i’ve talked to left and right wingers in person about this and most seem to agree with this concept or contributed to it. at the vaguest level it’s perceived as two groups, the neoliberals/neocons and the populists. the populists have a left (berniecrat, demsoc) and right (trumpian, nazbol-lite) wing. the neos are all the old guard repubs (mitch) and centrist/corporatecrats. at their most basic understanding of this they believe the populists are trying to help the people while the neos only care about the markets. obviously this struggle is being heavily catalyzed by the 2k checks.
I’d have to see the right populists officially break ranks with the main body of their party to believe it. The impulse to lick boot is way too strong in them.
This implies that right populism is an actual belief held by those in power, and not a cynical strategy to get voters that standard neocons can’t get.
Right populist voter - kinda dumb, kinda racist, but knows NAFTA is bad.
Right populist leader - very bad, very racist, willing to say NAFTA is bad but will do little about it
I always thought the tried&true sign of that kind of populist was like being a blank template funkypop doll that is meticulously ambiguous in language to allow voters to project their own selves onto them, without even realizing it. Like how Trump would say “Drain the Swamp” all the time… Nevermind the fact that the phrase was originally coined by US socialists about a century earlier. Some people could hear it as “Get rid of all the corrupt deep money interests that corporations are using to control the government” others might hear it as “Get rid of the degenerate gay agenda that’s weaseled its way into government and forced my kids to be taught that men aren’t automatically right and women automatically wrong” At the end of the day it lets them get votes from two people who might not have a single view in common
The left populists have the same problem. They keep coming groveling back to the Biden centrists, tails tucked between their legs
