Richard Feidler

And that's what makes it so difficult.

For most of us, the drive to belong is much stronger than this need to hold on to factual truth.

And I think that people for whom that drive to belong is not quite as strong are exceptional, which is why dissidents are a very small minority in any country.

I don't think you're wrong.

I think they're just thinking one step ahead.

If they exercised a little bit of power now, they're going to lose access to any power.

I think that the cynical analysis of most politicians, certainly that's what we've seen with members of the Republican Party in the United States.

Trump has shown them several times over.

It didn't take that many, right?

But he's shown several times over that he can commit electoral murder of anybody who stands up to him, any Republican who stands up to him.

And so Republicans will either stand up and then resign or not run for re-election, or they will just make themselves accountable only to him and not to their voters.

You know, it reminds me of this conversation that I had with an Israeli political scientist years ago.

And he was like, you know, I've been trying to figure out why people vote for autocratic leaders.

And like, first, I had this idea that Russians were a particular way.

And then I had this idea that like Russian Israelis were a particular way.

And then you people voted for Trump.

But I thought maybe it's just human nature.

Yeah.

You know, I had all these ideas.

I've written books about why Russians conditioned by decades of totalitarianism act a particular way and why political power is so difficult to wield in Russia or to create in Russia, you know, distributed political power.