YAY

Josiah Ober, "Quasi Rights: Participatory Citizenship and Negative Liberties":

"... By contrast [to oligarchic constructions of upstarts as threats], the Athenian democratic ideology construed the threat to public order, the prime suspect of "paranomic" activity, as the hubristic individual - he who was strong enough and arrogant enough to seek to establish preeminence via the humiliation of others within the polis. By combining the language of the hubris law itself and Demosthenes' normative language in explicating that law, we may say that Athenians saw women, children, slaves, and (presumably) foreigners, along with the weaker of the citizens (i.e. those commanding few resources) as the potential objects of illegitimate activity, rather than the willful originators of threats to the public order. The powerful hubristic individual was imagined as seeking to establish hierarchical relations within the polis on his own terms by demonstrating his capacity to humiliate, by outrageously insulting weaker persons by speech or deed (especially sexual violation), and by seeking to do so with impunity. And if he (or the class of powerful persons he represented) were successful in establishing a secure "personal" social hierarchy within the polis, a social space free from the legal authority of the democratic state, it would clearly mean the end of the effective rule of the demos: this is why a successfully perpetrated, unchastised act of hubris could be characterized as signifying "the overthrow of the democracy."..."

The Authoritarian

Josh Marshall:

"Look at this exchange caught by CBS's indefatigable Sopan Deb from the Michael Savage radio show.

SAVAGE: Donald Trump is with us on the Savage Nation. Line 10. Donald Trump, you're the only one who can save us from this insanity. We need you Donald. You've got to become president.

TRUMP: There's no question about it. It's horrible. What's going on is horrible. And Hillary Clinton was there. I mean, she was there. Now she's saying what she's going to do. What can she do? She was there and led to the weakness of our country. And it's disgraceful that she now talks about what she can do. She can do nothing.

Like the Skittles nonsense, it's an embodiment of the Trump campaign: simultaneously hateful ugly and comical stupid. But look at the self-abasement. As President Obama said memorably in his convention speech, We Americans don't look to be ruled. But a lot of high-profile Trump supporters not only hunger to be ruled but their advocacy has incorporated this hunger to be ruled into its very vocabulary. It sounds dramatic to say this. But expression of support has been channeled into an abasement or even abandonment of the self...."