Even as a workplace drama, Fear is a disappointment. We are promised in the prologue the story of the ‘nervous breakdown’ of the executive branch of the US government: a story of insubordination and sabotage, of documents removed from the president’s desk and orders to the military flatly disobeyed.

For all the talk of Russia ... Trumpism could not have been a more quintessentially American phenomenon: a faux populism stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster from a variety of the local resentments arising from a divided and broken country.

The danger lies in seeing Trump or Brexit as an aberration, rather than a reaction to and by-product of liberalism. The received wisdom is that liberalism is somehow virtuous and inherently good. But this formulation makes it impossible to understand why politicians saying openly fascistic things are garnering wide support in supposedly principled liberal democracies.

For many of us, the US election of 8 November was the apogee of a year of regressions. Historical progress implies directionality, and 2016 was a leap into the dark as far as human history is concerned. 2016 should have us reaching back into the past for answers. To find out how both the Left and the mainstream Right got history so unfathomably wrong, we should delve into previous conceptions of historical progress.