Was the autocracy President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan created over 20 years in Turkey a rejection of liberal democracy, or a response to its failure? The Turkish nation created in 1923 never healed the wounds of a people who lost an empire, and the new nation found itself in an awkward place in the Western international system, integrated into it but stigmatized as not quite modern or Western enough. Its new political class never resolved the country’s bloody history, or reckoned with its minority communities, its Christians, Alevis, Jews, Arabs, and Kurds, and though Turkish nationalism offered one possible sense of identity, it was one both incomplete and oppressive. Article continues after advertisement The twentieth-century Turkish Republic, the nation-state, had been founded in response to an entirely different world, with entirely different pressures.…