Irvine Welsh Quotes

The normalization of Trump is one indicator that there may be less to the populist insurrection than imagined.

To some extent, the mainstream's absence means the Tea Party is the Republican Party.

In the last several years, I have been troubled by the right shift of the Republican party too far to the right.

I think that conservatism as we understand it is coming under great strain during the era of Trump.

The surge in right-wing populism and the phenomenon of Trump are related. You can think of them together as the same problem.

There are two forms of populism, left-wing populism and right-wing populism. Right-wing populism requires the denigration of an "Other." Left-wing populism tends to be about the haves and have-nots.

I just think that the skepticism about truth has almost completely flipped - from being something associated with generally left-leaning progressives to being something which is a tool of right-wing populists and demagogues. I think a lot of those people writing books ten years ago would now think those books are no longer needed, they've kind of been vindicated.

I'm a former, living, breathing, right-wing conspirator.

So I think that we're in a very heightened and somewhat unusual period of politics and polling around the countries that New Zealanders take close interest in.

The conservative movement was told to curl up in a fetal position and just stay there for the next eight years, thank you very much. Well, how things have changed.

I think if you look all across the country, the so-called Blue Dogs are all gone to kennel. There are no more Blue Dogs, they're called Republicans. People would rather elect consistently conservative Republicans than Blue Dogs, who are only conservative when it's convenient.

We're seeing quite a lot of people who really would like a return to class-based politics.

I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me.

... communistic, socialistic ... as populistic as ever have been addressed to any political assembly in the world.

Trump is a populist in the same mold as the nineteenth-century Populists who gave their name to American grassroots political movements. Historians and pundits argued themselves blue in the face over whether Populists were reactionary or progressive, but they were both.

I think that liberalism and the centrist governing elite of this country need to learn lessons from the Trump phenomenon. It is part of the way that the country is governed and the country is shaped that induces spasms of populism, including spasms of bigoted populism.

Donald Trump may be unusually flamboyant, but his views are all too representative of the party that is about to nominate him for president.

No, we should not be afraid of the populists; we should embrace those they are fighting.

UKIP's biggest fight is with the Conservative Party.

Politically at that time, with Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the White House, it wasn't looking too great for the Left. And we were always on the left.

I do not want to see, for any reason, the Tories resurgent in any way.

Once upon a time - in the days of Margaret Thatcher and John Major - I would have rejoiced in a Conservative Party landslide in Britain. But now, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's victory fills me with fear and foreboding.

When it comes to explaining the phenomenon of right-wing populism, liberals are likely to argue both that the populist era has exposed a darkness always present at the heart of conservative politics and that a toxic, post-truth new-media ecosystem has greased the skids for President Trump, Brexit and the rest.

Trump is a product of a seething populism and nationalism that is the driving political force.

It's important that Donald Trump and what he represents - this kind of ethnic, quote, 'conservatism,' or populism - be so decisively rebuked that the Republican Party, the Republican voters will forever learn their lesson that they cannot nominate a man so manifestly unqualified to be president in any way, shape, or form.