Cleaning off my desktop after months of neglect I came across this fragment of text by Thomas Mann on the subject of German fascism:

This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstacy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face. (From ‘An Appeal to Reason’ in Thomas Mann: Order of the Day, Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades, p. 57, trans. by Helen T. Lowe-Porter, Knopf (1942).

I suspect I probably ‘archived’ it as an equally apt description of American politics.

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