By Patrick Burles - @PatrickBurles on Twitter

U of L professor talks populism, rise of Donald Trump at SACPA

Feb 2, 2017 | 2:24 PM

LETHBRIDGE – A discussion on populism, highlighted by the election of Donald Trump to U.S. President, drew a large crowd to SACPA (Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs) Thursday afternoon (Feb. 2).

Dr. Trevor Harrison, a sociology professor at the University of Lethbridge, explained that populism has been seeing a resurgence over the last 30-years along with globalization — citing Trump’s rise to power and the U.K. referendum on Brexit as significant examples.

“Basically what populism is, it’s defined as the people versus somebody, and it’s usually an elite,” stated Harrison to the media, before taking the podium at SACPA. “Now the elite is kind of undefined and also the people is a pretty undefined kind of term, but it’s a kind of term that’s used by various political leaders to try to mobilize the mass against a perceived kind of injustice of some sort.

“Alberta’s certainly had a lot of that,” he continued. “Ralph Klein fit in that mold, but also Social Credit, back to William Aberhart, so Canada’s actually had a lot — particularly Western Canada — of populous movements over the years. The interesting thing is they’re not necessarily right wing or left wing, people are not that ideological, but we’ve seen like the CCF, the NDP, Social Credit, so we’ve had a lot of populous movements in Canada.”

Trump’s message of taking back control of the country from those in power in Washington, was used as a very clear example of how populism can gain a great deal of support from the masses.

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Harrison proceeded to go over one of the major issues with the philosophy, touching on its past and where it appears to be headed in the future.

“It depends a lot on the kind of leadership, everybody in some sense appeals to the mass of the people, even mainstream political parties do that. The dangerous thing is when you get kind of a demagogue, and we’ve seen, historically, some bad examples of that like Adolph Hitler or Benito Mussolini, so I think a lot of the fears about Donald Trump, is this is looking very authoritarian and very much like some very bad populous movements of the past,” said Harrison.

“In one fashion or another, politicians, again, always try to appeal to the mass of people. What we’re actually seeing though is very much kind of a polarization on either side, and that to some extent is a fault of the mainstream parties, that they haven’t been able to appeal to enough people. So, there is a real danger here of populism kind of running amok. Even Preston Manning, who led a populist movement, has warned about kind of the dark side of populism.”