And So It Begins. How Does It End? November 21, 2024November 20, 2024 Ed Luce begins his piece in The Financial Review: It is time to study Caligula. That most notorious of Roman emperors killed what was left of the republic and centralised authority in himself. Donald Trump does not need to make his horse a senator; it will be enough to keep appointing charlatans to America’s great offices of state. Rome was not destroyed by outsiders. Its demolition was the work of barbarians from within. The question of whether Trump consciously wants to destroy the US federal government is irrelevant. You measure a leader by his actions not by his heart. To judge from what Trump has done within a fortnight of winning the presidency, his path is destruction. David Remnick ends his piece in The New Yorker: One of the perils of life under authoritarian rule is that the leader seeks to drain people of their strength. A defeatism takes hold. There is an urge to pull back from civic life. An American retreat from liberal democracy—a precious yet vulnerable inheritance—would be a calamity. Indifference is a form of surrender. . . Vladimir Putin welcomes Trump’s return not only because it makes his life immeasurably easier in his determination to subjugate a free and sovereign Ukraine but because it validates his assertion that American democracy is a sham . . . All that matters is power and self-interest . . . Putin reminds us that liberal democracy is not a permanence; it can turn out to be an episode. One of the great spirits of modern times, the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel, wrote in “Summer Meditations,” “There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.” During the long Soviet domination of his country, Havel fought valiantly for liberal democracy, inspiring in others acts of resilience and protest. He was imprisoned for that. Then came a time when things changed, when Havel was elected President and, in a Kafka tale turned on its head, inhabited the Castle, in Prague. Together with a people challenged by years of autocracy, he helped lead his country out of a long, dark time. Our time is now dark, but that, too, can change. It happened elsewhere. It can happen here. Do something.