The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[Angrboda]

Populism is one of those terms that people throw around very loosely. The most precise definition, to my mind, comes from a prescient 2004 article by the political scientist Cas Mudde called “The Populist Zeitgeist.”

Mudde saw, long before Trump, that the future of Western politics would be shaped by populist politics. By “populism,” he did not just mean generic anti-establishment politics, but something more specific: “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.”

The key word here is “ideology.” Populism is not merely a rhetorical style pitting elites against the people, but a genuine belief that this is the true axis of political conflict. In the populist worldview, the people have a unified set of common-sense beliefs (“the general will”) that would fix politics if implemented. The only reason it is not happening, for the populist, is that malign elites are preventing the people and their champions from holding power.

In a populist movement like MAGA, the “people” are defined narrowly as only those “good” or “true” Americans — meaning typically, though not exclusively, white rural Christian Republicans. Trump presents himself as their champion against the malign forces of globalist liberalism, personified by the Washington political establishment and coastal cultural elite (a construction that easily and regularly shades into antisemitism).

This kind of populism is, as Mudde notes, morally binary; they are telling a story not of normal political contestation in a democracy but of epic conflict between the forces of good and evil. And on the right, Jeffrey Epstein became a stand-in for evil. His sexual viciousness and habit of hobnobbing with the rich and powerful — everyone from Bill Clinton to Bill Gates — cultivated a deep belief that everyone in the American elite class was secretly abusing children. These were not reasonable people that you might lose to in a fair election, but crooks who had corrupted the whole system in order to serve their own dark desires.

For many MAGA believers, then, Epstein was not just one story among many. It was the master story of American politics: the skeleton key unlocking everything that they believed Trump was supposed to be fighting against.

https://archive.ph/O2igb#selection-921.0-971.219