Gloria Álvarez: Populism and Latin Americanization of North America

Fergus Hodgson, 16 November 2016 rss iTunes SoundCloud-logo

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Populism dates back to the Romans, Gloria Álvarez says: they called it “bread and circus.” As a prominent political analyst based in Guatemala, she has seen this many times over in her part of the world, but now she says it is arriving in the United States.

“It is not a political ideology. It is not an economic system,

[but] a mechanism to manipulate psychologically masses and voters in order to get them to vote for you.… It is trying to distract with gifts, with things that are portrayed as free, and we know that there is nothing free in this world. Someone has to pay the bill at some point.”

We examine the long-term rise of this tendency in Latin America and now in the United States, particularly given the latest US presidential election. In particular, she says people who care about limited government in the US tradition need to better communicate this to Latino immigrants. Otherwise they will go with the superficial promises that are familiar to them, and the Democratic Party has already caught onto this.

Gloria Álvarez and Fergus Hodgson at the Latin American Bitcoin Conference in Buenos Aires. (Cecila Olive)

Gloria Álvarez and Fergus Hodgson at the Latin American Bitcoin Conference in Buenos Aires. (Cecilia Olive)

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Fergus Hodgson (@FergHodgson) is an economic consultant and Gold Newsletter‘s roving editor.