America, what have you done?
You chose fascism over democracy.
You chose hate over hope, oligarchs over experts, patriarchy over equality.
You chose repression, theocracy, violence.
You chose anger, lies, insults, threats.
You chose a felon over a prosecutor.
You chose a dictator over the rule of law.
You chose Putin and his puppet.
Why?
Men gather the clouds, and then they complain of the tempests that follow.
Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France (1796) Chapter III, p. 3
Every nation gets the government it deserves.
Joseph de Maistre, Letter 76 (27 August 1811); published in Lettres et Opuscules.
The citizens of the world’s democracies now must live with the undeniable knowledge that they are capable of embracing illiberal movements and attacking their own liberties as a matter of their own free will rather than as the result of a disaster or foreign conquest. Worse, the budding authoritarians who live among us now know it too. They have a demonstrated market for what they are selling. They will be back, and the next time they will bring glossier and better-packaged versions of dictatorship than the ragged prototypes this first wave of loud and pushy salesmen offered.
Tom Nichols: Our Own Worst Enemy, p. xiii, Oxford University Press, 2021
https://americanliterature.com/author/alexander-pope/poem/the-dunciad
The Dunciad by Alexander Pope, 1743:
“You by whose care, in vain decried and curst,
Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first…”
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/how-tiktok-x-helped-trump-beat-harris-2024
Disinformation on demand
Legacy media shoulders significant blame for their “sanewashing” of Trump’s incoherency and deteriorating mental state. Voters believed Trump could fix a steadily improving economy despite his promotion of inflationary tariffs. The media even presented Trump’s rants as cogent discussions of economic theory.