Unusually Level Headed Piece

From the Atlantic pointing out how all of the Trump alarmists have been wrong.

How could so many get it wrong? Underlying these various accounts of doom is a major analytical flaw. In some sense, the flaw is so obvious that I wasn’t entirely aware of it until I started thinking about this article. If we exclude cases of military conquest or occupation, as occurred during World War II, there is no clear case of a long-standing, consolidated democracy becoming an autocracy. Democracies backslide—it is a spectrum, after all. But democracies, or at least certain kinds of democracies, do not “die.”  

Germany is a touchstone for any conversation about the fragility of democracy. But Germany, when Adolf Hitler entered politics, was a young democracy, and the particular democratic configuration known as the Weimar Republic was even younger, having been established only in 1918. Young democracies are fragile. Moreover, Germany was suffering from historical afflictions that the United States—and, for that matter, most other countries—is not likely to experience again. In an essay for The American Interest, and also the subject of his forthcoming book Democratic Stability in an Age of Crisis, Jørgen Møller lays out the case in convincing detail. Germany, Austria, and Italy, he writes, were “bedeviled by the legacy of the World War,” which “created revanchist yearnings in all three countries, which could be harnessed by undemocratic forces on the Right that had, in the first place, been brutalized by four years of fighting in the trenches.”

Here's another hint: if you know any of the people who compare Trump to Hitler, you know these are the very last people who would every ACTUALLY stand up to fascists when they are ACTUALLY in power. They - and this is a generalization of course - are more likely to be the types leading you to the gallows.