This article moves the debate over the vague terms "left," "right," and "center." Still, a problem with the analysis, at least to me, is the "self-reporting" of what people "think" they are. This does, however, show support for open and transparent government is in decline, a decline not seen in civilized societies since the 1930s.
I have long held to a thesis about the 1930s: In that decade, and into the 1940s, a large swath of the elite lost faith in open society, and quite a number of elite cultural, political, and economic people chose sides. Some became fellow travelers or more of international Fascism and some international Communism. The ones who were demonized after WWII? You guessed it, the New Deal internationalists who were friendly with Communists. While the Dulles brothers, who were friendly (and sometimes more than friendly) with Fascists and literally Nazis, were exulted, and placed into important governmental positions, those friendly to Communists, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, were hounded out, vilified, and, in Hiss' case, imprisoned. Foreign policy debates in our nation's history have almost always been an outgrowth of domestic politics, going back to the 1790s when Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians were screaming "treason" at each other.
And I continue to say that any social scientist who speaks about "left," "liberal," "right," "conservative," and "center," should be utilizing Daniel Bell's formulation of those terms (see his Forward to that book), which is to qualify each of those terms in the context of the cultural, political, and economic. The fellow who wrote this article for the NY Times, David Adler, is not following Bell's formulation, either. It hurts the depth of the analysis, in my not so humble view, but this does show how elitists in Western societies, who often thought of themselves as "centrist," led their societies to Fascism and Nazism in the 1930s, and may be doing so again today. For when the economic powers that be feel themselves under attack, they will be more willing to manipulate a percentage of the working class with culturally reactionary rhetoric. However, at some point, if the economic situation does not result in that percentage of the working class being redeemed, the demons unleashed in that society become uncontrollable. This is how Hitler and Mussolini arose back in the 1920s and 1930s, and today, in the United States, we have been led from Reagan to Trump.
