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Go to Economist.com and get your first month free. You're going to. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

Hi, I'm Nathaniel Rechman, Persuasion's editorial assistant.

Back in October, I wrote a story called The Simbleton Manifesto.

It came out of a frustration of doing increasingly simplistic slogans

being substituted for actual policy proposals.

From Trump's plan to build the wall, to demands to defund the police,

it felt like we were living in a world where people were increasingly

uninterested in solving real world problems with sensible solutions.

Looking back through my old notes from university, I found a term first used by the sociologist Seymour Lipsett and Earl Rabe in their 1970 classic, the politics of unreason.

Simplism, as they called it, seemed to describe almost perfectly what we were seeing today.

My article took this idea and tried to flesh out its implications.

Using Trump's border wall as the definitive example of Simplism policy, I came up with

false strands which I thought illuminated how

symbolism worked and why it was so damaging. First was the fact that

simplest assumed the solution to our problems was so obvious that debate

was unnecessary. We saw this in Trump's references to the

...