This concluding paragraph of Mr. Divine’s April 13 , 2018 essay leave no doubt where he stands on Orbán, as not just the harbinger of decline, but where ‘Democracy Disappears’ in the America of Trump.
We cannot take anything for granted anymore. What was once a theoretical collapse of a liberal democracy now has a proof of principle. Do not ask when this choice between liberalism and illiberalism will come to America. It is already here.
Mr. Divine writes for an audience whose historical memory is, to state the obvious, subject to its in-curiousness, allied to a need for some kind of leader in the political present: Andy Divine’s self-presentation as an Intellectual, who can be trusted to be a model of probity, meets the almost ‘standards’ of his readership.
Jean-François Revel’s ‘How Democracies Perish’ was published in 1983. Its paperback edition proclaimed in caps :
THE POWERFUL BESTSELLER THAT EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD READ.
And brief quotations from book reviews:
“Chillingly persuasive.” -Newsday
” A stirring alarm” Chicago Sun-Times
In less than a decade the Soviet Union was no more, and the Easter European counties were now beginning their self-emancipation from Soviet tutelage, to express it in Kantian terms .
Mr. Divine is an Augustinian, whose search for modern day apostates is an all consuming obsession: his Bell Curve advocacy, and its current iteration against Black political activists , his War Mongering, his programmatic Anti-Leftism , and his targeting of Students is about his malign, unslakable Neo-Conservativism. But all of his toxic moralizing politics are now dissolved into his Anti- Orbán polemic. Like Augustine’s search for the Arianists, Donatists, and Pelagain apostates was a necessary apologetic for the evolving Christian Theology of the Church, in its halting steps toward hegemony.
Almost Marx
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/andrew-sullivan-a-democracy-disappears.html
