There are times when it appears that we are reliving the 1930’s; nationalism, some of it thuggish, is on the march. You could attribute it to bad economic conditions and the failures of liberal government, but the fact is that things aren’t even close to being as bad as they were in the 1930’s, unless you live in Greece. Growth in the US, which elected Trump, the Philippines, which elected Duterte, and the UK, which supported Brexit, is actually fairly robust. The logical question, then, is what is going on here?
I may be old-fashioned, but I can’t help thinking that the current impatience with democratic norms is being driven by two factors: technology that provides us with instant self-gratification; and a universal comic book culture which leads us to believe that superheroes are there to save us if we can only identify them. As a result, Trump actually ran his campaign as a Bruce Wayne/Batman kind of figure, and there is plenty of reason to believe that Duterte actually is a vigilante.
This isn’t going to change until the new “superheroes” discredit themselves, and the supporters of liberal democracy work harder to make their case.