I am very angry, frankly, at the oil companies not only because of the obscene profits they’ve made but at their failure to invest in alternate energy to help us eliminate our dependence on foreign oil

Oh…you mean like the nuclear plants that government regulations make impossible to build? Or how about the regulations that make it impossible to build more refineries? Or the regulations that make it impossible to drill in the ANWR? Or the government’s refusal to press our territorial rights in the Arctic Sea, where they suspect more oil reserves might be? Where’s McCain’s rhetoric about any of that?

Typical statist, McCain is…always willing to blame somebody else for a problem he helped create and that he refuses to address.

While I’ll agree that populist has become a broad label, I wouldn’t say it’s completely devoid of meaning, nor would I in any way say that it’s related to libertarianism.

As an example, here is an example of a possible definition from the Wikipedia article on populism (chosen because this has often been my definition as well):

In recent years, scholars have made advances in defining the term in ways which can be profitably employed in research and that can also help clarify the origins of such differences. One of the latest of these is the definition by Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell who, in their volume Twenty-First Century Populism, define populism as pitting “a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice” [4].

I have always viewed the definition of “populism” as inherently being a collectivist mindset. To me it’s always been a solidarity “us vs them” mentality, with the demagogue always identifying with the “us”, of course.

Actually, I’m of the opinion that “populist” always meant “panderer”. It’s just that in the good ol’ days with fewer media resources at our disposal it was harder to catch the “men of the people” when they screwed up and showed their true colors.

Oh, don’t let those minor distinctions fool you…he’s plenty populist too. And when you get down to it, nationalists and populists both embrace statism so you and Doug are both right.

“Just like George!”

He’s a nationalist. He is for that general [imaginary] construct known as “the nation”. He believes that the goals of the nation supersedes our individual needs and wants. He believes that we exist to serve the nation.

Listen to everything that comes out of his mouth, and it belies a completely foreign understanding of the relationship between an individual and the state to that of the majority of American history.