What We Get Wrong About America's Crisis of Democracy; By Adam Gopnik

"The interesting question is not what causes authoritarianism but what has ever suspended it. Lurking behind all of this is a faulty premise—that the descent into authoritarianism is what needs to be explained, when the reality is that . . . it always happens. The default condition of humankind is not to thrive in broadly egalitarian and stable democratic arrangements that get unsettled only when something happens to unsettle them. The default condition of humankind, traced across thousands of years of history, is some sort of autocracy.America itself has never had a particularly settled commitment to democratic, rational government. "