The Oh, Hello and

Welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood.

Two familiar voices today. First and seconds Jody Dean will explain why

populism is always of the right and never the left, and Jane McEllevy talks about real

organizing, not fake organizing. First, Jody Dean. Jody is a prolific author, most recently

of Crowds and Party from Versoo which we discussed in this show last

summer and a professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith colleges in

Geneva, New York. She has an article called Not Him, Us and We Are in Populists in the new issue of Theory and Event, an online journal of political theory, on the challenges of the Trump era and the pitfalls of the populist temptation. You can find the article by Googling Theory Event

Jody Dean populism. Jody Dean. So I want to talk about populism but first I want

to talk about the tweeter in chief.

We have a president who is an active user of Twitter.

People get up every morning and wonder what the president tweeted overnight.

We've got pundits analyzing the morning tweet flow from

Trump Tower or the Oval Office of Maralago wherever he is at the moment. What do you

make in the fact that we have a president for whom Twitter was an important part of his rise to power and an important way of his communicating with the public.

Trump shows us how communicative capitalism has come into its own.

By that what I mean is,

communicative capitalism has promised us

that everyone can say whatever they want.

Whenever they want, it's promised us a kind of immediacy of every opinion being equal and every

opinion mattering and weirdly what Trump does is put that strange semi-democratic power in the hands of the president.

So instead of recognizing as presidents tend to that they have the so-called bully pulpit and can use the

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