M. Gessen

Again, this kind of reminds me of life under communism.

Friends who lived under communism told me how the reason why those economies crashed was partly because the theory wasn't great, but secondly because people kept getting appointed to posts who had nothing to recommend them except their loyalty.

Is this what's going on in the United States now?

So this is why his lieutenants parrot absolute nonsense like Rene Good and Alex Preti were terrorists, for example.

We recently saw Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary, former Fox News presenter, give an extraordinary speech where he said, in this conflict, the United States won't be bound by namby-pamby international law or the Geneva Convention.

Again, there's this candor here.

Let's move on to the MAGA tribes that support Donald Trump.

There's an English writer from the early 19th century called William Hazlitt who wrote this wonderful essay where he seemed to kind of grasp this aspect of human nature.

He wrote, Man is a toad-eating animal.

The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself.

One makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.

The totalitarian trade-off.

Is there some kind of exhilaration then that some people in this circumstance experience that they feel in surrendering some of their autonomy, surrendering some of their independence to the dear leader, the great helmsman, the property developer-in-chief or whoever it is at the top of the tree?

Did you see this happen in Putin's Russia?

And when the economy starts to tank as various sanctions and boycotts kick in against the Russian economy and people's standard of living goes down, that doesn't seem to affect Vladimir Putin's popularity.

Is this something we should perhaps bear in mind when we have hopes that the regime in Iran will be overthrown by people wanting their freedom back?

You quote Hannah Arendt, who's, I think, going to be relevant for all time now.

I think it's been long enough, I think we can safely say that, about the two qualities that she says characterises the audience, or the fans, if you like, of the autocrat.

Gullibility and cynicism.

Can you explain how these two traits work together, the gullibility, then the cynicism?