Well before Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, I sent a holiday greeting to my friends that read: "These times are not business as usual. Wishing you the best in a troubled world." Now I feel the need to share this message with the rest of the world. But before I do, I must tell you who I am and what I stand for.
I am an 86-year-old Hungarian Jew who became a U.S. citizen after the end of World War II. I learned at an early age how important it is what kind of political regime prevails. The formative experience of my life was the occupation of Hungary by Hitler's Germany in 1944. I probably would have perished had my father not understood the gravity of the situation. He arranged false identities for his family and for many other Jews; with his help, most survived.
In 1947, I escaped from Hungary, by then under Communist rule, to England. As a student at the London School of Economics, I came under the influence of the philosopher Karl Popper, and I developed my own philosophy, built on the twin pillars of fallibility and reflexivity. I distinguished between two kinds of political regimes: those in which people elected their leaders, who were then supposed to look after the interests of the electorate, and others where the rulers sought to manipulate their subjects to serve the rulers' interests. Under Popper's influence, I called the first kind of society open, the second, closed.
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