Madeleine Albright is worried. We should be, too.

Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state, was born in a period of totalitarianism. She was very young when her parents, who later became Catholics of Jewish descent, left Czechoslovakia after Hitler's invasion in 1939. They returned after the war but again left their country after a communist puchi in 1948.

Her father, diplomat Joseph Corbel, sought asylum for the family in the United States, writing that if they returned home, it would be arrested “for my steadfast attitudes in protecting the ideals of democracy.” America took them as refugees. Corbel became a well - known foreign policy scholar, and in 1997 Bill Clinton made his daughter, Albright, chief of his diplomacy, the first woman to hold that post.

By that time the Cold War was over, and the great ideological wars of the 20th century seemed to have been resolved. Liberal democracy was on the rise, and Albright's adaptive country was its powerful champion. The arch of her life seemed to coincide with a global evolution from the widespread tyranny toward an ever - expanding freedom.

So it's sad and thrilling that Albright, now 80, has just published a book entitled “Fascism: A warning.” The book is not just a warning to Donald Trump; Albright is concerned with the eclipse of liberal democracy around the world and told me in an earlier interview that he planned to write about that issue even before Trump was elected as president. But the president has only reinforced its project. If we think of fascism as a wound from the past that has already been cured, putting Trump on the White House was like putting the bandage out of that wound, and touching where it leaves the greatest pain,” she writes.

In addition, the fact that this book's release would impress us if Trump did not disrupt our amazing capacity. Long-term Albright has been the optimistic experience of American excepologicalism, a worn-out figure of the estherity that was not given to alarming speeches. It's shocking that she feels the need to warn us about fascism.

In January, Freedom House, an international measure of democracy, reported that 71 countries were suffering a decline in political rights and civic freedoms, while only 35 had marked raises. Instead of going against this trend, America under Trump became part of it. As Freedom House concluded, “A major development of 2017 was the withdrawal of the United States as champion and example of democracy. ”

Albright's not accusing Trump of being a fascist. His efforts to undermine the rule of law have achieved only mixed success, in part the cause of its inefficiency.

But Trump is, as Albright told me, the most undemocratic president” in modern American history. It empowers global authoritarianism and in exchange is being empowered by the international growth of right-wing populism. As she writes in the book: “The importance of the crowd is powerful in international affairs. Around-the-world leaders learn from each other and mimic each other. ”

Historian Roger Griffin described the key vision of fascism as the national <x0). Albright's definition is broader than most academic taxes; it tends to use “fascism” as a synonymous with authoritarianism.

Her book includes Italy and Benito Musolini and Vladimir Putin's Russia, as well as Venezuela of Hugo Chavezi, Turkey and North Korea of Kim Jong-il, who was succeeded by his posthumous son Kim Jong-un. Besides Mussolini, she has met all these people mentioned. Whatever they have in common, it says, “is the assumption, or decision, that they own the soul of the nation and that they have the answers and that their instincts are good, that they are smarter than anyone else and that they can do all things themselves. ”

Trump melts itself and the state just like that. Many of the details in Albright's stories about different dictators resemble it. Before I read it, I didn't know Mussolini had promised to give the swamp “,” and that his crowd whistled on the reporter's group during his campaigns. [I didn't even know Mussolini, like Trump, thought it was unhealthy to shake hands.] For Chavez, Albright writes his “communicative strategy was to disperse rhetorical flares and tows in all directions.” He was successful in controlling the media.

The currents in the book are intentional. One of my editors told me to get the reader to work alone,” said Albright. So you can see many different steps. ”

I asked Albright how she avoided despair by seeing authoritarianism detecting the flow of her childhood and resurface in her old age. There's something I think I learned from my parents,” she said. You need to create a way to deal with problems in order to avoid despair, and not just to observe these problems. We need to understand that we all have a role in this.” Its role at this time is to talk about the problem, whatever authority it gives her career and her history.

D'oh!