• Stephens begins with the observation that four countries are supporting, with arms and fighters,  Bashar al-Assad’s totalitarian Syria. And he asks why? “Why should a Shiite theocrat, a Russian kleptocrat, a Korean gourmand and a Chinese son of heaven unite so openly to rescue a foul and feeble Baathist dictatorship?”
• And his answers, at least to me, are convincing. For one, the four dictators want to see a popular rebellion against tyranny fail spectacularly. Why? Because they are all most afraid of a popular rebellion. And for two, they want no less to see America fail in its efforts to support a popular rebellion.
• America’s interest for Syria ought to be “foiling Dictatorship Inc.’s ambitions for the country.” But America is quite without an administration capable of devising, coordinating and executing a consistent military and diplomatic strategy. Above all, it would require what we no longer have, the belief in what used to be called the free world, a world with shared moral principles, broad interests, and long-term aspirations.
• Trump himself seems to have wanted his presidency to be all about having Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and their ilk as friends and dinner guests at Mar-a-Lago and then his playing golf with celebrities at his West Palm Beach International Club. This presidency, being entirely a product of his own pipe dream, never came about of course. Instead his presidency is something else, perhaps best described as his not being up to the task of being president, his first year or two in office being colored by a constant and growing frustration with his own failure to achieve his unrealistic goals for the country, these stemming most of all from his nearly complete ignorance of the country’s history.
• Without his yet jettisoning our democratic principals entirely, our individual freedoms, human rights, the rule of law,… Trump has revealed himself to be entirely without the Enlightenment values on which these principals are based, and on which the country was founded, values emphasizing tolerance, acceptance of differences, equality, human dignity, reason and the scientific outlook, and most important the healthy skepticism of the humanist who challenges conventional religious views, in particular superstition, intolerance, and bigotry, the very views that have characterized in large part Trump’s own presidency up until now. Trump’s sympathies for authoritarianism, for intolerance of differences, for bigotry, have prevented him from opposing the Putin, Xi, and Erdogan, as well as the other dictatorships of the Dictatorship Inc. of which Stephens is writing.

• 
  After reading Bret Stephens, and making a few comments of my own I happened to stumble on a piece from the Boston Review, by G. M. TAMÁS,
• On Post-Fascism, or the degradation of universal citizenship.
• I was struck by how close we were, Bret Stephens, G. M. Tamas,, and myself and as I’ve come to see since the presence of Donald Trump in the Oval Office,  hundreds of other writers and commentators, who are all describing pretty much the same thing, what Tamás calls the degradation of universal citizenship, what Stephens calls the renewed and powerful presence in our world of Dictatorship Inc., what I call the slow and painful jettison of the values of the Enlightenment that we thought for a good time were here to stay. Apparently they weren’t
• Anyway, here’s a selection from Tamas’s article in the Boston Review:

Before the Enlightenment, citizenship was a privilege, an elevated status limited by descent, class, race, creed, gender, political participation, morals, profession, patronage, and administrative fiat, not to speak of age and education. Active membership in the political community was a station to yearn for, civis Romanus sum the enunciation of a certain nobility. Policies extending citizenship may have been generous or stingy, but the rule was that the rank of citizen was conferred by the lawfully constituted authority, according to expediency. Christianity, like some Stoics, sought to transcend this kind of limited citizenship by considering it second-rate or inessential when compared to a virtual community of the saved. Freedom from sin was superior to the freedom of the city. During the long, medieval obsolescence of the civic, the claim for an active membership in the political community was superseded by the exigencies of just governance, and civic excellence was abbreviated to martial virtue.

Once citizenship was equated with human dignity, its extension to all classes, professions, both sexes, all races, creeds, and locations was only a matter of time. Universal franchise, the national service, and state education for all had to follow. Moreover, once all human beings were supposed to be able to accede to the high rank of a citizen, national solidarity within the newly egalitarian political community demanded the relief of the estate of Man, a dignified material existence for all, and the eradication of the remnants of personal servitude. The state, putatively representing everybody, was prevailed upon to grant not only a modicum of wealth for most people, but also a minimum of leisure, once the exclusive temporal fief of gentlemen only, in order to enable us all to play and enjoy the benefits of culture.

For the liberal, social-democratic, and other assorted progressive heirs of the Enlightenment, then, progress meant universal citizenship—that is, a virtual equality of political condition, a virtually equal say for all in the common affairs of any given community—together with a social condition and a model of rationality that could make it possible. For some, socialism seemed to be the straightforward continuation and enlargement of the Enlightenment project; for some, like Karl Marx, the completion of the project required a revolution (doing away with the appropriation of surplus value and an end to the social division of labor). But for all of them it appeared fairly obvious that the merger of the human and the political condition was, simply, moral necessity.