Authoritarians control their flock with flattery about their inborn goodness and fear-mongering about the outside forces threatening it. There’s an underlying laziness to all this. It frees the followers from thinking things through since the strongman is going to protect them. And it frees the strongman from winning them over with real improvements. Vladimir Putin railed that the West was using gay rights to weaken Russia, a charge moderns find laughable. Putin would have better […]