“In fact if there is one good thing to come out of
the current political uncertainty, it is that complacency about American
democracy will be harder to sustain in future. Let us not worry overly about
how to define a fascist: there are plenty of other nasty kinds of authoritarian
regimes. It is the crisis of democracy that should concern us more. We know by
now what can happen when the institutions of representative government become
bitterly polarised, when large swathes of the electorate lose the capacity to
compromise, when power and wealth pile up in the hands of elites and when those
in charge of the state give up the challenge of responding to widespread
economic hardship. History is not a one-way street and democracy has turned
authoritarian before. Can it happen again? Why not?”— Columbia
University historian Mark Mazower, “Fascism Revisited,” Financial Times, Apr. 14-15, 2018
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