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Thursday
On Monday night MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow made a nice literary allusion when she noted that authoritarian types fantasize about a dictator strongman breaking free of Lilliputian ropes. She was referring, of course, to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, who is bound to the ground by the tiny citizens of Lilliput after being shipwrecked. There’s a lot to unpack in Gulliver’s Travels—Swift is in my opinion the GOAT of political satirists—but let’s first look at this particular fantasy.
Yale historian Timothy Snyder, one of our foremost experts on authoritarianism, explains that while people may dream of a strongman uniting the nation and getting things done, the reality is far different. Dictatorial power today, he writes, “is not about achieving anything positive. It is about preventing anyone else from achieving anything. The strongman is really the weak man: his secret is that he makes everyone else weaker.”
This is why conditions inevitably deteriorate under authoritarian rule. “Unaccountable to the law and to voters,” Snyder writes,
the dictator has no reason to consider anything beyond his own personal interests. In the twenty-first century, those are simple: dying in bed as a billionaire. To enrich himself and to stay out of prison, the strongman dismantles the justice system and replaces civil servants with loyalists.
Basically, people think that strong men (and it’s usually men) will work for them whereas in reality they work only for themselves. Everyone else is expendable, including their loyal followers.
I recommend reading the entire article, which gives a grim account of how societies spiral downward under the rule of such people. Snyder has seen the work of strongmen up close so he knows what he’s talking about. But I want to turn now to what Swift adds to the conversation.
Gulliver’s Travels is composed of four books in which Gulliver recounts his experiences in (1) the land of the Lilliputians, (2) the land of the gigantic Brogdingnags, (3) a hodgepodge of fantastical locales, and (4) the land of the Houyhnhnms, who are highly intelligent horses that have subjugated bestial humans. After Gulliver is tied down by the Lilliputians, the question arises why Gulliver allows himself to be dictated to when he so clearly has a size advantage. To be sure, he swears allegiance to the Lilliputian emperor while he is still bound, but authoritarians would see him as gullible (the origin for his name) for not taking advantage of his power.
And indeed, he has violent impulses. Take, for instance, the moment when Lilliputians are clambering over his body:
I confess I was often tempted, while they were passing backwards and forwards on my body, to seize forty or fifty of the first that came in my reach, and dash them against the ground. But the remembrance of what I had felt [being shot with tiny arrows], which probably might not be the worst they could do, and the promise of honor I made them—for so I interpreted my submissive behavior—soon drove out these imaginations. Besides, I now considered myself as bound by the laws of hospitality, to a people who had treated me with so much expense and magnificence.
This talk of honor and the laws of hospitality sounds almost quaint in the wake of the Trump years. One reason why Trump has had such a toxic effect on American politics is because of his readiness to cast aside any norms and conventions that stand in his way. Trump has provided a permission structure for his fans to entertain—and even to act out—secret desires that they have previously suppressed.
To be sure, the GOP had been going this way for a while now. I think of Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich shattering Congressional protocol in the 1990s, of the Bush-Cheney presidency engaging in preemptive war and torture, of Senate Majority Lead Mitch McConnell violating traditional practices regarding filibusters and judicial confirmations.
Trump, however, accelerated the process. When his supporters commend this non-stop liar for his truth-telling, they are referring to how he speaks to their base desires, which feel true to them. Sometimes their response is to quietly cheer, sometimes to directly insult perceived enemies (whether on-line or in person), sometimes to engage in violence.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud famously explains how civilization relies on a certain suppression of instinctive hungers in order to operate, even while the suppression results in discontent. Gulliver is willing to submit to civilization’s restraints—he has been well-trained—whereas populist authoritarians rise to power on the promise that they will banish discontent and give the people what they crave. In the minds of their followers, why settle for irritating governance and messy politics when someone is offering to make your dreams come true? In reality, however, only those at the top get what they want.
In Gulliver’s Travels, the Lilliputians are fortunate that Gulliver doesn’t use his power, even after the Emperor condemns him to be blinded for trumped up charges. Instead, Gulliver runs away, and even then he’s apologetic about not following the nation’s laws. (“At last I fixed upon a resolution, for which it is probable I may incur some censure, and not unjustly…”) Meanwhile, Swift will go on the mention other authoritarian excesses in his work, whether it be the flying island of Laputa hovering over rebellious populations (thereby cutting off sunlight and rain) or the Houyhnhnms initiating genocidal slaughter against the Yahoos. Swift is no democrat but he recognizes the evils of autocracy when he sees them.
The author would rather have us emulate the giant king of the Brobdignags, who has a strong ethical compass. When Gulliver offers to teach him how to make gunpowder, he is horrified.
Returning to the Lilliputian ropes, the next time you fret about the inefficiencies of electoral democracy, messy political compromises, onerous regulations, waffling politicians, the slowness of the courts, or having to choose between the lesser of two evils, recall that the alternative may be an unleashed Gulliver who will stomp on you if you get in his way.