When it comes to the spicier cultural issues that generate flame wars online, I tend to find myself falling on the side of the conservatives. The exceptions to this are LGBT rights and drug use, but these days, these issues seem to divide more on old/young lines than conservative/liberal lines anyway.
I'm strongly against all forms of gun control. I believe that nations often have the responsibility to get involved in the affairs of other nations, including militarily. My diet consists mostly of red meat and I have a longstanding beef with vegans. I find media that overtly panders to minorities irritating whether or not I'm in said minority. I believe that wealthy liberals are intentionally and maliciously fanning the flames of race and gender conflicts to break down community bonds to make people easier to manipulate. Yadda yadda.
In short, when it comes to cultural views, I'm a milquetoast example of exactly what you'd expect to find from a young, online, cultural conservative, or at least libertarian.
And yet, despite all of this, I'm a Socialist. Not a Socialist-lite or Social Democrat in the vein of Bernie Sanders, but a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist.
I believe corporations are fundamentally evil to the core. I believe the overwhelming majority of working people in the US (and probably the world) are being ruthlessly exploited by a class of nobles we'd all be better off without. As a result, I believe we have an ethical responsibility to favor trade unions, strikes, and literally anything that protects workers from corporations. I believe the only realistic long-term result of unchecked Capitalism with rapidly improving technology is a dystopia. Yadda yadda.
Now, neither my cultural beliefs nor my economic beliefs are particularly unusual. The proportion of people in the US identifying as an Economic Leftists or Socialists has gone up every year since 1989, and the cultural conservatives, reactionaries, anti-progs, and anti-woke types are growing rapidly as well. Yet, I've never met anyone else in the overlap.
The combination of cultural Conservatism and economic Socialism is what's historically been called Populism, so that's how I'll be using that word. (I'm clarifying this because some people call Trump a "populist", but he's about as anti-socialist as someone can be, so I'm not using that word the same way as these people.)
Looking to the past, I can see lots of examples of this kind of Populism, especially in the first half of the 20th century, but practically nothing in the present. Libertarians are culturally liberal and economically conservative, and there's loads of them, so you'd think the opposite would also be true, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
With this in mind, I have 3 questions for this community:
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Why are there drastically fewer Populists today than there were in the past?
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Besides "Populist", what are some other names for the belief system I'm describing?
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Where are all the Populists that are left? I assume there's not literally zero, and that some of them hang out online together somewhere, so where are they? Are there populist blogs? Populist forums? Populist subreddits?
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Notes -
I think 2 is the actual best option for an out, but doesn't play out in practice. I think this is something related to the phenomenon pointed out in Scott's "The first offender model"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/02/social-censorship-the-first-offender-model/
If all the companies behave ethically and then one steps out of line, then people can notice and coordinate and boycott them. If all the companies behave unethically, people get generally annoyed but can't coordinate to single out one of them out to crush. Walmart pays their employees like crap and extorts farmers and suppliers, and people shop their anyway. And Target probably does a bunch of crap too. McDonalds pays their employees like crap and is terrible to their franchisers. Jewelry shops buy diamonds from slaves and warmongers. Nestle murdered babies in Africa, people still buy their stuff.
A large part of the problem is also that it's way too easy for companies to own companies which own companies. I just googled and found out that apparently Nestle owns Kitkat? Except Hershey has distribution rights in the U.S., but Nestle owns it everywhere else. How do I boycott that? And apparently they own Purina. I don't think bags of Purina pet food say "Nestle" anywhere on them, and I doubt most people who buy it know that it's tainted by baby murder. Companies are not actually held to standards, which is largely the fault of customers not caring more, but largely the fault of it being way to easy for a company to just put on a skinsuit and avoid their tainted reputation.
If an individual human regularly put on convincing disguises and committed crimes with some of them but tried to leverage the good reputation of others, people would notice and be outraged. Companies get away with it.
I don't need companies to get involved in charities and politics and sacrifice money to change the world to make it better. Just don't be evil.
A Walmart near me is paying $16-$26 an hour for a cashier position with health, dental, vision, and PTO. Not bad for a job that doesn't require any college.
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Materialist areas of the economy tend to have materialist oriented customers and businesses. I don't know of any non-profit version of a superstore. Non-materialist businesses tend to be non-materialist oriented. It is easy to find non-profit hospitals, schools, and social clubs. I think there are plenty of examples of businesses having values other than profit. Its just that many of those values have become so ingrained with profit because they are required to be profitable that you don't really separate them in your head. For example, good customer service is expected in the US, and people pay for it.
The superstores I am familiar with pay their employees decent wages compared to their alternatives. The small stores that superstores replaced were often family run. If you asked the younger family members what they got paid, they'd laugh in your face (if their parents weren't around). Because many of them were not paid. Many of the "greeters" at stores often completely lack alternative employment options. So paying someone more than zero dollars is not a hard hurdle to pass.
It is hyperbolic to say that nestle murdered babies. In the 70s they marketed infant formula in a region with chronic malnutrition and water problems. Very dumb of them in hindsight. But the evidence for malicious seems thin. Imagine you are a sheltered Swiss executive in the 70s. You don't know much about Africa. Your country has not had a serious famine or food security problem in at least three centuries. You hear that babies are dying from malnutrition in Africa. You think "hey we have baby formula that is healthy, why don't we sell it there". The teams beneath you carry this out, no one brings up the logistical problems.
Its not really even clear how much damage Nestle' did. I tried to look up numbers, the only stuff I found was highly exaggerated. One of them blamed nestle for 1.5 million baby deaths from malnutrition. I tried to look up the total number of kids dying from malnutrition in Africa, and the scattered data I could find suggested that the total number of malnutrition deaths was also around 1.5 million. So that source basically used Copenhagen ethics on Nestle "you touched the problem, so all of it is your fault".
Africa is also not a profitable market. If some executive started selling formula there hoping to make a profit they should be fired for being an idiot that can't do math. This was likely a botched humanitarian effort.
If I'm right about Nestle's Africa thing being botched humanitarianism then ironically they ended up being evil by trying to be a charity and massively fucking up. Wouldn't be the first time that has happened in Africa.
Family owned stores also tend to have limited hours that are less convenient for the customers than chain store hours.
And the fact that the family owner's values got reflected in the store had negative as well as positive implications. If the shoe store owner doesn't want you dating his daughter, you're never buying shoes there again. That's unlikely to happen at Wal-Mart. And if he doesn't like selling brown shoes, or if his store is unsanitary, he's not very beholden to the market, so has little incentive to change.
To be fair, companies often try various things to figure out whether they are profitable. Maybe they thought the market was growing and took a chance on it being better in the future. Anoither possibility is that they decided to start selling products to a small but existing African market, and it was a local manager who decided to try expanding his sales.
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