The fact that there was (and is) such a market for these over-simplified ideas, though, has implications beyond Trump himself. I can think of a few (not mutual

The fact that there was (and is) such a market for these over-simplified ideas, though, has implications beyond Trump himself. I can think of a few (not mutually exclusive) possibilities: * People have always wanted politics to be conveyed in this way, but previous politicians either didn't have the skills or the desire to pander to that style of messaging. * People's capacity for processing nuance has been saturated by all the complexity of modern life, or by our decreasing attention spans (which is perhaps caused by a culture of instant gratification and companies mass-producing engines which turn dopamine into ad revenue). * People still have capacity for nuance generally, but don't think it is worth investing that capacity on something like politics, either due to the feeling that current problems are too hard to solve, or that the system doesn't reflect their interests anyway. * Political polarization and the game theory of plurality voting means that politics has devolved into two tribes that see everything as a zero-sum game, so applying nuance is seen as a dangerous weakness. Personally I can't help thinking that the thesis of Future Shock[0] seems to match the reality around us quite well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock