It is often seen as puzzling that men and women, having tasted freedom, can seemingly embrace, or at least accept, authoritarianism, once again. There are many instances in the 19th and 20th centuries, ours as well, that demonstrate the idea that people can willingly surrender hard-won freedoms in order that someone else might give them a firm direction to go or certainties to believe in.

Erich Fromm, whose Escape from Freedom I read many years ago, examined the phenomenon in the 1920's and 1930's ( a fruitful time for authoritarians) and concluded that the freedoms that people had achieved over time (from say, the relative security of being a middle ages peasant in a small village, born with a status, a profession and a belief system), could engender feelings of hopelessness and perhaps fear. What do you do with all that freedom? How do you act in the world?

Even a country that touts itself as a beacon of democracy and freedom like the United States is not exempt from this process. How else do you explain the genuinely popular support for Trump, an authoritarian in democratic clothing if ever there was one? It is too simple to say that these voters were fools or idiots or bad people. Clearly many of them were well-educated and perfectly sane.

But Trump, I think, touched a nerve in the realm of cultural and personal freedom (and a backlash that had been building for some time), that spoke to the idea that there was too much choice about how one could live one's life, who one could be or become. Identity politics, so called, did not help sway people otherwise.

Many people hanker for certainty and what they think is how things should be - simple and straightforward and easily measured - and are prepared to surrender political freedoms to get back to that imagined place. It is just that, imagined, but it behoves us to try to understand, rather than condemn.