14 March

When governance is your job, it’s a bit like how everybody thinks they know about education, because they went to school. Everybody is a supposed expert in government, because they vote. Most don’t have a clue. For example, the two most ‘authoritarian’ regimes of our lifetimes. China and Russia. How did those regimes start? As democratic revolutions. Using ideas imported from the West. ‘The people’ uprising. The sort of thing people out there burning Teslas think is social progress. The rubbish 1960s-style activism has sold to us for decades now as the path to freedom. Are we noticing that Trump is like Lenin and Mao?