Amerika

Populism means appealing to the spirit of a people over democracy, which has become pulled in so many directions with so many footnotes and so much red tape that it can do very little.

In many ways, populism is civic nationalism growing up, since it talks about peoples instead of individuals and aspires to a founding culture not just through religion but values and behaviors.

Recently the Afrikaners took a stab at secessionist populism in their latest position statement:

If we do not have cultural freedom, we will be dominated by the demographic majority in every area of our lives. This applies even to the most fundamental matters that affect our survival. Domination by the majority at the expense of minorities is fundamentally inimical to the very principle of a democracy. Democratic freedom can only be achieved if cultural freedom is ensured as an essential precondition for our survival.

At the same time, cultural freedom is a precondition for our mother tongue, Afrikaans, to continue its existence as a fully functional language.

The recognition of cultural freedom in the form of culture-related rights and spaces is a condition for the equal enjoyment of our individual rights. Without such recognition, the individual rights of the demographic majority annihilate the individual rights of cultural or national minorities.

In other words, they want the ability to be a people apart in a multicultural society. They do not want to be dominated by minorities; they want to have their own spaces, language, values, behaviors, standards, and aesthetics as any culture would if it lived in its own nation.

At the same time, they want to contribute to the multiculture around them and are careful to avoid being an explicitly racialist movement, despite race, ethnicity, and culture being linked by tradition and common sense.

The entire world seems to be going this way: populism asserts the importance of the founding culture, and then by removing civil rights laws, it hopes to allow itself to exist apart from the rest of the diversity and socialism dystopia.

Tags: populism, south africa