We are no longer viewing events at a distance. This isn’t history. I’ve talked often about the dangers to democracy, our democracy. But now they are here, they are immediate.

Hilary Mantel referred to history as ‘the plan of the positions we take when we stop the dance to note them down’. We are the dance.

We’ve always had sharp differences of view, left and right and in-between. But the principles of representative government, freedom of speech and association, and the rule of law, have in the post-war era, in the Western democracies, never been under threat. Until now. Could it now be, literally, them or us?

We’ve always had a ruling class, defined by money or land, or both, but our democracy has over two hundred years more or less (we could of course go back much further) held them in check. But now we have social media businesses kowtowing to Trump (Silicon Valley likewise), while shedding the responsibilities they once avowed, And the message that they and other media convey so readily is that here – in the UK and in the USA – we’re broken societies, failed states.

We’re at risk of surrendering our democracy too easily.

Reading a review of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, ‘Shadow Ticket’, I came across the following. The words are the reviewer’s, not Pynchon’s. ‘Fearing disorder and rejecting freedom’s responsibilities, we willingly cede liberty in exchange for simplicity and a false sense of safety. Fascist tendencies have always been lodged deep in the American grain.’

Are we now more willing to cede power to a new ruling class, one that will be disinclined to relinquish that power through the democratic process?

Extending that line of reasoning… it’s argued we want safety from a defined enemy, who the media have helped define for us and who, in the case of the UK and the USA, is an immigrant population who are deemed to be taking our jobs and preying on our services, and on our women and children as well. Take it up another level, and there are conspiracies, and a class, in our case a self-serving middle-class, who are in effect conspiring against us.

The direction of travel is ominous.

Reading Paul Preston’s ‘Architects of Terror’ I’ve been made aware of the role that an entirely fictional ‘Jewish-masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy’ played in justifying the violence of the Spanish Civil War. Franco likened his victory to that of the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, some 450 years before: ‘We have not shed the blood of our dead to return to a decadent past, to the sad liberalism that lost us Cuba and the Philippines.’

Germany after 1933 and Spain from 1936 are just two examples of how easy it is to slip from democratic government, vilified as ‘sad liberalism’, to autocracy.

The violence in Palestine and Gaza, in the Yemen and Sudan, the brutality of ISIS, Boko Haram and Islamic State, have all seemed distant. We didn’t ourselves feel threatened. Putin invading Ukraine has brought it to our doorstep and yet swathes of people across Europe are willing to support him. He represents an old order which, however divided, gave people security. Young people headed to towns, to western Europe, industries closed or moved away, remittances from abroad weren’t enough to secure either prosperity or pride. We’re not yet faced in Europe with the effective transfer of power from the courts to one man, as is happening with the Supreme Court’s connivance in the USA. But we’re heading that way.

We liberals have always thought we had the moral high ground. We’re locked into the old post-war order and it’s as if nothing has changed. But swathes of our populations want to claim back that ground. They don’t have the same sense of moral niceties that we do. To them, our high morality is sham. Our cities prosper while local towns, once the backbone of our prosperity, are in decline. Democracy has failed them. It is our game, no longer theirs.

And look at the language I’m using. Is it really us or them? And which side am I on? Could I be persuaded that democracy has failed, and some form of autocracy, backed up as necessary by violence, might be the only answer?

OK, that’s a rhetorical question, for me at least. But for how many others might it be a reality?