In a piece for the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple identifies a similarity between the popular support fueling Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s increasingly imposing islamism and the growth of state power in the West:
Considerations not only of the wishes but of the welfare of the majority have increasingly trumped considerations of freedom in all western democracies. Almost everywhere (the notable exception being Switzerland) politicians have become drunk not so much with power as with responsibility. Power, however, tends to follow responsibility, which after all is its justification; and where populations look to governors for protection and prosperity, governors are only too willing to oblige. Few people, certainly not members of a modern political class, are able or willing to resist the lure of increased power.
It is hardly surprising in the circumstances that a sense of limitlessness has emerged in our political classes that is not so very different from that of Mr Erdogan…