Authoritarianism often begins with a lie: that a complex society can be reduced to something simple, manageable, and tidy. It’s a way of seeing that values order over truth, clarity over reality. James Scott gave us the language for this when he showed how states make society “legible” through censuses, registries, and maps—tools that turn lived reality into categories that can be counted and controlled. What begins as a rational project of governance soon reveals its darker side: those who resist classification are marked as unruly, even dangerous. Illegibility itself becomes a threat.
Dictators carry this logic further. They do not merely want to know their societies, they want to command them, dividing populations into friends and enemies, loyalists and traitors. The act of seeing is never neutral. It defines problems, frames solutions, and licenses repression. Once a group is named—whether “dangerous classes” in Victorian England, “kulaks” in Stalinist Russia, or “illegals” in today’s America—its members can be abandoned to suffering or targeted without remorse. To be rendered visible in this way is to be made disposable.
Language is crucial here. Words like “enemy of the people,” “traitor,” or “radical left” are not casual insults but acts of classification. They strip opponents of legitimacy and redefine who counts as part of the political community. Once outside that circle, rights no longer protect you. To be labeled is to be placed in a category where injury, exclusion, or even death can be justified.
Spectacle ensures that this way of seeing takes hold. Rallies, televised stunts, and the constant churn of social media are not ornamental—they are central to governance. These are collective rituals, repeated performances that rehearse the boundaries of loyalty and betrayal. Chants, slogans, and symbols operate like liturgies, binding followers to a shared vision and normalizing exclusion as an act of patriotism. The performance itself is the politics.
Institutions lose their autonomy under such a gaze. Courts, agencies, and legislatures are not valued for their constitutional role but for their loyalty to the leader. Judges are praised or condemned according to their decisions. Generals are “mine” or “traitors.” Even the census, once a neutral instrument of state legibility, becomes a weapon to mark outsiders and deny them standing. Bureaucracy bends toward the grievances of one man.
Other ways of seeing must be erased. Independent journalism, science, and education provide competing lenses, so they are denounced as corrupt, elitist, or fake. Alternative visions of reality cannot be tolerated because they threaten the monopoly of perception. Truth itself becomes partisan, dependent on who is speaking rather than what is said.
This politics of vision is also written into landscapes. Walls, detention centers, surveillance networks, and militarized borders make exclusion visible and enduring. They are not only barriers but material inscriptions of fear and hierarchy. The wall at the border, in particular, functions as a physical map of belonging and danger, a permanent line drawn into the earth to remind people who is inside and who is outside. Space itself is reorganized into zones of safety and threat, inclusion and abandonment.
The map that results is a moral geography: real Americans versus enemies within, patriots versus globalists, winners versus losers. These boundaries are constantly redrawn to sustain anxiety and enforce submission. Yesterday’s ally may become today’s traitor, and an enemy can be rehabilitated if they bend the knee. What matters is not substance but compliance.
The greatest danger is that this way of seeing does not remain the property of the leader. It spreads. Trump did not only impose his optics; he trained his followers to adopt them. Through repetition of slogans, partisan media, and the daily rhythm of outrage, millions learned to recognize enemies instantly and to feel justified in doing so.
To see like a dictator is to collapse complexity into binaries, to transform opponents into existential threats, and to enlist people in enforcing the gaze themselves. Trump’s presidency showed how this vision can take root inside a democracy, bending institutions and corroding trust until only one way of seeing remains—his
Suggested Readings
Appadurai, Arjun. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Buck-Morss, Susan. Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left. London: Verso, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Gessen, Masha. Surviving Autocracy. New York: Riverhead Books, 2020.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.