A grainy image of his face drew comparisons to Hollywood heartthrobs. A jacket similar to the one he’s wearing on wanted posters is reportedly flying off the shelves. And the words written on the bullets he used to kill a man in cold blood on a sidewalk on Wednesday have become, for some people, a rallying cry.
Four days after a gunman assassinated a top health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan and vanished, the unidentified suspect has, in some quarters, been venerated as something approaching a folk hero.
Because most people follow the one that shouts the loudest. The person who claims to have the answer to all problems usually does really well during elections, especially when there are many things not going too well. It doesn’t matter whether these persons actually have a solid solution, they don’t even have to have a plan, only shout they know what to do. People don’t want to spend their time to figure out whether a poliyion consists of empty promises and lies, people expect politicians to be honest. Most of the time the populist politicians not just claim they have the answer and solution to all, they also make their competition look evil by claiming they are corrupt, nazis, communists, pedophiles, etc. “You don’t want to vote for a pedo, do you?” No matter the acts they committed themselves. For example, Hitler claimed to be a national ‘socialist’ while claiming the dirty communists are evil, winning the socialist votes. Putin, who is a full nazi based on his actions, invades Ukraine “to fight nazis”. Trump, who is an extreme right wing politician with a long friendship with Epstein and now a criminal record, claims his opponents are nazis, pedos and criminals and those should never hold office.
Facts don’t matter, it’s all feelings. The one who knows how to hit that usually is very popular during less stable times. So when billionaires claim they can end wars, bring us to Mars, fix the economy, drive out those criminal desease infested immigrants (or jews in nazi Germany setting) (see, making them look super evil, dehumanizing them, creating a villain only they have a solition to), people just think “he’s successful with all his money, lying on such a large scale can’t be possible right, the opposition apparently is super evil, he must be a good candidate”.
TLDR: Fueling hate and anger, claiming to be the only one with a solution usually works to get people’s votes. And the general public is too dumb to see beyond empty promises and they dismiss facts over feelings.
Right. Everything you say is true but you don’t look into the mechanisms that sit behind and make it work. You’re not looking into why it works.
For example, you mention how people don’t want to spend their time figuring out what a politician really stands for. But why? Most people don’t have this time. Most people don’t have the training needed to critically assess the information they receive either. The system’s always worked on the basis of some level of honesty along with robust and critical media. Ultimately most people hear most of the words of the candidates through media. In the 20th century through radio, TV and in the 21st through the Internet. When you explore the media angle you can observe media ownership changes and with them a significant shift to pro-corporate, pro-billionaire and anti-worker stances dominating the landscape. In effect, the billionaires are telling the people who don’t have time or skill to seek and sift through independent information, what to think, believe and feel, and who best represents those feelings.
Then you have candidates emerge who represent those feelings and the same billionaires pour ridiculous amounts of money in their campaigns, get their media outlets to transmit the message without sufficiently challenging its factuality and effects.
You put the two together and that answers to a significant degree why people vote for oligarchs. We saw all of this play out in plain sight during the recent US election.
You can’t remove loudmouths that promise easy solutions to hard problems. They’ve always existed. If you removed their funding and their megaphones however, most won’t even know about them. That’s not to say populists haven’t been elected without being supported by the owner class, but this isn’t one of those cases. This is the owner class capturing the democratic system and electing their representative through these methods. It didn’t happen yesterday. It’s been going on for a while, getting ever more effective. Note that the alternative candidate in the recent election was also subservient to the owner class, just to a somewhat different part of it and perhaps to somewhat lower extent.
I think highlighting these processes is crucial because the solutions are actionable and efficient. It’s very unlikely for us to be able to get the majority of any society to be able to spend the time needed and have the mental tools needed to arrive at factual conclusions from sifting through the (corporate) media firehouse. I don’t think it’s ever been achieved. Removing private money from politics and media is possible and has been done before.