Suzette Brooks Masters

So I have a few thoughts about how we got here.

And I think a lot of it has to do with the unbridled excess and distortions caused by capitalism, which have created a tremendous amount of inequality that is frankly unbearable because it is so glaring.

And I also think, and this is thinking about a little bit of the futurism stuff and the sort of the age of uncertainty that we're living in right now.

I think in times of tremendous and accelerating change, which I believe we are in right now, we're in the middle of a technological revolution, like the ones that have proceeded that have led to a tremendous amount of societal change.

I think our government systems have not...

demonstrated that they are capable of managing through the change.

And so I think at the same time that all this other stuff's been going on, I think there's this massive amount of anxiety that people feel about the future.

And because the government...

the governments across these Western democracies have not demonstrated how they will respond and have not spoken to people's anxiety, right?

They've either pushed it under the rug or ignored it or minimized it or been so short-term in their policy prescriptions that it doesn't feel real.

I think there's this massive loss of confidence

Right.

And I think that's when populist leaders that are hearkening back to a nostalgic previous time that may or may not have ever existed.

Ethnically pure, demographically flourishing.

Yeah.

Everything was hunky dory, right?

Like they can appeal to that and scapegoat people like immigrants, people of color, people of gender fluidity, like whatever it is, right?

Anything that feels like it's part of this massive change that we've been dealing with, right?

This is a logical counterreaction.

And so the way we build back probably has to do with