You are right - populism does not possess a coherent programme. At present it is merely a demand for the voice. However the more it finds it voice, the greater the potential for the emergence of a coherent alternative to the prevailing regime of social engineering/ technocracy.
I take the point about needing to avoid a onesided approach to the relationship between Culture and Economics, but surely the thing that Populism lacks at present is a coherent set of principles, other than a rejection of the legitimacy of the values motivating the Technocrats. It's characteristic of Expertise that it's identified as non political even when it's masks a series of political and cultural assumptions. The refreshing thing about Populism has been that it has used the balot box as a bulwark to defend the values of the Demos against the technocrats. However this can only work so far: historically those challenging the right of elites to rule required a critique of the ideas of those elites beyond a simple counter position to them. At the risk of being simplistic the critique would need to both counter pose it's values to those being forced on them and to seek to demonstrate the internal weakness behind mainstream technocrat thinking.
Very interesting piece: especially on the interaction between economics and cultural politics, which has always been portrayed as either remote or at best obscure. Here it seems that economics are used as a technical explanation to discredit popular opposition to elites. Is this technocratic approach to economics itself amenable to critique: both in terms of it's fundamental beliefs, and it's own coherence? If the cultural turn in politics makes the old models of compromise redundant are we about to witness a more disruptive, dramatic and enduring breakdown of the European order?
You are right - populism does not possess a coherent programme. At present it is merely a demand for the voice. However the more it finds it voice, the greater the potential for the emergence of a coherent alternative to the prevailing regime of social engineering/ technocracy.
We need to reconfigure the relation between culture and economics to avoid being one-sided and also seek to de-politicise expertise.
I take the point about needing to avoid a onesided approach to the relationship between Culture and Economics, but surely the thing that Populism lacks at present is a coherent set of principles, other than a rejection of the legitimacy of the values motivating the Technocrats. It's characteristic of Expertise that it's identified as non political even when it's masks a series of political and cultural assumptions. The refreshing thing about Populism has been that it has used the balot box as a bulwark to defend the values of the Demos against the technocrats. However this can only work so far: historically those challenging the right of elites to rule required a critique of the ideas of those elites beyond a simple counter position to them. At the risk of being simplistic the critique would need to both counter pose it's values to those being forced on them and to seek to demonstrate the internal weakness behind mainstream technocrat thinking.
Very interesting piece: especially on the interaction between economics and cultural politics, which has always been portrayed as either remote or at best obscure. Here it seems that economics are used as a technical explanation to discredit popular opposition to elites. Is this technocratic approach to economics itself amenable to critique: both in terms of it's fundamental beliefs, and it's own coherence? If the cultural turn in politics makes the old models of compromise redundant are we about to witness a more disruptive, dramatic and enduring breakdown of the European order?