What's Behind the Rise of Demagogues?

In Austria last month, nearly half of the electorate voted for the presidential candidate of a party set up by former Nazis. The politics of fear unequivocally triumphed in Assam, a state in India’s northeast, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party came to power for the first time on an explicitly xenophobic platform.

Last week, an investigative journalist in Delhi offered fresh evidence implicating BJP figures in the mass killings of Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002. But we no longer live in the time when such moral scandals are electoral liabilities. Rodrigo Duterte, elected president of the Philippines last month, may have actually been helped by his brazen support of vigilante death squads. Even in the world’s oldest democracy, a presidential candidate openly advocates torture.