One of the first intellectual histories that I read in graduate school was Ben Alpers’s Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture (2003), which traces the cultural cachet of authoritarianism during the 1920s and 1930s. In a period of ideological exhaustion and widening inequality, many Americans saw Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin as the only politicians with coherent and caring political projects. That the interests of the common man would be safest in the hands of a tiny cohort of economic and political elites—what we might now call the populist paradox—was just emerging as a political script. Fast forward to the present, Read more