Populist Politics Quotes

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Populists feed on democratic dysfunction. As long as democratic elites and institutions in advanced industrial democracies remain unable or unwilling to tackle the myriad challenges facing their societies, we should expect populism to remain an attractive political option.

Politicians used to be leaders. Now they follow voters, desperate for a tick in a box.

Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.

The Republican party is changing. It's becoming more populist.

Enough! Donald Trump should not be President. He should withdraw.

Faced with global challenges, politicians like Donald Trump have played on the fears and concerns of the American people with divisive, hateful rhetoric and proposals.

Bolsonaro is a tropical Trump. They have a very common agenda, a very regressive agenda, when it comes to civil rights, social rights, and environmental rights.

Trump is a hybrid phenomenon as I see it. He is somewhat like UKIP and Le Pen with his right-wing populism that espouses some fascist overtones, but he's also partly just the old neoliberalism in disguise, especially if we look at some of the people he appointed to his cabinet.

The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy - then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight - assuming it was straight in the first place.

The architects of Brexit are a cocktail of lying racists and buffoons. I don't think even someone as cynical as me could have predicted how deeply stupid these people are.

There's no books out there articulating what the alt-right is. If they're such great philosophers, and they have such good ideas, and they're on the vanguard of intellectualism, where are their books? They don't have any.

Nominally left- and right-wing populists differ primarily in their choice of which 'others' to exclude and attack, with the former singling out big corporations and oligarchs, and the latter targeting ethnic or religious minorities.

Mike Huckabee represents something that is either tremendously encouraging or deeply disturbing, depending on your point of view: a marriage of Christian fundamentalism with economic populism.

American populist politics has a long tradition, from Andrew Jackson to Huey Long to Joseph McCarthy. But the politician Trump is most like could be George Wallace.

I don't think you can understand Trump's relationship to his voters and how he gets away with what he gets away with, without understanding the pact between a lifestyle brand and its consumer base and how that really transformed the global economy in the 1990s.

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre.

Politicians and leaders who see the media as 'the enemy within' divide society into two clashing cultural camps. Populist demagogues benefit from binary oppositions.

I think Donald Trump is trying to use populist rhetoric to cover up a right-wing agenda.

I'm vulgar, I'm a populist. But isn't that what the mayor should be?

Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of their restoration to the center of American life.

The populist left loves power more than democracy, and it will fight to keep it at great cost.

A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.

The French elites' strategy of trying to defeat the Le Pens by aping their rhetoric, stealing their policies, and pandering to their voters has been a political and moral failure.

Few things trigger fear and misconception more than economic tribulation, and nothing prompts elected officials to react with more simplistic populism.