We have spoken before about the erosion of the moral prestige of intellectuals. It's not that they have become immoral (there are exceptions, of course); it's that the majority of society has stopped believing in anything transcendental, anything particularly well-argued, or anything that transcends the mediocrity of the commonplace (there are exceptions, too, now).

Is Trump killing democracy? Are we witnessing a crime in real time? In a few decades, will we need a historian Carles Porta to elucidate the dark plot? Are we still in time to avoid the tragic death? Let us shed light on the darkness. And what better light than that projected by Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu and company three hundred years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, when they taught us the joy of reasoning, thinking and feeling freely, when they instilled in us confidence in progress and science.