"All despots bribe. The people bribe and brutalise. Who told them to exercise authority? They were made to live, to listen, and to love. Someone has done them a great wrong. They have marred themselves by imitation of their inferiors. They have taken the sceptre of the Prince. How should they use it? They have taken the triple tiara of the Pope. How should they carry its burden? They are as a clown whose heart is broken. They are as a priest whose soul is not yet born. Let all who love Beauty pity them. Though they themselves love not Beauty, yet let them pity themselves. Who taught them the trick of tyranny?"

—Oscar Wilde, 1900.

Old Oscar was wrong about that last part. Tyranny is not a trick you learn. Tolerance of—and, alas, submission to—tyranny is not a trick you learn. It is a reflex in all of us. To call it a trick is like calling breathing a trick, or flinching. Everyone has in him the potential to be a tyrant or to be subservient in their admiration of one. Mr. Madison knew that, and that's why he famously wrote in Federalist 55 that, "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob."

It was an impolitic thing to write, probably a gaffe as those are defined today, almost as bad a gaffe as pointing out in public that the racists and xenophobes among us are deplorable. When Hillary Rodham Clinton dealt in this uncomfortable truth last weekend, the elite political media exploded, but she was not wrong. The reaction was primarily fueled not by the racists and xenophobes themselves, but by everyone else, who knew that, through their atrophied attention to their obligations as citizens in a democratic republic, they had enabled the racists and xenophobes and surrendered their birthright as Americans to a wish for a tyrant.

It is now popular to opine that, had the Democratic Party nominated someone else for president, then Donald Trump already would have been crushed as an electoral force. Watching the events of the last month leads me to the opposite conclusion. Had the Republican Party nominated someone more dedicated to the hard work of demagoguery, someone more committed to the craft of being a dictator, instead of the scatterbrained dilettante currently campaigning as a performance piece, that candidate would be even money to defeat anyone the Democrats put up in opposition.

Angelo Merendino Getty Images

A substantial portion of this country wants someone not to govern, but to rule, to defeat the imaginary enemies they have concocted so as not to bestir themselves to resist the forces that actually are working against their interest. For the balance of this election cycle, and largely due to the presence in it of this ridiculous man and his ridiculous campaign, the American people have proven themselves profoundly unworthy of being called citizens.

Look at what has happened just today. Donald Trump first says that he will release his medical records on a television doctor show. Then he says he won't. Then he does share some information with the television doctor show. That this is completely insane on its face will not appear anywhere in the accounts of the day because, in its deepest heart, the elite political press knows that this is the kind of thing for which many of its customers secretly yearn: an entertaining autocrat, Juan Peron and Evita all wrapped up in one man.

And then there are the ongoing revelations about the way that the same candidate has conducted his private business. His foundation seems to exist solely for him to be seen as doing good works using other people's money, essentially laundering his charity. David Farenthold of The Washington Post has been presenting the prosecution's case on this, day after day. And on Wednesday, in Newsweek, journalist and author Kurt Eichenwald presented an extensive brief in support of the notion that the Republican nominee for president is so entangled with foreign investors that he never can be extracted again.

Let's just pick one rotten cherry from Eichenwald's reporting.

But for the Trump Organization, Qaddafi was not a murdering terrorist; he was a prospect who might bring the company financing and the opportunity to build a resort on the Mediterranean coast of Libya. According to an Arab financier and a former businessman from the North African country, Trump made entreaties to Qaddafi and other members of his government, beginning in 2008, in which he sought deals that would bring cash to the Trump Organization from a sovereign wealth fund called the Libyan Investment Authority. The following year, Trump offered to lease his estate in Westchester County, New York, to Qaddafi; he took Qaddafi's money but, after local protests, forbade him from staying at his property. (Trump kept the cash.) "I made a lot of money with Qaddafi,'' Trump said recently about the Westchester escapade. "He paid me a fortune."

This likely will occasion another spasm of impotent introspection on the part of our elite political media on the topic of, "Why doesn't any of this stick?" But few of the members of that media will dare to look at the real answer, which is that there is a substantial constituency for what Trump has been peddling and that the elite political media has been pandering to that constituency every day since Trump became a genuine phenomenon. The racism is offensive and the economic insecurity is a dodge. Americans are bored with their democracy and they don't have the democratic energy to do anything about it, so they'll settle for an entertaining quasi-strongman. When they decline, democracies get the dictators they deserve. A country mired in apathy and lassitude gets a dictator who can't even put in the hard work of becoming very good at it.

It has become popular among many people, particularly on the left, to blame the failings of The Media for the rise of El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago, but that is not entirely accurate. There has been great journalism done during the campaign. Farenthold, certainly, is going to have to clear some room for some new hardware on his shelves next spring. Eichenwald has now done his bit, and likely will do more. The local Florida newspapers have dug relentlessly into Trump's activities in that state, especially his involvement with Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, and they've become so frustrated that their work has been like shouting down a well that they've taken to shaming the elite political press with editorials. This is the way journalism is supposed to be done. But very little of it seems to have filtered up into the coverage of the campaign.

Matthew Busch Getty Images

There may be a number of reasons for this. Having spent a lot of time around newsrooms, I suspect that territorial bureaucratic nut-cutting may have a lot to do with it. But that journalism is out there for everyone to read and, take it all in all, it renders ludicrous the notion that Donald Trump even is running for president, let alone that he might win. During the run-up to the Iraq War, there were sources you could find that were shooting holes in the case being made for the invasion—the BBC, AFP, the McClatchy crew in Washington. But that reporting didn't filter up into the elite political media either, and we now see what happened because of that. This, I fear, is the same history repeating itself.

But the truth is that the facts are out there if anyone wants to make the effort and find them. (The elite political media makes this harder by its curious reluctance to let these stories fully inform its coverage of the campaign.) That's our collective job as citizens, and to do it requires a collective national will that no longer may be in us. With every new poll that is released, I comfort myself with the knowledge that Donald Trump is not willing to put in the hours to be a competent authoritarian, which is cold comfort, I know, but you take what you can get.

That cannot be said of the next guy to try it, and there will be a next time, because the basic tectonic plates beneath our democracy have shifted so as to make the next guy inevitable. The mechanics of tyranny are not a magician's prestige, the third part of a trick in which the lady is reassembled or the rabbit brought back to the hat. The mechanics of tyranny are primal in all of us, and vestigial in very few. They are reflexes, like breathing or flinching. We engage them without thinking. In fact, that's the very best way to do it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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