I lived in Turkey for many years and watched as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became more repressive. When I asked a Turkish academic why a segment of society had continued, for two decades, to vote for an increasingly authoritarian leader, he told me that for those people, to renounce him would be to renounce their own souls. He said this with some sympathy. Erdoğan’s policies early in his reign had helped religious and poor people to feel proud, to believe they had a place in Turkish society. I returned to the United States six years ago, but the idea of renunciation stuck with me—this notion that to renounce a leader or a movement or an ideology can be to renounce oneself. I’ve been thinking about it lately while watching the illegal American-Israeli war against Iran and the conduct of the American “secretary of war,” Pete Hegseth.…