Reading during my current trip has included scholarly accounts of two major political leaders active in the 20th and 21st centuries. As I read, I jotted down revealing details about each one. Can you guess who they are from the excerpts below?
Leader #1
· His highest words of praise about someone were that they had “said some very nice things” about me.
· He was ignorant and uniformed but constantly promoted himself as a “genius.” He had total faith in his views and ideas on all subjects and ignored experts.
· Foreign heads of state meeting him observed “his self-assurance and self-praise are absolutely monumental.” They found him “bizarre.”
· In his rallies, his speeches were rambling “monologues,” but people had to cheer and applaud, lest they attract threats of violence from others in the audience. The rallies were not customary political events but “tribal rituals.”
· He chafed under any limitation on his power, expressing open hostility to checks and balances, rule of law, the judiciary, and the electoral process.
· He portrayed himself as the champion of national exceptionalism.
· His governance was highly personalized, with his family holding key positions of power in the party and the government.
· He eventually came to surround himself only with loyalists and sycophants.
· His decision-making style was impulsive, ego-driven, and often based on personal instincts rather than the opinions of experts or careful deliberation.
· His ascension to power was “history repeating itself as farce.”
Leader #2
· He was a highly charismatic leader who inspired unprecedented and unshakable loyalty from his followers.
· His rallies were showcases for the fervency of his popular support and featured long rambling bragging rants.
· He promised to restore national “greatness” and said that only he could do it, casting himself as the savior of the country.
· He targeted immigrants and minority groups as scapegoats for the nation’s problems and campaigned based on xenophobia and racism.
· He promised if elected to suppress opposition, control the media, and otherwise undermine democratic institutions.
· He took the political use of outright lies and disinformation to a new level.
· News outlets that criticized him or reported the truth about his activities were automatically accused of falsehood and illegitimacy. He could not tolerate an independent or objective press.
· He exploited divisions within society, pitting groups against each other, calling opponents the “enemy” and solidifying his base by preaching relentlessly of a war between “us” and “them.”
I know. It’s impossible in each case not to think immediately of Trump.
But neither one is Trump. The first is Nicolae Ceausescu, the dictator of Romania between 1965 and 1989. The second is Adolph Hitler, who became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. (In case you are not aware, under Ceausescu’s 24-year dictatorship, thousands of opponents were imprisoned, tortured, and killed, all freedoms were eliminated (including bans on contraception and abortion), living standards plummeted and inflation soared. Thirty-five years later, the country has yet to recover.)
Across time and cultures authors and playwrights – Sophocles, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Milton, Ibsen, Schiller, Camus, and countless others – have taught us that character is destiny. Flawed leaders inevitably result in chaos and national disaster. When a leader lacks integrity, wisdom, or any moral compass, when they are unhinged by unbridled ego, greed and selfishness, when they inhabit the fantasy of their own greatness and lose the correcting anchor of objective truth, the result is ruinous. Always.
It does not matter whether the authoritarian is on the right or the left. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Chavez or Franco, Mao or Mussolini, Stalin or Pol Pot. It doesn’t matter if it’s the 1st century or the 20th century, or Europe, Asia, or the Americas. The result is the same: destruction of democratic institutions and norms, purges, deportations, camps and mass detentions, famines, forced ideological conformity, war, genocide, economic collapse, cultural collapse, ethnic persecution.
As Mark Twain said, history may not exactly repeat itself, but it rhymes.