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It's great to be Turkey just now. The economy, barely scathed by the global recession, grew 11.7 percent in the first quarter of this year, and 10.3 percent in the second.  Like the Ottoman Empire reborn, Turkey has sponsored a visa-free zone with Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and is moving toward creating a free trade zone as well. And Turkey is a force not just in its neighborhood but, increasingly, in the world.

diplomatically, Turkey matters more than the others do. Among them, only Turkey is overwhelmingly Muslim and located in the Middle East, within hailing distance of practically every crisis zone on the planet. And thus the question of what kind of force Turkey will be matters more as well.

It's a caricature to say that Turkey has chosen the Middle East, or Islam, over the West. Turkey's aspiration for full membership in the club of the West, including the European Union, is still a driving force. But Turkey aspires to many things, and some may contradict each other. The country wants to be a regional power in a region deeply suspicious of the West, of Israel, and of the United States; a Sunni power acting as a broker for Sunnis in Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere; a charter member of the new nexus of emerging powers around the world; and a dependable ally of the West. When Turkey is forced to choose among these roles, the neighborhood tends to win out, and that's when you get votes against sanctions on Iran.

From the time of Kemal Ataturk, Turkey has been committed to its "European vocation." But Ataturk was a modernizer, not a liberal; one of his slogans was "For the people, despite the people." And if Kemalist secularism was not a formula for European-style liberal individualism, it's scarcely clear that the AKP's market-oriented moderate Islamic restoration is, either

Turkey is a success story that the West has every reason to welcome. The image of moderation and tolerant cosmopolitanism that it offers to Middle Eastern audiences contributes not only to Turkish soft power but to global peace and security, at least in the long run.

The towers fell more than 14 years ago; the statute of limitations on post-9/11 panic has expired. Yet Americans have never been more fearful. I’ve increasingly come to feel that I don’t recognize my own country.

this does not fully express the difference between Trump and those who came before. Words were not his sole, or maybe even chief, medium. Trump tended with exquisite care to what Max Weber would have called his charismatic aura—a matter of imagery rather than language. His campaign appearances had an elaborate aesthetic, one that seemed to draw equally on the orchestrations of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and the Super Bowl halftime show.

nationalism was only Trump’s surface narrative. What really distinguished him, at least as the standard-bearer of one of the two parties, is that he did not believe in a whole people who shared a common interest. He divided voters between loyalists and enemies. In What Is Populism?, the German historian  Jan-Werner Muller defined the term with a quote from a 2016 Trump campaign speech: “The only important thing is the unification of the people--because the other people don’t mean anything.”

Trump’s deep message was that “the other people”--immigrants, liberals, Blacks, etc–are not part of “us.” Fringe figures on the right, like Father Coughlan or Henry Ford, had spoken this way, but presidential nominees had not. Bernie Sanders, for all that he excoriated the rich, did not–any more than FDR had in 1932. And since 2016, Trump’s surface narrative, the one that has actual policy prescriptions that allegedly would benefit all Americans, has largely fallen away to reveal the one beneath that speaks of the other party as “the enemy within.” This is precisely the kind of rhetoric that the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt considered essential for a leader seeking to gain the acclaim of the mob—his, and apparently Trump’s, idea of democracy.

there is a strain of thought, favored by moderate conservatives like the New York Times’ David Brooks, that treats our growing polarization as a symmetrical phenomenon that equally afflicts left and right