“Admit it, you just want your own dictator“:

this is certainly not the first time we’ve seen voters adopt a cultish reverence for a strong-willed presidential candidate without any perceptible deference to the foundational ideals of the country whose personal charisma was supposed to shatter obstacles standing in the way of making America great again. Many of the same people anxious about the authoritarian overtones of Trump’s appeal were unconcerned about the intense adulation that adoring crowds showered on Obama in 2008, though the spectacle featured similarly troubling signs—the iconography, the messianic messaging, and the implausible promises of government-produced comfort and safety. Just as President Trump fans will judge every person on how nice or mean they are to Trump, so too, those rooting against Obama were immediately branded unpatriotic or racist.

It’s frightening how many people support Trump or Hillary. Of course, they’re also the candidates with the biggest negatives, so that’s sort of encouraging.

[Update a few minutes later]

2016: The Democrats theme is totalitarianism. Not that totalitarianism is anything new to the Left, which is what the Democrats have essentially become.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: Sad that it takes a Canadian to point out: “Don’t blame Trump; blame America“:

I agree Trump is ridiculous — but he is an illustration of a problem and not its cause. Trump is not the swamp: he is the creature emerging from it. For however ridiculous and appalling his candidacy may be, it is no worse and no more ridiculous and appalling than the whole pattern of American politics at this time.

Is his candidacy more lunatic than the idea of a third President Bush or a second President Clinton? More despairing than the idea of an America so bereft of political talent that two families supply the major pool?

Is he more manipulative than President “you can keep you doctor, you can keep you plan” Obama? Is he less venal or arrogant than Hillary “it’s my server and it’s my State Department” Clinton?

Is his candidacy less perplexing than parts of the Democratic party’s fixations? Is it less lunatic that the spectacle of a former governor, Martin O’Malley — one of the few Democrats wandering the no-man’s land of opposition to the Hillary machine — apologizing, more than once, for asserting out loud that “all lives matter”? The Democrats have drilled so deep into the factionalism and demagoguery of identity politics — sexual and ethnic — that any appeal to universalism, any echo of the greatest phrase in the Declaration of Independence — “all men are created equal” — is now toxic? Donald Trump may be annoying, but he has said or done nothing that equals the fatuousness of a system in which the claim that all lives matter is seen as a troubling deviancy?

[Via Ed Driscoll]