Populism isn’t just bad elites or gullible masses. It’s what happens when both sides lose the virtues that once held them together. Elites forget humility and justice, turning reason into arrogance; populists forget prudence and temperance, turning righteous anger into resentment.
HN itself is a kind of popu-elitism. Look at the other comments here. We're a crowd of self-identified “slow thinkers” who often post fast, intuitive reactions. The irony is that our intuitions here are shaped by analytic habits, not moral ones.
The real goal isn’t to think faster or slower, but to build a society that makes a virtuous life first possible, and then easy.