It’s fine to blame individual people for bad choices, but not to then despair of ‘the people’ en masse. Ironically, people voted for Brexit because of a similar attitude to the one you’re taking - that everything’s going wrong, that you can’t trust anybody (these days), that we need a big change to avoid nebulous disaster. But, in fact, none of that is true, either then or now. Most people don’t support Reform, most people didn’t even support Brexit (and only a very narrow majority even of those who voted supported it). People (and countries) are a mess of contradictory thoughts and feelings, and we shouldn’t focus only on the negatives!

As to politicians, it is right to think badly of them, because elite opinion does effect mass opinion, whether we like it or not. So, traditional parties from both wings adopting accommodationist policies towards the far right has made the far right worse; that is the cause of our problems and so that should be the target of our anger.

People have busy lives and arent experts in all topics. It was historically the job of the media to present the issues as neutrally and as impartially as possible to the masses.

Instead we have soundbites, personality politics, and outright right-wing bias from official channels.