Let's back up to 2017, when Amazon first announced their HQ2 hunt. Right off the bat, the sweepstakes led to silly, folksy gimmicks by local politicians.
Because the world is changing and our mothers' rules, which might have seemed folksy in the 90s, the stuff of immigrant standup routines, are now unfathomable to younger generations.
The effect is deflationary bathos, which nails what Aeschylus sees as the folksy and sentimental way in which Euripides plays on the emotions of his audience (lines 1052–88).
Remember Herman Cain, the pizza tycoon whose folksy manner and populist tax plans propelled him to giddy heights in 2011, before sex scandals dragged him down and out of the presidential primaries?
The setting was the White House family quarters and the tone was folksy and familiar-but the message from Ronald and Nancy Reagan was written in a spirit of earnest alarm.