For one thing, we need to stop viewing the twentieth century as a historical parenthesis filled with pathological experiments conducted by crazed thinkers and politicians, as if liberal democracy had been there before those experiments and merely needed to be revived after they failed.
Por un lado, necesitamos dejar de ver al siglo XX como un paréntesis histórico plagado de experimentos patológicos perpetrados por pensadores y políticos trastornados, como si la democracia liberal hubiese existido antes de esos experimentos y sólo era necesario revivirla después de que estos experimentos hubieran fracasado.