blame the government that continuously gives itself a raise while a teacher’s salary has not gone up in the past 40 fucking years, and all the schools throughout Europe seem to be over-pupiled and understaffed. A recipe, in short, for an undereducated class that will vote for demagogues.
The people are to blame.
Well the good news is that none of this is new. Thomas Frank’s The People, No shows just how old all this is. Complaining about the masses is about as old as democracy itself. It shows how the sentiment that populism is anti-democratic (as is the conclusion one draws when The People vote in someone who seems very anti-democratic) is unfounded, and hints, perhaps conspiratorially, that this is a strategy for those that have to keep those that don’t have away from organizing as a way of getting more. It’s about as hard as any American is going to flirt with socialism. But that is the thesis here. Anti-populism is a strategy to keep our betters more well fed than the rest of us.
I grew up listening to people blame ‘politicians’ for the state of the world as if those politicians were some Alien race forced upon us. That politicians come from the same pool of humans as the rest of us is a fact conveniently overlooked when we watch a politician describe the internet as a ‘series of tubes’. But I can recall how people once used to quip that we shouldn’t bulk too hard at politicians and their stupidity, because they too are people who come out of the populace. But the opposite is true as well – the populace is born of government policies and the effects they have on the populace. If the people are dumb, shouldn’t the government be empowering them.
Tomorrow is the US election. My apathy is through the roof. What do I think about ‘the people’? I don’t know. I currently am residing in Albania, where someone has set up a whole restaurant dedicated to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. It might be a coincidence, but that restaurant is located in the same city where, by agreement between the two countries, Italy plans to ship its refugees for processing. Bare in mind that in my lifetime part of Italy’s immigration crisis was because we had to many ‘damn Albanians’ had flooded into Italy, and couldn’t we just ship them somewhere else?
I am confused. I guess we all are.
Post Script:
Hello. This blog is gonna be kind of defunct for a little bit longer. I have been enjoying my time off a bit too much. But this review and the time I finished the book seemed like too good a time not to publish it. When will I start posting again in earnest?
I don’t know.
Failures in Polymathy 