In this third article in a series I argue that populism is--at least in part--fueled by an inarticulate rage against Legalist forms of government.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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There's legalism, and then there's legalism. There are intricate and restrictive laws that make it impossible for people to get both good and bad things done, and then there are intricate and restrictive traditions that form the basis for our system of government by keeping parliament from ending up with only the power to put a rubber stamp on whatever diktats came out of the PMO this week. Putting Poilievre and Trudeau so near the opposite extremes of your scale leaves very little room for anyone more legalistic or more autocratic than them.
Of course, there are nuances. The graphic was only a mechanism for showing readers that there is an issue that is orthogonal to the standard left-right continuum. When someone comes up with a way of measuring legalism objectively (sorta like the way the Gini coefficient measures inequality), I'll think about parsing things out with more precision. ;-)