I guess there’s nothing to do about my reluctance to write this post other than to write my way through it.
Across the West, the political elites have become estranged from their native populations. This process began in the years after the demise of Communism, and it accelerated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The causes are manifold: Cheap money during a long period of low interest rates, ideological radicalization, the lack of clear political alternatives, the cancerous growth of state bureaucratic systems, and the social consequences of globalization within the political classes all played a role. Probably we have yet to understand the causes fully, but the upshot is that our elites have been pursuing crazy policies that are obviously detrimental to their own populations for decades now. They had a head start in wreaking their destruction because the West had accumulated a lot of prosperity they could burn through before anyone began to feel the pain of their idiocy, and also because of various structural advantages, including their control of broadcast media.
Read Full Article: https://amgreatness.com/2026/07/01/the-grave-and-increasingly-obvious-limitations-of-populist-politics/
