The Dreyfus affair was sparked by a single cause célèbre. Just one court case —one disputed trial—exposed unresolvable divisions between people who had previously not really been aware that they disagreed with one another, or at least had not been aware that it mattered. Two decades ago, different understandings of "Poland" must already have been

Maurras eventually aligned himself with the Vichy regime that collaborated with Hitler after 1940—using, of course, the slogan "France First."

And this is what Trump has proven: beneath the surface of the American consensus, the belief in our founding fathers and the faith in our ideals, there lies another America—Buchanan's America, Trump's America—one that sees no important distinction between democracy and dictatorship. This America feels no attachment to other democracies; this

This form of moral equivalence—the belief that democracy is no different, at base, from autocracy—is a familiar argument, and one long used by authoritarians. Back in 1986, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a scholar, intellectual, and Reagan's UN ambassador, wrote of the danger both to the United States and to its allies from the rhetoric of moral equivalence

Trump has no knowledge of the American story and so cannot have any faith in it. He has no understanding of or sympathy for the language of the founders, so he cannot be inspired by it. Since he doesn't believe American democracy is good, he has no interest in an America that aspires to be a model among nations. In a 2017 interview with Bill

Buchanan's pessimism derives partially from his sense of white decline but also, like some of those diametrically opposed to him on the left, from his dislike of American foreign policy. Over the years he has evolved away from ordinary isolationism and toward what seems to be a belief that America's role in the world is pernicious, if not evil. In

In the past century and a half, the most despairing, the most apocalyptic visions of American civilization usually came from the left. Inspired by European thinkers and movements—Marxism, anarchism, Bolshevism—the American radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mourned the arrival of a hellish modernity and deplored the

Although several speakers had talked about oppressive left-wing ideology at universities, Hungary is the only European country to have shut down an entire university, to have put academic bodies such as the Hungarian Academy of Sciences under direct government control, and to have removed funding from university departments that the ruling party

A similar international network went into high gear after the 2019 fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. ISD tracked thousands of posts from people claiming to have seen Muslims "celebrating" the fire, as well as from people posting rumors and pictures that purported to prove there had been deliberate arson. A site called CasoAislado had one