Expaticats

It isn’t hard to be a populist. If you play the role convincingly, you can go far. There are a few things you need to be able to do.

First of all, you need to say that you speak “the language of the people”. Nobody knows exactly what that is. That doesn’t matter. You know what the man in the street thinks. You know what TheAmericanPeople(tm) want. What do you mean you can’t define what the language of the people is? That’s obviously because you don’t speak it! You’re out of touch!

Of course, you don’t just speak the language of the people. You also excel in plain speaking. All difficult problems have an easy solution. Even better, there are no hard problems. “They” just don’t understand, or are afraid to. You’ve got the solutions. The details don’t matter. Details are for those who can’t speak plainly.

Speaking of “them”, it is of course important that you create an us versus them situation. You can do that in several ways, but usually it’s easiest if you say that it’s all the fault of the “elite”. Elite is another one of those words that doesn’t mean a whole lot in practice. When are you part of the elite? If you have a degree? If you live in a certain neighborhood? And are you automatically wrong if you are part of the elite, whatever that is? That doesn’t matter. The elite is everyone who disagrees with you.

Of course, it is useful to have a set of different “they”s that you can use. The elite is always a good one, but, you can also use more easily identified groups of people. Racial, religious and geographic differences help.

Lastly, it has to be obvious that you are the underdog. The others are out to oppress you. The media is in cahoots with the others. You speak plainly, so you can call the others names. But if they are critical about you, that is obviously part of the conspiracy to keep you down.

In the next part of this course: “I can protect you from ‘them’”.