Democracy on life support: Donald Trump's first year in office

Under Trump, the plague of mid-20th century authoritarianism and apocalyptic populism have returned in a unique American form

Donald Trump was elected president of the United States a year ago this week.

His ascendancy in American politics has made visible a culture of cruelty, a contempt for civic literacy, a corrupt mode of governance and a disdain for informed judgment that has been decades in the making.

It also points to the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life, the erosion of any sense of shared citizenship and the death of commanding visions.

As he visits Asia this week in a trip that those in the White House, as usual, feared