Inspired by Yasterblanksy post, Don't Call Trump A Populist:
There's a certain amount of push from the thoughtful media to resist treating Trump as a Republican; he's not a "conservative" but a "populist". He's against free trade!
...
[Quoting Doyle McMannus] In Trump’s picks for economic and domestic policymaking jobs, there’s a consistent underlying thread. And no, it’s not that so many of them are billionaires. It's Republican orthodoxy.
Don't get distracted by embarrassed conservatives, and their stenographers at The Times, pretending it isn't.
In a comment there I note...
This goes right to my point of the way progress is thwarted by the inadequacy of our metaphor for politics: the spectrum.
Politics is in reality like a circle of high school friends. When softball season ends and your daughter spends more time with the band crowd, did she move left or right? And then when soccer starts up again, did she get closer to her softball friends who are on the soccer team? Or further away from softball because of the more distance between her and those softball friends who also do band but not soccer?
The meaning of the word "populist" as it is used in our language: someone who appeals to a coalition that isn't possible to understand using the spectrum metaphor because it represents moving left and right simultaneously.
