Who Goes Nazi?

He talked about the Nazis and the war, and then he advanced the startling theory that Hitler’s admiration of the United States had inspired him to use American history as a model for his conquest of Europe. Look at the parallels, Born said, and it’s not as far-fetched as you’d think: extermination of the Indians is turned into the extermination of

John Doris’s book Lack of Character noted that “situational factors are often better predictors of behaviour than personal factors.” Baggini suggests that plenty of Germans living under the Third Reich would otherwise have led “blameless lives” if they had not been put in an environment that brought out their worst selves. By the same token, “many

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh

The key question for Lippmann wasn’t whether the average person was intelligent enough to make decisions about public policy; it was whether the average person could ever know enough to choose intelligently.