Historian Robert Kagan has put his finger on the resurgence of authoritarianism in the US and around the world with a brilliant article, "The Strongmen Strike Back." Kagan's explanation of why we are where we are makes clear that authoritarianism represents the great challenge to the liberal democratic order. By liberal democratic order we mean a society organized along the lines laid out in the Declaration of Independence, where individual rights and citizen participation in governance are the paramount values.
What Kagan points out is that this construct doesn't specifically deal with a range of security impulses common to humans, impulses that are traditionally met by such institutions as tribe, culture and ethnicity, among others.
His argument is the best I've seen. The article is rather lengthy but you will get the gist in the first few pages. After that it rings with tremendous insights throughout. Unless these issues can be addressed human freedom, already in retreat in many quarters of the globe, may face an increasingly uphill fight in the years ahead.
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