O Populismo Feito e Amado pelo Papa Francisco.

O Papa Francisco e muitos líderes europeus de esquerda quando querem condenar Trump usam o termo "populismo". É a velha falácia de rotular (falácia ad hominem) para evitar o debate.

Além disso, o chamado "populismo" sempre esteve ligado ao esquerdismo, pois são eles que procuram elaborar políticas que fornecem dinheiro e bens de graça para os mais pobres. Os esquerdistas é que costumam se assentar em políticas do tipo "bolsa família" ou "food stamp" ou liberar a presença de imigrantes ilegais ou serem menos rigorosos com o uso da lei se a pessoa é pobre.  Esquerdistas é que costumam falar de "povo", em defender o "povo", como uma categoria única de pensamento. São os esquerdistas que dividem as pessoas em classes, segundo os bens materiais. Muitas vezes, eu vejo partidos de esquerda nanicos no Brasil dizer que defendem o povo. Mas em geral o povo mesmo não os apoia.

Ao usar o temo "populismo" contra Trump e afins, eles evitam de dizer que eles são elitistas.  Trump está do lado do tipo de pessoas que está preocupado em manter sua cultura e religião cristã, preocupado com seus empregos, com o terrorismo e com a entrada de muitos imigrantes ilegais. Enquanto os esquerdistas, elitistas universitários, estão preocupados com uma tal mudança climática (que permite que a elite distribua dinheiro aos seus) e descartam o valor da religião cristã.

O populismo da esquerda tem base materialista, os bens materiais definem as pessoas e assim as pessoas devem ser divididas, dessa maneira os esquerdistas distribuem os gastos públicos, ao mesmo tempo que se enriquecem com dinheiro público.  O populismo de Trump e afins é um populismo de defesa cultural e espiritual.

O escritor Samuel Gregg escreveu sobre o populismo do Papa Francisco no site The Federalist, aquele que o Papa defende e protege, o populismo esquerdista, que diz que todos têm "direito" à casa, terra e trabalho de graça fornecido pelo Estado.

Vejamos parte do artigo de Gregg, abaixo

Pope Francis Hates Populism, Except When He Loves It

I suspect I wasn’t the only person taken aback when Pope Francis recently stated in an interview with Germany’s leading liberal newspaper Die Zeit that “Populism is evil and ends badly, as the past century shows.”

The pope didn’t specify who he had in mind. Plenty assumed he was obliquely referring to Donald Trump and European politicians like Marine Le Pen. I’m sure, however, that others thought that the pope’s words verged on the kettle calling the pot black. For whether it’s his rhetorical style or the type of political movement to which he appears to lend his support, Pope Francis seems quite sympathetic to some forms of populism.

But Pope Francis Is All About ‘the People’

Nor are some of Francis’s principal supporters averse to invoking populist language when defending his program for the Catholic Church. Consider, for example, Archbishop Victor Fernández. The Argentine theologian is close enough to the pope that some phrases that appear in Francis’s 2016 apostolic exhortation “Amoris Laetitia” bear an uncanny resemblance to expressions used in articles penned by Fernández in 1995, 2001, and 2006.

Asked in a 2015 interview whether he considered the pope isolated and surrounded by opponents in the Vatican, Fernández answered: “By no means. The people are with him, not his few adversaries. This pope first filled St. Peter’s Square with crowds and then began changing the Church. Above all, for this reason he is not isolated. The people sense in him the fragrance of the Gospel, the joy of the Spirit, the closeness of Christ and thus they feel the Church is like their home.”

“The people.” “Crowds.” “The people.” Such language has very specific meaning in Latin America. When used by figures such as the long-deceased Argentine populist Juan Perón or the more recently departed “twenty-first-century socialist” Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, the purpose of this phraseology is the same. It is to evoke an almost mystical connection between the leader and “the people” as they struggle together against oppression.

This rhetoric goes hand-in-hand with tendencies to caricature real or perceived opponents. The speeches of Perón and Chávez are full of ad hominem rants against “enemies of the people.” Francis himself isn’t shy about applying labels. There’s even a blog that has compiled his more memorable phrases: “rigorists,” “fundamentalists,” “Pharisees,” “intellectual aristocrats,” “little monsters,” “self-absorbed promethean neo–pelagians,” to name just a few. The targets range from younger Catholics with a distaste for 1970s liturgy to theologians who insist that coherently preaching the gospel requires a concern for intellectual rigor.

Pope Francis Is Himself a Populist

But Francis’s populist side manifests itself most clearly in addresses he’s given to one particular group that he has clearly supported: an organization called The World Meeting of Popular Movements. The populist edge to Francis’s thought is very evident in, for example, a 2015 speech he gave to this group in Bolivia. At various points, the rhetoric employed by the pope—“tyranny of mammon,” “this economy kills,” “bondage of individualism” etc.—is decidedly charged, even polemical. Some of it isn’t that different from the language used by populist politicians throughout Latin America.

This last point is underscored by the fact that Pope Francis delivered these remarks while seated next to President Evo Morales of Bolivia. A self-described communitarian-socialist, Morales is a quintessential Latin American left-populist. Like all such politicians, he’s steadily removed constitutional restraints on his power in the name of “the people.” Morales’ prominence at the pope’s speech, as one journalist present remarked to me, reinforced the sense that “the whole event had the feel of a deeply political, very left-wing, and somewhat secular rally.”

The pope’s apparent empathy for a type of populism was further underscored when the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences held a conference in April 2016 to mark the 25th anniversary of John Paul II’s encyclical “Centesimus Annus.” The two heads of states invited to speak were none other than Morales and another left-populist head of state, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. The event was tilted even further in a left-populist direction by the presence of the then-candidate for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who also gave a speech.

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There’s some evidence this is Francis’s view. In an interview with the Spanish left-leaning newspaper El País, the pope described Latin American populism as healthy because it made “the people . . . the protagonists.” He then associated populism in Europe with the rise of the Nazis.

But does this mean that, from Francis’s standpoint, “the people” crushed by poverty in Latin America are the true bearers of the subcontinent’s destiny (even if their left-populist leaders destroy the economy in countries like Venezuela and trash civil liberties throughout the region), whereas “the people” in Western Europe fed up with unaccountable Eurocrats are closet racists who, sotto voce, want to take Europe back to the dictatorships of the 1930s?