National Perspective: Americans face deep questions

Would you join the resistance if stuck in an authoritarian regime? A psychologist explains

Most of us like to believe we would have opposed the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany. We may even like to imagine that we would have bravely fought for the resistance to Nazism in the 1940s. But would we? Our ability to take a stand may be put to the test as authoritarianism is increasing worldwide. All electoral democracies can transform into autocracies. These are governments that restrict political and civil rights, centralise executive power…

National Perspective: Americans face deep questions

This is an era when the great certainties that ruled American life for nearly three generations are being questioned more deeply, more widely and more seriously than at any time in decades. When the Communist Soviet Union in 1939 agreed to a pact with Nazi Germany, an English diplomat remarked that “all the isms have become wasms.” So it may be in the United States, where the Donald Trump movement has raised many of the difficult, searing questi…