Getting the Government We Deserve

If you slavishly follow a blatant con artist of a leader because you enjoy watching him say and do hateful things to people you don’t like, you deserve to have him come back and burn down the tattered remnants of your life.

The Madness of Crowds

In his immortal antiwar novel Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. mentions in passing a nineteenth century work called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I cannot recommend this 1858 book by the Scottish poet and journalist Charles Mackay highly enough for anyone wishing to understand our own times, when millions of people in