Bryant might be interested in this, if he hasn’t seen it already. When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History

This is a very interesting essay about a world leader who:
– had not been elected by a majority vote
– had his political roots in a southernmost state
– whose coarse use of language… and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media
– used the occasion [of a terrorist attack] – “a sign from God,” he called it – to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion
– pushed through legislation – in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it – that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus
– proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader
– and surprisingly, is NOT named Bush