From the latest issue of the LRB
We were warned by Richard Rorty in 1998:
Something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.
We were warned by Sheldon Wolin in 2003:
The elements are in place … a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent on reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favour a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers. That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors.
We were warned by Carl Jung in 1938:
He is like a man who listens intently to a stream of suggestions in a whispered voice from a mysterious source and then acts on them … The true leader is always led. We can see it work in him. He himself has referred to his Voice … That is why he makes political judgments which turn out to be right against the opinions of all his advisers … When this happens, it means only that the information gathered by his unconscious, and reaching his consciousness by means of his exceptional talent, has been more nearly correct than that of all the others, German or foreign, who attempted to judge the situation and who reached conclusions different from his. And of course, it also means that, having this information at hand, he is willing to act upon it.
How my heart sings 