Tag: authoritarianism

Why have we stopped comparing Trump to Andrew Jackson and started comparing him to William McKinley?

Democracy in America is not well, but what ails it? According to one diagnosis, the country is suffering from multiple strains of one-man rule—tyranny, fascism, authoritarianism. Variants of the virus originate in the people and their passions. Citizens vote the tyrant into power. Racism, misogyny, or some other affliction of cruelty and fear, fuels their votes. Democracy is not just threatened by disease. It is the disease. This idea, of despotism from the demos, has a distinguished pedigree. Plato and Aristotle thought that all, or nearly all, forms of tyranny arise from the people. The vulgar many oppose the virtuous few, whose ethos of remove is an irritant to the many. Stirred by a demagogue, the people and their leader […]

Trump’s power is shakier than American democracy

“As soon as Trump became a serious contender for the presidency, journalists and historians began analogizing him to Hitler. Even the formulator of Godwin’s Law, which was meant to put a check on the reductio ad Hitlerum, said: ‘Go ahead and refer to Hitler when you talk about Trump.’ After Trump’s election, the comparisons mounted, for understandable reasons. “But as we approach the end of Trump’s first year in power, the Hitler analogies seem murky and puzzling, less metaphor than mood…. “There’s little doubt that Trump’s regime is a cause for concern, on multiple grounds, as I and many others have written. But we should not mistake mood for moment. Even one that feels so profoundly alien as ours does now. For that, too, has a history in America. “During […]