Everyone is a populist

The word 'populist' is , I find, one of the most frustrating words used in politics at present. In the current trend that word is used to describe people from the right and left who are out of 'mainstream' thinking, with the implication that these thinkers are offering stuff that is impossible to give away or do, but the people are too dumb to understand that and therefore the mature, sensible politicians have to regroup and frustrate these populist at every turn and by any means. This is seen in the farce that Brexit has become. Of course people are populists. We all are. We are the ultimate cherry pickers, having gone beyond left and right .

Yet the politicians who decry 'populism',  which in reality is everything they don't agree with, are populists themselves. We can see this in Britain wherein we have a welfare state and state funded healthcare system. If it is not 'populist' to claim that we can continue to run this healthcare system 'free at delivery' without further rises in taxes I don't know what is. Is that not something that is impossible to do or give away, but people are still fooled by the omission of the politician. The further omission is , as we've seen since Gordon Brown, the gap between taxes and expenditure was attempted to be filled by large increases in indirect 'stealth' taxation, which in any case isn't enough to fund these services, so we have been borrowing heavily even as people decry austerity. In America they can get away with huge deficits and tax cuts because of the dollar as world currency, although when that is no longer the case , America is going to have a lot of tough choices in a political atmosphere  that isn't  conducive to compromise. But then at present neither is Britain.

But don't blame the populists. All politicians are populists.