2017 study ... showed that voters in Britain highly satisfied with their lives were 1.6% more likely to support the party in power... a 10% rise in family income was associated with a mere 0.18% increase ... happiness seems more important to the outcome of elections than money... in 15 European elections ... Life satisfaction... twice as important…

talk-show hosts like journalists ... know how to grab the brain’s attention and stimulate fear, sadness or anger.... We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, characters and scene. But in the present era of tribalism, it feels like we’ve reached our collective limitations... I met psychologists, med…

The most powerful engine of elitism is the European Union... Founding Fathers of Europe deliberately removed a great deal of decision-making from the hands of the (nation-bounded and short-sighted) public... Confronted with popular revolts against the rule of experts they have simply dug in their heels... For the EU, technocratic decision-making …

To some liberals, Donald Trump’s inauguration portends doom... to many conservatives, it’s a crowning moment ... as if each side is living in ... a different reality.... information avoidance... all of us ... ward off any new information that makes us feel bad, obligates us to do something we don’t want to do or challenges our worldview... we’re …

The festering European economic crisis was joined by two additional crises in 2015 – the refugee crisis and the security crisis that public terrorist attacks generated. All of this was played out in mass media and provided the final push for nationalist parties across Europe ... In contrast to Trump, European populists are committed conservative…

When you can’t understand why people behave in a certain way, the easiest thing to do is to convince yourself that people do not know what they are doing. This is what European political, business and news media leaders have done... difficult to understand the rage against the meritocratic elites best symbolized by the well-trained, competent civ…

the liberal critiques I read weren’t so much attacking my decision as they were questioning my intelligence and my ability to understand the issue... I was on the outside of the so-called liberal bubble... what I saw was not pretty... contempt and arrogance, and an offensive air of intellectual superiority... incapable of talking with those who …

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

democracies are not as secure as people may think... since 2005, Freedom House’s index has shown a decline in global freedom each year... signs of democratic deconsolidation in the United States and many other liberal democracies are now similar to those in Venezuela before its crisis.

foolish to assume that “experience” is an unalloyed asset ... In this age of rage against anything or anyone that can be depicted as “the establishment” ... a handicap to be an “insider” and a great advantage to be an “outsider”... calling them dangerous did not amount to an answer to the grievances driving substantial numbers of voters ... tell…

We do not estimate the integrity and ability of an acquaintance by his flabby willingness to accept our ideas… But when a candidate for public office faces the voters ... he faces a mob of men ... quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental ... whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understa…

Breitbart News Network is expanding its U.S. operations and launching sites in Germany and France... as it seeks to monetize the anger and anti-immigrant sentiment unleashed by Donald Trump’... Milo Yiannopoulos is ... explore launching a new television show... an opening to tap ... a wave of American populism similar to forces driving Britain …

How to make sense of Donald Trump’s election? Here are some articles which helped me. Maybe they’ll help you.

the “crowd”—the concept, more so than the reality—was born in fin-de-siècle Paris... the fascination and fear of crowds obscures their reality and reach... But here’s the rub: “le crowd” is, in part, a mythical creature... less a feature of the modern political landscape than a creature of Le Bon’s private nightscape the “mob” that took the Bast…

THE PARALLELS BETWEEN the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming.... both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.

Two convergent trends are making populism a potent negative force. First, democracies have morphed into unrepresentative plutocracies that lead growing numbers of people to feel shut out and voiceless... Media ... business model is now based on social media and clicks, not facts. Clicks depend on theatrical performance, stunts, celebrity, ent…

Segregated social universes, an industry moving from red states to the coasts, and mass media’s revenue decline: The disconnect between two realities shows no sign of abating... American political discourse in 2016 seemed to be running on two self-contained, never-overlapping sets of information... today’s media ecosystem encourage that separatio…