Trump's proposed massive cuts to Medicaid prove he was NEVER a "populist"

[Ken Burch]

8. OK.

And, while it can be used to do great harm(as can every OTHER style of political rhetoric, including whatever it is that people who have issues with populism support as an alternative form of discourse), it can be PART(not all, but part) of building the resistance and creating a long-term backlash-safe progressive majority.

Any successful politics has to be grounded in the idea of serving the people, of giving the people some sort of say in their destiny.

The right-wing xenophobic politics that Trump and the media CALL "populism" is a distortion of the idea...creating the illusion of populism and the illusion of a defense of the powerless-for the last thirty years or so, the right-wing populist parties, in addition to the bigotry central to their programs, were also the only parties promising to defend the welfare state and in some cases workers' rights. The "social democratic" parties in Europe had abandoned the defense of social welfare and workers' rights and were and are competing with right-wing parties in their eagerness to cut programs for the poor, weaken unions, and destroy job security-the obvious way to stop those parties would be for the social democrats to start defending the working and kept-from-working poor, but even though all of those parties are in long-term decline on the European mainland, they stubbornly refuse to give up on market economics and the corporate fixation with balanced budgets.

Whatever we call our approach, we need to get back to serving the people, defending the people, creating a society in which nobody is cast off and disregarded, where no one is ever called "deadwood", where we are passionately opposed to things like massive layoffs on Christmas Ever.

We have a market economy, but that doesn't mean we have to be market-deferential. We should be treating business as ONE part of life, not as though it is more important than everything and everyone else, not as though the "private sector" should be able to throw human beings on the scrapheap.

That's why I keep saying we need to be a party of the streets, not the suites.