Populism is a political standpoint emphasizing community, participatory democracy, and individual liberty. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the populists were farmers, workers, and small entrepreneurs (craftsmen, etc.), who resisted the rise of corporate state power, the latter which emerged from the slavocracy represented by the Democratic Party. The populists were pro-labor, abolitionists, etc., represented by the Republicans, who saved the union from dissolution and protected freed slaves in the South.
In contrast to populism, progressivism was the political movement advancing the interests of corporate state power. Progressives embedded themselves in the administrative state and technocratic apparatus and governed, not by democracy, but by administrative rule and regulation. Progressivism was the philosophy and practice of the Democratic Party.
The same is true today. The populists are the working people who live in small cities and towns and in the countryside. They’re the vast red color that makes up most of the map of the United States. They support free speech, free conscience, free association, etc. There, liberal values and democratic-republic practices still prevail.
The progressives are in the scattered blue parts, representing elite urban sensibilities, managing marginalized minority populations in the inner cities. These are the areas fraught by social disorganization and violent crime, governed by the social logic of the management of people.
When the British colonists rebelled against the United Kingdom, they were freeing themselves from monarchy and empire. They established in its place a secular nation-state based on individual liberty, unalienable rights, and democratic republican norms.
Nationalism is the political philosophy of the nation-state, which emerges from the Enlightenment (France is another good example). Nationalism is what allows for the integral state representing the interests of the people and necessary for establishing a rule of law responsive to the people, which is the demand of populism.
This is contrast to a corporate state (transnational in the current epoch) or a theocracy, in which people are governed by unaccountable private tyranny or religious clerics respectively.
I am a nationalist because I’m a liberal and a democrat and understand the importance of the rule of law and personal sovereignty. This is also why I am a populist. They go together in this way.
The worldview of the X account posted above has been set on its head. The account claims that the populists are duping their supporters into believing what they say without understanding it, yet the user doesn’t even understand what populism and nationalism mean. This individual is not alone. Ignorance about is widespread because it’s the media’s job to invert perception of reality. It’s a hi-tech camera obscura. Tens of millions are falling for it. They live in a simulation.
freedom and reason 