Every woman adores a fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
--Slyvia Plath, "Daddy"
We were talking the other day about the worst bosses we ever had. I've been lucky; I've not suffered under many bad ones, and the bad ones I've had I didn't suffer under long. There was one editor in particular who had a deserved reputation as a difficult man--he'd get in fistfights with writers and had the temerity to win them--but he and I usually got along fine. He raised his voice at me in a staff meeting once, and I raised mine right back at him, but it was over a trivial issue and neither of us crossed any Rubicon of disrespect. (It probably helped that both of us understood that while he was a slightly bigger boy than me I was quite a bit younger and had a reach advantage.)
I imagine others perceived him differently than I did, for many of my colleagues kept bottles of Xanax and Valium in their desk drawers and tiptoed gingerly past his office. While I did all right there, for others it was not a happy place.
But it did produce good work. My boss got a lot out of his staff, even allowing for inevitable casualties of burnout. Turnover was high but the daily pressure to do not just good but exceptional work resulted in lots of prizes and, more importantly, some great journalism. He did not run a Montessori school, he did not want to hear about your problems at home or with your student loans. Working for him did not automatically make him your friend.
I thrived under him, and I came to understand that he was an empathetic human being with issues of his own, so I'm reluctant to say he was a bully. But others have said that, and they may be right.
In the current climate "bully" is about as vile an epithet as you can hurl at someone, but that doesn't mean it's not an effective technique. While it's fashionable to say that bullies are unhappy and damaged creatures who are often hurting as badly as their victims, there's countervailing evidence that kids who bully other children in fact enjoy relatively high levels of social standing and self-esteem. Bullying might even be a path to popularity for some of them. There doesn't seem to be much basis for the popular idea of the schoolyard bully as sad, self-loathing and frightened.
In the adult world, bullies often succeed because, as Stanley Milgram demonstrated with his shock experiments--where people were willing to administer painful electric shocks to others simply because a pretend scientist in a lab coat told them to--most of us are reluctant to question authority. We accept what the authority figure tells us, even when we might suspect that power is being abused. We even lionize our bullies: Patton might have been just as fine a general if he'd not slapped those soldiers, Bobby Knight might have been just as good a basketball coach had he not thrown that chair.
Before Human Resources civilized them, newsrooms used to breed lots of bullies, some of whom are now fondly remembered by some of the people they once terrorized. It's a kind of Stockholm syndrome, I guess, the way we get nostalgic over how poorly we were treated by some little martinet. Or maybe just our way of saving face.
What's hardly ever said is that bullies often get their way, that they often succeed through intimidation and force of personality. A lot of us are drawn to them, especially those of us who are most worried about our place in the world. Donald Trump was a famous bully before he ever embarked on a presidential campaign.
You can go a long way as a bully. There are a lot of people who are just looking for an order to obey. Maybe it's not a majority in this country, maybe it's just 35 percent of 35 percent, but it's out there.
I don't know that we're all that different from other people. We like to think we are, sure. We like to think that we're exceptional, both individually and as a nation, that if a situation arose where we needed to be brave we'd rise to it.
But most of us are pretty ordinary. Most of us wouldn't try to be the hero. Most of us don't stand up to bullies. Most of us don't challenge authority. Most of us just work here, we do what we're told.
Which is why it's important that we maintain the checks and balances we have, that we poke and pry into the lives of our would-be leaders, those crazy narcissists who actually want the impossible job of shepherding our big country into the future. Because it's easier to nip a certain kind of ugly nationalism in the bud than it is to uproot it after it's become entrenched in power. It's easier to defeat a bully before he gets his hands on the levers that move the state.
Because power, however attained, confers a presumption of legitimacy.
I don't have a lot of political litmus tests, and I understand that reasonable people can disagree on things. I don't think anybody has a patent on the truth. But I know better than to think it can't happen here.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 04/05/2016