The New York Times has a piece by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub and it's a little video where they point out that over the last 200 years we've gone from basically no democracies in the world - or a couple, ours being one of the very first. At the time that the United States became a democracy in 1787, arguably, or even 1776, there were a few other countries that arguably were democratic, but not many.

And then we saw a steady rise up to the Civil War, and then during the Civil War it kind of dropped down, and then a steady rise up to World War Two, and then it kind of dropped down a little bit. And then after World War Two another steady rise to the point where about half of all the countries in the world are small d democratic - I'm not talking Democratic Republican kind of thing, I'm talking about democracy in a republic.

And now we're seeing so many of these democracies backslide into authoritarianism. We have seen it in the Philippines with Duterte, you see it in Russia with Putin, you see it in Turkey with Erdoğan, you see it in Hungary with Viktor Orbán. It is happening in country after country after country that were formerly highly democratic countries.

And we're seeing it in the United States, the rise of this populist authoritarianism. Donald Trump is basically using the same playbook as the people that I just mentioned who have taken countries that fundamentally at their core had strong democratic institutions.

-Thom

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