I’m no historian, and perhaps I am too fatalistic, but I’m wondering if historically there has been an inevitability in the rise of certain dictators. For example, were circumstances such that the dictatorship of Julius Caesar was inevitable? Were circumstances such that the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler was inevitable? In America today, are circumstances such that the election and subsequent dictatorship of Donald Trump is inevitable? I’m sadly starting to think so. Such circumstances include the polarization of the American people, the Trump cult of personality, and the Democratic candidate for president being an increasingly unpopular old man too stubborn and/or delusional to step aside for someone else. It’s the kind of thing that is often referred to as the perfect storm. Any historians (or anyone else) here may wish to comment, even to tell me that I’m full of crap. Frankly in this case I hope that I am.
The idea that there are inevitable political outcomes is sometimes called historicism. Its roots trace back to at least Plato who argued that societies go through predicable stages of government from timocracy to oligarchy to democracy to tyranny. I think that it is overly simple to assume any such procession is inevitable, but there must be conditions which make it more likely people will desire to invest great power into a single individual. Washington thought that high tensions among political parties was such a condition. Indeed, his warning doesn’t sound too out of place when applied to our current moment: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual, and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.”
