From TPM Reader ES …

I totally agree with your last post’s insights. Trump’s theater of subservience is here to affirm and habituate people to the politics of authoritarianism.

I’d add two things: maybe you’ve read it back in the day, but one of the founding texts on the topic is La Boëtie’s “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.” It’s from like 1570. He avoided it being published while he was alive because case in point. It’s short and marvelous and very tranchant. In it he notes that tyrants can only survive with the consent of those they rule over. As such they often try to coopt the elites into their courtiers, both to prevent challenges and to give the spectacle of adhesion to the populace. This was written under absolute monarchy. It’s still current. 

From TPM Reader EA …

You are totally correct that Trump’s style of dominance politics demands that everyone around him surrender their dignity. But it’s wrong to call him a strongman, because his demand is really a sign of his utter weakness. I have never seen a more psychically fragile, pathetic U.S. President, and doubt if there was ever a weaker one.

We talk a lot, rightly, about how Democrats are often instinctively cautious about going on the political attack. I just got a mass-email press release from the Biden campaign that is part of their “felon” push and the jousting in the lead up to the debate. I don’t have anything particular to add beside, jeez, this is intense stuff, by which I mean not “intense” in the slangish mean of “good” but intense. Like totally going off. One needs to do this with a full spectrum approach, in press conferences, ads, surrogates etc. But if this press release is any measure, they’re not holding back.

Text after the jump … (links are the ones that came embedded in the email).

I’ve been reading through your emails about your favorite Editors’ Blog posts, and among the maybe dozen that are most often mentioned, there are three themes I wanted to highlight, because they each relate to a central dimension of our politics today.

The first is the post on “bitch-slap politics” which I wrote in 2004; I later began referring to the concept I described in it as “dominance politics”.

The second is the post I wrote the day after the 2016 presidential election about optimism as an ethic, a posture toward life rather than a set of predictions about the future. It was actually a post with a series of bullet-pointed observations. But that one bullet point — about optimism — resonated with people. A lot of you wrote in about it. And in recent years it’s probably the thing I hear about from people most.

I’ll return to those two topics in a moment.

The third theme is not really any individual post but a stream of posts and tweets over several years about “dignity loss” and “dignity wraiths” and like things, a whole bespoke vocabulary or a running gag about this pattern we’re all aware of in which Trump demands of people an ever escalating series of humiliations, dignity losses and more. Trump requires it — that part alone isn’t hard to understand. It’s that people give it … lavishly and fulsomely. Soon you’ve got some guy you may not have agreed with but seemed like a reasonably self-possessed adult, and they’re saying “thank you, sir, may I have another” each time Trump comes up with a new insult name for them, praising his far-reaching intellect and encyclopedic knowledge of history, clapping obediently on his approach. Trump somehow casts a spell over these people and soon they’re like a desiccated dignity husk. It’s like he’s a dignity black hole that no one can re-emerge from.