Status Updates From The Second Coming of the KK...

The Klannish spirit—fearful, angry, gullible to sensationalist falsehoods, in thrall to demagogic leaders and abusive language, hostile to science and intellectuals, committed to the dream that everyone can be a success in business if they only try—lives on.

Illiberal in their suspicion of dissent and the rights of minority groups, clinging to fictive images of their nations as homogeneous and destined to be so, resentful of cultural elites yet accepting the dominance of economic elites, they direct anger at big-city cosmopolitans and at groups outside their imagined homogeneity.

Every such movement (right-wing populists) arises also from specific local and national contexts, and all are different. But they share characteristics, as a particular but recognizable type of conservatism.

When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

The journalist Dorothy Thompson, who spent years covering Nazi Germany,& lived through the 1920s heyday of the Klan, pointed out that “no people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. . . .