How billionaires learned to love populism: Amy Chua on what’s behind the Trump alliance between self-dealing plutocrats and blue-collar voters. John Jackson on Koch and the neo-Confederate (and more). Meet Marshall DeRosa, the Koch-funded, white supremacist professor teaching at Florida Atlantic University. Luther vs. Erasmus: Michael Massing on when populism first eclipsed the liberal elite. Perhaps the most insidious threat facing Western democracies has been the progressive decline of elite accountability and responsibility. Populism is a problem — elitist technocrats aren’t the solution. Maybe voters aren’t as uninformed as elites like to think — elitist jargon is the real issue.
What’s been stopping the Left? If progressive political parties had pursued a bolder agenda in the face of widening inequality and deepening economic anxiety, perhaps the rise of right-wing, nativist political movements might have been averted. 21st century Americanism: Populist symbolism can be powerful — but we can’t drop the old language of class. Yanis Varoufakis on the high cost of denying class war.
