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. Working through the consequences of this, it is not difficult to see why the left has been unable to get much traction out of these changes, especially in developed countries. People are not rebelling against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function. More generally, it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control, in order to evade exploitation, marginalization, addiction, and stigma. Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world. There are other issues on which similar disagreements arise, with the most important at the moment being immigration and international trade. Economists, for instance, understand that a tariff on imports is equivalent to a tax on exports, but it is difficult to imagine more than 20% of the population being either willing or able to follow the chain of reasoning that leads to this conclusion. Similarly, the fact that immigration does not create unemployment, because it increases both the supply and the demand for labour, is highly unintuitive, and yet leads elites to take a much more casual view about the labour-market effects of migration than the public does. (Elites then make things worse by moralizing this disagreement, suggesting that the public position must be motivated by racism. Thus they present themselves, not only as smarter, but as morally superior to the rest of society.) [A] very prominent feature of populist politicians is their speaking style, which has an unscripted, stream-of-consciousness quality (e.g. see Hugo Chavez’s Aló Presidente TV show, which one could also, totally imagine Trump doing). This is important precisely because it is the opposite of the self-controlled, calculated speaking style favored by mainstream politicians (which the French have the perfect term for: langue de bois). This is why populist politicians are perceived, by a large segment of the population, as being more “honest,” even when everything that comes out of their mouth is a lie. […] it is perfectly clear, when listening to Donald Trump, that what he is saying is exactly what he is thinking. Indeed, he obviously lacks the verbal self-inhibition required to speak in any other way. This is what leads people to trust him – especially if they are relying on intuitive cues, rather than analytic evaluation, to determine trustworthiness.