David McElroy

Everyone knows that Adolph Hitler was the absolute dictator of Germany for 12 years, but most people don’t realize he got that power legally. In 1933, the democratically elected German Reichstag passed what came to be known as the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler the power to rule however he pleased.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate voted to give the president so much power that it reminds me of a first step down that road. In a military authorization bill, the Senate inserted a clause that gives a president the power to have the military arrest a U.S. citizen and send him to a military prison — to be held indefinitely with no trial. Isn’t that something you would have expected from Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia?

Let me repeat that. This legislation will allow a president to unilaterally send any American to rot in jail with no hope of appealing to a court for a trial. All he has to do is claim the person is a suspect in some kind of terror-related crime. And we know that no president will ever misuse his power in order to achieve other purposes. Right? And we know the authorities never jump to conclusions and falsely arrest an American in terror-related cases. Right?

If you trust any person with that kind of power, you’re either naive or insane.

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When it comes to my ideas about how to structure society, I have confident answers for most things, because they’re based on solid principles that I’m very comfortable with. But there are a few tough questions that I don’t have answers for. The toughest one — and the one that haunts me the most — is how to protect children with parents who are abusive or otherwise unfit. I honestly have no good ideas. Do you?

I started thinking about this Wednesday because of a video clip that a lot of people were linking to. Some were laughing. Some were shaking their heads. Others were angry. I’m just left frustrated at how no solution to this problem fits neatly into any of the things I believe in.

The video is a collection of several stories about a woman in Florida who has 15 children with three different men. She is angry because she thinks no one is doing enough to give things to her and her children. She’s not a sympathetic character, to put it mildly. At one point, she tells a TV reporter:

“Somebody needs to pay for all my children and all our suffering. Somebody needs to be held accountable and they need to pay.”

The state’s child service agencies had been trying to help her. They had been paying her rent, giving her furniture, and providing other services. But that wasn’t enough for this dysfunctional woman. When we meet the woman and her kids, they’re all living in a two-bedroom motel unit — after they had been evicted from a house that the state had been paying for. (The details of the eviction are unclear.)

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If you dig beneath the surface of most politicians, you’ll find a narcissist. Once you understand who narcissists really are — and what it is they crave — there’s nothing surprising about it. The only surprise is how few people notice it.

For more than 20 years, I’ve worked with dozens of politicians. By dealing with them in very stressful situations — when their careers and egos are on the line — I’ve seen sides of many of them that the public never sees. So I’m willing to say without question that most of them are narcissists. Most of them honestly believe the world revolves around them and their needs.

In casual conversation, we think of narcissists as those who are in love with themselves, but the reality is much different. A narcissist craves attention and love and respect, but he’s secretly empty on the inside. He projects a false self to the world in order to get what’s sometimes called “narcissistic supply.” He’s like an emotional vampire who desperately needs other people’s attention and admiration to survive. (You can read much more than you’ll probably ever want to know about narcissism here.)

So is it any surprise that people who crave attention and admiration from others gravitate to politics? Of course not. To these people, the entire world revolves around them and their desperate needs. They matter. Other people don’t. They can be charming and manipulative when they need to be — when they need to impress you or make you love them, so you’ll give them the attention and love they crave.

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