Lately I’ve been fascinated with reading about the lives of various dictators’ partners. More specifically, the mindset intrigues me. I wonder what goes on through their heads.
I’d be the perfect First Husband and eat shrimp cocktail while the peasants worship us!
Right? I’m gonna start practicing my queen waving right now
Would leaving them make them change? If you stick around, you might be able to change their mind on some issues they don’t feel so strongly about.
That’s what I was thinking. My wife would be benevolent but politically clueless, making me the real dictator.
No lol. Even attempting to be a dictator would go against my core principles. We don’t have to agree on everything or even a lot, but “dictators are bad actually” is one of them.
What do you mean “if”? My wife has been a dictator since the day we got married…
Damn, didn’t think I’d see one of these jokes in 2025. Wild.
You don’t really have a choice
Perhaps i’m too optimistic, but I think these conflicts tend to be resolved much earlier on. I don’t think someone just wakes up one day and says “hey I want to be an evil selfless despot”.
Not a dictator, but I think a close enough example is Mackenzie Scott, formerly Bezos. I don’t know her or Jeff personally of course. We know about Jeff’s privelege of course, but Mackenzie was the daughter of a financial planner and granddaughter of a natural gas executive herself. The two of them met working at a hedge fund. I hate hedge funds and think they shouldn’t exist, and I suspect there was some nepotism and privelege that helped them both get there, but i’m not going to call everyone who works at a hedge fund or benefits from privelege evil.
Then they quit to start Amazon. Privelege aside I am sure there was a lot of hard work and risk in those early years. She reportedly did a lot of work while also having 3 children (and they adopted a 4th), and she also put off her passion of writing novels to do so. I’ve known a lot of people who own their own small businesses, and there’s a lot of hard decisions and sleepless nights involved. I’m sure they both made mistakes and learned lessons, and occasionally made selfish decisions.
To use a scientifically inaccurate idiom- the frog boiled. Amazon became more ruthless, certainly unethical, and most likely violated antitrust laws that never get enforced. They applied more pressure to everyone - their employees (which led to union suppression tactics), their suppliers, their customers, governments, and that’s just what I know about.
It’s possible that Mackenzie knew about all of that and was fine benefitting from it until Jeff cheated or grew distant or whatever. But from her quotes and her actions afterwards, it seems like she had enough of the exploitation. She divorced him in 2019, getting half of Jeff’s net worth and making Musk the world’s richest man instead.
She signed the Giving Pledge, which at face value is basically a promise to give away most of her wealth to charity in her lifetime. The efficacy of the Giving Pledge is beyond the scope of this comment, but according to her website she’s given away over $19 billion. Philanthropy like that can often be a shady scheme to funnel money to friends and family, avoid taxes, or lobby governments for favorable legislation. It’s possible that she is doing some of that too, but I haven’t seen an expose yet. So maybe she actually is giving that wealth back to the world.
She also has written and released a couple of novels. Maybe she hired a ghost writer, and I’m sure her money helped her get published, but it does kinda seem like that was her dream and she followed it. She also married (and shortly thereafter divorced) a private schoolteacher- not skme celebrity or politician or billionaire.
Maybe it’s just a well-crafted facade, but from a distance it looks to me like a rare case of someone actually realizing that such wealth accumulation was bad for the world and stepping away from it. She’s still quite wealthy, allegedly with a net worth over $30 billion left, but that kind of money takes time to get rid of and she seems to be making progress.
Questions like “how much money should a person be allowed to have” are details that are going to change over time and I’m not sure what the answer is right now, but at the very least i think the world would be a better place if more billionaires did what Mackenzie Scott is claiming to be doing.
No, political wife is not what I signed up for. Unless I was too afraid to leave, in which case I would try to secretly work against him. Which is also terrifying but at least useful.
Not in a relationship, but hypothetically yes, absolutely. I’d try go exert as much power as I could to make sure their rule is benevolent and try to convince them to create strong institutions that would become democratic after our deaths.
Now if my dictator gf started committing atrocities, I’d leave ASAP if I could do so safely. But I don’t think I would ever be dating the sort of person who would use that sort of power for evil.
As long as they are becoming a dictator to enforce an ideology I believe in, absolutely. I’d definitely seize this opportunity to go after my enemies as well. The “golden rule” is treat others how you want to be treated and I’m sick and tired of being a punching bag, so it’s only fair.
The time to be nice about the state of our broken society ended a long time ago. The enemy gives no quarter and they won’t stop until we’re all slaves working for less than basic needs in return. If I got my way via S/O proxy dictatorship, life is going to massively improve for the average person anyhow.
If they were becoming a fascist, what else would I do, execute a double cross, steal some nukes and wreck havoc? I’d try to manipulate them into letting me life an easy life first but if they actually expected me to live like a evangelical conservative idiot, that ain’t gonna happen so cowabunga it is.
Hell no. I’ll stand far away so as not to be in the shot when the inevitable assassination attempts begin. I would only support them in the open as a survival strategy while secretly trying to fuck up everything they try to accomplish behind closed doors.
Like, what kind of dictator are we talking here? Is this a Lord Vetinari benevolent dictator, or your typical generic slimeball autocrat?
Personally, I’d like to think that if they did become the latter, they’d be so far different from the person I love that I would break from them. Thoughtfulness, intelligence, and consideration aren’t usually things I see associated with dictators, you know? But people have an incredible capacity to isolate and put on different masks between their personal and professional lives…
If they woud be one of the rare benevolent dictators, which can work better than democracy, I would stay.
I would have left when they started making moves to become said dictator.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here, because I think survival could play a bigger part than morals.
Now, if they’ve both always been assholes and rise to power together, that’s totally different, they’re just monsters.
If you really believed that your partner had the best intentions, and you were surprised when they became a malevolent dictator, you may not approve and be disgusted by what they are doing, but what do you think is going to happen when you ask the dictator for a divorce? The one person who knows more about them than anyone else isn’t going to just get half the furniture and an apartment down the road.
Maybe? If she actually had the people’s trust and took power in a system that was already far from democratic, simply because she’s not a money-worshipping sociopath, I certainly would. It’s better than what most of us have gotten as leaders, at least in the West, in recent memory.
However, while I do think a good chunk of the world is in grave need of a radical ideological change and that pretty much all of our wounds are collectively self-inflicted (imagine if people actually believed in being righteous before all and were rightly guided? If people had moral shame? Every imperialist massacre would stop tomorrow…), I don’t think we could enforce it, so I truly wonder how necessary it would be for my wife to be a dictator. “Yes, baby, perhaps this area of the world has gone to shit, let’s just go somewhere else instead of fighting the wave of zombies and their masters?” is probably what I would say, lol. Regardless, whatever change that I think could justify taking power even if massively unpopular would be to force a change that, sadly, can only to come from within, voluntarily. If we could just find a way to remind people to remember they and others are human, that would be great.
