America had lots of warning about this moment

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Donald Trump’s authoritarian instincts and imperialist ambitions have spawned plenty of how-did-we-get-here hand-wringing among Americans. That, in turn, has produced much commentary about the signs missed, the predictions ignored.

Perhaps none of the forecasts were as prescient as the one from Richard Rorty, an American philosopher whose warning about the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. was dusted off in 2016, when Mr. Trump first got elected. It has found even greater relevance and meaning in his second term.

“Members of labour unions and unorganized unskilled workers will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking and to prevent jobs from being exported,” the late Mr. Rorty wrote in Achieving Our Country, a book based on lectures he’d given at Harvard in 1997. “Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers – themselves desperately afraid of being downsized – are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

“At that point something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”

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Mr. Rorty imagined the gains made by Black and brown Americans would be wiped out. “Jocular contempt” for women would come back in fashion. “All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. He [this strongman] will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there is so little resistance to his inevitable rise.”

Mr. Rorty argued that this phenomenon would be the fault of many on the Left, who would become increasingly less interested in the real-world concerns of the white middle class in favour of identity politics, diversity and inclusion and culture wars. “Outside the academy [leftist intellectuals],” Mr. Rorty wrote, “Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place.”

Sounds like the genesis of the MAGA movement.

Even before Mr. Rorty, the American writer Sinclair Lewis imagined a similar scenario in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. In it, a senator named Buzz Windrip becomes the U.S.’s first fascist leader, a president who was “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic.” Mr. Windrip brands the press liars. He’s obsessed with the U.S. balance of trade. He promises to hand Americans cheques of up to $5,000 a year. His believers become convinced he’s been sent to rescue the country from financial and cultural ruin, and “they raised hands to him in worship,” Mr. Lewis wrote.

With three years left in the Trump administration, who knows where things will stand by the time the President’s term expires? How far will his efforts to extend America’s global footprint take him? Will the masked ICE officers abducting people off the streets become regular features of American life? Will state-sanctioned police be going door to door, looking for those who don’t fit the profile of people Mr. Trump wants in the U.S.?

Will the great divide Mr. Trump has created in his country become a final, unbridgeable chasm that leads to a fatal, internal conflagration?

Well before Mr. Rorty – millennia before, in fact – another philosopher predicted democracy’s demise. In The Republic, written some time around 375 BC, Plato argued that despite its many benefits, democracy had inherent flaws that would lead to its downfall.

He theorized that democracy’s emphasis on freedom and equality created conditions for a demagogue to spring forth and establish autocratic rule. In Plato’s mind, a republic, at its zenith, would celebrate enormous freedoms and reject forms of authority and self-restraint, which eventually would sow rampant public disorder.

Plato imagined a would-be dictator promoting himself as a protector of the values many in the country held dear. He would use lies and over-the-top rhetoric to bolster his views and positions. And he would incite foreign conflicts to distract the population and create a perception of strength and respect abroad.

This sounds very much like where the U.S. finds itself today: at the mercy of an authoritarian leader growing in strength and fearlessness by the day as he aggressively pushes the boundaries of his powers.

So Americans can’t say they weren’t warned about the dark place in which they currently find themselves. They absolutely were – and instead of changing course, many of them laid the groundwork for it.