Is populism really a problem for democracy?

This article is published by DemDigest. Here is an excerpt:

Much of today’s populist backlash can be attributed to an “extremely ruthless and competitive version of neoliberalism,” according to Stanford University’s Francis Fukuyama.

“A lot of today’s populist backlash is actually due to this neoliberal economic world, where if you could squeeze the slightest couple of cents out of the supply chain by moving your production out of North America into some Asian country, you would immediately do it,” he tells Persuasion’s Yascha Mounk. “And if you could squeeze your workers, you could insist that they not join a union, and then you could nibble away at their benefits and so forth. You were justified in doing this because there were economists who said, ‘Well, that’s what makes capitalism efficient.’”

“That was one of the versions of neoliberalism, and I think it has made a lot of young people really dislike capitalism,” Fukuyama asserts. “Today, they associate capitalism with this extremely ruthless and competitive version of neoliberalism, and that has had a lot of dire political consequences for all of us.”

Read the full article here.