Populism has spread around the world, pushing morons and incompetents into power - because people vote for morons and incompetents.

Representative democracy is, to quote H.L. Menken, "the pathetic belief that collective wisdom emerges from individual ignorance."

Ordinary people know nothing and understand even less. Thus their votes are reliably catastrophic. Until we recognize that representative democracy is totally unfit for purpose in a complex modern inter-connected world, we will continue our slide towards chaos.

Unfortunately, there's no way to change the situation. Everyone thinks democracy is great. So we will have to pass though a long period of tyranny before - hopefully - standing amid the ruins, a few clever people say, "let's not do that again."

Until then, Boris, Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, et al have the field to themselves.

Because ordinary people are totally incompetent to vote with any semblance of understanding anything of importance. They merely vote for the easiest and most venal soundbites and memes, because those are the limit of what their intellects can (almost) encompass.