Cruz out, Sanders takes IN

[eynon81]

I'm voting for Trump me-thinks to punish us for our sins....because seriously f**k us at this point.


*probably really going to puss out and vote for Gary Johnson.

[NAB]

[The Comrade]

[The Comrade]

[eynon81]

[The Comrade]

I have so many fun fantasies about what happened to Dylan

[NAB]

[Kane]

You can't really call Trump left/right. He's an opportunist that's utilized populism - demagoguery and nationalism to great effect. He's not an ideologue, he's just after the power. Look at his character and his history, he has a worldview that few people share. He can't even relate to the average American. He only believes in himself - he's not fascist/nationalist/socialist/leftist. He's Trump.

[The Comrade]

american populism is decidedly right-wing.

[Philly]

Populism can have leftist elements to it. Huey Long was a left wing economic populist. He was also of course, a crook, a conman, and a complete fraud, but that's beside the point.

Right now the GOP voter base is underachieving, unsophisticated, poorly uneducated white people. As it happens, that's the perfect profile for a potential supporter if you're running a populist campaign.

The Democratic base is minorities and educated white people. Minorities are justifiably weary of populism since it's just the political equivalent of angry mob of white people in search of a convenient scapegoat for all their problems. And educated white people hate populism because it's based on the premise that their education, experience with problem solving in complex situations, and ability to use critical thinking are all meaningless.

So as long as the GOP remains in their current form, populism will necessarily be right wing, because only the conservative party has the proper demographics to support populism. But there's no static rule that poor, uneducated whites will always associate with the more conservative of the two parties. We've had shifts before and it can happen again. There have been times in our history when a thriving intellectual conservative movement existed. Trump didn't kill it. It died before he showed up, but now he's here to feed on its flesh.

The intellectualism of the left may one day be devoured by a new breed of mouth breather liberals, and if it does, a liberal populist could rise a la Trump.