At some point in your life, you have been drawn to someone whom you should not have liked, at least on paper. Not the charming rogue of a romantic comedy or the morally complex antihero in a prestige drama. I mean someone whose appeal was less about psychological complexity and more about audacity. Someone who said the thing you’d never say out loud, or who went after people with a kind of gleeful disregard for consequences that made something in you (some quiet, buried part of you) feel a flicker of satisfaction. Someone whose cruelty, even directed at others and clearly wrong, somehow landed on you as a kind of relief.
If there is even a small, reluctant part of you that recognizes that description, it is worth examining why, because it points to a psychological dynamic with implications that extend well beyond individual taste in entertainment.
The Mirror Dynamic
When someone is genuinely and repeatedly drawn to a figure who is flagrantly narcissistic, openly contemptuous, or casually abusive, they are not necessarily responding to their charisma. They are responding to a mirror. The narcissistic public figure gives visible, sanctioned, and often celebrated expression to something that lives inside the admirer in a form they cannot or will not express themselves. The appeal is not “I wish I were more like that person” but something else—that person is doing the thing I have been told I cannot do.
Jung identified this mechanism as shadow projection: the process by which disowned aspects of the psyche are perceived and experienced in others rather than in the self (Jung, 1946). What makes this particularly relevant in the context of public figures is that projection intensifies around qualities that are simultaneously desired and forbidden. The flagrant narcissist does not create the admirer’s suppressed contempt or grandiosity; they give it somewhere visible to land.
We could call this inhibited antagonism. The contempt, grandiosity, and sense of being above the ordinary rules of decency that characterize the narcissistic public figure are aspects of the admirer’s own psychology that have been driven underground. Suppression does not resolve these feelings; it pressurizes them. The person who has spent years performing reasonableness while privately harboring contempt for whoever they have decided is beneath them finds, in the flagrant narcissist, a kind of vicarious release.
The Defensive Response
This is also why admirers of such figures tend to become so defensive when you point out what their favorite figure is actually doing. You are not only criticizing a public but challenging something they have identified with at a level they may not be consciously aware of. The elaborate rhetorical wall that goes up in defense of the clearly objectionable thing the clearly objectionable person said is not confusion but a projection of their disowned self.
In my own research on narcissism and empathy, I found consistent evidence that people with lower empathy scores tend to harbor more covert admiration for narcissistic figures than overt admiration. They often sense, on some level, that their attraction is at odds with the image they present to others. The admiration is concealed, expressed in private or only with others who share enough of the same values for the social cost to feel manageable. Tangney and colleagues (1992) found similar patterns in their work on shame and self-concealment, noting that disavowed aspects of identity tend to seek expression through identification with external figures rather than direct acknowledgment.
The Political Dimension
The same dynamic operates, perhaps most consequentially, at the political level. When otherwise reasonable people vote for or defend a candidate who is overtly cruel, dishonest, or contemptuous of the people they are supposed to serve, the usual explanations (economic anxiety, cultural displacement, anti-establishment sentiment) are not wrong exactly, but they are incomplete. Underneath those legitimate grievances is often something more personal and less flattering: an identification with the transgression itself. A satisfaction in watching someone with power say the thing they have always wanted to say; a vicarious experience of dominance that their own lives, for whatever reason, have not provided.
This is not an argument for reducing complex political behavior to a single psychological variable. Human motivation is always layered, and I have very little patience for frameworks that flatten people into two-dimensional caricatures. Some people who support objectionable figures are genuinely deceived. Some are making calculated transactional choices. Some operate from a tribalism that overrides individual moral evaluation. But we have to stop pretending that the attraction is only external. For some people, it is internal, and the people most resistant to hearing this are often the ones for whom it is most true.
The Invitation
The bravest thing a person can do in this context is to sit with the question honestly. Not a few minutes of performative self-examination, but genuine reflection on what these figures are activating. To ask: What is this person giving me access to? What in me responds to this, and what does that response want?
Narcissism Essential Reads
You cannot escape yourself by outsourcing your shadow to someone else’s performance. It follows you. It intensifies when unexamined. And the longer it goes unexamined, the more it can be leveraged by others. Someone unaware of what they are carrying can be led by what is disowned far more easily than someone who has looked at it directly.
The narcissist in the public square is not only a political or cultural phenomenon but an invitation to explore yourself with greater depth.
