Sometimes things get clearer with distance; step away from a pointillist painting, and what appeared as chaos begins to take shape. Since moving to this country – a country I’ve known and written about for years, a country from which my journalist father barely escaped with his life after the Communist putsch of 1948 – I feel I see the political situation in the US with a new clarity. It’s not a pretty picture. In fact, seen through the lens of what happened here 70 years ago, it’s so disturbing that I’ve spent months arguing with it. Historical analogies are notoriously tricky, I’ve told myself, and the United States in 2019 is light years removed from Czechoslovakia in 1948. It