To be fair, almost every leader portrays themselves as a “man of The People” when this is almost never the case. Even authoritarian dictators like Gaddafi clai

To be fair, almost every leader portrays themselves as a “man of The People” when this is almost never the case. Even authoritarian dictators like Gaddafi claimed this in order to lend legitimacy to their rule. What’s really surprising is that it actually often works, at least as long as the leader keeps handing The People table scraps that is. In the United States, I find the phenomena of well educated, wealthy republican businessmen playing themselves up as—for lack of a better term—Good ol’ Boys to be a particularly ugly version of this. It’s a cynical and demeaning farce, yet it still seems to get results. Perhaps the root cause is that true men of The People rarely make it to power. Perhaps it is some human quirk: a primal desire to latch on to leaders and identify with them. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon so I guess you can either try to fight it or exploit it.