This is How the Right Destroys Democracy

None of what's happening in the U.S. or Europe is much of a surprise. The playbook for authoritarians is pretty predictable: undermine democratic politics by following the letter of the law while systematically undermining its norms and institutions, find social cleavages you can exploit to pit people against one another, and wring every advantage you can out of social and economic crises.

What infuriates me is that, just like Europeans in the 1930's, today's Western center and center-left elites are so blind and pusillanimous that they are incapable of coming to grips with either the Great Recession, the rise of Teabaggers and the National Fronts, or the consequences of their own mistakes.