United States | News & Politics

You have to understand both conservatives and narcissists.

Conservative morality isn't based in utilitarian ethics; it's nothing to do with greater good or least harm. It's about pecking order: those at the top are protected by rules and not bound by them, while those beneath them are bound by rules but not protected by them.

And the important thing to realise is this isn't a cynical observation of a regrettable truth for them, it's aspirational and idealistic. That's how they think it ought to work, and they admire it when they see it.

For them, the world is full of winners and losers. Not only is it good and right and moral for a person in power to abuse that power and violate laws and customs, doing so makes them a winner who deserves to get away with it. To attempt to hold a winner accountable is an affront to the natural order, blasphemy, sacrilege, dragging god from his throne.

And similarly, it's good and right and moral for losers to be punished for violating rules, and to submit to abuse and oppression. All the rules and double standards around gender roles, racial roles, etc are not hypocrisy to them, they're the whole point. High-status people in society (eg rich cishet white men, or police or military officers etc) are celebrated for getting away with things that others are punished for, and demonstrating both sides of the dichotomy is actively desired.

If a cop beats the shit out of a black kid and is rewarded rather than punished, that's justice on both sides for them. The authority figure is allowed to revel in their license to abuse, as is their due, and the black kid is punished with humiliation and further trauma for daring to complain. If a woman is punished for promiscuity while a man is rewarded for having sex with her, ditto.

That's why LGBTQ rights are such a threat to them - making gender identity anything but hardcoded messes with all their hierarchies, as does any change to man=fucker=winner, woman=fuckee=loser, and of course queer=victim=super-loser. It's their whole social order turned on its head and dumped out on the floor.

So amidst all this, dictators are the the ultimate celebrities to them: they don't just get away with murder, they get away with genocide, and wholesale flouting of both national and international law. They are rockstar-gods, accountable to none, the highest status imaginable. They will fawn and grovel and dream of being that great.

(That's why they're all so fucking pro-israel, and why pointing out their genocide and torture of the Palestinians is so completely infeffective - all it's doing in their view is establishing Israel's credentials as untouchable winners.)

On top of that, DJT is a malignant narcissist - as conservative leaders tend to be, since conservative voters admire those personality traits like dictators in miniature.

And narcissists are pathetically dependent on praise from the people above them - it's the strongest hit of self-esteem they can get to fill the eternal sucking void in their souls for a tiny instant, even better than victimising someone themselves and mocking them for it.

So when Putin and the Saudis and the russian mob and every other fucker tossed him some sad little scrap of status, he whined and pissed on the floor like a submissive little lapdog, desperate for more. He got suckered into shady deals that left him owned body and soul, he got suckered into kompromat of all kinds leaving him even more vulnerable to external leverage, and all of this left him grateful for being able to attract the attention of vicious bastards, because it made him feel important and special.