“The world must be made safe for democracy,” President Woodrow Wilson declared in his 1917 war message to Congress.
To engineer support for the cause, he proceeded to shut down civil liberties, create a national propaganda machine, and set the modern administrative state in motion. In the name of democracy, he instituted compulsory conscription and jailed “disloyal” adversaries.
A generation later, Brave New World author Aldous Huxley scornfully observed that a holy impulse had turned democracy into a “universally and absolutely true theology, which it is all humanity’s highest duty to put into practice.”
Huxley’s theological imperative is now in its terminal, flamboyant state. It comes to life, Elmer Gantry-style, on MSNBC, where all things Trump-related and Repub …