While presidents come and go in America, and at most can only serve eight years according to The Constitution, what The Supreme Court ruled in July of this year was that presidents have absolute immunity to commit (what might be construed before the ruling was made) as criminal acts, as long as they are "official acts" (something that The Supreme Court never defined, and perhaps will make up as they go), as well as immunity to be investigated should there be inquiries into a president over the possibility of criminal acts.
What a recipe for potential dictatorship whether sooner or later, yes?
What the Supreme Court leaves open for the Senate and House of Representatives is that a president can be impeached by a simple majority in the House of Representatives, and a two thirds majority in the Senate, but otherwise gives itself power to decide what presidential acts fall under an official act versus an unofficial one.
It is also an unprecedented ruling.
Impeachments are pretty difficult to enact, so it changes which bodies of government have more power, and it would seem that the Supreme Court has given itself more power in their ruling than the Senate and the House of Representatives now currently hold. The Supreme Court can also hold impeachments up as they deliberate whether the president is engaging in official acts (or not), especially if there is a national crisis where impeachment needs to be swiftly executed. In the meantime, the president may be committing crimes right and left, to the point where a bigger crisis looms.
According to Jamie Raskin, a Constitutional scholar, professor and Constitutional lawyer, the new ruling was "made out of whole cloth" - his words - and not something that the founders of The Constitution would have wanted as it was a document written to keep the country from being ruled by kings, queens and dictators. More here.
And according to Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor for 30 years, the ruling is "a path to dictatorship" - his words. More here.
Under the new Supreme Court ruling, President Richard Nixon would have gotten away with his crimes (ordering the break-in into the Democratic National Committee's main office to obtain information so that it would put him at an advantage to win the presidency). Nixon resigned before he could be impeached.
So it is something to be concerned about if you like your freedom, including the freedom to make decisions and choices about your own life, and to have some say over what government officials do and say on your behalf. If you like voting instead of being ruled, and you like talking about what you want to talk about as long as it isn't abusive, and you like reading a press that is not just propaganda, you may want to consider what being ruled by a king, queen or dictator will mean for your life and the generations that follow.
Now for the definition of what a dictatorship is, I turned to Wikipedia for some excerpts:
A dictatorship is an autocratic form of government which is characterized by a leader, or a group of leaders, who hold governmental powers with few to no limitations. Politics in a dictatorship are controlled by a dictator, and they are facilitated through an inner circle of elites that includes advisers, generals, and other high-ranking officials. The dictator maintains control by influencing and appeasing the inner circle and repressing any opposition, which may include rival political parties, armed resistance, or disloyal members of the dictator's inner circle. ...
... Stability in a dictatorship is maintained through coercion and political repression, which involves the restriction of access to information, the tracking of the political opposition, and acts of violence. Dictatorships that fail to repress the opposition are susceptible to collapse through a coup or a revolution. ...
... The opposition to a dictatorship represents all of the factions that are not part of the dictatorship and anyone that does not support the regime. Organized opposition is a threat to the stability of a dictatorship, as it seeks to undermine public support for the dictator and calls for regime change. A dictator may address the opposition by repressing it through force, modifying laws to restrict its power, or appeasing it with limited benefits.[10] The opposition can be an external group, or it can also include current and former members of the dictator's inner circle.[11]
Totalitarianism is a variation of dictatorship characterized by the presence of a single political party and more specifically, by a powerful leader who imposes personal and political prominence. Power is enforced through a steadfast collaboration between the government and a highly developed ideology. A totalitarian government has "total control of mass communications and social and economic organizations".[12] Political philosopher Hannah Arendt describes totalitarianism as a new and extreme form of dictatorship composed of "atomized, isolated individuals" in which ideology plays a leading role in defining how the entire society should be organized. ...
The one thing about kings, queens and dictators that you can count on is that they get to run the country any way they want, whether you like it or not, and even when the high majority of the population doesn't want it. No one has a say in how it is run. Even if you like how the country is run, the primary dictator can die and another dictator you don't like can take over.
Most of them will send out an army or their secret police if you have any objections, voice objections, become part of a revolt, become part of a group who does not approve of what the government is doing.
Most protests are put down. Most dissenters and complainers are silenced by the government. Free speech is not allowed.
The message is: you aren't supposed to protest or have thoughts of opposition; you are supposed to be supplicating or sublimating, and being dictated to by the dictator.
Many people look at dictators as gods so they won't think of protesting. But those who don't and have concerns about what is happening, it's swept out as not being worthy of consideration. Every governmental action for and against the people is ordained as necessary by the dictator god. Your job is to worship the dictator to get better treatment, or so you might think.
Despotic dictators will do anything they want to do to you, including torture, and tell you how to live, and what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, and if you don't like it, they can put you in prison for making a fuss. And most of them won't care how it effects you or your family.
They will let you know that they are the ultimate authority at every turn. They will raise taxes to support programs or a war you may disapprove of. They will make deals with other dictators whether you like the deals or not.
They will raise armies and draft individuals whether you think it's a war worth fighting or not. They will risk the lives of many sons whether you like it or not.
They can lie to you or tell you the truth, and you won't know the difference; it is up to what you believe, or to hold them in regard even if they are slipping up.
I don't usually write about these kinds of issues. Being ruled by a dictator, I would imagine, is not a way that you really feel part of national decision making. You may have or not have a voice at all. Maybe the rules are so stringent about what you can talk about that you dare not talk, especially about any government matters. You pay taxes, send your sons off to war, get information that may or may not be the truth, and that is about it. I would also imagine that you might purposely try to blot out of your mind the ambitions and policies your government makes (seemingly on your behalf), and that you squash any attitude you might be feeling about what the dictator decides for your country for the sake of your own survival.
The Constitution of The United States of America has been the opposite of all of this (until very recently): it was very anti-authoritarian, very much about compromise, and individual rights, including the right to protest and point out things the population didn't like. Free speech was considered a right and a freedom.
Sometimes politicians and judges distort the meaning of The Constitution, like religious sects distort the meanings in the Bible and Koran, but what it says is pretty clear, and we have mostly shown that we can follow The Constitution. It's text is also obviously a blueprint in how to avoid authoritarians and would-be kings who would take the decisions away from citizens and put it solely into their own hands. Again, these dictators, kings or queens may, or may not, care about the citizens of the country, and they may not be endowed with any empathy at all.
Who cares and doesn't care about citizens' concerns is always up for debate, and that is what elections are largely about.
The Supreme Court, for instance, also recently ruled that any politician can take money from anyone as a bribe. The president can promise large corporations tax breaks, unlimited access to lands, subsidies and other benefits in order to make money for themselves or their campaign. Is that good for you and your community, or is it bad for you and your community? Would you ask your elected officials to make a new law banning bribes, or do you not care, or do you like that idea so that you can bribe politicians to do what you want too? You have the right to voice an opinion on this at the time of this writing, and even gather people to protest any of these decisions - but this may not last by next year.
You won't have that ability if you are ruled by a dictator or a king. You probably won't even know about the bribes and deals being made.
However, as I've said, my blog is not focused on whether dictators, kings and queens are good for our country, or any country, per se. It would seem to me that most citizens would rather live in a democracy, and live in a country where politicians are beholden to all people of a nation, and not just keeping promises (bribes) with corporations and individuals with enormous amounts of money.
However that choice is not up to me. It's up to a voting public, and what they want, and the senators and house representatives that are serving their state and counties.
This part of my blog is focused on issues having to do with the Cluster B personality disorders and how they relate to abuse, bullying, domination, power and control.
And occasionally that spills over into discussing politics and world events. For instance this post was devoted to discussing Putin's possible malignant narcissism (now often referred to as Dark Triad), and a little on why malignant narcissists start wars, how it might effect the war in Ukraine, and more to the point, how to avoid voting for malignant narcissists if you want to have peace in the world, and have a little tiny say in how the government is run. And it is tiny, but there may be a lot more voices that echo your own concerns, so not all issues are hopeless.
The population too, is a lot more powerful than any government or any dictator. It's largely why more revolutions are successful than not, especially if a population is being driven into poverty, famine, losing their standard of living, or losing family members to an endless war.
There are only so many rebellious citizens that a dictator can plow down and kill. If more arise, they can be killed too. But revolutions that reach a popular majority will be too hard to fight off. In those cases, soldiers themselves tend to be divided (many do not want to kill their own citizens for a bad policy of their dictator). The dictator, at that point, will be swamped by the population just like allies swamped Germans in Normandy. There were a lot of dead men on that beach, and in some parts of the beach more dead men than live ones, but they eventually swamped the Germans and removed them from the beach and drove them out of Normandy. Germany began to shrink back to its original size before the invasion.
That war was caused by a dictator. And if you read history, a lot of dictators like to start wars. The population goes along with it (for a time, while they are doing well).
But what can happen is that a government and its leaders are toppled and killed off, and there is chaos for awhile until a new form of government is in charge. And guess what kinds of governments citizens like after years of hardship and wars?
Democracies, on the whole.
I will say that I would be happy to be in a world that was peaceful all of the time, without wars, and where basic human needs were met across the planet (food, shelter and clothing). I remember reading about Native Americans and how they were horrified by how white settlers treated other white settlers, and to some degree, how whites treated their own children.
They saw white settlers practicing child abuse. Apparently Native Americans who saw their children as their own future, a future that they needed to take care of if their tribes were to keep existing, and their old people were to be taken care of and revered for their wisdom and experiences, meant that they had to treat the future well, with dignity and respect. Mostly they were horrified at seeing white people letting other white people starve, letting them be homeless, letting them lie in squalor and their own vomit if they were addicted, feeling arrogant and haughty when they left people in dire straights, and so on.
Apparently the lack of empathy was on display pretty early on, and that lack of empathy would carry white settlers to commit a genocide and land grab against the Native American people, or round them up in barely survivable concentration camps called reservations where they would be dependent on the white man. The white man would bring the buffalo (another link) and chestnut tree to very near extinction, making them more dependent. Both were a vital food source and shelter source for them. The Native Americans had good reason to be extremely concerned.
Lack of empathy is a very well known narcissistic and sociopathic trait, and it tends to manifest as early as childhood largely from growing up in home, school and neighborhood environments which are neglectful, violent, bullying or abusive. It doesn't mean that they are the target of abuse. Looking at bullying situations with thoughts like "bullying works" can be all that it takes to lead them down the path of being bullying for life.
In other words, it doesn't set up people to put their best motivations toward their fellow human beings from the very beginning. That lack of empathy becomes a brain matter too (another link and a link to an article I wrote that discusses the subject), something that they, and the people who relate to them, will have to deal with for the entire life of that narcissist or sociopath usually (a tiny minority of them can be rehabilitated, and it takes hitting rock bottom in every aspect of their lives, something that narcissists try to prevent at all costs with on-going prevention tactics including trying to get away with as much as they can without getting caught, blaming others for deeds they have done, lying, and relying on charm to get them through situations where they might be held accountable).
Many psychologists speak online about why narcissists, and especially malignant narcissists, should not be in positions of power. So why would they say that?
His main background is primarily about spying, maneuvering, manipulating and bullying, yes? Perhaps this has everything to do with why Dr. Grande made the speculation or guess that he was a Dark Triad, where Machiavellian characteristics are part of the Dark Triad.
Putin's country was once bullied too (Russians were bullied and some of their major cities were destroyed by Nazis). We know that bullies grow up in environments that are bullying, where a lot of submission is going on where bullies try to make people be submissive to them, and where it looks like, to a child, that you have no choice other than to be submissive, or to be a bully.
We don't know how his love life went other than that he is divorced. We don't know if he bullied his wife, but we do know that narcissists, which he very well may be, who grow up in environments where submission or bullying is the only choice you have, marriages tend not to work out because of the "be a bully or be a submissive doormat mindset" doesn't work in a marriage or in a family.
In other words, it doesn't matter if he produced economic greatness for the Russian people; it doesn't matter if that is the first thing on his resume or on his mind; it doesn't matter how much "business acumen he has" because eventually the country's main economic focus is now (or will be) the invasion of Ukraine, a disaster for many of its regular businesses and manufacturing plants.
It doesn't matter if he is outwardly charming, and appears to say the right things at the right time.
What matters is whether he is a bully or not.
It doesn't matter how much expertise he has on his resume. What matters most is his character because character determines how he treats other people, including how he conducts himself in his personal life, with his rivals, with his friends, with his business associates, with people he likes and more importantly doesn't like, his prejudices and what and how he conducts himself with those prejudices, and with people he is prejudiced against, and how he conducts himself as a leader.
When some people get leadership positions, they become insufferably arrogant, and hopefully I can explain some of why, in this post and in its own eventual post. Arrogance leads to being blind to other people other than yourself and what you want. One sign of arrogance that we all know about is sticking your nose in the air when you talk to other people. Unless there is something medical going on with the throat or neck of the person, or there is something distracting going on in the background, looking over someone's head is a sign of arrogance and/or they really don't want to hear what you have to say, and don't care either.
The opposite, a desire for intimately wanting to know and understand your perspectives means looking directly into your eyes. Narcissists on the lighter end of the scale can sometimes do it temporarily. The acting stops temporarily. The judgements stop temporarily. The sighs and flippancy stop temporarily. The lecturing and posturing stop temporarily. Pulling their chin in stops temporarily, and they may even pull their head towards you and off a little to one side to hear what you have to say (however danger: psychopaths and narcissists with psychopathic traits will pull their head straight towards you in an intimidating way, like a staring contest, so be sure they aren't doing that).
If you've grown up with abusive, arrogant, manipulative parents, it's likely you won't meet them eye to eye either, but I doubt very much you'll be going around with your nose in the air either. I would bet you have a posture that is self protective: arms held in, head down, legs pulled up a little if you are sitting down and your eyes moving side to side as exhaustion sets in (narcissists try to break your boundaries, your self esteem and resolve by lecturing at you constantly). So don't feel guilty that you don't always meet people's eyes; it doesn't mean you are a narcissist. What I'm describing here is doing it with most people and in most situations.
And we can't count on good character from these kinds of leaders. They are in power for life, right?
Many kings and queens were and are tyrants. It's really the only way to hold on to life-long power.
There is also evidence that the more power they gain, and the longer they stay in power, that it literally goes to their head, such that they no longer think clearly about all of the issues facing them, the perspectives of others, and they become more entitled, expecting people to serve them in any way they want. And there is evidence that they tend to feel more and more entitled to be rude, insulting and even dangerous to people who do not do exactly what they want.
They can tend to lose more power, and lose the ability to respond in critical typical leadership ways, as entitlement starts to take over their thinking process and wishes.
They also tend to lose empathy and get tired of people who are calling for an empathetic response. In other words, they become grumpy and do not want to deal with on-going crises, which unfortunately for them, is what leadership requires. That's another reason they can lose it, and why revolutions can start under their watch.
It's very possible that the Constitution of the United States of America was written with this in mind. We have presidents who can only serve for eight years. Why only eight years? Possibly that is when the entitlements, the inability to feel empathetically, the inability to see issues clearly without resorting to unrealistic positive thinking ("Everything is great under my leadership!"), and the obsessions to keep entitlements, including wanting to be in power forever, at all costs, start to set in the brain.
It keeps presidents who want more and more power from applying, and also holds them accountable for power grabs via insurrections, and makes the job more about serving the citizens in the short time they are allotted ... until recently when the Supreme Court tried to make it possible for presidents to commit crimes in office, especially crimes associated with power.
The inclination to think of power first, and serving the people as you deem necessary to keep yourself in power, is more of a narcissistic trait, obviously, than an empathetic trait. It requires changing your moral and ethical resolves to stay in office and in power, or on the side of candidates who are authoritarian, aggressive, vengeful and who, through strong emotions, particularly rages, decide impulsively on whether or not to head to war - based on the rages.
None of us are prepared for our country to vote for a despotic tyrant. We aren't prepared for our country's leader to lash out irrationally and impulsively against us. We aren't prepared for our country's leader to go against their own citizens or to manipulate voting, or to start invasions and wars to obtain more land, or to go fascist and authoritarian in absolute ways.
There is also evidence that many of us aren't prepared for huge revolutions in our own country either.
And we are especially not prepared to feel threatened constantly by our own government.
People who grow up in authoritarian dictatorships are used to this, but a population in a democracy is not.
There is usually "a suspension of disbelief" in voting for a dictator, or authoritarian, where not enough research is put into a vote.
Meanwhile despotic tyrants think that submission to being controlled equates to a population adoring them and their leadership, and that they have die-hard loyalists who will always come to their defense. Those thoughts are common and cause them to be blind to the issues swirling around them, or to underground revolutions gaining momentum.
It's a little like a blind leader leading a blind populace.
AND THE VIOLENT OUTCOMES THEY TYPICALLY HAVE DURING THEIR REIGN
(ISSUES TO CONSIDER)
If you are from a democratic country and you want to avoid a leader who will more likely try to grab as much power and take away the freedoms of their own citizens, as much as the people will tolerate anyway (and they will tolerate more and more if fear takes over their psyches unless they plan to make a run for it).
* Most important: Hypocrisy:
Any leader who wants stringent rules, regulations, strict laws and strict obedience on a population, but who shows signs that he believes these same rules, regulations and laws do not apply to himself or herself, is obviously showing hypocrisy.
They don't care if they are hypocritical as long as they sense that a population is paying much more attention to what the dictator says than what they do.
The leader will lobby for a loosening of laws when it comes to killing their enemies, starting coups, invading countries and insisting that they remain in power longer than what the terms of their democracy require, assuming they haven't taken complete control yet. They don't care about the approval of any other government officials except those officials who they have personally elected, or surrounded themselves with, or that they have personally hand-picked to carry out their orders, especially malignant narcissists. In other words, taking away personal power and personal decision-making from the population, while gaining more power for themselves, including never being accountable for their actions, will be, if it isn't already, quite obvious.
They will cry, "Not fair!" if they are held to the same legal and lawful standards as the rest of the population, while at the same time they will be taking away freedoms from the population.
In general: look for any hypocrisies. The hypocrisies will always reveal entitlement, and those entitlements are necessary to look at in terms of how far a leader will go to obtain power and unaccountability for their actions.
For instance:
- Not to be redundant, but do they reveal that they have a right to behave any way they want, but that others do not?
- Do they bristle in political discussions when verbally attacked by a political opponent, but spend inordinate amounts of time verbally attacking their opponents?
- Do they run negative campaigns but expect other political opponents to stick to policy discussions?
- Do they seem to feel entitled to start a war even when the population doesn't want it, or never thought it was necessary?
- Do they expect others to follow orders, but feel exempt from following orders from others?
- Do they expect to be treated with politeness, dignity and respect, but rarely treat others with politeness, dignity and respect unless they are getting something from them?
- How much power do they want for themselves, and how much power do they want to take away from citizens?
- How are tax breaks distributed? Does it almost always go to the people who financed their campaign? To wealthy friends? To people who have some sway in terms of getting their pet policies enacted? And how many tax breaks do they give to the middle class and poor in contrast? - This shows how they regard the rich and poor. It also shows how transactional they require relationships to be (a lot of transactional relationships as opposed to "love of people", or "helping people" is also a sign of narcissism too).
- Do they always expect others to cave into them and what they want just about always?
- Are they compromise-resistant?
- Are they discussion-resistant, and almost never listen to other perspectives?
- Do they think in terms of conspiracy theories about others ("They want to take power and money away from me!" but are always trying to take money and power away from others?)
- Do they always act as though the ends justify the means when it comes to what they want, but call people selfish who just want a little politeness and respect?
- How much criminality is in their background?
- How much suffering, unethical behaviors and breaking of laws do they feel comfortable committing to get what they want?
- How do they treat women, children, the disabled, the downtrodden, the impoverished, wait-staff, bell boys, and pets? Do they show empathy, or a lack of regard for them? Do they laugh at them, show disgust, or show empathy? Do they visit parts of their country which show a lot of poverty or where disasters have taken place to meet people, and hear their needs, and make some promises to resolve their suffering? If it isn't good, that is how they will treat others who have less power than they do, always. In this case, past behavior is a definite sign of future behavior.
- Are they slave oriented at all? Do they justify slavery? Do they have a record of not paying people what they are owed ... and in addition, do they not pay a lot of people and say: "the work wasn't good enough!"
- Do they expect a population to pay their taxes while being "tax cheats" themselves?
- Do they talk of, or spend a lot of time setting up detention centers and concentration camps? And do they seem like they would rail and fuss themselves if they were in that position themselves?
- Are they willing to lie to get what they want, but rail and fuss if someone lies to them?
- Do the needs of the country seem to come second place to their own needs? And if someone else puts the country's needs first, do they insult them?
- How do they treat the military? Are they polite, or demeaning or demoralizing? Are they willing to waste a lot of lives in order to achieve some sort conquest objective? Do they expect actions from soldiers that they would never expect from themselves? Are they a draft dodger?
- Does the "flattery part" of them seem drastically different from "the tough guy" part of them? In other words, do they seem like two different people, one nice, and the other cruel? Jekyll/Hyde personality traits are a sign of narcissism.
- Do they say they want "absolute power", but would attack any other leader who said that from his own country?
- Do they act like a king or queen, that if they rage enough, people will come running to solve their problems?
- Do they seem to hate democracy, but wouldn't want to be in an authoritarian-led government themselves?
- Do they seem obsessed with getting people out of their way, or locked up, who are putting up roadblocks to their achieving absolute power, but would hate it if the situation was reversed?
- Do they expect all government officials, first and foremost, to be sycophants, to take orders from them, whereas if they were in that position, they'd most likely be rebelling against government officials doing that to them?
- Do they seem to show some disdain for democracy and the rule of law in democracies, but would hate their own freedoms being taken away if the situation was reversed?
- Do they show any personality traits like Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Napoleon, Putin, Saddam Hussein, or other invasive dictators? If so, expect their leadership to go much the same way.
The result of all of this?
Heavily narcissistic dictatorial leaders elicit strong responses from other people. People either seem to love them, pledge their utmost loyalty to them, excuse them constantly for their sins, and to see them as saviors ... or they see them as power hungry liars, and see hypocrisy in everything they do, have contempt for them, their tactics, and their proclamations are perceived as always fake. In some cases, they can't even bring themselves to consider anything in seriousness that they have to say.
If 30 percent of a population is unwaveringly loyal to them, another 30 percent is likely to express disloyalty, contempt and disgust. They tend to be polarizing figures for this reason, thus the prospect of revolutions is a real threat to peace in a nation, and peace in and around the world. Other leaders cannot count on them or trust them to be consistent and emotionally stable, i.e. thoughtful instead of raging (unless they too pledge loyalty and unwavering support).
For all of their bravado, dictatorial leaders are more likely to lose wars, and lose respect than win them for the main reason that they conduct their wars in a much more brutal fashion, without allowing their military to retreat, without allowing their generals to run the war.
Most people do not like being bombed, killed, taken from, and trauma bonded to another nation. Their identities are usually wrapped up in the nation where they were born and the life they have within that nation, otherwise they would leave and live in the invading nation.
Second most important: Hate speech.
Hate speech is done to get a populace attacking someone other than the leader for the misery in their lives (whether that be economic policies, disasters, poverty, famine, or disenfranchising). For the despotic tyrant who is not exactly serving his population, but using them for his own power and control agendas, hate speech of other groups of people become a necessary part of their rule, or so they think.
Often intellectuals are particularly hated in dictatorships unless they can provide services to a dictator.
If the intellectuals are particularly broad-minded, which many intellectuals tend to be, these intellectuals tend to flee countries that take away freedoms. If they don't get out in time, they are often killed. Dictators have to kill "other perspectives" and that, and the individuals who verbalize other perspectives, are killed first.
Here are some questions about hate speech (note, it is also important to pay attention to how other politicians are responding to it too):
- Do they spend a lot more time insulting other politicians rather than talking about remedies and policies? And if they do talk about policies, is it about disenfranchising?
- Do they appear to be more bigoted, than not? Are there racist slurs in their speech?
- Do they appear to be more xenophobic, than not?
- Do they appear to be more sexist, than not?
- Do they appear to be intolerant of a lot of people, or groups of people?
- Do they merely put on an act of morality or religiosity, but everything in their past shows that they are really not moral or practice the tenets of the religion they are trying to appeal to, to get votes.
- Are they insulting others a lot? Do they insult groups of people?
- Do they often resort to calling people names?
- Do they twist the names of others, or attach denigrating prefixes to their names to demoralize them?
- Do they appear to want to nullify or kill people from another political party or faction?
- Do they appear to want to kill a part of a population who is becoming more resistant to their rule?
- Do they feel they have a right to behave any way they want to any group of people they want, but that others do not have those same rights unless they have the same opinions that the leader does about those same group of people?
- Do other politicians who want to get power or to be associated with them appear to be afraid to say certain things? Do they skirt around certain issues, appear not to want to upset them in any way? - this shows that this kind of a leader can turn on these politicians at any moment, to hate them, to take away any power they might have, to shun or excommunicate them. Narcissists require absolute loyalty.
If other politicians are giving them more and more unlimited amounts of power, it shows that they are afraid of being hated, and of the hate speech landing on them. They become more and more like brainwashed sycophants as time goes on, especially as this kind of leader gains more and more power. Eventually a whole government can become corrupted over not wanting to lose their positions and jobs, even if it might mean pleasing a leader they are more afraid of than admiring of.
And a warning here: politicians who seem to have no backbone, who are willing to give up their ethics and morals to serve a dictator or would-be dictator tend to be narcissists. Narcissists are sickeningly fawning to anyone who they think has more power than they do. They will fawn away every moral and ethic they used to have (or more likely, pretended to have) in order that they will get into position to be the next dictator some day. And for the fawniest of fawners, that can come true for them. A dictator will reward the most loyal fawner.
- And not be redundant again, are other politicians all of a sudden adopting all of this leader's perspectives when they had some perspectives that differed before? Do they appear to have given up all of their own perspectives, ethics, insights, personal qualities to be a sycophant? Do they look ashamed when the leader makes fun of anything different about their perspectives, or when they insult them, because it isn't what he wants? Does the leader engage in a lot of shaming to get them to comply with his vision at all times?
Do politicians either quit, or look depressed, or appear weak, when the rest of their political party is adopting all of the perspectives of the authoritarian dictator?
Shame is obviously a powerful weapon, and people who want to "hang on" to something like a career position related to power, often give into the shame first. The holdouts either cave in eventually, or quit altogether.
This is what narcissists, and especially malignant narcissists, strive for so that when they do something like attack another country because the other country is a democracy, or free, or has some quality they don't want or like on their border, war and violence start.
Violence can also happen from within as the populace becomes more poor and desperate. As many, many freedoms the populace used to have are taken away bit by bit, the more discontent they tend to be. While some people like extreme amounts of law and order, most people like freedoms more. Dictators, themselves, go about in the country and the world as if they cannot be bothered with following the law or being orderly themselves. If anything, they continually break laws and orderly conduct. They break the peace with compulsive unpredictable actions.
Hate speech and fear drive these kinds of politicians and eventually the citizenry to cave into being surveilled, losing their independent thinking, their lives, and their childrens' lives to violence, poverty and/or wars (either revolutions or wars with other nations, sometimes both at the same time).
Hate speech and shaming can also have a powerful effect on families: giving up their own children to fight and to be killed for narcissistic dictators in wars. Narcissistic dictators seem to need people to die in wars for them, for their so-called glory and terrible legacy that only another up-and-coming dictator would appreciate and want to emulate.
Third most important: Arrogance and Entitlement.
Arrogance and entitlement for most narcissists translates to: "You must agree to, and have all of the perspectives that I have because I'm superior to you."
And if this kind of leader/candidate is constantly insulting people who have different perspectives than they have, it shows that they have intolerance and contempt for people who think differently than they do. We also see this among cult leaders: you either believe everything the cult leader has to say, or "you are outside the cult" ... "You are either with us, or against us." ... "You are either one of us, another superior being and entitled to special treatment as a result of this, or you are one of 'them', not worthy of considering or understanding at all." and so on. It's very insular. It's very close-minded. It's very black and white thinking. They expect the whole electorate to be blindly loyal to them, to follow all of their draconian laws, to be squelched of free speech, and to adopt a communal tradition of "think-alike" modes of perspectives.
You'll notice that these nations do not have much going for them in terms of contributions to their people, or the world, because exploratory thought is harshly put down and reprimanded.
These leaders don't want people around who think or believe anything differently from what they are told to believe and think. This is why they have very little tolerance for intellectuals, and anyone who shows openness to new experiences and perspectives. In many dictatorial nations, one of the first genocides is lobbed against intellectuals as Pol Pot did in Cambodia. Leaders find people who are intelligent, exploratory, and humble to be a direct threat to them and their attempts to brainwash.
We can see this in religions who practice forms of bigotry: "You are either in our religion, and religious sect, or you are against us" or at the milder end of the spectrum: "you simply don't exist for us". As we know, bigotry can lead to violence.
There is generally a lot of pressure to think and believe the way they want you to think and believe. A lot of us aren't great at discerning the motivations of others, but character is much more valid than anything else, and can wreak more havoc than people think. If you are from an abusive family, you know that they are model people to outsiders (as long as they can hold up a fake persona, something that both narcissists and sociopaths use, but that is even liable to show some cracks after awhile).
As I've said many times before, character is the dominating feature for how things will pan out in the future, which is why I am writing this post, and if you talk to child abuse survivors, they've been living with sneak attacks, crazy-making, deeply flawed analysis of situations which sound more like projection than anything else, experiencing very unstable actions and reactions from their narcissistic parent, a lot of gaslighting, and a lot of abuse. Running countries with this set of traits is dangerous.
It is also not realistic for a leader of a whole nation to expect an entire population to think and feel the way a leader wants the populace to think and feel. We are not bees, thinking in the communal style that they do, nor are we born with roles. They are all a result of coercion, whether constant, or violent, or whether gentle and suggestive, starting in childhood. We are taught lessons about bullying and persuasion techniques too, and we are either going to use what we see, react with fear with what we see, or feel contempt and disgust for what we see, and a lot of us will reject it as intrusive, presumptive and unnecessary, and perhaps even feel that all of the differences among us are to be valued rather than held in check.
One of the problems with narcissistic leaders is that many of them feel they can read minds, which more often than not leads them to think they are better than others ("I can read minds and they can't"), but which more often than not leads them into developing conspiracy theories that countries, organizations, a population, or certain powerful individuals are out to conspire against them and take away their power, or the persuasive hold they have over a nation. Since power is "all important" to narcissistic leaders, they can act on the delusion that they can read conspiracies of other leaders of other countries (where pre-emptive invasions are likely, whether their own countrymen think it is necessary or not, and whether their own countrymen want the invasion to take place or not).
Arrogance keeps the narcissism in place (i.e. unchangeable, as well as entitlements to always get their own way).
Some signs of arrogance in leadership types of people:
* "Only I can fix this problem."
* "Only I have the business acumen to solve this economic disaster."
* "Only I can tell what is a national security problem for our nation."
* "Only I know what is happening to this country and how to steer it."
* "Only I know and understand who are our enemies and friends."
* "I'm the smartest and most bold leader of the world. People are going to thank me for a long time for what I've done for this nation."
* "Only I am the true patriot and know what is best for this country."
* "Only I care about this country full time, all of the time, which makes me the best leader to run it."
Fourth most important: Conspiracy Theories:
A conspiracy theory is a belief or suspicion that a small or secret organization or person is responsible for a sinister circumstance or event where other probable explanations are not considered.
A conspiracy theory can also be considered a lie, where a little bit of truth is coupled with a bunch of lies to get people mobilized against a nation, a government, a certain part of the population, certain businesses (foreign and domestic), certain areas of a country where some opposition to the dictator (or wanna-be dictator) is happening, and usually minorities, or already disenfranchised groups of people.
Usually the following groups of people are vilified to keep a conspiracy theory alive that they are infiltrators to an otherwise peaceful and controllable nation. Some groups of people who are targeted:
* People who speak a different language.
* Minorities and people who have different customs or orientations
* People who are not in agreement with the leader
* People who are opposed to the dictator's ambitions or ways of running a country
* Protesters of government policies
* People from an opposing party (often depicted as evil, gone astray, lawless, not real citizens, unethical, garbage, aberrant to normal human values, less than human, aberrant in terms of sanctifying and promoting life and family or a certain religion, selfish and self oriented, entitled, boorish and unpopular, awry, unruly, dishonest, plotting, "nasty" - a favorite phrase among narcissists, in the minority, unseemly, dangerous, shady, unworthy, disruptive, shameful, indecent, critical, ungrateful, people without merit, disruptive, protesters without grounds to protest, burdens on the country). Most dictatorships tend to adopt anti-intellectualism or anti free thinking, which in turn, can halt progress/modernism, and mean antiquated policies, machinery, infrastructure, national security, and regulation of people.
* The press, especially members of a free press where freedom of speech and deep investigative reporting are norms. Most dictators eventually run the press as an arm of the government, hoping to keep the population uninformed enough so that the dictator can run the country more to his liking and where he can control the financial strings and policies how he wants, without criticism
* The poor and disabled (they are vilified for "taking" from the national coffers and as being a strain on the financial system)
* The elderly (also accused of "taking" from the national coffers and as being a strain on the financial system)
* The homeless (seen by dictators as people who find work to be an onerous blockade to unfettered freedom, and are a threat and an inconvenience to those who do work, especially those who work for the good of the country)
* Addicts (often seen as criminals ... most dictatorships have very stringent drug laws where prison is the likely outcome for people who are using or addicted)
* Women (often seen as weak, too empathetic, too sexually attractive, unless they are covered up or producing sons, or working in field the dictator approves of, but otherwise aberrant to contributing to society, or keeping working men focused on national objectives). Women in countries with dictatorships, on the whole, experience more domestic violence and lax domestic violence laws, and more prejudice and disenfranchisement than women from democracies, although long held traditions like long-held customs like matriarchal run-families can change that trajectory.
* People of a different race that the dictator wanna-be thinks can be singled out and scapegoated.
* People who might break laws are already seen as breaking the law
* Visitors from other countries who are thought to be enemies, spies or are deemed to be rivals.
* People from inside the country who are deemed to rival the current leader - someone who may be gaining followers in an attempt to over-throw the dictatorship or get elected to replace the current system of government. These people are usually killed or they have to deal with a kangaroo court.
* Refugees (seen as an undeserved burden, and also introducing an aberration of customs and languages which are not common to the hosting country)
* People of neighboring countries where the style of government differs from their own (seen as harboring ideas and policies that are opposed to the dictator's style of government). Sometimes these countries are invaded if the style of government is seen as too divergent from their own, whereby that nation is made to adopt the dictator's style of government.
One thing about narcissists is that they always have to have a scapegoat to keep the blame off of themselves, and to keep people from looking at the deeds of the dictator. The DARVO tactic, gaslighting, and accusing others of what they are doing themselves is the tell-tale sign.
And what better way to do it than to drown out as many issues as possible with conspiracy theories about their chosen scapegoats, who tend to be minorities or disenfranchised somewhat by society already? And if you are part of the majority and narcissistic yourself, you look at all of this blaming of others as a whitling away of the competition, of giving you greater access to power yourself.
If you can disenfranchise women, or keep women out of higher paying jobs, you can disenfranchise half of the population.
If a dictator can galvanize enough people to go against any of his perceived enemies, then he can create more power for himself.
Ultimate power is about silencing most people except those who flatter and promote the leader, taking down protests, meddling in the press so much so that it becomes an arm of the government, meddling in a justice department or laws so much so that a tyrannical government or ruler can never be held accountable even for fake events or stories. Lack of empathy is rampant, especially for those who suffer under the ruler's laws. There are also scapegoating practices and policies. Law becomes arbitrary and dependent on how much of a scapegoat you are to the ruler or ruling class. Voting becomes obsolete, many jobs and professions become obsolete especially those with an intellectual bent to them except when it comes to the production of weapons, spying on the populace, or jobs that can drain other countries of resources or competition. People must accept their lot in life, or their role, to survive and to keep from being scapegoated (i.e. to be accepted and acceptable to the society under the dictator).
What to watch out for in terms of conspiracy theories:
* There is usually a lot of criticism and insults directed towards an opposition leader or a certain segment of a population or nation.
* The dictator often portrays them as criminals, deviants, villains, less than human, a scourge on the nation. To get the most attention, a lot of opposing parties have to be portrayed as baby killers, or baby and child rapists - dictators have no trouble making up stories like this to create shock. Obviously this would get the ire up for most parents and grandparents, and that is the point. A secondary choice are pet killers and eaters, particularly of dogs, cats and certain kinds of caged birds. However, if the press investigates, they often find the facts not to be true, or there is a singular case where it was said to be a custom among a large group of people. However, some people will believe in the conspiracy theories of leaders (loyalists).
* Some facts may add up, but most don't.
* There seems to be an agenda in vilifying someone or a group of people. There isn't fair-mindedness or open perspectives. Attention is achieved by constantly criticizing a group of people, and seeing another person's perspective is usually completely denounced. Most dictators don't entertain other people's perspectives at all - the focus is always on an agenda of getting more power and control, and eventually invading other nations (as a way to fight off competition, or a bogus "national security measure", or simply to "take" - where entitlement comes in). There is a pretty fair chance of a dictator starting a war, or terrorizing their own citizens, or threatening other nations, of breaking treaties, because the focus is always on the negatives of other nations, other people, other leaders, other influential people (where terrorizing an intellectual class comes in - dictators are primarily anti-intellectual).
* As stated above, campaigns, laws and policies are largely focused on the negatives of other nations, groups of people, and particularly on vilifying. I have talked about "trash-talking" in many other posts about narcissism and narcissists; it's the same thing, only on a grander scale.
What conspiracy theories can sound like:
* "These people are a pestilence upon our land. They carry every disease known to mankind."
* "These refugees are being kicked out of their country for good reasons. They can't follow laws. And when you can't follow laws, you have to sleep in a tent. That's your punishment for not being loyal to your government and to your leader. I don't care if they are suffering. They are going into other nations to take others' jobs, to get very little pay so that the countrymen will be a minority,. It's an invasion. I say "Stay in your tents and spread disease! We don't need to have the pandemic in our country! And if the rest of you don't follow me, you will all live in a tent too!"
* "I will incite more fear and vengeance into people that aren't with us than ever before. You know that they eat rats, and then become like rats themselves."
* "We have to remember that we're racially superior. We're smarter, more able, healthier. Since we have the strength and know-how, we can invade other nations and survive their resistance. Those of us who don't want to, and who aren't up to it, can sit in jail. Disloyalty will always have its consequences."
* "I'm not afraid of hate. I can look any person who resembles a tarantula in the eye and know I can take them down."
* "You know that the people in that crazy other party eat babies and dogs, don't you? Anyone like that should be rejected and pay immediately, and we have the detention homes to make sure they pay."
* "My only objective is to please you, to promise you that you'll be happier and richer than you were before!" and then while in office they renig on all of the promises (this is called future faking, very common for narcissists).
* "Baby haters will pay. We can't have a nation where babies aren't respected and aren't allowed to be born. Women who don't want babies are leeches, and a strain on the system and they should be summarily shunned."
* A tell-tale sign: groups of people are given animal names, or referred to as diseases or poisons.
Things to remember:
* Many malignant narcissists who reach power spend most of their time seeking retribution, vengeance and trying to disable or kill people who oppose them. Poisonings, shootings, bombings, hangings, firing squads, torture chambers and torture instruments, "planned accidents", and long prison sentences become constant every day events. They can often get their followers to enact these murders, or disabilities. The whole point is to hurt others who are not followers, and who don't bend to the persuasive speech of the leader.
* Many leaders with malignant narcissism spend untold amounts of money spying on people who may disagree with them, who may hate that they are in power, who may be thinking of ways to escape their country, who may be organizing a protest, who may be trying to get stories out to a media, who may be indulging in free speech when free speech is banned, who may be complaining in private about how the country is becoming more impoverished, where food and other goods are becoming more scarce.
Then there is a lot of time put into how to punish all of these kinds of people - who should be imprisoned, who should die by a firing squad, who should be banned and so on. This takes a lot of attention away from "how to run a country". Malignant narcissists are obsessed with loyalty and agreement with their thoughts on all matters, ambitions and policies.
* Powerful dictatorships tend to become very militaristic (which means a country's wealth is put toward militaristic goals and weapons).
* If the leader is younger, they also spend endless amounts of time in sexual conquests, affairs, orgies for some of them, and sexual escapades, and opulent private parties. The number of bed-hosts they want brought to their chambers becomes endless. They are generally not loyal to their marriage partners, seeing them only in terms of being people who will do their bidding for them, who will put up with just about anything to get crumbs of affection and praise.
* Narcissists are generally paranoid. If they feel there is a lot of opposition to their power and control agendas, they will be spending most of their time riling people up to attack their opponents, making plans to take the opposition down and making them pay a price for opposing. And because narcissists are so paranoid, they usually start wars with other nations they feel are a threat.
* Once a country goes towards being an invader of other countries, the objectives of an invasion mean that empathy has to be sacrificed at all times to achieve invasion objectives. You can't care about a person and invade their country or their neighborhood, or their hospital, or their house at the same time.
* Sometimes a population becomes happier and richer under dictatorships, but generally not as much as democracies. There are several factors that contribute to it. There is a squelching of free thinking and intellectualism in most dictatorships because leaders find these people not to be blindly loyal enough, to be too free thinking, too intelligent to brainwash, and a threat to mind control. Dictators spend most of their time gaining more power, relieving their paranoias through aggression, threatening others, vilifying and spreading false gossip about leaders who even slightly oppose them, having affairs, gaining unlimited amounts of wealth, secretly planning revenges and maneuvers, secretly planning ways to lie to their followers, finding excuses and ways to start a war, trying to pass laws which are very restrictive on a population but which give them more and more unlimited powers and freedom to treat people any way they want, looking for loyalists who will do what they say, trying first to vilify the press and then get rid of the press altogether. The objectives are not to make the lives of the population better, but to "pacify" the population enough so that there won't be uprisings.
* Often the only way to take dictatorships down is a rebellion. Most people won't take that chance out of fear of the consequences (and those consequences are often repeated continuously, and threats, arrests and long prison sentences are given to some people to send a message to the rest of the population).
* Remember that when narcissistic dictators are in charge and they are "ruining" your country, any kind of rebellion can mean a death sentence for you.
* People who are in long term relationships with narcissists become traumatized and trauma bonded. If you are in a dictatorship and focused on all the ways you are stifled, taken for granted and limited, and how much poverty you are enduring, and receive some sort of erroneous governmental punishment to make you an example of what you "shouldn't think or say", you are going to have the same trauma reactions of either fawn, or flee, or fight, or freeze that domestic violence survivors have. All of these trauma responses have health and mental health consequences. And acting out any of these trauma responses also has consequences under a dictatorship, even fawning, as you will be tested over and over again to do what you are told under any and every circumstance, to break your ethics, and take the rap for the unethical things the dictator orders you to do.
* Would-be dictators who are malignant narcissists generally run campaigns that are full of negativity:
-- fear ("If you don't vote for me, you'll be sorry, and the country will go down")
-- lies, insults and smear campaigns against those people who they deem to be their competition or enemies, and against groups of people they deem to be too weak to fight back (i.e. scapegoats)
-- promoting and espousing a system that is rigged against them unless they, the would-be dictator, gets the power to fix it.
-- playing on a population's economic fears
-- anger (lots of displays of anger and rage)
-- focusing attention on how wrong it is for others to criticize them, and how people will pay for criticizing them
-- bullying
-- prejudice: xenophobia, racism, religious bigotry, sexism, misogyny, etc.
* Malignant narcissists get narcissistic supply (get a hit of dopamine) by hurting other people, or groups of people. They also get narcissistic supply by being outrageous, breaking the norms or niceties of the overall culture, and seeing what they can get away with (to see if people will still flatter them and be loyal to them). If they feel they are taking power away from certain people, they can feel very satisfied, and even laugh when they see destruction of homes, and the torture and pain of others.
However, all of this cannot happen in a vacuum. There has to be an incredible list of enablers, co-bullies, co-conspirators, the brainwashed, wealthy people or companies who think they can gain more wealth and power by associating with a dictator, people who are authoritarians themselves and want authoritarians in power, people who want a strong parental-type figure to solve their problems, people who feel so weak they are willing to put up with anything to have someone solve their problems, people who feel so impoverished and disenfranchised that they are willing to bypass disbelief to "try out a dictator", people who want others to have the same lifestyle and beliefs that they have and believe a dictator will bring that about, or people who see dictatorship as an extension of their religion and belief system.
In this Psychology Today article entitled Why Do People Follow Tyrants? (History repeats itself because of human nature.) written by Jean Kim, M.D., and reviewed by Abigail Fagan, talks about the kinds of people who want dictators and who support would-be dictators.
Very few people want or enjoy trauma bonding over the long run however, so there will always be forces to democratize or re-democratize.
Dictators love trauma bonding however, especially if they are the ones who hold power. They feel they are owed it (again, entitlement taking over everything they think about). As I've said before, they will most often become more emboldened to invade. It's just the way dictators work, how they think, and what they want for themselves, first and foremost, and the legacy they want to leave behind, as sick as that legacy might seem to those of us with more empathy in the brain, and who want a peaceful outcome for our country.
Some people will try to live in a compartmentalized state where they will put up with it. Sometimes poverty, famine, losing sons to war, losing credibility in the world at large, feeling isolated, used, alone and victimized will create forces to over-throw a dictatorship, but it can be a long process, over generations, or the government is too powerful and has too many loyal soldiers and weapons at its disposal to take down a rebellion or protest that the country will always remain a dictatorship.
And that's the problem. Once a dictatorship is allowed to rule, it's very hard, if not impossible, to unwind it in your lifetime.
My own belief is that trauma bonding slows evolution in terms of becoming a more peaceful, tolerant planet. It also stunts intelligence. We have a choice to give into destruction or build a utopia.
ArtII.S3.5.1 Presidential Immunity to Suits and Official Conduct - Constitution Annotated (U.S. government website_
Lofgren Statement on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Presidential Immunity Decision - for Lofgren (U.S. government website)
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (Amazon books) - by Heather Cox Richardson
This is in the comments section of the Amazon page:
The author, Richardson, writes: “Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint. But why would voters give away their power to autocrats who inevitably destroy their livelihoods and sometimes execute their neighbors?... The key to the rise of authoritarians, they explained, is their use of language and false history.[ 3] Authoritarians rise when economic, social, political, or religious change makes members of a formerly powerful group feel as if they have been left behind. Their frustration makes them vulnerable to leaders who promise to make them dominant again. A strongman downplays the real conditions that have created their problems and tells them that the only reason they have been dispossessed is that enemies have cheated them of power… Once people internalize their leader’s propaganda, it doesn’t matter when pieces of it are proven to be lies, because it has become central to their identity. As a strongman becomes more and more destructive, followers’ loyalty only increases. Having begun to treat their perceived enemies badly, they need to believe their victims deserve it. Turning against the leader who inspired such behavior would mean admitting they had been wrong and that they, not their enemies, are evil. This, they cannot do.”
The Supreme Court Has Grown Too Powerful. Congress Must Intervene. - by Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan for The New York Times (Mr. Bowie and Ms. Renan are professors at Harvard Law School. They are the authors of the forthcoming book “Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People.”)
The Supreme Court Gives the President the Power of a King (The immunity decision has enormous implications for Trump’s trial — and the future of the presidency.) - by Michael Waldman for The Brennan Center
If You Care About the Supreme Court, Care About the Senate - by Jesse Wegman for The New York Times
Jamie Raskin: How to Force Justices Alito and Thomas to Recuse Themselves in the Jan. 6 Case - by Jamie Raskin for The New York Times
excerpt:
... The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can invoke two powerful textual authorities for this motion: the Constitution of the United States, specifically the due process clause, and the federal statute mandating judicial disqualification for questionable impartiality, 28 U.S.C. Section 455. The Constitution has come into play in several recent Supreme Court decisions striking down rulings by stubborn judges in lower courts whose political impartiality has been reasonably questioned but who threw caution to the wind to hear a case anyway. This statute requires potentially biased judges throughout the federal system to recuse themselves at the start of the process to avoid judicial unfairness and embarrassing controversies and reversals. ...
Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Trump’s Immunity Claim, Setting Arguments for April (The former president’s trial on charges of plotting to subvert the 2020 election will remain on hold while the justices consider the matter.) - by Adam Liptak for The New York Times
excerpt:
The Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to decide whether former President Donald J. Trump is immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, further delaying his criminal trial as it considers the matter.
The justices scheduled arguments for the week of April 22 and said proceedings in the trial court would remain frozen, handing at least an interim victory to Mr. Trump. His litigation strategy in all of the criminal prosecutions against him has consisted, in large part, of trying to slow things down.
The Supreme Court’s response to Mr. Trump put the justices in the unusual position of deciding another aspect of the former president’s fate: whether and how quickly Mr. Trump could go to trial. That, in turn, could affect his election prospects and, should he be re-elected, his ability to scuttle the prosecution.
The timing of the argument was a sort of compromise. Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump, had asked the court to move more quickly, requesting that the justices hear the case in March.
Justice Breyer, Off the Bench, Sounds an Alarm Over the Supreme Court’s Direction (In an interview in his chambers and in a new book, the justice, who retired in 2022, discussed Dobbs, originalism and the decline of trust in the court.) - by Adam Liptak for The New York Times
excerpt:
... “Recently,” he wrote, “major cases have come before the court while several new justices have spent only two or three years at the court. Major changes take time, and there are many years left for the newly appointed justices to decide whether they want to build the law using only textualism and originalism.”
He added that “they may well be concerned about the decline in trust in the court — as shown by public opinion polls.”
Textualism is a way of interpreting statutes that focuses on their words, leading to decisions that turn on grammar and punctuation. Originalism seeks to interpret the Constitution as it was understood at the time it was adopted, even though, Justice Breyer said in the interview, “half the country wasn’t represented in the political process that led to the document.”
There are three large problems with originalism, he wrote in the book.
“First, it requires judges to be historians — a role for which they may not be qualified — constantly searching historical sources for the ‘answer’ where there often isn’t one there,” he wrote. “Second, it leaves no room for judges to consider the practical consequences of the constitutional rules they propound. And third, it does not take into account the ways in which our values as a society evolve over time as we learn from the mistakes of our past.”
Justice Breyer did not accuse the justices who use those methods of being political in the partisan sense or of acting in bad faith. But he said their approach represented an abdication of the judicial role, one in which they ought to consider a problem from every angle. ...
The Supreme Court Is Getting Very Annoyed With the Fifth Circuit’s Dogged Lawlessness (The justices are running out of ways to politely turn away the Fifth Circuit’s ambitious attempts to push a conservative policy agenda.) - by G.S. Hans for Balls and Strikes
The Supreme Court Protected More Autocrats Than Just Donald Trump (The decision in Trump v. United States is the product of Republican justices who want another Republican president in office.) - by Madiba K. Dennie for Balls and Strikes
The MAGA Supreme Court Is All the Way Here (John Roberts has long presented himself as the Supreme Court’s principled institutionalist. His opinion in Trump v. United States should be the end of that fantasy.) - by Jay Willis for Balls and Strikes
Why the Heck Isn’t She Running Away With This? - by David Brooks for The New York Times
excerpt:
... Two big things baffle me about this election. The first is: Why are the polls so immobile? In mid-June the race between President Biden and Donald Trump was neck and neck. Since then, we’ve had a blizzard of big events, and still the race is basically where it was in June. It started out tied and has only gotten closer.
We supposedly live in a country in which a plurality of voters are independents. You’d think they’d behave, well, independently and get swayed by events. But no. In our era the polling numbers barely move.
The second thing that baffles me is: Why has politics been 50-50 for over a decade? We’ve had big shifts in the electorate, college-educated voters going left and non-college-educated voters going right. But still, the two parties are almost exactly evenly matched.
This is not historically normal. Usually we have one majority party that has a big vision for the country, and then we have a minority party that tries to poke holes in that vision. (In the 1930s the Democrats dominated with the New Deal, and the Republicans complained. In the 1980s the Reagan revolution dominated, and the Democrats tried to adjust.) ...
Project 2025 - from Wikipedia (the most comprehensive article on the project without having to read more than 900 pages of documents.
Project 2025: What is it and who's behind it? Here's an explainer (The 922-page plan outlines a sweeping road map for a new GOP administration that includes plans for dismantling aspects of the federal government and ousting thousands of civil servants in favor of Trump loyalists who will carry out a hard-right agenda without complaint) - by the Associated Press and the NBC News Chicago staff
What is Project 2025? What to know about the conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration - by Melissa Quinn, Jacob Rosen with Jaala Brown contributing to the report for CBS News
What is Project 2025? (It’s a blueprint for what a second Trump administration could look like, dreamed up by his allies and former aides.) - by Amber Phillips for the Washington Post
excerpt:
If Donald Trump struggled somewhat in his first administration to move the country dramatically to the right, he’ll be ready to go in a second term.
That’s the aim behind Project 2025, a comprehensive plan by former and likely future leaders of a Trump administration to remake America in a conservative mold while dramatically expanding presidential power and allowing Trump to use it to go after his critics.
The plan is gaining attention just as Trump is trying to moderate his stated positions to win the election, so he’s criticized some of what’s in it as “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal” and insisted that neither he nor his campaign had anything to do with Project 2025.
Still, what’s in this document is a pretty good indicator of what a second Trump presidency could look like. Here’s what Project 2025 is and how it could reshape America.
Trump claims not to know who is behind Project 2025. A CNN review found at least 140 people who worked for him are involved - by Steve Contorno for CNN
Project 2025 would fundamentally change public education, experts say - by Lexi Lonas for The Hill
Here's how Donald Trump and his allies plan to reshape the government if he regains the White House. 2024 If Trump Wins - by Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman for The New York Times
Republicans Are No Longer a Political Party (It’s become yet another subsidiary of Trump Inc.) - by David A. Graham for the Atlantic
excerpts:
... Meanwhile, in Washington, Trump appointed Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, to senior-adviser roles in the White House, barely skirting anti-nepotism rules for the executive branch, even though neither of them had any experience in government. But Trump erred, in his own view, by failing to appoint sufficiently sycophantic aides to other roles. Too many of his appointees were determined to defend the processes of government and the rule of law, infuriating him. He and his allies have vowed not to make the same mistakes again. ...
... In Manhattan this week, a judge is expected to rule in a civil fraud trial that could fine Trump hundreds of millions of dollars, cancel the Trump Organization’s license to operate in New York State, and strip it of marquee properties. Weisselberg is reportedly in talks to plead guilty to perjury in the case, atop a prior felony guilty plea. The Trump administration was, if anything, worse run. It was four years of constant chaos, punctuated by two separate impeachments and concluding with an attempt to steal a presidential election. (Trump is in court over that, too.) None of this is a good omen for the RNC’s future as a Trump subsidiary. ...
Mitch McConnell Surrenders to Trump (The longtime Senate Republican leader gambled that he could outlast the former president—and lost.) - by David A. Graham for The Atlantic
except:
Dour, somber Mitch McConnell was gleeful, if such a thing can be imagined. Surveying the aftermath of the January 6 riot, the longtime Kentucky senator concluded that Donald Trump was finished. “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” he told a reporter. “He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”
That was a little more than three years ago. Today, McConnell surrendered to Trump. The Republican leader announced that he will step down from his leadership post in November, meaning that if Trump wins the presidential election, as he currently seems favored to do, he’ll have a Senate Republican leader in place more ready to work with him. ...
... McConnell and Trump always had an uneasy relationship. McConnell was an exemplar of the old Republican Party—committed to business-friendly and socially conservative policies. He never particularly liked Trump, but they found ways to work together. Trump even appointed McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as secretary of transportation. The greatest achievements of McConnell’s leadership and Trump’s presidency were the same: the installation of a six-judge conservative majority on the Supreme Court and an influx of conservative judges on lower federal courts. ...
Voters Are Deeply Skeptical About the Health of American Democracy (Nearly half say it does not do a good job representing the people, and three-quarters say it is under threat, according to a Times/Siena poll.) - by Nick Corasaniti, Ruth Igielnik and Camille Baker for The New York Times
excerpt:
... Nearly half of all voters are skeptical that the American experiment in self-governance is working, with 45 percent believing that the nation’s democracy does not do a good job representing ordinary people, according to a new New York Times/Siena College poll.
Three-quarters of voters in the United States say democracy is under threat, though their perception of the forces imperiling it vary widely based on partisan leanings. And a majority of voters believe that the country is plagued by corruption, with 62 percent saying that the government is mostly working to benefit itself and elites rather than the common good. ...
... Coupled with stubborn inflation, divisive culture wars and geopolitical crises, voters are expressing exasperation with American politics and a government that they believe has failed to serve them at the most basic level. ...
Should I Break Up With My Trump-Loving Partner? It’s a great relationship in nearly every other way - by James Parker for The Atlantic
excerpt:
... the older I get, the more I think that a person’s opinions—political or otherwise—are the least important thing about them. The opinion-making portion of the brain is so vulnerable, so goofy, so effortlessly colonized by alien spores … It’s a write-off, really. How they live, how they make you feel—that’s the salient part. ...
Beware Prophecies of Civil War (The idea that such a catastrophe is unavoidable in America is inflammatory and corrosive.) - by Fintan O’Toole for The Atlantic
excerpts:
In January 1972, when I was a 13-year-old boy in Dublin, my father came home from work and told us to prepare for civil war. He was not a bloodthirsty zealot, nor was he given to hysterical outbursts. He was calm and rueful, but also grimly certain: Civil war was coming to Ireland, whether we wanted it or not. He and my brother, who was 16, and I, when I got older, would all be up in Northern Ireland with guns, fighting for the Catholics against the Protestants. ...
... Yet my father’s fears were not fulfilled. There was a horrible, 30-year conflict that brought death to thousands and varying degrees of misery to millions. There was terrible cruelty and abysmal atrocity. There were decades of despair in which it seemed impossible that a polity that had imploded could ever be rebuilt. But the conflict never did rise to the level of civil war.
However, the belief that there was going to be a civil war in Ireland made everything worse. Once that idea takes hold, it has a force of its own. The demagogues warn that the other side is mobilizing. They are coming for us. Not only do we have to defend ourselves, but we have to deny them the advantage of making the first move. The logic of the preemptive strike sets in: Do it to them before they do it to you. The other side, of course, is thinking the same thing. That year, 1972, was one of the most murderous in Northern Ireland precisely because this doomsday mentality was shared by ordinary, rational people like my father. Premonitions of civil war served not as portents to be heeded, but as a warrant for carnage. ...
Four Lessons From Nine Years of Being ‘Never Trump’ - by David French for The New York Times
David French is a life long Republican and a writer for the right wing publication, the National Review. I thought his article was interesting because it goes into why "Never Trump" Republican voters switched to being for "Trump no matter what".
What he found was that a lot of Republicans stick together, even with different ideologies and morals, and that hate is a driving force (they hate Democrats so much more). Trump is who the Republican nominee is, so they'll be loyal to the Republican party and its agenda in order to keep Democrats out.
He also found that being accepted and acceptable by the community of Republicans was more important than not voting, and not voting for a (to them) lowly Democrat. He also found that ideology does not play as big a role as being part of the community of Republicans.
The rage that many Republicans feel towards the main stream media is also a factor in why they have decided to only listen to views like their own, to news channels that are committed to Republican agendas and ideals. Many Republicans feel they cannot trust news sources which explore "the other side". - This is quite obvious to me when I see political posts from my Republican friends (so many posts are about how "Democrats will try to steal the election again" - as if it is a fact). The contrary Democrat view is "Trump will try to steal the election again, and will try another insurrection." So the two parties are opposed as to who is trying to steal an election.
Note: For me it is difficult to belong to either party because 1. I like to research (and I usually research all sides as I did in this article about the controversies over vaccines and mask-wearing) and 2. I don't like the fighting, the accusing, the vilifying, the threatening of doomsday scenes, and trying to make either party out to be "the big green evil monster party". I don't want to be part of fighting and infighting and being affiliated with a party puts me in one camp, and I don't want to be in one camp, or in the middle of the arguments. I'm sick of it.
This means I am an Independent.
