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I disagree on both assertions. Progressivism is a populist movement, and there are strong pockets of populist support for the LGBTQ movement. These are not elites by any stretch of the definition. In fact you're besmirching the term "elite" by categorizing these people as such. Again, populism doesn't have to be large counts or a majority. Just an appeal to people's belief they aren't being served by government or institutions. There's no other way to describe the LGBTQ movement than that. Warped victimhood populism. The fact it's penetrated things like higher education is a reflection of the tide. Society has lost the ability of restraint because you can't act as if something is abnormal and not worthy of promotion, THAT'S the problem. It allows movements like this to take hold,
LGBTQ+ identifying people counted for less than 3% of the US population until just about the day before yesterday.
It was most certainly a top down movement. The Elite working through academia and the media...and then eventually the law to normalized and popularize this type of sexuality.
Medicaid for all is a populist progressive/leftwing movement....LGBTQ was not.
Blacks accounted for less than 10% of the US population during the Civil Rights movement. You and whiterock seem to be under the impression that "elites" aren't part of the populism. Universities are easy sprouting grounds because they have a venue and access to large groups. They also are tools for government policy. The cause and number of people who support the LGBTQ movement is much larger than 3%. It is this multiple factor of populism that has carried it to the forefront.
You will get no argument from me that the 1960s civil rights movement was a top down phenomena.
The vast majority of voters in the South (and the North) did not want forced integration of their schools and neighborhoods at the end of a national guardsman's bayonet.
The Supreme Court, the corporate Media, and the powers that be made that revolution…then claimed it was populist.
The Civil Rights movement started well before the 1960's. The LGBTQ movement is a progression from the gay rights movement of the 70's. Like the Civil Rights movement, academia picked it up later. Welcome to populism.
Naw..welcome to elite top down movements that use populism/protest as a veneer for societal change the elites wanted.
You're almost there. Populism is taken advantage of to provide opportunities for power, money, prestige, etc. by those who are in a position to manipulate it.
How did this conversation get hijacked by civil rights? CR was actual, formal, legal oppression in one region of the country that large percentages of the rest of the country found objectionable, a super-majority by the 1950s. Really not a part of the elites/masses topic under discussion. A great example of how democratic process is supposed to work in a self-governed free society.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/16/50-years-ago-mixed-views-about-civil-rights-but-support-for-selma-demonstrators/
The alphabet people do not have a scintilla of the systemic oppression blacks faced, yet elites are shoving Queer Theory down the throats of a largely indifferent and increasingly resistant society. Nobody wants LGBT-ites to be any more unhappy than they already are. Nobody wants them in jail or otherwise segregated. But that's not good enough. Elites are demanding ratification of the lifestyle/ideology, or else.
I would be surprised if a black person reading this latter portion of this thread wouldn't find the patent false equivalence at play here to be amusing, or worse.
I'm not arguing equivalence at all. In fact agree whole heartedly they are not by any measure of principle. This is about populism, and how a minority percentage of the population (RB referenced 3% for the LGBT population) can garner enough support to push social change in a broad sense, including in negative directions like with the LGBTQ moment. What started as trying to lift laws on the restrictions of private behavior, progressed to marrying who you want, and now to today's insanity is a populist tide gone awry. It didn't start as a top down movement, but has certainly been manipulated by "elites" as it has become more accepted in society at large,
The truth is this conversation has gone tangential from the original issue of how concentrated power structures and populism can be very dangerous combinations. Especially with a single elected position with broad executive authority. My answer is to reduce that authority. You seem to advocate populist uprising to use it for alternative purposes. Call me old school, but I like constitutional republics more than democracies.
See bolded. You are not describing populism. You are describing ACTIVISM.
Definition of
populism from the Cambridge Dictionary
populismnoun [url=https://dictionary.cambridge.org/help/codes.html][ U ][/url]
politics, mainly disapproving
/pp.j.l.zm/ us
/p.pj.l.zm/
political ideas and activities that are intended to get the support of ordinary people by giving them what they want.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/populismPopulism happens when power structures, to include societal institutions, fail to address the needs of ordinary people. The LGBTQ agenda is not an example of populism, but rather the kind of nonsense power structures engage in, often as simple virtue posture, rather than dealing with ordinary problems like the price of eggs, gasoline, electricity, rent....or an out of control border causing a range of social pathologies in middle and working class communities. Sometimes elites engage in such to distract ordinary people from every day problems. But, sometimes, elites engage in such because they are simply out of touch. We have a little of both going on. The latter is far more serious.
By definition, populism is not the agitations (activism) of tiny slivers of the population. Populism happens when a bunch of those slivers come together, coalesce, and start threatening power structures by sheer weight of numbers. THAT'S when you start hearing societal elites start using the "p" word. By definition, 3% of the population are not a populist movement. For sure, the 3% is always trying to APPEAR to be a populist movement. They do this by organizing and acting in a number of attention grabbing ways.....picketing places, blocking streets, breaking windows, burning buildings, defacing public art...... But none of that would be necessary if they or their views represented a substantial percentage of the population. To actually BE a populist movement, one actually has to represent the desires of ordinary people, at least a plurality of the population.
That's why BLM was pandered to, and MAGA is actively repressed. BLM is astroturf, organized to support a partisan agenda. Like most astroturf movments, it exploded to popularity, then waned sharply back to irrelevance. MAGA, on the other hand, is almost half the country, not organized but simply appealed to. It's ability to elect such a non-traditional candidate out of nowhere alarms established power structures. they simply cannot understand it, and reflexively resist it, without really pausing to consider cause/effect. And, of course, that opposition is strongly focused on the personality of the individual at the head of the movement. Because it's not astroturf, it is durable.
"Populism is a word rarely heard unless societal elites have screwed up."
The more shrill the bleating, the more true that statement is.