Yes, This Is The Face Of A Tyrant – The Weekly Dish
Denial. Avoidance. Distraction. Willful ignorance. These are all essential to enabling a tyrant s rise. And keeping this pattern going is Richard s profound grasp of the power of shock. He does and says the unexpected and unthinkable in order to stun his opponents into a kind of dazed passivity. It s this capacity to keep you on your heels, to keep disorienting you with the unacceptable (which is then somehow accepted), that marks a tyrant s relentless drive. He does this by instinct. He craves chaos, lies, suspense, surprises not because he s a genius, but because stability threatens his psyche. He cannot rest. He is not in control of himself. And whenever the dust settles, as it were, he has to disturb it again.
This is what we ve been dealing with in the figure of Donald Trump now for five years, and it is absurd to believe that a duly conducted election is going to end it. I know, I know. I m hysterical and over-the-top and a victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump is simply too incompetent and too lazy to be an actual tyrant, I m constantly scolded. He s just baiting me again. And so on. But what I think this otherwise salient critique misses is that tyranny is not, in its essence, about the authoritarian and administrative skills required to run a country effectively for a long time. Tyrants, after all, are often terrible at this. It is rather about a mindset, as the ancient philosophers understood, with obvious political consequences. It s a pathology. It requires no expertise in anything other than itself.