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“Today, the voice of populist infantile politics is amplified by social media allowing the ignorant to claim equality with the informed.”
― Ece Temelkuran, How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship

“Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term.”
― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

“In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest politician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.”
― Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios

“The term POTUS used to be viewed around the world with a degree of respect. Unfortunately the current US president has junked any last remnant of that image. Instead he seems only too happy to trash the environment; to scrap age old alliances promoting peace and prosperity; to discard internationally binding treaties; to toss aside like garbage hard won civil liberties. Maybe DETRITUS is a more fitting acronym for the current occupant of the White House - 'Deranged egotistical tyrant ruining & isolating the U.S.”
― Alex Morritt, Lines & Lenses

“NO DIVINE BOVINE ! The clumsy creature currently inhabiting the White House is a distinctly dangerous animal. Part boneheaded raging bully, part dastardly coward showing signs of advanced stage mad cow disease. Neither of good pedigree nor useful breeding stock, there is essentially very little of substance between the T (bone) and the RUMP, except of course for an abundance of methane and bullshit. It's high time brave matadors for you to enter the bullring, with nimble step and fleet of foot. Take good aim and bring down this marauding beast once and for all. Slay public enemy number one and we will salute you forever. A louder cheer you will not hear from Madrid to Mexico City, from Beijing to Brussels, from London to Lahore, from Toronto to Tehran and ten thousand cities in between.”
― Alex Morritt, Impromptu Scribe

“The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism.24 Populism calls for the direct sovereignty of a country’s “peopleâ€� (usually an ethnic group, sometimes a class), embodied in a strong leader who directly channels their authentic virtue and experience.
Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elites� and “experts� and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. By valorizing a strong leader, populism overlooks the limitations in human nature, and disdains the rule-governed institutions and constitutional checks that constrain the power of flawed human actors.
Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties, which share a folk theory of economics as zero-sum competition: between economic classes in the case of the left, between nations or ethnic groups in the case of the right. Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. As for progress, forget about it: populism looks backward to an age in which the nation was ethnically homogeneous, orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed, and economies were powered by farming and manufacturing, which produced tangible goods for local consumption and for export.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“REMOVE THE LOUDHAILER ! If the Democrats really want to beat Donald Trump, how about getting some of their wealthy backers to buy up or take down Twitter ? The Twit-in-Chief without Twitter is nothing - a songbird without a song. No self-respecting news organisation would stoop to plug the gap. All that would be left is a pretentious peacock eunuch strutting around aimlessly with no fawning admirers. Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
― Alex Morritt, Impromptu Scribe

“Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

“Each type of pseudo-populism comes into being to improve or save its respective adherents from the absence of a moral or social framework, which means that even if we don't understand them fully, we are expected to place our faith in them. Although these pseudo-populist organizations are relatively small, they manage to influence governments, invoke terror, and control large sums of capital.”
― Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

“Tread very carefully where injustice is concerned, because it takes very little for the oppressed to become the new oppressors.”
― Abhijit Naskar, No Foreigner Only Family

“Populists, by contrast, will persist with their representative claim no matter what; because their claim is of moral and symbolic- not an empirical- nature, it cannot be disproven.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism?

“We know that Donald Trump loves S.C.A.P.E.G.O.A.T.S. Now he has stooped to new lows - Separating Children And Parents Entering Gateways Of America Truly Sucks !”
― Alex Morritt

“In each of these places, they took strikingly similar steps to consolidate their power: they ratcheted up tensions with perceived enemies at home and abroad; packed courts and electoral commissions with their cronies; and took control of the media.”
― Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It

“Populists are highly skilled at weaponizing these forms of resentment: their rhetoric
simultaneously aims to turn the growing anger at affluent people against the ruling elite and to turn the growing focus on ascriptive identity against immigrants as well as ethnic and religious minorities.”
― Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It

“Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elitesâ€� and “expertsâ€� and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. By valorizing a strong leader, populism overlooks the limitations in human nature, and disdains the rule-governed institutions and constitutional checks that constrain the power of flawed human actors.
Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties, which share a folk theory of economics as zero-sum competition: between economic classes in the case of the left, between nations or ethnic groups in the case of the right. Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. As for progress, forget about it: populism looks backward to an age in which the nation was ethnically homogeneous, orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed, and economies were powered by farming and manufacturing, which produced tangible goods for local consumption and for export.”
― Steven Pinker

“A very different threat to human progress is a political movement that seeks to undermine its Enlightenment foundations.
The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism. Populism calls for the direct sovereignty of a country’s “people� (usually an ethnic group, sometimes a class), embodied in a strong leader who directly channels their authentic virtue and experience.
Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elites� and “experts� and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. By valorizing a strong leader, populism overlooks the limitations in human nature, and disdains the rule-governed institutions and constitutional checks that constrain the power of flawed human actors.
Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties, which share a folk theory of economics as zero-sum competition: between economic classes in the case of the left, between nations or ethnic groups in the case of the right. Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. As for progress, forget about it: populism looks backward to an age in which the nation was ethnically homogeneous, orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed, and economies were powered by farming and manufacturing, which produced tangible goods for local consumption and for export.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.

Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his present credo—derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and probably the revue Of Thee I Sing—little Buzz, back home, had advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef stew in the county poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal machine politicians, with jobs for their brothers-in-law, nephews, law partners, and creditors.

Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of oratory, but he had been told by political reporters that under the spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you could not remember anything he had said.

There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.

But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability to be authentically excited by and with his audience, and they by and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat—a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat—and (sans scenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.

Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional Common Man.

Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate.

But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“ÃŽntr-o lume de neînÈ›eles, mereu schimbătoare, masele atinseseră punctul în care puteau crede, în acelaÈ™i timp, orice sau nimic, când ele gândeau că totul este posibil È™i că nimic nu e adevărat. Amestecul era destul de ciudat, întru-cât demonstra sfârÈ™itul iluziei că naivitatea era o slăbiciune a spiritelor primitive nebănuitoare, iar cinismul reprezenta viciul unor minÈ›i superioare È™i rafinate.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Month on month, week on week, day by day, hour by hour, it becomes ever more impossible to give expression to the inexpressible nature of this world. The circle of lies that the miscreants draw around their crimes paralyses the word and the writers who employ it. Yet a common obligation makes you persist to the last moment: that is to say to the last drop of ink; it impels you to seize the word, in the truest sense, to take possession of the word threatened with paralysis. One must give apology today when one writes... and yet one must write on...
One must write, even when one realises that the printed word can no longer improve anything. To the optimists, it might seem an easy thing to write. To the sceptics - not to say: the hopeless - it’s more difficult, and this is why their word weighs so much heavier. These are, so to speak, voices coming from the beyond, haloed by the radiance of futility. (For even futility has its radiance!)”
― Joseph Roth

“Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.

The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war.

Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. "Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones - you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states".

A mercantile bourgeoisie arises, whose members seek social position through wealth and conspicuous consumption: "they will spend large sums of money on their wives".

These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy - wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of parts and the lust of the spoils of office.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth.

In rather case the end is revolution.

When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims, but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease.

Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power.

But even democracy ruins itself by excess � of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy.

This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses.

As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them; to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play (a hit, no doubt, at Aristophanes, whose comedies attacked almost every new idea). Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course.

The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey� that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protected of the people� rises to supreme power. (Consider the history of Rome).

The more Plato thinks of it, the more astounded he is at the folly of leaving to mob caprice and gullibility the selection of political officials � not to speak of leaving it to those shady and wealth-serving strategists who pull the oligarchic wires behind the democratic stage.

Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters â€� like shoe-making â€� we think only a specially-trained person will server our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“There is a difference between an uprising against oppression and mob rule.”
― Abhijit Naskar, No Foreigner Only Family

“There’s no nuance in the business end of a pitchfork.”
― Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

“This worldview breeds two political desires, and most populists are savvy enough to embrace both. First, populists claim, an honest leader—one who shares the pure outlook of the people and is willing to fight on their behalf—needs to win high office. And second, once this honest leader is in charge, he needs to abolish the institutional roadblocks that might stop him from carrying out the will of the people.”
― Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It

“One of the good things about running as a populist firebrand is that if the present doesn't offer you enough disasters to exploit, you can always invite your supporters to live in the imaginary disasters of the future.”
― Chris Stirewalt, Every Man a King: A Short, Colorful History of American Populists

“Populism' is a compliment to me. We envision a different Europe where every E.U. country should have the freedom to decide its own economic policies.”
― Matteo Salvini

“He read an article in a left-leaning paper that took the ad to task for grammar errors and mixed metaphors and other literary crimes, but Jack thought it was cool.”
― Jim Lowe, New Reform

“There is a tragic irony in all this: populists in power often end up committing the very sins of which they had been accusing “the elitesâ€� when the populists had been in opposition: excluding citizens and usurping the state. What the establishment supposedly has always done, populists will also end up doing. Only with what they think is a clear moral justification and, perhaps, even a clean conscience. Hence it is a profound illusion to think that populists can improve our democracies. Populists are in the end different elites who try to acquire power with the help of a collective fantasy of political purity.”
― Jan-Werner Müller, The Rise and Rise of Populism?

“Fame is the measure of neither character nor wisdom.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“It is one thing give a voice to people's frustrations and another to give them solutions.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“Indian democracy has taught the world the beauty and competitiveness of its governing system for a prolonged period. But Modi administration is remapping the Indian political map which some called the rise of nationalism, while others called it the rise of patriotism in this era of populism.”
― Nilantha Ilangamuwa