Buy essay on The Populist Addiction

The article by David Brooks touches upon a topic of populism, that is a political position appealing to the masses. At the core of populism is the aspiration of a political force to win the confidence and support of the masses.
In this case the real goal, that can be the struggle for power or enrichment, tend to hide behind the social and attractive ideas. The author even speaks, that populist ideas can be based on the ideas of racism or religious fundamentalism.
Such political attitudes like populism and elitism seem to be opposite, but in fact they just mirror the ideas of one another, as they have common views on the politics as the struggle between different social classes: the pure and the betrayers, the enlightened and the corrupt.
The author shows that nowadays populism is in vogue: both the Democrats and the Republicans have their populists. For example, Sarah Palin from the Republicans, who tried to divide country between the cultural elites and other real Americans, and practically the same did the Democrats. It is also evident that modern democracy sometimes is built upon the idea that the elite should rule the country.
So why do politicians turn to the populist ideas? There are several quite clear purposes for this.
The first is that populist ideas are popular among the ruling class, because members of the ruling class think that it will help their class of the elite to have power.
The second reason is that populist ideas make voters responsible for their own problems. As the author says: “With the populist narrative, you can accuse the former and absolve the latter”.
But it is important to remember that according to the historical examples and historical practice, populism practically always failed, it was a history of defeats.
First of all, it is quite clear, that real Americans don’t think that punishing the rich and the powerful is a good idea, as it won’t solve the problems and make people happy. Punishing the elites won’t solve all economic problems like unemployment, pure investment and innovations, pure progress and economic growth and many other. Voters understand that in the history of America great changes were done by anti-populists. Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, for example, who didn’t divide the national economy into separate classes, but thought that Americans are the people, that should struggle for the common prosperity of America.
In conclusion, we must point out that populist ideas are not in fact optimistic, as populism is built on combative divisiveness, but not on the common goal optimism that the nation will succeed.