At Donald Trump’s cabinet committee meeting this week, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff said the following to his beloved president:
There’s only one thing I wish for. That that Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realises that you are the single finest candidate since the Nobel Peace award was ever talked about, to receive that award. Your success is game changing out in the world today and I hope everybody wakes up one day and realises that.
Even for Steve Witkoff, this may seem a bit much. But political science suggests that there are reasons why people like Witkoff say things like this. Personality cults lead, with some predictability, to the inflation of ludicrous compliments.
Xavier Marquez gives many examples of flattery inflation in authoritarian regimes:
Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was routinely called “the Giant of the Carpathians,” “the Source of Our Light,” “the Treasure of Wisdom and Charisma,” “the Great Architect,” “the Celestial Body” and “the New Morning Star” by major public figures, and “court poets” wrote embarrassing encomiums to his rule… In Zaire in 1975, Mobutu Sese Seko was hailed as a new “Prophet” and “Messiah,” and his interior minister at the time even proposed replacing crucifixes in schools with Mobutu’s image.
As Marquez points out, this is all pretty weird if you think about it. Why would anyone want to make such obviously ridiculous claims and comparisons?
These forms of flattery seem sometimes humorous or bizarre. Yet they are puzzling, disproportionate to the achievements or charisma of their object: who could possibly believe that Hafiz al-Assad was indeed Syria’s premier pharmacist, and what could possibly be the point of publicising this ridiculous claim?
Part of the answer is that encouraging a cult of the leader goes hand-in-hand with personalist politics:
[D]irect cult production activities may increase the legitimacy of the leader rather than that of the state or the ruling organisation as such, they will tend to be associated with the consolidation of personal power within a regime… Thus, the emergence of the Stalin cult was not only associated with the collectivisation crisis, but also with the consolidation of Stalin’s personal power within the Politburo; and similarly the Franco cult was at its height while he was consolidating his power during and immediately after the civil war years.
Hence, personal vanity blends with the logic of the state.
In Trujillo’s Dominican republic, for example, it became common knowledge that painters who created flattering representations of Trujillo were well-rewarded, while newspaper columnists who failed to mention his achievements were often the object of vilification through anonymous letters (sometimes written by Trujillo himself). In these circumstances, it is unsurprising that sycophants prospered, and cult content became highly exaggerated, with comparisons between Trujillo and God becoming quite common.
All this helps explain how the Republican party has become an organisational technology ad maiorem gloriam Trumpis. But still, it doesn’t explain why the praise is so bizarrely over the top. Does Steve Witkoff really believe that Trump is the Finest Candidate Ever for the Nobel Peace Prize?
Very likely not. Marquez suggests that flattery becomes increasingly ridiculous when competition for rewards intersects with the dynamics of signalling personal loyalty.
[L]oyalty signalling typically emerges when there is common knowledge that there are rewards or punishments arising from credibly and publicly recognising (or failing to recognise) the leader’s exceptional qualities.
If you are in a cult of personality centred on someone who has power, you want to reap the benefits of connection rather than suffering the penalties of disfavour. So how do you show your loyalty? By paying the costs of humiliation. The more grotesquely over the top your praise, the more credible it is as a signal of support for Dear Leader.
Voluntarily engaging in behaviours that incur peer disapproval or loss of dignity can credibly indicate one’s loyalty, as when people repeat obviously absurd flattery of the leader in public.
Apparatchiks’ willingness to degrade themselves will hurt their reputation with other people. But for exactly that reason, it serves as proof of loyalty to the one man who counts, Donald Trump. The more appalling the self-abasement, the more effectively it will serve this purpose.
The bad news is that flattery inflation tends to feed on itself. If there are many courtiers vying for attention, they will repeatedly up the ante in their efforts to out-compete each other. Merely unctuous flattery may give way to truly “nauseating displays of loyalty” as officials compete to win favour.
For example, Marquez describes how Kim Jong-il’s toadies and catchfarts were willing to claim in public that he “had mastered teleportation to avoid being tracked by American satellites.” I’ve not seen anything as ostentatiously ridiculous being said by Trump’s cabinet members. In fairness though, we’re only seven months in. •
