Is knowing who to trust.
The people were right to trust FDR and probably right to trust Eisenhower, for example. (Truman was a much worse president than his reputation.)
Clinton and Obama could not be trusted, both made things considerably worse for their rank and file followers and did so deliberately.
We’re about a third of the way there: a lot of ordinary people have realized they can’t trust ordinary elites. They’re increasingly open to people who don’t feel like the normal politician.
This is behind Brexit, Trump, the rise of LaPen in France. It was behind Corbyn’s rise and how well Sanders did.
But there are large gaps. Distrusting the neoliberal technocrats who joined the EU and slowly immiserated almost all of Britain outside of parts of London made sense, but turning to Boris Johnson indicated monumental bad judgment. I think Brexit could have been a boon, but not run by Boris and the Conservatives, because what they objected to in the EU was the good stuff, not the evil.
In America, people turned to Trump, who presented himself as a right winger FDR: the class traitor who knows how the system works but is out for ordinary people. (Although religious fundamentalists who voted for him were right to trust him. He’s not Christian in any meaningful way, but he delivered for them.)
Corbyn was a good sign: but ordinary people proved susceptible to a propaganda campaign. They trusted the media, which liked about 80% of the time with respect to Corbyn, and then they trusted Starmer, who could not have been elected Labour leader if he had not embraced most of Corbyn’s policies: which he has since walked back and which a pre-schooler should have known he never believed in, nor intended to honor.
In a democracy you can’t be well led if you won’t support people who have your best interests at heart. It’s just that simple.
Now it’s true that elites have spent a lot of time and money building a media, intellectual and educational apparatus designed to make sure that people don’t learn good judgement in their childhood and if they stumble across a good judgement in their adulthood don’t stick with it. This isn’t precisely ordinary people’s “fault” but they, we, have to fix it, because sure as hell our elites won’t.
Every society has leaders. Even relatively egalitarian societies. It’s up to use to learn how to pick and support good ones.
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