Fascism’s Easy. But Democracy and Civilization? They’re Hard Work.

Frida Ghitis: How do we fight the tide of ugliness, stupidity, and hate sweeping our world? She says the far right emerges to take away the rights of anyone and everyone it considers inhuman, subhuman, inferior, lesser.

Ghitis says it's infuriating to see lunatics who who want to set fire to basic freedoms painted as totally legitimate vis-a-vis people who want freedom.

She says we know that what there doesn’t end anywhere but violence, violence and ruin is not the end of history.

What the bad guys seek, all of them, is power over. What is raw power? Well, it’s control, not liberation. It's domination, domination. The road of raw power leads to self-destruction. And those of us on the side of civilization must seek another kind.

The average person is profoundly conflicted, in a way that’s very, very difficult for those of us who have a moral sixth sense to relate to at all.

They don’t have this sense of utter clarity that we do, about right and wrong, false and true, good and evil, and so forth. That, of course, is precisely why great institutions from religion to education needed to exist.