Hello and welcome to Brokonomics now much of our audience has complained that we've not been

perhaps as optimistic as we possibly could be we tend to broach some fairly gloomy subjects here

lots of black pills it may seem all rather bleak and you have been saying to me why don't I correct that, why don't I inject a little bit of optimism into this series?

So I thought, right, who is the most optimistic person I know know and I thought about it and it has to be

Dr Steve. Dr Steve thank you so much for coming on

Oh it's my pleasure I hope I could keep my optimism together in this with all the technical problems I had trying to get into this.

So thank you so much for your patience.

Oh, no, it's super, thank you so much for coming on. So, Dr. Steve, you have sort of built a brand around your

enthusiasm and optimism around populism and conservatism. So why don't we start there? How do you define those two terms?

Pop- Yeah, so the way I understand populism in a very broad sense is the way scholars would would look at it. The key characteristic of

populism is is generally seen as a distinctly vertical political antagonism as opposed to a horizontal one.

So instead of polarizing politics horizontally,

seeing the political animus is between left versus right or liberal versus conservative, this

horizontal antagonism gets reconfigured vertically. So now the animus is between the people versus the

political class, the world versus the rulers. Right, so like in the states we'd

say it's the ordinary American versus the oligarchs out there, right?

And that seems, what seems to be driving populism is a dynamic known as de-legitimation, which is really a widespread loss of trust in elected officials and our public institutions and really even the British scholar Colin Krauch talks about the loss of belief in the democratic process itself and his theory of post-democratic sentiments.

Gallup here in the states did a recent study and found that Americans across the board have lost any trust and confidence in virtually every single public institution.

You know, we're talking our government, our legal system, our medical system,

big business, big tech, the legacy media, the criminal justice system, you name it.

One scholar in Philadelphia, which is just about 20 minutes away from me here, is he's actually

making the argument that the United States may in fact

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