The following is from an online review of Yale historian Tim Snyder's latest book and seems relevant to a climate in which populist demagogues and despicable chancers like Johnson find their way to power through one means or another.
'When all political power is held by 0.1% of the population who together own circa 80% of a country’s wealth, this privileged minority cannot allow democracy or rule of law to flourish as this will lead to diminishment of their wealth through the high taxation necessary to enact progressive legislation to improve life chances for the many and move society forward. So an alternative reality is created, a different sense of time; by connecting emotionally with a sector of the population (‘the base’) and looping back to a non-specific former time, promising to “make Germany/Russia/America great again” (the language & message is always the same). The idea is fostered that there is no truth other than the purity of ‘the people’, ‘the nation’, who are under threat by contamination from outside: Jews, Moslems, ‘western degeneracy’, homosexuality, Mexicans, liberals, people from “s***hole countries”.
The purpose of government then changes from ‘doing’ – i.e. improving society by moving it forward and making everyone’s lives better – to ‘being’, guarding the purity of ‘the true people’. All politicians lie, but you may choose our lies, our alternative reality, over ‘theirs’: the others, the outsiders, the ‘them’ who are not us. During this process, political opposition is eliminated in stages, elections become a rigged and managed ritual, investigative journalism is eliminated and replaced by state propaganda (i.e. RT, Sputnik & Fox News), and politics is reduced to a theatrical spectacle of rabble-rousing rallies and the manufacture of artificial crises one after another to keep the population off-balance and continuously emotionally enraged.'
Though I'm not sure about that last bit, it sounds like Snyder's thesis is worth engaging with. I'm definitely going to be reading this soon.