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Fred asks questions that we should all consider. America - or a good portion of it at least - voted for the Man on the White Horse. We got him.

Those who curl their lips and sneeringly refer to Trump as a latter-day Napoleon are half right. What they tend to overlook is the historical context for Napoleon's reign. For all of his personal faults and egotism, Napoleon sought to bring order to a fractious and warring Europa. An examination of the order he sought to impose reveals an effort to empower and protect the common man. Were he not so undermined by those who sought to preserve the old order, we would have a more stable and peaceful Europe today. Makes Nappy less the ogre than modern historian would have him.

Trump shares many of the same characteristics with Napoleon. Just what we really need now..

An exercise for the reader: Calculate Fred’s Fraction for this recommendation: Those on Wall Street responsible for the subprime disaster should be summarily arrested and have their delicate asses immediately put, without recourse, into the general population of Leavenworth for ten years.

Well, except that Fred is simply wrong in his basic premise. It was the Democrat politicians that caused the subprime disaster. Sure, a number of people on Wall Street profited by it. But the big banks were forced into it against all past precedent and experience in mortgage lending.

The Authoritarian impulse is very dangerous, but it is fatal when combined with false perceptions about reality.

False perceptions about reality brought about the Bolsheviks, the NAZIs, Mao, Pol Poi, Castro, and, recently, Venenzuela.

Closer approximations of reality brought about Franco in Spain, and Pinochet in Chile.

This was excellent.

The rigorous censorship we call “political correctness” prevents expression of ideas disliked by the ruling classes. It leads to surprises. It is why the Talking Heads were consistently, universally, and utterly wrong about Donald Trump’s chances of being elected. They continue to suffer from this cerebrocolonic congruence.

And that was priceless. LOL

Hence their eternal appeal in times of chaos. Often they lead to a society that no one would want to live in.

The Authoritarian impulse may be the only solution in some instances. Unfortunately there is no record or trace of groups or societies which tried everything else: "flower power," "love conquers all," "we can reason with them..."

Similarly, if the participants are familiar with concepts like The Social Contract, ethics, morals, and "restraint for the greater good" the likelihood of collective survival is possible; without them, their fate is oblivion; removal from history without a trace.
That is the fate that nature demands, and nature is relentless and uncompromising.

The Hutu-Tutsi mutual genocide is a glaring lesson of one extreme.

As is the observation of the opposite (more civilized) condition : "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

The magic concept here, and the difference between civilization and barbarity is time, place, participants; the words "chaos" and "often" : context.

Those on Wall Street responsible for the subprime disaster should be summarily arrested and have their delicate asses immediately put, without recourse, into the general population of Leavenworth for ten years.

Is it a coincidence that the most commonly recognized champion of the subprime disaster was a sodomite, a pervert, a deviant?? An elected criminal?

The authoritarian impulse arises when legitimate government can’t or won’t maintain order. Which is beginning to look like now.

In all fairness, that is the perfect description of Obama's eight years.

"Now" is standing on the top of the cliff and wondering if "authoritarian impulse" is our way out, or more of the same...

The real difficulty with the authoritarian impulse is that it runs so closely parallel to the legitimate operation of government. ...Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men... That is, parenthetically, the reason progressives are always finding new rights: it offers the chance for more government to "protect" them. Now that's an Authoritarian Impulse!

It is one thing for the government itself to fall to this temptation. Government employees are, for the most part, well-meaning people with a conviction that their jobs make people's lives better (not necessarily an accurate conviction, but that's another matter). But when we have violence openly and shamelessly committed on a population in an attempt by a private group to intimidate it into ideological submission, that's quite another matter and is one thing that cranks Fred's ratio into the danger zone. As he points out, when it is exacerbated by government collusion as it has been in the case of BLM in the United States and radical Islam in Sweden, et al, look out.

This may be Jefferson's Tree of Liberty getting thirsty. The first target of that has been an oppressive government in the United States in the form of its previous administration. Trump is neither Mussolini nor Napoleon, he's the guy who might prevent one. But he's only one man, and the roots of the authoritarian impulse run deep. The second target of this is likely to be the complicit: the radicals, the politically correct, the activists, the bullies. If it reaches that point the Tree of Liberty is likely to drown. If it reaches that point some of us may not care anymore.