Why embrace them? Why enable?

On the NPR show Weekend Edition Saturday this morning host Scott Simon had a discussion with Stephen Greenblatt, whose book Tyrant, Shakespeare on Politics has just been published. Greenblatt worked through Shakespeare’s history and tragedy plays and studied the tyrants. He concluded a few things that carry over into today’s world. He thinks Shakespeare wrote these plays as a way to ponder some important questions. Why do people, who know the aspiring rulers are liars, impulsive, dangerous demagogues, embrace them anyway? These people are concerned with their own interests, so why are they enablers?

Once the tyrant is in power how might the people get out of the situation? Shakespeare knew it wasn’t easy, but did portray ways that might lead out. The worst way is assassination. Shakespeare also proposes speaking truth to power (usually done by women in his plays), using the vote, and insistence by ordinary politicians of observing the procedures of democracy.

This looks like a book worth reading.



Jasmin Mujanović is a political scientist with a specialty in Southeast Europe. In a Twitter thread he wrote:

The point being: enforcing the rule of law, enforcing norms, and institutional and democratic integrity is fundamentally premised on a shared social and political commitment to those principles — one that is currently absent in the US. Don’t hold your breath for Deus Ex Mueller. Or still more clearly: countries turn authoritarian and/or illiberal when a significant portion of the elite and/or public decide they are, for whatever reason, OK w non-democratic governance. It’s not a complex process. It is, actually, quite terrifying in its simplicity. And if you don’t believe folks like myself, or @SashaHemon, or @sarahkendzior, who have drawn linkages w the present moment in the US & the history of E. Europe, C. Asia etc. then please just recall the *decades* of authoritarian rule in the American South well into the 20th Cnt.