In the face of a standoff between Trump and Erdogan, Nina L. Khrushcheva tells how her formative years in the Soviet Union taught her to be allergic to “authoritarian charlatanism”. For the moment the two leaders – a blustering buffoon and a pugnacious sultan – are at loggerheads over tariffs. Both men are two self-serving, shallow-thinking quacks and charlatans with nothing but an ambition and an overinflated ego. Worse, they don’t have the patience or temperament to patch up relations diplomatically.

The author asks why some of the world’s dictators feel drawn to charlatanism and conspiracy theories, and “whether quackery is a necessary feature of authoritarian rule.” Instead of working from their office Trump and Erdogan tour their countries tirelessly, holding rallies and giving speeches to cheering crowds. Both men have come under intense fire for their controversial and divisive politics. But they rely on incendiary rhetoric to deflect blame, their firm grip on a gullible public to garner support, and their twisted view of reality to muddle through.

Trump’s climate change denial and Erdogan’s anti-science ban on Darwin’s evolution theory reminds the author of “the impact of perverse scientific theories” on the Soviet society. Under Joseph Stalin scientific research flourished, but certain disciplines fell foul of political ideology. The agrobiologist Trofim Lysenko rejected genetics and gained Stalin’s trust. His bogus research led to widespread famine, killing millions of people.

Nikita Khrushchev also embraced “theoretical perversity.” Apart from supporting the Lysenko theories, he sided with “ideologically hardened engineers and geologists who insisted that the rules of communism could defy the laws of nature,” like using atomic bombs “to reverse the course of major rivers, allowing water to be redirected toward agriculture, rather than being ‘wasted’ by flowing into the Arctic Sea.”

Hitler’s embrace of “demented” racial ideology was based on his “science” of Lebensraum – races needed ever more Lebensraum, “room to live”, in order to feed themselves. Nature demanded that the higher races overmaster and starve the lower. Since the innate desire of each race was to reproduce and conquer, the struggle was indefinite and eternal, and his solution was the Holocaust.

That Stalin and Hitler were so influential had much their demagoguery and gigantic state propaganda machinery to thank for. Today the support for Trump and Erdogan reveals an alarming prospect - education has become a fundamental divide in democracy – pitting the educated on one side against the less educated on another. It creates an alienation that cuts both ways, splitting voters into two increasingly hostile camps in an election.

In Turkey and in America, the educated urbanites face an uphill battle to reason with the less educated in rural areas, who fear they are being governed by intellectual snobs who know nothing of their needs and grievances. The educated resent that their fate is now being decided by those know-nothings who are ignorant of how the world really works. Bringing the two sides together needs a unifying figure.

But Trump and Erdogan, who share the same paranoid thoughts, are far from being able or willing to unite their countries. In fact they adopt the divide-and-conquer strategy, spreading deep-state conspiracy theories that instil fear, sow discord, create a siege mentality and make opponents the scapegoats for failures and disasters. Their strategy is to cleave the country into two warring parties: either you love your president or you hate him. Trump and Erdogan – each has convinced his loyalists that his foe is their foe. And they see the press and media as “enemy of the people.”