Dark Fantasy: Regressive Movements and the Search for Meaning in Politics

Recent trends in politics culminating in the US with the election of Donald Trump both provoked and expressed a troubling intensification of emotion in the body politic. Heightened levels of anger, frustration, and distrust, the dismissal of the norms of politics and policy making, and the prevalence of intractable conflict indicated an increase in the power of regressive forces. The power of these forces takes the form of dark fantasies involving the loss, indeed the destruction, of safe s...