Never has George Santayana been proven more correct. His exact words, often misquoted, are that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

It is no accident that all this is occurring eighty years after the Second World War. The last of those living then are dying off. Almost no one is left who can remember that past, and so here we are repeating it.

The collapse of Soviet communism gave us a sense of complacency about the inevitability of the liberal democratic order. We have failed to uphold the civic virtues needed to sustain it. We are about to pay a heavy price for that failure.