With tremendous wit and wisdom, the former head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit identifies the qualities particular to dictators – and warns against consigning such people to history
How to deal, psychologically speaking, with Boris Johnson and Donald Trump? For obvious reasons, many of us have spent the past several years telling ourselves that these (insert your own insult here) politicians are outrageous anomalies, mere boils on the otherwise unblemished face of the body politic. Of course boils are nasty, their suppurating eruptions highly unpleasant for anyone who happens to be in the vicinity. We all know this. But we take comfort in the fact that they may also be treated. The condition, ultimately, is curable. The state – I won’t say deep state – will carefully apply its very own brand of topical antibiotics, and the inflammation will eventually disappear, smoothness restored at last.
But is this really true? The writer Ferdinand Mount doesn’t believe that Johnson and Trump are as exceptional as we might like to imagine – we must, Mount instructs, abandon the comforting illusions of historicism, the idea that liberal democracy is inevitably here to stay – and in his brilliant new book, he sets out to put them in context, looking for traces of their tactics and their effects in, among other strong men of history, Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, António de Oliveira Salazar, and General de Gaulle. The result is a kind of field guide to Caesarism; think of it as I-Spy an Autocrat. Mount uses his examples as a means of telling us what to look out for, from propaganda and wall-to-wall lies to a certain (weird) kind of charisma; from careful timing (the authoritarian bides his time) to national susceptibility (peak grievance is his moment). More encouragingly, he also examines how Caesars are unmade, a section that includes accounts of events as disparate as Catiline’s attempt to seize control of the Roman state in 63BC, Indira Gandhi’s imposition of a state of emergency in India in 1975, and, yes, both the toppling of Boris Johnson by Conservative MPs and the march on the Capitol after Donald Trump lost the American election to Joe Biden in 2020. Continue reading...
http://dlvr.it/SsFbsJ
Post a Comment