Enjoying the view from Limbo
Watching Donald Trump these days, with his increasingly unhinged bluster and threats and humorless assaults on common sense, I see more and more of what I have always seen. It is the same thing we would see in Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and any other upside-down man of our time for that matter, were they all as constitutionally inclined toward infantile public exposure...
Many people, motivated presumably by a need to cover for their own long-term blindness or appeasement of a lifelong totalitarian thug of the first order, are depicting Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric of the past week as indicating a man who has suddenly “become unhinged,” or “lost his reason.” Not true. He was never hinged or rational in the first place. Rather, this moment, both...
A summary of the private life of the potential tyrant, or “tyrannical soul,” from Plato’s Republic, Book IX: “When these men are in private life, before they rule, aren’t they like this: in the first place, as to their company, either they have intercourse with their flatterers, who are ready to serve them in everything, or, if they have need of anything from...
Follow: