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A little OT, but here is an interesting paper from Bridgewater (Ray Dalio) about populist movements in various countries in the 20th Century that includes all of your favorite boogeyman leaders: https://www.bridgewater.com/resources/bwam032217.pdf

It just came out this week.

Yeah, I agree. There's never been a libertarian state, there never will be. The kind of man who spends his life gathering political power isn't ever going to be the kind that wants to distribute that power.

As I've said, I don't think libertarianism is the solution to all problems. I do think that it is a good default starting point for addressing first world problems. This is because first world problems are generally caused by our stable, secure state. As problems go, those are the best to have.

A little OT, but here is an interesting paper from Bridgewater (Ray Dalio) about populist movements in various countries in the 20th Century that includes all of your favorite boogeyman leaders: https://www.bridgewater.com/resources/bwam032217.pdf

It just came out this week.

While populism was a force in the US, and some would say that Roosevelt was a populist of the left—because his
policies were both populist and rather extreme at the time (though much less so in retrospect)—we will consider
him a ”quasi-populist.” If you are interested in more classic cases, you might skip to the next section to review
those in Europe.

An interesting piece, but it seems to be extremely forgiving of our populists. Extreme historical policies don't become less extreme because we got used to them, or because we now agree with them(or not). There must have been some part of the New Deal that wasn't extreme, but I can't think of it. (For the sake of accuracy, at this point, I need to point out that Hoover started policies very similar to the New Deal, but much less aggressively. They were extreme when he did it, far more so when Roosevelt ramped it up.)

For the record, the differences between Stalin's, Hitler's, Mussolini's, and Roosevelt's reign were differences of degree, not kind. I'm not so sure about pre-war Britain and France, I haven't really looked into them.

It's also weird that they gave a full page to Huey Long, without even mentioning corruption. I thought of him as being a populist, but knew him as the prototypical example of corrupt southern politician. Maybe populism and corruption are synonymous to these guys. Or maybe they thought it would distract readers.