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You, a rational person, have no affection for the Aryan-race obsessives, the inveterate paranoiacs and the enmity addicts making the entire tradition of Western democracy seem an excellent candidate for confinement in those institutions originating in the bucolic regions of early 19th-century England. But your censure is wasted on madmen. They can’t understand it.

True scorn must be reserved for their enablers — those who find themselves in the company of madness and do their level best to make madness look normal. This is true within liberal democracies. It’s no less true among them.

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tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Gormley: Trudeau and Ivanka Trump are enabling populist madness and that will hurt us all Back to video

But it may not have occurred to Justin Trudeau when he recently took Ivanka Trump to a show. They’re not so odd a couple, Justin and Ivanka. They share at least a willingness to enable America’s first would-be kleptocratic populist regime by acting as though it isn’t crazy.

And crazy it is. Nationalism-trumpeting, authoritarianism-promoting populism doesn’t merely bend the rules of the liberal order. It denies their existence, rejecting the basic parameters of democratic reality. In the alternative universe of the alt-right, facts are no match for philosophical preference, laws don’t apply to the preferences of the strongest, and opposition to the strongest makes one an enemy of the state. It is, in other words, quite mad.