To my thesis that populist movements are a magnet for the power and wealth hungry:
Turns out Russian collusion isn’t a “witch hunt hoax” after all. At least not in Austria.
The country’s government collapsed on Saturday after Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said he was pulling the plug on his ruling coalition after just 17 months in office.
The move came barely 24 hours after the release of a bombshell video showing Heinz-Christian Strache, the far-right leader of his junior coalition partner, trying to trade public contracts for party donations from a woman he believed to be the wealthy niece of a Russian oligarch. [Politico]
This clarifies, for me, the problem of ‘populist movements’. They are deeply informal, ‘the people coming together to do the right thing,’ but because they are informal and spontaneous, they lack rules that help discourage, and people who are experienced in weeding out, grifters (to borrow a popular word on the left for President Trump), wealth-hungry, power-hungry – the unprincipled, shall we say?
The Republican Party isn’t a counter-example, because the GOP was invaded and conquered by the Tea Party, a populist movement centering on loathing for Big Government and taxes. Being populist, it was a natural magnet for the self-interested, and in President Trump and a base wedded to him, they see their opportunity to cash in on their big opportunity. This is not to suggest that all members of the Tea Party are corrupt, but exceptions such as Rep Amash (R-MI) are just that: exceptions. As it happens, Amash now has a primary challenger for the next election, state Rep Lower, who has embraced President Trump. It’ll be interesting to see if Amash survives the primary, which will serve as a measure of Trump’s strength in the Republican Party in his district.
Back to the point, Strache is a vivid example of one of the dangers of populism: an unprincipled leadership out to enrich itself.
