A Despotism Reader

 An email from DM made think I should put together this short post.

A significant percentage of America seem to think that a despot is better than governing themselves.

DESPOT Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster

1a: a ruler with absolute power and authority

tyrannical despots

b: one exercising power tyrannically : a person exercising absolute power in a brutal or oppressive way

regards the basketball coach as a despot

Perhaps tyranny is in the eye of the beholder: if the despot beats up the people you don't like, what's wrong with a little tyranny?

Well, sooner or later the tyrant turns on its own: Hitler purges members of his own Nazi party in Night of the Long Knives | June 30, 1934 (HISTORY); The Moscow Purge Trials (1936-38): Bibliography and Selected Links; and Behind The Mao Purges (Taiwan Today).

The tyrant's only interest is in accruing and retaining for power for themselves.

Where the Christian Nationalist sees fulfillment of white Christian men gaining power, the tyrant lacks all Christian values, accrues to him all the nation's trappings, and sees only the fulfillment of his own desires for control.

Where the right-wing populist sees the return to them of economic status, the despot sees only the enrichment of himself.

When those true believers have put the despot in power, they become expendable.

The despot allows only one true believer: those who believe in the despot's right to power over others.

Tyranny, Democracy, and the Polity: Aristotle's Politics  (Farnam Street) is a good primer on the West's best thinker on politics.

Those in the first row he referred to as “true forms” of government, while those in the second row were the “defective and perverted forms” of the first three.

The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments which rule with a view to the private interest, whether to the one, or the few, or of the many, are perversions.

[…]

Tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needy: none of them the common good of all.

De Tocqueville wrote about despotism, too. You can read my comments on de Tocqueville, starting here.

sch 7/7