The % of any human population possessed by racial and economic status anxiety that is ready to be infantilized by demagogues as they act out their cognitive bias of overpayment for certainty is fairly constant. Put that celebrity demagogue together with a social media rage monetization machine....et voila, here we are. In his novella Mario and the Magician Thomas Mann foresaw the first, but not the second. Eric Hobsbawm foresaw the second with this aphorism applicable to the Murdochs, Facebook and Twitter: "capitalism saws off the tree branch upon which it sits."

The final piece of the puzzle is described in the Hudson Institute's Kleptocracy Project: how the narcissistic nationalism of western populist demagogues is exported from east to west by mafia with a flag kleptocracies like Russia.