In a way it's comforting to know those people who hold these positions, with distinguished careers and supposedly made of better stuff than us mere mortals, are in fact just a bunch of miserable weasels, a-holes and sycophants.

We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.

Now that the moral posturing of the west is unraveling, the question is really what comes next. Fukuyama talked about western liberal democracy being the "end of history", but it is more and more evident that this is a system ripe for disruption.