Andrew Sullivan’s interesting and wide-ranging piece - Democracies end when they are too democratic:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html
A few highlights from Sullivan’s article –
“The web’s
algorithms all but removed any editorial judgment, and the effect soon had
cable news abandoning even the pretense of asking “Is this relevant?” or “Do we
really need to cover this live?” in the rush toward ratings bonanzas. In the
end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic, measured far more
accurately than any other medium had ever done before.
…
In Eric Hoffer’s
classic 1951 tract, The True Believer, he sketches the dynamics of a genuine
mass movement. He was thinking of the upheavals in Europe in the first half of
the century, but the book remains sobering, especially now. Hoffer’s core
insight was to locate the source of all truly mass movements in a collective
sense of acute frustration. Not despair, or revolt, or resignation — but
frustration simmering with rage. Mass movements, he notes (as did Tocqueville
centuries before him), rarely arise when oppression or misery is at its worst
(say, 2009); they tend to appear when the worst is behind us but the future
seems not so much better (say, 2016). It is when a recovery finally gathers
speed and some improvement is tangible but not yet widespread that the anger
begins to rise.”--
Robert Kagan’s (senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution) piece – This is how
fascism comes to America
UPDATES: Global Fascism
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/world/europe/rise-of-donald-trump-tracks-growing-debate-over-global-fascism.html
MIT economist Simon Johnson - Donald the Destroyer
Washington Post’s Richard Cohen on Trump –
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-taught-me-to-fear-my-fellow-americans/2016/05/30/1b364736-242a-11e6-aa84-42391ba52c91_story.html