Nancy Pelosi gets humiliated at an Oxford debate by a banjo player who stood up and faithfully defended the worldwide populist revolt in the face of one of our most corrupt politicians!
Nancy Pelosi did not like what I had to say…
Populism is not a threat to democracy.
Democrat elites like her are.
Watch my full Oxford Union speech from the debate with her: pic.twitter.com/ZNm8maNZjy
— Winston Marshall (@MrWinMarshall) May 10, 2024
– Winston Marshall, former banjoist for Mumford and Sons, engaged in a debate with Nancy Pelosi at the Oxford Student Union on whether populism poses a threat to democracy.
– Marshall’s stance aligns with the idea of “refeudalization,” described by Joel Kotkin, where society reflects a caste system akin to feudalism, with power concentrated in the hands of a few.
– Marshall’s critique of elites like Pelosi resonated with many who see populism as a response to perceived elitism and a means to reclaim democratic values.
Winston Marshall, the former banjoist for the band Mumford and Sons, faced off with Nancy Pelosi at the Oxford Student Union debate on whether populism was a threat to democracy. Pelosi was totally out of her league. Winston said that since 2008, we are in what he called ‘the populist age,’ and he’s right. Even the leftwing Guardian is admitting that we are living amid a rising populist age, and he did a very good job in defining populism. The key characteristic of populism is a distinctly vertical political antagonism as opposed to a horizontal one.
Instead of polarizing politics horizontally, seeing the political animus as between the left vs the right, populism reconfigures that polarization vertically, now the animus is between the people vs the political class. Ironically, far from being opposed to democracy, populism, as Winston rightly pointed out, is democracy! It is the outworking of the rule of the people as opposed to a corrupt oligarchical elite like Nancy Pelosi!
Because populism is more of a structuring of reconfiguring politics away from a horizontal animus and more around a vertical divide, populism transcends the traditional left vs right binary. That’s why you have populists of all political stripes, The common enemy of populists is the corrupt elite. Populists have the unique capacity to unite in a way the traditional left and right simply couldn’t given their horizontal animosity. The establishment left is now an intrinsic part of the aristocratic elite.
It’s all part of a social order that Joel Kotkin of Chapman University profoundly describes as refeudalization, which refers to how the structure of our society is increasingly reflecting the kind of caste system that characterized the feudal Middle Ages. For example, today, like then, you have an astonishing concentration of wealth and power where very few people control pretty much everything. 5 years ago about 400 billionaires owned half of the world’s assets; today that number has dropped to just 100. Next to that, we’re seeing today the rise of a comparable kind of religious fundamentalism referred to as cultural socialism, what we more commonly call ‘wokeness.’
Like with all forms of religious fundamentalism, the key characteristic of wokeness is the total and complete intolerance of any form of dissent. Dissenters are heretics, and heretics must be, by definition, excommunicated, hence the role of cancel culture. So Winston is absolutely right, the far-left are now the ruling elites who use their power and affluence to protect their privileged position in this new corrupt caste system.
This notion that populism is somehow anti-democratic is projecting onto others the very sins that the corrupt elite are committing. Winston describes a billionaire-bureaucrat alliance that is producing what British scholar Colin Crouch calls post-democratic sentiments. We still have elections, campaigns, and debates, but no one really believes in it anymore. The vast majority of the population no longer trusts the democratic system or institutions because no matter how they vote, nothing ever really changes.
The elites seem to get everything they want and the will of the people always ends up dismissed and derided. This is what’s called a post-democracy sentiment, and it is every bit a product of the rule of our current elite. Marshall gave an absolutely brilliant defense of populism as the very soul of democracy, at the expense of one of the most anti-democratic of elites, Nancy Pelosi!
Copyright, 2024. TurleyTalks.com
Our brand new Turley Talks app is our very own platform that can never, ever be canceled! This app is our way to declare our independence from all woke platforms that hate conservatives and have tried to cancel and demonetize Dr. Steve. You can download it completely free today by going to fight.turleytalks.com!
