by Don Hall

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." — H.L. Mencken

Populism, as it has seemed to serve the outermost conservative (and often rabidly nationalist) rings of political life globally, tends to get a pretty bad rap. America's governmental systems are rigged to promise populism—loosely defined as a movement that must claim to speak on behalf of ordinary people and that these ordinary people must stand in opposition to an elite establishment which stops them from fulfilling their political preferences—but keep that impulse in check through representation rather than direct votes on things.

Populism gets a bad rap for a few fundamental misinterpretations:

Due to the fact that the most obvious manifestations of populism are associated with the Far Right, populism becomes married to authoritarianism, pro-gun stances, and anti-immigration. Populism is not so much an ideology than an approach and that approach reflects the ideology using it not the other way around.

Populists are outsiders who advocate for a change to the status quo and call for the need for urgent structural change, economic or cultural. Populism is creating a sense of urgency with 'the voice of the people' the only solution.

By these definitions, we are in the throes of two distinctly different but incredibly similar populist movements which is the cause of such partisan strife. The cultural left exaggerates the the existence of 'systemic racism,' 'defund the police,' and the creation of voter ID laws as 'Jim Crow 2.0' with the solution being that anyone voting for the other side are morally bankrupt white supremicists regardless of ethnic heritage. The working class right decry the teaching of children about Critical Race Theory, the border being overrun, and the other side embracing communism with the solution being to 'Stop the Steal.'

Both are populist movements. Democracy is dependent upon populism. The more of the population who casts a vote in one direction or the other determines who wins power. It's not a complicated idea. Part of the bargain requires that win your side loses, you accept the loss. We're not quite so good at that part lately.

In fact, contrary to the handwringing going on about the mentally deficient coup attempt, it was the left who refused to accept the election of Donald J. Trump and spent four years in apoplexy doing any and everything they could to delegitimize his bizarre ascension. The poor losers were not initially the Republicans, it was the Democrats and left-leaning media. Trump rode in on a wave of populism exacerbated and inflamed by decades of being called 'deplorables' by the Left Elite Establishment. His odd and mostly ineffective reign sparked an equal and opposite populist movement as prone to hysterical pronouncements, its own set of racist dogwhistles, and hyperbolic taunts of potential tyranny leaving us with a country split into four distinct tribes: the Neo-Marxist Left, the Moderate Left, the Moderate Right, and the Alt-Right Fringe.

The outliers both are looking to focus on tribes. The Neo-Marxists seek to divide the country up into oppressors and oppressed using gender and race as tribal divisions. The Alt-Right are pushing to divide us into nationalistic tribes. The middle (by far the largest group) may have disagreements from within but fundamentally see all Americans as one big tribe.

Before governments and exploding populations, cities, or fast food, humans needed to be gathered up in tribes. It was a matter of survival sand much of our current state springs from those tribal days.

Empathy exists to ensure the survival of our offspring.
Morality exists to govern the behavior of the members within the tribe in hopes that the tribe will not destroy itself.
Hierarchies within the tribe exist to police those motivated to break from the agreed upon morality.

Now all of the tribes live close together and we must find a way to see all humanity as a single species rather than a collection of tribes. Our survival depends upon this. The Age of Competition has ended. The Age of Cooperation is here. If we do not find a way to extend that empathy to all tribes, we will be the arbiters of our own extinction.