My current take on the Populist gains in the last few years (based on this and other articles from the same author): I believe that State (capital S) main funct

My current take on the Populist gains in the last few years (based on this and other articles from the same author): I believe that State (capital S) main function is to take care of the "average citizen". And we are all "average" in a way or the other... i.e. I could be a good coder, painter, car salesman, whatever - but this does not guarantee I have perfect health, or above-average business savvy, or I am a good parent, or ready to use a foreign language and move abroad to look for work. The neo-liberist idea is to cater only for "superheroes" (and the rest will adapt or perish)... so now more and more people try to back parties that claim (or pretend) to have the "average" interests as their main goal... populist, nationalistic, "social-right" movements. And this is because the Left in general started aligning itself with the neo-liberist ideals and pushed "freedom" above everything else (this has surely complex causes, including the failure of Communism: European left parties had to shift their goals to something that was as far as possible from the decline of the Socialist/Communist ideals).