Timeline for Why is populism seen as being negative or bad?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
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| Jun 17, 2020 at 9:20 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Feb 28, 2020 at 14:57 | comment | added | Ray | @agc Ah, I see the confusion. I was arguing that being democratic is not a sufficient condition for a government to be good (as evidenced by the Nazis). I am not arguing that democracy is a necessary condition for bad government (as evidenced by the rest of the Axis powers, Stalin, and plenty of others). As an aside, I don't think that populism would be a sufficient condition for the genocide; populism without the other factors would have been...less dangerous, at least. I argue only that democracy is not a panacea, and that the Nazis were an important demonstration of this fact. | |
| Feb 28, 2020 at 2:56 | comment | added | agc | @Ray, Populism was a sufficient cause of the post-WWI genocide, not a necessary one. Had Germany then a non-democratic form of government those other factors might have led to genocide anyway. In States such factors are addictive poisons, unhealthy in any kind of State. | |
| Feb 26, 2020 at 2:08 | comment | added | Ray | @agc People in democratic systems generally have reasons for voting the way they do, yes. But whatever their reasons were for voting many Nazis into office, they did vote. I assume you aren't suggesting that for it to be democratic, the citizens would have needed to first vote to decide whether each was or was not antisemitic, for example, and only then vote on the candidate that best fit their democratically selected beliefs. But I'm not quite sure what you are suggesting. | |
| Feb 25, 2020 at 15:05 | comment | added | agc | @Ray, Re "...largely democratic means": Plus things like WWI reparations, the Crash of '29, the Reichstag fire, Germany's wealthy conservative elite backing the Nazis, a longstanding authoritarian streak in German culture promoting severe child-rearing and schools, a prior imperial history that promoted racism, (and an admiration for the then "superior" U.S. racism), antisemitism, etc., none of which had democratic origins per se. Utopian mythology slathered with pathetic sentimentality is a bipartisan phenomena, be it for Good Old Days or Brave New Worlds. | |
| Feb 25, 2020 at 14:44 | comment | added | Tal | I think we should seriously hesitate to source as fact the words of a man who firmly believed the colonies were better off under British control. Churchill isn't an independent voice of political reality. Churchill was a monarchist and an imperialist whose very being seeped with all the "white man's burden" contained within it. In history, he heroically vaults over the exceedingly low bar of being aggressively anti-Nazi. Not to save the people being persecuted by them, but because the British Empire was inherently threatened by any heavily militarized German state. | |
| Feb 14, 2017 at 1:47 | comment | added | Ray | @user4012 We shouldn't let Godwin's Law keep us from bringing up the Nazis when they're relevant to the question. The Nazis came to power through largely democratic means, so when a question makes the assumption that democracy is necessarily good, they are an extremely important counterexample. As long as we don't compare people to Nazis just for disagreeing with us, we're not really going against the spirit of Godwin's Law. | |
| Feb 12, 2017 at 2:20 | comment | added | user4012 | if you want a less Godwinned example, Hamas was fully democratically elected in Gaza. | |
| Feb 10, 2017 at 20:37 | history | answered | matt_black | CC BY-SA 3.0 |