Richard Feidler

And I think that the totalitarian trade-off, and this is something that we, I think, don't talk about enough, especially in the United States.

People really...

especially in the democratic side, do not understand this fundamental thing.

Yeah, I'll get to the totalitarian trade-off in a second.

But I think we don't understand this fundamental human need or human ability to see some things as more important than what's in their pocketbook.

Democrats and political scientists generally assume that people will vote their economic self-interest.

And to a lot of people, other things are more important, especially if voting their economic self-interest doesn't do them any good year after year, election cycle after election cycle.

So the totalitarian trade-off is you are not going to be well-off, as you haven't been, but at least you will belong to something great.

And that belonging to something great is a kind of, that's the relationship between the tyrant and the slave in Hazlitt's formulation.

You get to be the slave, but you're my slave, right?

and you have this relationship to this spectacular power that I keep demonstrating by bombing other countries, by removing dictators, by destroying the East Wing of the White House, by plastering everything with gold, by staging the biggest military parade ever, and you belong to this, too.

I don't know about exhilaration, but I think there's relief.

And this is something that Eric Frum wrote about in Escape from Freedom, which I think is one of the best books ever written about this particular phenomenon.

He wrote it in 1940.

This was after Hitler came to power.

And his basic hypothesis is that there are times in human history when enough people feel dislocated enough, insecure enough, so scared about the future,

that a critical mass of people want to hand over their agency to someone else who basically says, I will take care of you and I will make the future predictable again.

Absolutely, yeah.

I think the 90s in Russia were that kind of dislocating moment of just people feeling like they had no idea where they lived, who they were or what the future was going to look like.

It doesn't.