Trump, Musk and the dictates of the heart
The new right-wingers think people have forgotten what dictatorship means. Putin, Trump or Orban differ only in their dictatorial “phases”. Putin is an old hand who imposes his lies on his people with the aggressive undertone of punishment for disobedience. Orban follows the uprising from time to time to see whether the “critical mass” of followers has already been reached. The smaller the counter-protests, the closer he is to becoming a mini-Putin. Trump is a grotesque mixture: a dictator of elbows who still has little idea of political dictatorship. For him, his claim is the result of business acumen, of the old glamor of his name. But that is what Trump knows: the power of simple but well-designed messages. The Milgram experiments from the 1960s in the USA investigated human behavior. Stanley Milgram wanted to find out how unconditional obedience could come about under the Nazi dictatorship. In Milgram's experiments, simple gestures sufficed, such as staring up at the sky, which was joined by more and more passers-by. Or the authoritarian instruction of a man in a white lab coat, during which many test subjects would have (theoretically) given another subject fatal electric shocks. The clear, simple message and the appearance of authoritarianism are Trump's method. His authority is his […]