Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister, brutally cracked down on protesters in Istanbul's Gezi Park last year, banned Facebook and YouTube, faced serious allegations of corruption, and, more recently, was caught on camera slapping a demonstrator.
None of this mattered last week as a majority of Turks made him the country's first popularly elected president.
A range of 19th-century thinkers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Jacob Burckhardt warned against putting rabble-rousers exalted by popular vote into power. The Turkish Teflon leader's electoral triumph is only the latest instance of degraded democracy.