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2017: Through the Populist Looking Glass
The main question at the start of the year is whether the post-1945 world order, now in its eighth decade, can be sustained once US President-elect Donald Trump takes office this month. To address that question, it is essential to understand how sustainable Trump’s power will be.
https://prosyn.org/dVGOmja
A new year is supposed to begin in hope. Even in the darkest days of World War II, New Year celebrations were sustained by the belief that somehow the tide would turn toward peace. There was vision then, too. Writing after the fall of France in 1940, Arthur Koestler insisted that the “whole problem was to fix [Germans’] political libido on a banner more fascinating than the swastika, and that the only one which would do is the stars and stripes of the European Union.” Others, too, were already imagining the international institutions and domestic reforms – enfranchisement of women in France, the British National Health Service, the United States’ GI Bill – that would ground the post-war global order.