Understanding the Populist Free online reading

What is driving the palpable shift in populism and right-wing sentiment? Identity politics has become a phenomenon taking over, but in a divided society, have some identities become more equal than others? This essay tries to empathize and understand those feeling increasingly disenfranchised with a society and media they feel no longer reflects them, and at worst is beginning to demonize them. In a "virtue signaling", self-professed professionalism, egocentric, "everyone's an expert" world, the author of this essay is a self-confessed failed fiction-writing, over-thinking antagonist, who knows full well his opinion is as worthy as the next man's. From the start he states all this is conjecture and shouldn't be taken seriously; after all, it's only politics.