Populism

Hannah Arendt (in The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951) - The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Steve Bannon (interview with Michael Lewis, 2018) - The Democrats don’t matter, the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.

Eric D. Beinhocker (in The Origins of Wealth, 2006) - Foremost among norms related to cooperative behavior is a belief that life is a non-zero-sum game and that there are payoffs to cooperation. Societies that believe in a fixed pie of wealth have a difficult time engendering cooperation and tend to be low in mutual trust.

Jean-Louis Bourlanges (avril 2017) - Autrefois, les élections c'étaient des salauds élus par des cons, désormais ce sont des cons élus par des salauds.

J.A.C. Brown (in Techniques of Persuasion) - (1) Most people want to feel that issues are simple rather than complex, (2) want to have their prejudices confirmed, (3) want to feel that they ‘belong’ with the implication that others do not, and (4) need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations.

Ian Buruma - Affirming the dreams of people who have little is the key to successful populism.

Sir Bernard Crick - (in In Defence Of Politics, 1962) - Boredom with established truths is a great enemy of free men.

Ralf Dahrendorf (in Acht Anmerkungen zum Populismus, 2003) - Populism is simple; democracy is complex.

Istvan Deák - If we were to draw some kind of composite portrait of the Nazi voter or Nazi Party member, one exhibiting the most frequently occurring characteristics, we would find that he or she was a Protestant, north or central German, living in a small town, and engaged in a “traditional” profession.

Rudiger Dornbusch & Sebastian Edwards (1991) - Populist episodes (...) tend to have some fundamental common threads. In particular, populist regimes have historically tried to deal with income inequality problems through the use of overly expansive macroeconomic policies. These policies, which have relied on deficit financing, generalized controls, and a diregard for basic economic equilibria, have almost unavoidably resulted in major macroeconomic crises that have ended up hurting the poorer segments of society. (...) At the end of every populist experiment real wages are lower than they were at the beginning of these experiences.

Kevin Drum (2012) - The internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. Or in simpler terms, the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter.

Attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe by Leon Feuchtwanger - There is nothing the rabble fear more than intelligence. If they understood what is truly terrifying, they would fear ignorance.

Masha Gessen (2017) - Lying is the message. It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.

Wrongly attributed to Joseph Goebbels - This will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed. (Das wird immer einer der besten Witze der Demokratie bleiben, daß sie ihren Todfeinden die Mittel selber stellte, durch die sie vernichtet wurde).

Joseph Goebbels - Propaganda must (…) always be essentially simple and repetitive. In the long run basic results in influencing public opinion will be achieved only by the man who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form, despite the objections of the intellectuals.

Eric Hoffer (in The True Believer, 1951) - Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents (...) Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil.

Eric Hoffer - The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfilment. Whither they are led is of secondary importance.

Aldous Huxley - The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience  — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Garry Kasparov - The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

Martin Luther King - Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Karl Kraus - The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he.

Mark Lilla - Every major social transformation leaves behind a fresh Eden that can serve as the object of somebody’s nostalgia. And the reactionaries of our time have discovered that nostalgia can be a powerful political motivator, perhaps even more powerful than hope. Hopes can be disappointed. Nostalgia is irrefutable.

Leo Longanesi (December 1938, published in Parliamo dell'elefante, 1947) - Marching bands, flags, parades. An idiot is an idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a historical force. Italian original: Fanfare, bandiere, parate. Uno stupido è uno stupido. Due stupidi sono due stupidi. Diecimila stupidi sono una forza storica. 

François Mauriac (in Le feu sur la terre, 1950) - Moins les gens ont d'idées à exprimer, plus ils parlent fort. The fewer their ideas, the louder people speak.

Cas Mudde (The Populist Zeitgeist, 2004) - I define populism as an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.

Cas Mudde (The Populist Zeitgeist, 2004) - Populism is moralistic rather than programmatic. Essential to the discourse of the populist is the normative distinction between ‘the elite’ and ‘the people’, not the empirical difference in behaviour or attitudes. Populism presents a Manichean outlook, in which there are only friends and foes. Opponents are not just people with different priorities and values, they are evil! Consequently, compromise is impossible, as it ‘corrupts’ the purity.

Cas Mudde (The Populist Zeitgeist, 2004) - Populism seems to become stronger the more intellectuals criticize it.

Jan-Werner Müller - When identity politics predominates, populists will prosper.

Jan-Werner Müller - Populism is a distinctly moral way to imagine the political world and necessarily involves a claim to exclusive moral representation.

Jan-Werner Müller - Populists pit the pure, innocent, always hardworking people against a corrupt elite who do not really work (other than to further their self-interest) and, in right-wing populism, also against the very bottom of society (those who also do not really work and live like parasites off the work of others).

Jan-Werner Müller - The core claim of populism [is that] only some of the people are really the people.

Jan-Werner Müller - Populist parties are almost always internally monolithic, with the rank-and-file clearly subordinated to a single leader (or, less often, a group of leaders).

Jan-Werner Müller - Populists in power (...) : a kind of colonization of the state, mass clientelism as well as what political scientists sometimes call “discriminatory legalism,” and, finally, the systematic repression of civil society. It is not just populists who engage in such practices; what is distinctive about populists is that they can do so quite openly. They claim to have a moral justification for their conduct.

Jan-Werner Müller - Populist constitutions are designed to limit the power of nonpopulists, even when the latter form the government. Conflict then becomes inevitable. The constitution ceases to be a framework for politics and instead is treated as a purely partisan instrument to capture the polity.

George Orwell (January 1939) - We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

Werner Patzelt - Populism is the “ugly brother” of a beautiful girl named “democracy.”

Robert O. Paxton (in The Anatomy of Fascism, 2004) - An essential step in the fascist march to acceptance and power was to persuade law-and-order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity in the face of Left provocation.

Karl Polanyi (in The Great Transformation, 1944) - A country approaching the fascist phase showed symptoms among which the existence of a fascist movement proper was not necessarily one. At least as important signs were the spread of irrationalistic philosophies, racialist aesthetics, anticapitalistic demagogy, (and procapitalist demagogy for that matter) heterodox currency views, criticism of the party system, widespread disparagement of the "regime," or whatever was the name given to the existing democratic set-up.

Karl Popper (1945) - Civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth – the transition from the tribal or “enclosed society”, with its submission to magical forces, to the “open society” which sets free the critical powers of man. The shock of this transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization and to return to tribalism.

Neil Postman (in Amusing Ourselves To Death, 1985) - Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Sam Rayburn (Texas lawmaker) - Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.

Andrés Miguel Rondón - The recipe for populism is universal. Find a wound common to many, find someone to blame for it, and make up a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys. Label them: the minorities, the politicians, the businessmen. Caricature them. As vermin, evil masterminds, haters and losers, you name it. Then paint yourself as the savior. Capture the people’s imagination. Forget about policies and plans, just enrapture them with a tale. One that starts with anger and ends in vengeance. A vengeance they can participate in.

Andrés Miguel Rondón - Populism can survive only amid polarization. It works through the unending vilification of a cartoonish enemy. Never forget that you’re that enemy. Trump needs you to be the enemy, just like all religions need a demon. A scapegoat. “But facts!” you’ll say, missing the point entirely. (...) What makes you the enemy? It’s very simple to a populist: If you’re not a victim, you’re a culprit.

Andrés Miguel Rondón - The problem, remember, is not the message but the messenger. It’s not that Trump supporters are too stupid to see right from wrong, it’s that you’re more valuable to them as an enemy than as a compatriot.

Bertrand Russell (in How to become a man of genius, 1932) - Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks - Jews were hated because they were poor and because they were rich; because they were communists and because they were capitalists; because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere; because they clung to ancient religious beliefs and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks - Anti-Semitism is the world’s most reliable early warning sign of a major threat to freedom, humanity and the dignity of difference.

Thomas Sowell - It is (...) central to totalitarian ideology that it convert questions of fact into questions of motive. Facts are a threat because they are independent of the ideology, and questioning the motives of whoever reports discordant facts is a low-cost way of disposing of them.

Paul Taggart, paraphrased by Cas Mudde - Populism is politics for ordinary people by extraordinary leaders.

Kurt Tucholsky (1931) - Das Volk versteht das meiste falsch; aber es fühlt das meiste richtig.

Traditional - Schrödinger's immigrant: the one who lazes around on benefits whilst simultaneously stealing your job.

Billy Wilder (1945) - The optimists died in the gas chambers, the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills.