The similarities to the world that produced the Russian revolution are too close for comfort, argues Adrian Wooldridge
Western policy was dedicated to making sure that the problems that had produced authoritarianism, both left and right, could not occur again.
.. The Allies created a triad of global institutions—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations—that were supposed to stabilise the global economy and prevent conflict.
.. Mr Putin is much more the embodiment of the spirit of his age than is the outgoing American president, Barack Obama.
.. The Democrats might not have lost the election if they hadn’t nominated Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of a decaying establishment
.. the proportion of after-tax income going to the top 1% doubled from 8% in 1979 to 17% in 2007.
.. Part of the solution lies in exposing liberalism’s enemies as the paper tigers that they are: Mr Putin, in particular, presides, by fear and fraud, over a country whose economic power is stalling and whose people are plagued by poverty and illness. Other strongmen around the world are far less tough than they claim.
.. They need to take worries about immigration more seriously and check their instinct to ride roughshod over minorities such as evangelical Christians. They also need to redouble their efforts to fix capitalism’s most obvious problems. High levels of inequality are threatening stability. Economic concentration is allowing companies to extract record profits. Overregulation is driving businesspeople to distraction.