Will I love Let Them Eat Tweets?

Hacker and Pierson argue that “plutocratic populism,” their term for what currently ails the United States and other democracies, is the latest solution to a structural dilemma in modern democracy.

Conservatives are regularly determined to protect wealth and privilege but need to win over voters who typically lack wealth and privilege to elect them. That means a continual effort to craft appeals that, in effect, disguise their aims.

The recent turn to populism means relying on non-economic issues – race, nativism, and various culture war issues concerning sex and gender most potently – to attract voters to support parties whose… show more.

Hacker and Pierson make an important contribution to understanding the mess that the promotion of unbridled capitalism has made America. They argue the elites (society’s wealthiest and most influential) have a dilemma. Being outnumbered, there is always a risk that a democratic society will vote to diminish/confiscate their wealth. They describe two ways in which this dilemma has been addressed; ensuring the needs of less affluent members of society are met, so they’re not motivated to confiscate the wealth of the elites; the other strategy for guarding their wealth is by getting poor people to blame minority groups for difficulties… show more.