As the Cold War wound down almost four decades ago, a top adviser to reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev warned the West that "we are going to do the most terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy.”
In the celebrations of the triumph of Western liberal democracy, of free trade and open societies, few considered how disorienting the end of a binary world of good and evil would be.
But when the spread of democracy in newly freed societies looked more like the spread of divisive global capitalism, when social fracture grew and shared truth died, when hope collapsed in the communities technology left behind, a yearning for the certainties of the providential authoritarian leader set in.
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