Activity

[...] Today, the choice offered the electorate is no longer that between right and left, but centre-right and centre-left. The distance between the two discourses emerged in the late 1990s when Arthur Schlesinger snapped back at Clinton’s increasing use of the coinage ‘the vital centre’, writing in…

The central thesis of this study is that systematic use of the term populism is a post-war phenomenon which develops in exact proportion to the disuse of the term ‘the people’: the more peripheral the people in political discourse, the more central populism becomes.

[...] one may throw the term out the window, but others will continue to use and disseminate it. The alternative is precisely to regard its vagueness and self-contradictoriness as its defining characteristic. This was the route taken by Pierre-André Taguieff, for whom populism is a political style …

Politicians must find a way--or several ways for different groups--of framing basic income so as to outflank critics from the media and the establishment, most of whom have had more than the equivalent of a basic income from birth. Opponents will continue to use the sophistry of reciprocity--surely…

Means-tested housing-related benefits might have to be continued in the UK and other countries with distorted housing markets, which should be tackled separately [...]