An interesting post about populists. I think this point can be extended. Find a wound common to many, someone to blame for it and a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys…if you’re not among the victims, you’re among the…
Read More Note on a future populism postThis Trump speech has been widely circulated by now, but two things come to mind. The first of all is that he seems to have the verbal version of the Heartbleed SSL bug. In Heartbleed, the problem is that you can request a keep-alive message of length you specify, with data you provide, but there…
Read More Interrogation by silence, and Trump’s mental HeartbleedSo I’m watching the chute, and then the experimenters chuck down this pellet, which turns out to be some sort of libertarian riffing off my Neo-Edwardians post around the idea that perhaps the move away from a simple, Posh vs. Oiks politics is to do with the rise of post-scarcity, idea dear to the hearts…
Read More Scarcity and political complexityHere’s a really good post about public transport and design. I would add to their account of the genesis of the Boris-bus that it’s not enough to say that Johnson started out by saying he wanted a new Routemaster, rather than saying he wanted a new bus for London and deciding what would be best.…
Read More In which I whine about Boris buses againWe haven’t done one of these for a while, not least because I haven’t been blogging enough. Here are some ideas The Populist Papers: this will probably be either AFOE or maybe Politico Europe, and it’s an effort to define what the key traits of populism (European meaning, negative LaFollette) are. My thinking is that…
Read More Open newslist 10The world is in turmoil. Trump. Brexit. Marine Le Pen. And as very often when this is so, it’s in turmoil about macro-economic policy although this is often less obvious than you might think. MLP, for example, wants to recreate the franc, redenominate the French national debt, presumably devalue/inflate a great chunk of it away,…
Read More An even simpler plan nobody wantsDoes anyone else think Sir Ivan Rogers quit when he did in order to make sure his replacement was someone like Sir Tim Barrow? Rogers’ ostensible explanation for quitting was that his posting was coming up anyway in a couple of months and he wanted to give his successor some time to read themselves in.…
Read More The Rogers LegacyThere’s a common argument around that claims something like this: If Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic candidate, he’d have faced a terrible monstering from the press, and would therefore have lost the election. I think it is seriously misleading. Let’s unpack the argument a bit. The point about the terrible monstering from the press…
Read More You can’t opt out of negative campaigning