He has used a series of show trials – some based in fact, others pure fantasy – to eviscerate civil freedoms. February’s earthquakes, which took an estimated 50,000 lives and injured twice as many, were badly handled by the government and exposed the corruption of a system that cared more for patronage networks than for well-built buildings.

Under normal political expectations, Erdogan should have paid the political price with a crushing electoral defeat. Not only did he survive, but he also increased his vote share in some of the towns worst hit by, and most neglected after, the earthquakes.

“We love him,” explained a resident quoted in The Economist. “For the call to prayer, for our homes, for our headscarves.”

That last line is telling, and not just because it gets to the importance of Erdogan’s Islamism as the secret of his success. It’s a rebuke to James Carville’s parochially American slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Actually, no: It’s also God, tradition, values, identity, culture and the resentments that go with each. Only a denuded secular imagination fails to notice that there are things people care about more than their pay cheques.

There is also the matter of power. The classically liberal political tradition is based on the suspicion of power. The illiberal tradition is based on the exaltation of it.

Erdogan, as the tribune of the Turkish Everyman, built himself an aesthetically grotesque, 1100-room presidential palace for $US615 million ($945 million). Far from scandalising his supporters, it seems to have delighted them. In it, they see not a sign of extravagance or waste, but the importance of the man and the movement to which they attach themselves and submit.

All this is a reminder that political signals are often transmitted at frequencies that left-wing ears have trouble hearing, much less decoding.

To wonder how Erdogan could possibly be reelected after so thoroughly wrecking his country’s economy and its institutions is akin to wondering how Vladimir Putin appears to retain considerable domestic support after his Ukraine debacle.

Maybe what some critical mass of ordinary Russians want, at least at some subconscious level, isn’t an easy victory. It’s a unifying ordeal.

Which brings us to another would-be strongman in his palace in Palm Beach, Florida. In November, I was sure that Donald Trump was, as I wrote, “finally finished.”

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How could any but his most slavish followers continue to support him after he had once again cost Republicans the Senate? Wouldn’t this latest proof of losing be the last straw for devotees who had been promised “so much winning”?

Silly me. The Trump movement isn’t built on the prospect of winning. It’s built on a sense of belonging: of being heard and seen; of being a thorn in the side to those you sense despise you and whom you despise in turn; of submission for the sake of representation. All the rest – victory or defeat, prosperity or misery – is details.