liveonearth

...Glib, facile solutions stand at the very heart of the populist appeal.  Voters do not like to think that the world is complicared.  They certainly do not like to be told that there is no immediate answer to their problems.  Faced with politicians who seem to be less and less able to govern an increasingly complex world, many are increasingly willing to vote for anybody who promises a simple solution.  This is why populists from India's Narendra Modi to Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from Hungary's Viktor Orban to Poland"s Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and from France's Marine Le Pen to Italy's Beppe Grillo sound surprisingly similar to each other despite their considerable ideological differences.
--Yasha Mounk, p38 of The People vs. Democracy

**first use of tag: populism

liveonearth

Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult…. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And when they become discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.

– George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

liveonearth

If you cannot

explain it

in simple terms,

you do not

understand it fully.

~Albert Einstein