We have a president who nourishes fear, enables hatred and hastens the disappearance of truth with almost everything he does. Americans who engage in hate crimes have been “radicalized by signs of permission and approval”.

The internet has made it easier for hate groups to find one another, social media encourages “informational cascades” of dishonesty (much faster than television), and Twitter promotes the preposterous notion “that everything worth saying can be said right away”.

These are all observations from Martha Nussbaum’s ambitious new book, The Monarchy of Fear. Considering the conditions she describes, it’s hardly surprising that so many of the professor’s younger students at the University of Chicago believe “the America they know and love is about to disappear” – and that they demonize half the electorate as “monsters” who are “enemies of everything good”. They think “these are the last days, when a righteous remnant must contend against Satanic forces”.

But in the face of so many warning signs about the condition of the republic, this professor of law and ethics is all about resisting visions of calamity. She begins by saying something I also believe with all my heart: despite all of its current traumas, America is a much better place today than it was in the much-mourned 1950s.

Read more at The Guardian