John Dean was Nixon’s White House counsel during the Watergate scandal. A bedrock old-school conservative himself, he was a big fan of Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book Conscience of a Conservative, so much so that he entitled his own regretful 2006 book Conservatives without Conscience.
In it, he describes the findings of psychologists about “authoritarian personalities”. They think (or rather feel), as did Machiavelli, that what any polity needs is a strong, decisive leader who will make all the decisions for everybody, sparing them the onerous task of having to think for themselves.
Estimates are that about ⅓ of the American populace fits this description, longing for a powerful, dominating father figure to steer the national “family”. Of those, about 99% are sheep desperately seeking a border collie to lead them, and the other 1% are narcissistic psychopaths convinced that it’s their own (sometimes divinely ordained) destiny to do so.
John Dean was Nixon’s White House counsel during the Watergate scandal. A bedrock old-school conservative himself, he was a big fan of Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book Conscience of a Conservative, so much so that he entitled his own regretful 2006 book Conservatives without Conscience.
In it, he describes the findings of psychologists about “authoritarian personalities”. They think (or rather feel), as did Machiavelli, that what any polity needs is a strong, decisive leader who will make all the decisions for everybody, sparing them the onerous task of having to think for themselves.
Estimates are that about ⅓ of the American populace fits this description, longing for a powerful, dominating father figure to steer the national “family”. Of those, about 99% are sheep desperately seeking a border collie to lead them, and the other 1% are narcissistic psychopaths convinced that it’s their own (sometimes divinely ordained) destiny to do so.