the Egocrat is a sort of "phantasmic" public emodiment, theorized by Claude Lefort in "The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism"
an inversion of the idea that a member of the "general public" is a sort of anonymized subject (see notes on "abstracting yourself in public")
instead, the Egocrat actualizes the typically "indeterminate image of the people"
ending up with a "self-identical representativeness"
(Warner's summations, 172)
"Publicity puts us in a relation to these figures that is also a relation to an unrealizable public subject" (175)
Lefort "associated the trend with totalitarianism" (writing in 1979, he is possibly thinking of figures like Stalin and Mao, though Warner notes that this has "come to be the norm in Western democratic bureaucracies"
Habermas also notes a similar trend, also speaks of "a more recent return to the display of public representatives"
"a return that he calls 'refeudalizing'" (Warner 173)
Warner's summation "modern regimes [...] require a return to the image of the leader" (in the margins I wrote "Trump")
for Warner, the best example is Reagan ("his figure blurs the boundary between the iconicities of the political public and the commodity public")
moving "from the interior of the political system to the surface of the brand-name commodity [...] a conjunction of these two kinds of appeal" (Trump again)