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've heard an explanation for letting the owners capture a much higher share of profit is that we want to incentivize people to create new large companies. If person A has a dream of "I want to be able to support my wife and 2.1 children by working 20 hours a week and write rationalist fanfiction in my free time" and person B has a dream of "I want a company that sells books, no, sells everything over the Internet", we want to feed person B's ambition by dangling the carrot of immense profit, because not only will he create a lot of jobs and change the way we shop if he succeeds, the journey will also create something like cloud computing and S3 object storage as side-effects.
So, Jeff Bezos having $100 billion doesn't mean his current input is worth at least $100 billion and that if we replaced him with a Biff Jesus Amazon would immediately collapse. It just means we want every Biff Jesus to look at Amazon and think, "hey, I also want to start a company and become filthy rich". Yes, 99.9% of them will lose the race and the winner won't necessarily be the most talented entrepreneur, what's important is that there's this race at all.
Again, the same reasoning applies: if there are mineral deposits under your property and you either can't capture the profits from mining them or to pass them to your children, it's better not to let anyone know they are even there. You would have to move to another plot of land, leave your house and garden and pond behind.
I don't think these explanations are completely wrong or completely right. You can certainly challenge the underlying assumptions. Perhaps we have had enough growth and dangling wealth in front of people is no longer necessary. Well, the worldwide GDP is $1e14 right now and the population might grow to about 1e10 people. That's $1e4 per person, a thousand dollars' worth of value per year. Even with perfect redistribution it's just too low. I would want the economy to grow a hundredfold before I would consider winding down capitalism and asking for FALGSC.
Maybe non-monetary incentives can be just as strong. Maybe renaming Washington (either the state or the capital) to Jeff can be enough to get him to hand his shares over to Amazon warehouse workers. But the cool thing about money is that there's always more. There are just fifty states to rename, after all.
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