Populists are effective communicators
Reading this article gave me new ways to think, and reason, about the success of populism. Like it or not, it’s been enjoying a pretty good ride, and this article highlights how effective communication contributes to it. Ignore these mechanisms at your own peril. It is not difficult to see why populism can be an effective political strategy, and why it has become dramatically more effective in the age of social media. [A]cceleration in the pace of communication favours intuitive over analytical thinking. Populists will always have the best 30-second TV commercials. Social media further amplifies the problem by removing all gatekeepers, making it so that elites are no longer able to exercise any control over public communication. This makes it easy to circumvent them and appeal directly to the aggrieved segment of the population. The result is the creation of a communications environment that is dramatically more hostile to the analytical thinking style. ...