Both camps of people, the "conservatives" and the "liberals", hate me equally. The "conservative" camp will make arguments about how "Muslim immigrants" must be deported because they are fundamentally incompatible with the fabric of Western society, or about how "women" must be restricted to homemaking because they are fundamentally weaker and less intelligent due to genetic differences, or even about how true freedom is not possible without a purge of the "genetically inferior" and a dismantling of the state. The "liberal" camp will make arguments about how "white cis men" are the ones responsible for all of the world's evil, or about how "all men" abuse women, or about how the "ultra-wealthy" must be stripped of all their wealth and deported. Both camps scream their messages and create viral videos chock full of shocking anecdotal evidence, which evokes a primal emotional response in the audience. I calmly dissect their arguments without invalidating the underlying concerns, which riles them up and leads them to disengage with explicitives. Notice that in each of these arguments, there is a villain class that must be punished for social justice to be achieved. The discourse is strikingly similar to conversations with senile old people who base their arguments on a few personal anecdotes and popular anecdotal stories that have circulated orally in their circles. It isn’t fundamentally different from how they talk in parables and are disinclined to accept evidence that contradicts their personal experience.
"Left-wing populism" puts us in the same trap that got us here in the first place: just as one kind of messaging calls people to one camp, a semantic tweak in the message can manipulate them into the other camp just as easily; loud emotional messaging takes democracies back in time to the way they operated before the invention of the printing press. My viewpoint is that we must fundamentally reject punitive justice, but perhaps a less radical packaging of this idea will finally shift the political discourse.