Why populists are popular

Populists are popular because they give easy answers to problems that don’t have them

David Von Drehle

Such succinctness illustrates how professional writers differ from me.

[W]hen a tangled skein of forces — technical, scientific, economic and cultural — transformed Western societies from primarily rural to urban and agrarian to industrial, every walk of life was altered. Revolutions erupted around the world. Wars were waged among dying monarchies. A person could spend a career trying to explain it all, but the typical populist boiled it down to a problem of railroad barons and Jews.