I remember in graduate school reading a book about Max Weber and Thomas Mann, Harvey Goldman’s Max Weber and Thomas Mann, that explained their approaches to vocational calling by the traumas they suffered growing up. However, it always struck me as odd that readers who presumably were not so victimized as they evidently were nevertheless found that their ideas resonated. It is possible that all of educated Europe was similarly victimized, but were that the case then Goldman should have been writing a social history not psychological biography.
Goldman’s book came to mind as I read one after another account that fault’s Donald Trump’s own psychoses for his compulsion to undermine republican values and democratic process. In these accounts, Trump is faulted for believing that its all about him. In that case, one might as well fault Trump’s 71M supporters for also believing that its all about him, because they do. But its not.
As is so often the case, this form of argument takes me back to the opening lines of Aristotle’s Politics, where Aristotle argues that only free and equal individuals have the capacity to govern effectively together because none has the capacity to dominate the others. Such is not the case in a tyranny or under despotic rule; i.e., either where an inferior possesses sole power (a tyrant), or where a superior deprives others of power (a despot). Not incidentally, δεσπότης (despotes) is the word in Greek used to describe the manager of a private enterprise (οἰκονομία), or oikonomia, a private business, which, by definition, is not free and equal. In this sense, Trump is the tyrant who benefits from conditions of dependence and inequality. Trump’s sense of being wronged, always, is also their sense of being wronged, always. In this sense, it really is about Trump; but it is also really about the 71M who voted for him. They have been wronged.
If this is an accurate assessment, then Biden and Harris cannot solve this problem. However wronged they may in fact have been, Biden and Harris feel they have overcome them. They are therefore unlikely to govern from that place; which is both the good news and the bad news. It is good news because they are likely to trust expert research in their policymaking. But that is also the bad news insofar as they may not recognize the pathologies that oppression often confers upon the oppressed. If Aristotle is correct, however, no matter how benevolent their rule, Biden and Harris will be obligated to rule despotically until that point where citizens are in fact (and not only in aspiration) truly free and equal. That said, as Aristotle himself argued, despotism is far preferable to tyranny.