In a superb Atlantic magazine article, "A Warning from Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come," Anne Applebaum takes note of a Hannah Arendt observation about the most effective one-party state: "[It] invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."
One thinks of Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Trofim Lysenko (Stalin's Institute of Genetics director, who horribly influenced Russian agriculture and starved millions), Matthew Whitaker, Betsy DeVos, or Ryan Zinke.
The one-party state of "crackpots and fools" has been known by different labels, chiefly national socialism and Soviet communism. But the one-party state need not emerge from an unstable liberal democracy, such as the Weimar Republic which turned fascist, or a traditional aristocracy ruling a land of peasants, such as tzarist Russia which turned Bolshevist.
Even a liberal democracy with no tradition of landed nobles or widespread peasantry can go sour 
with just the right electorate, such as America's thrust into Trumpism. After all, its eponymous leader perceives a one-party state as ideal, and the contours of his reign — his disdain for the rule of law, his assault on America's valued institutions, his nepotistic administration — sharply reflect that of a one-party authoritarian.
"It Can Happen Here" is perhaps an overused phrase; still, the mostly unwanted reality is, it can. As Applebaum also notes in her disillusioned article, "Americans, with our powerful founding story, our unusual reverence for our Constitution, our relative geographic isolation, and our two centuries of economic success, have long been convinced that liberal democracy, once achieved, cannot be altered…. In truth, the argument about who gets to rule is never over." Trump and his party have ruled as a one-party state for two years, and, notwithstanding the rejectionist midterms, they seem determined to persevere.
David Brooks, in a flash of lucidity, believes he understands the conceptual roots of Trumpian pseudoconservatism — all its crackpots and fools. "In any meritocracy," writes Brooks, "there are going to be a lot of people who lose out and do not get the glittering career they think they are due. Sooner or later those people are going to rise up to challenge the competition itself and to question its idea of excellence." Brooks is correct; the history of authoritarianism is replete with such excellence-challenging crackpots — from the multi-careered Whitaker to that literature failure, Goebbels.
As I have, Brooks quotes Washington Post columnist Applebaum, whose intellectual life in Poland has been upended: "Resentment, envy, and above all the belief that the 'system' is unfair — these are important sentiments among the intellectuals of the Polish right," she laments. They're striking out at the thinking "elites" who have always bested them.
Applebaum also concentrates — for a domestic reason that's obvious — on the immense importance of loyalty to authoritarians everywhere and their one-party state. For instance,
"The Bolshevik one-party state was not merely undemocratic; it was also anticompetitive and antimeritocratic. Places in universities, civil-service jobs, and roles in government and industry did not go to the most industrious or the most capable. Instead, they went to the most loyal. People advanced because they were willing to conform to the rules of party membership. Those rules … usually excluded the former ruling elite and their children, as well as suspicious ethnic groups. They favored the children of the working class. Above all, they favored people who loudly professed belief in the creed, who attended party meetings, who participated in public displays of enthusiasm. Unlike an ordinary oligarchy, the one-party state allows for upward mobility: True believers can advance."
Again, I give you Matthew Whitaker — the absolute paradigm of toadyism and flunkyism as quite useful steps on the Trumpian ladder of success.
Precisely how would Trump and his aggressive congressional allies achieve an authoritarian, one-party state? That's a process we should all be contemplating and wargaming — which, I can almost guarantee you, Trump and his allies are doing.
I'm no alarmist; I would give them one-in-a-thousand odds of authoritarian triumph. But those are just about the odds we gave Trump in 2016. We can no longer afford the luxury of righteous, statistical knowingness — or any other certainty. Thus my Montaignean skepticism is alive, and thriving.
mosque or madrasa from your country ever again.