How did we get here? What led up to the place we now find ourselves?

Its too easy to just blame Trump, but he is only standing on the shoulders of dwarves, (or perhaps, more accurately, hanging from their ankles); an unbroken line of pygmy reactionaries reaching far into the dim past.

Was it Bush? Reagan? Nixon? Rand? Goldwater? Birch? McCarthy? Mussolini? Or do we need to look further back to some past Age of Unenlightenment, back to a time of powdered wigs and silk stockings, genteel colonial planters, some Puritan Roundhead or even further, to the philosophers of some distant medieval past, some anti-Renaissance.

Maybe there are no origins, only trends; stretching back to infinity.