Yes, very good point about the populist/elitist axis, vis the Left-Right political spectrum. Basically I see populism as, like Liberalism, a post-Revolutionary phenomenon. The egalitarianism of populism also runs directly counter to the aristocratic value placed on vested *inequality.*
However - and this point I think is crucial - aristo…
Yes, very good point about the populist/elitist axis, vis the Left-Right political spectrum. Basically I see populism as, like Liberalism, a post-Revolutionary phenomenon. The egalitarianism of populism also runs directly counter to the aristocratic value placed on vested *inequality.*
However - and this point I think is crucial - aristocracy also operated with a primitive instinct for equality: the formal equality that had to prevail among the warrior-class that imposed its rule on the rest of the population, in the pre-Modern Patriarchate. Always in the numerical minority, this class had to have true esprit de corps to maintain the "unit discipline" necessary to wield the monopoly of force. This group was always resistant to the rise of a "first among equals" among them to kingship, and in a feudal social order it was a consistently centrifugal political force. I think this aristocracy-ethos is one of the root-animating forces of populism in the post-Revolutionary era. Populism draws on the Jeffersonian assertion of equality among everyone in the nation, but refuses to extend that equality beyond the nation. It is anti-cosmopolitan solidarity, in other words, and forces in society which tend toward cosmopolitan values - "elites" like academic and entrepreneurial interests - are typically distrusted and can ultimately be targeted as the "enemy within." I think that this fundamentally illiberal, neo-aristocratic post-Revolutionary ethos goes to explain the Slaver-society of the Old South, and intensely nationalistic (and authoritarian) regimes in our own times.
Yes, very good point about the populist/elitist axis, vis the Left-Right political spectrum. Basically I see populism as, like Liberalism, a post-Revolutionary phenomenon. The egalitarianism of populism also runs directly counter to the aristocratic value placed on vested *inequality.*
However - and this point I think is crucial - aristocracy also operated with a primitive instinct for equality: the formal equality that had to prevail among the warrior-class that imposed its rule on the rest of the population, in the pre-Modern Patriarchate. Always in the numerical minority, this class had to have true esprit de corps to maintain the "unit discipline" necessary to wield the monopoly of force. This group was always resistant to the rise of a "first among equals" among them to kingship, and in a feudal social order it was a consistently centrifugal political force. I think this aristocracy-ethos is one of the root-animating forces of populism in the post-Revolutionary era. Populism draws on the Jeffersonian assertion of equality among everyone in the nation, but refuses to extend that equality beyond the nation. It is anti-cosmopolitan solidarity, in other words, and forces in society which tend toward cosmopolitan values - "elites" like academic and entrepreneurial interests - are typically distrusted and can ultimately be targeted as the "enemy within." I think that this fundamentally illiberal, neo-aristocratic post-Revolutionary ethos goes to explain the Slaver-society of the Old South, and intensely nationalistic (and authoritarian) regimes in our own times.