Posted on 05/01/2008 6:49:55 PM PDT by B-Chan
Loving The Dictators
In a recent article ["The dictators are back ... and we don’t care", The Times (London), April 27, 2008] Robert Kagan bemoans the rise of authoritarian governments in Russia and China, among other venues. His reaction is natural — and typical of the post-Soviet generation. With the victory of the Western Allies over the USSR's Communist empire in World War III (aka the "cold war"), liberal democracy über alles was the watchword of the day. Papa Francis Fukuyama told us that we were at the "end of history", didn't he? Surely, the evil idea of authoritarian rule went down the tubes along with the USSR, right?
Wrong. Around the world, so-called "soft" dictatorships such as Putin's Russia (and auto-bureaucracies such as Singapore) seem to be perfectly acceptable to those living under them. It appears that despite the hand-wringing of some in our own media/government elite, authoritarianism is back. How can this be? Can't the Masses in these countries see the obvious benefits of liberal democracy, of voting, laws, and representative government?
In a word, no. To many people around the world, democracy does not bring to mind Pericles of Athens in a fresh, slave-laundered tunic, lecturing the people on the beauty of freedom; instead, it brings to mind guns in the streets, riots, and general social chaos. Democracy is not a one-size-fits all form of social order, after all, and representative government is neither suitable for nor adaptable to every culture. Believe it or not, many (most?) people in the world are profoundly distrustful of nose-counting as a means of government, and I'd like to propose a reason why.
From what I've seen in my travels and read in my studies, the truth is that people don't want to participate in an equal sharing of political power. I think most people want the social order to be ruled by a single, non-participatory authority. I submit that this esire for top-down order is a natural part of human psychology, and is one reason why representative governments always fail over the long term.
I know the dogma these days is that people everywhere instinctively crave democracy (or a republican form of government, at the very least). The historical truth, however, is that most people don't really care what form of government is in place at the national level as long as they are free to trade, worship, and live their everyday lives as they please. Singapore, for example, manages to function quite nicely under an authoritarian government today, as did Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal. Even the French, those lovers of liberté, prefer to live under a central government that would be considered intolerably invasive here in the States. (For example: in France, the government gets to decide if the name you've picked for your newborn baby is acceptable or not. Imagine the State of Arkansas or Alaska having the power to block you from naming your kid Canyon or Ta'niqua!) And it's not just the furriners who prefer to let the Big Boys run the playground; our current abysmally low rates of voter participation in the United States are proof that most people in America couldn't care less about participating in government as long as the streets are reasonably safe, gas and beer are reasonably cheap, the Big Game starts on time, and taxes are reasonably low.
Democracy is the system in which the masses (the demos) rule. As practiced by the Athenian city-state in ancient Greece, democracy was never intended as a means of organizing any polity bigger than a city-state, and did not allow all citizens a say in government. The system established in 510 BC under Cleisthenes allowed all male citizens their say before the general Assembly, but carefully limited the power of the hoi polloi to make laws and shape policy (this was the function of the Boule, a body of representatives elected from the heads of the local political and tribal groups.) The system began to crack almost immediately, as the leaders of the various demes (sub-groups) of Athenian society began jockeying among themselves for political advantage.
Which brings us to another point: democracies are brittle and prone to sudden collapse. Even the "ideal democracy" of Athens was hardly robust; 170 years after its establishment, the Athenian democracy had coalesced into an autocratic quasi-empire run by small, special-interest groups. It was then conquered, first by the autocratic Spartans, then by Alexander the Great, whose Macedonian empire ruled the Athenians for two centuries. Finally came the Roman Republic (not a democracy — they had elected dictators) which lasted five centuries off-and-on but which reverted to autocratic rule with the (elective) dictatorship-for-life of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. Thereafter, Athens was under the Roman imperium in one form or another until AD 1806. Thus we see that even in its most pure form democracy has a lousy track record versus autocratic rule. Like communism, representative government looks great on paper but just doesn't work well in Real Life.
Keep in mind we're tallking about big government here. At the city and county level, people do prefer to have a say in government, but only to the extent that their government influences their everyday lives. Otherwise, they are content to raise their families, run their businesses, and earn their wages — and leave the big decisions to the local aristocracy.
Yes, I said "aristocracy". Every city in America has one: a cohort of four or five families who control (overtly or covertly) the local business, civic and governmental institutions. In every community, a sort of cream (or scum, if one prefers) of leaders naturally rises to the top of the general churn of citizens. It seems that some people are simply born with a talent for governing and administrating, and this talent tends to run in families. (In our city, for example, the V_________ family has been involved in running the show in one form or another for sixty-plus years, and most people are fine with that, because they do a fairly good job of it.) People born with this ability tend to rise to the levels of power of whatever community they inhabit, and tend to do what's best for the community out of a sense of noblesse oblige. Such families represent a natural aristocracy, and without them, most communities would be chaotic.
And they are. The city of Dallas is a perfect example of what can happen when The People are allowed to take the reins of power. Over the first 120 years or so of its existence, the city was dominated by an unelected Power Elite of wealthy merchants, landowners, and industrial leaders, and things ran fairly smoothly under their crass, pitiless but generally benevolent domination. During this time, the city had an elected government, of course — a government composed of various candidates carefully groomed by the power group to fill these positions, but an elected government, nonetheless. This shadow government was not perfect, nor was it always run for the benefit of all, but under its offhanded tyranny the city thrived and grew, and most of its citizens prospered.
But beginning in the 1960s this tidy system began to be undermined. Due to legal pressures and societal changes, a genuine democracy began to rise in Dallas, and the aging (and now mostly suburban) members of the Power Elite decided to quietly and gradually surrender their control of the city rather than risk plunging Dallas into the kind of chaos that had gripped places such as LA, Detroit, and Chicago. (This is why there were never any real race riots or integration-related violence in Dallas: the Powers That Be simply decreed that Dallas would integrate, democratize, and desegregate, and it was so.) By surrendering their power gradually, the Power Elite facilitated the keeping of the peace, ensuring that Dallas remained an attractive haven for business.
Unfortunately, by surrendering their power, the monopolar rule of the “old money” tribe was slowly replaced by a multipolar battle for power between the city's various ethnic tribes, each of which of course had its own clique of the natural leaders, each of which had its own aims and interests. The city of Dallas today is "governed" by an exquisitely democratic, representational, and sensitive elected government — and is, of course, a big frigging mess, with a declining tax base, a rising crime rate, and a sputtering economy. The exurbs, which are now run by the sons and daughters of Dallas former Power Elite, are where the peace, quiet, and economic action is.
Democracy does not scale well. The lesson here is that representative government, where it works at all, works only at the scale of a city-state like Athens, and even then only when it is dominated by a natural aristocracy. A state or nation run by democratic principles will sooner or later devolve into chaos, as self-interested groups of all types battle each other for control. One need only look at Dallas — or the former Yugoslavia — for proof of that thesis.
So let the dictators come. We don't have to love them, of course — but we can live alongside them, so long as they respect the basic human dignity of their thralls (e.g. no genocides, mind control, forced organ harvesting, etc.), and otherwise do not threaten their neighbors or the peace of the world. The United States and her allies can coexist in peace with any number of benevolent authoritarian nation-states. We might not want to live in an authoritarian state ourselves, but to people in other countries a dictatorship or autocracy could very well be an alternative preferable to chaos. As a representative republic that grows ever less representative and republican by the day, we can tolerate the dictatorships of the world as merely the latest examples of what might be called the default mode of human government.
It reads like an April 1st post.
Thanks, but don’t you have, you know, some kind of actual argument to make?
The General Human Pattern of social organization is a head male and usually his mate in charge (a king, football quarterback, dictator) with his loyal inner circle (the royal court, the in kinds, the junta). The rest of the population is “out”. The guy in charge stays in charge as long as:
1. He controls a critical resource, like Chinese water empires or trade routes, like Mohammed and his merry band of theives
2. Has recognition as such (divine right of kinds, enough guns to outgun the competition)
3. Doesn’t kill so many underlings that the rest vote with their feet to leave
This article suggests that we should be happy with another Clinton or Bush as President, because, hey, they’re born and bred to rule. As long as the trains run on time and we all get our annual visit with the socialized medico, life is good, so having a say doesn’t matter so much.
Of course, power corrupts, or it attracts the corruptible. And those who seem given a divine right (or A-OK to do anything) will do anything. Ban the religion you don’t like, execute those who annoy you, raze buildings to improve your view.
Democracy is an improvement over the General Human Pattern in that it recognizes that underlings have rights. Constitutional limits and checks and balances on powers help protect those rights.
Saying we should be A-OK with a fall back to more primitive patterns of behavior while keeping our modern technology is like terrorists who force women into burqas because Mohammed did it, but explosives and AK-47s are acceptable. Picking and choosing, taking the worst from the past and enforcing it into the present with the most advanced technology.
I hope this article is a joke. Because anyone who believes a “let the idiot rule because his father did a decent job, screw the better candidate because he has the wrong name” is a step in a very wrong direction.
Thank you for your response.
The real reason certain people are “born to rule” has less to do with their control of water canals or whatever and more to do with the only real “superpower” that exists. It’s called charisma, and it’s the power to get people to obey you out of love rather than fear. Some people are born with this superpower and some are not; here in the West, we call a person with charisma a “born leader” — the no-nonsense captain of the football team, for example, or the stern-but-wise teacher all the kids love, or the bright-eyed and witty schoolgirl who, though perhaps not the most physically attractive girl in school, still commands an army of loyal girlfriends and a herd of starry-eyed boys using nothing but sheer charm.
Charisma tends to run in families. Of course, this is no guarantee that any given menber of a “gifted” family will be charismatic; it is merely another trait that gets passed down in families. Charisma is furthermore not limited to “good guys”; most of history’s most horrible tyrants have possessed great personal charisma.
Yes, autocracy has risks. The powers of an autocrat (or an authoritarian government) are essentially unlimited, and can be used for great evil. However, the same can also be said of a democratic government. Sure, “Constitutional limits and checks and balances on powers” are there, and theoretically our government cannot exceed its constitutionally-delimited powers. But in the final analysis the Constitution is a piece of parchment, and, given the right circumstances, the U.S. government can assume powers that far exceed those specified in the Constitution. The President has executive powers about which most world dictators could only dream: he can, upon his own authority. confine innocent U.S. citizens to concentration camps, confiscate their property, declare the existence of a state of war, federalize National Guard troops and send them into the cities to confiscate guns, restrict travel on Federal-Aid highways (i.e. all highways) to “official traffic only”, shut down the air, water, and rail transport networks, commander the public airwaves, confiscate personal property for government use, suppress trade unions, nationalize vital industries, tear screaming children from their dead mothers’ arms and deport them, and send in stormtroopers to burn little kids alive inside their own homes.
And these are only the things that the courts have approved! Given a national emergency, he could pretty much do anything — suspend habeas corpus, order national curfews, cancel all passports, herd all Irishmen into gas chambers, order the euthanasia of every person over 65 — anything. Yes, such acts would be illegal, but (as Andrew Jackson famously pointed out) in the end, the Congress and Supreme Court have no means of actually preventing a president from doing anything he wishes to do; the Army has the power to defeat any challenger or combination of challengers for the executive power; as long as the Army goes along with him, the President of the United States — or of any country — has unlimited personal power.
The progression of power in the Roman state is instructive. The Romans were never big on democracy, and so the Roman Republic was controlled by the Senate, who chose the Consuls (and, in time of emergency, the Dictators) that held the actual executive power. In time, however, it became obvious that the toga-dpared aristocrats in the Forum had no means of enforcing “the will of the Senate and people of Rome” on an ambitious general with a Legion or two of personally-loyal soldiers at his back. Julius Caesar was acclaimed dictator for life by the Senate not because he charmed it out of them, but because his power was a fait accompli.
As with Rome in 44 BC, so today: in the final analysis every leader — Princeps, President, King, or whatever — is nothing more than the man (or woman) who can compel the Army to follow him.
First, a couple of minor corrections - male suffrage in the Athens of Pericles' day was not universal; it was in the hands of those wealthy enough to afford a suit of armor, and their corresponding obligation was to employ the latter in violent defense of the city. These were the hoplites. And Caesar was not the first Roman autocrat; that distinction belonged to Sulla, who let him live despite his relationship to Sulla's rival Marius (Caesar was his nephew). The "fall" of the Roman republic is a rather deep topic, actually, and I get the sense Mr. Lewis might want to consult Machiavelli on the topic before he concludes that the republic was either better or worse than the two monarchies between which it was sandwiched.
Those matters aside, we are left to contemplate the willing subjugation of a polis to a self-identified ruling class which is more or less exclusive based on familial relationships. I disagree completely that this "tends" to run in families; it does, however, attempt to propagate itself that way, naturally enough, until a more talented, forceful, or ruthless competitor kicks the thing over and assumes his or her own "natural" rule. A "natural" ruler may attempt to teach it to his or her children with more or less, mostly less, success.
Here I defy Plato utterly. He was well-reasoned, coherent, and completely mistaken. The yearning for a philosopher-king is what brings us sensational nonentities such as Barack Hussein Obama. He isn't my better in any sense, and I take the position of the ranch foreman Forbis quoted after being asked who his master was: "The son of a bitch hasn't been born yet." Nor will he be.
Let me be even more blunt - I reject autocracy as a false and deceptive refuge in order that is intolerable to any free man or woman, a sad recourse of an individual caught between gangs of armed thugs who must compromise or die. I reject autocrats and would-be autocrats as fools, poseurs, and justifiable objects of target practice. The first one stupid enough to say "I am your natural ruler" out loud had better by God be wearing body armor.
I honestly don't care what patterns Mr. Lewis flatters himself that he has discerned among the peoples he has visited and evidently comprehended to an astonishing degree. I've done a little traveling myself and I gently suggest he's underestimating them. The notion that human beings do not desire freedom is a lie. It is a lie.
As for political freedom, I think that for most people around the world the freedom to live, work, and raise their children in peace is freedom enough, and to hell with whatever else the government does.
Obama is your better in at least one sense: he is better at getting people to follow him. And you may rest assured that there are many people in this world who are your master in every field of endeavor. The same is true for all of us. The only man with no master is the dead man. As Dylan said, "You gotta serve somebody".
PS — I know Sulla was dictator prior to Julius Caesar; however, I chose not to mention it because he had neither charisma nor will to power. He later renounced the title (and the power that accompanied it) in favor of writing his memoirs. Gaius Julius did not, and with his dictatorship began the entity that became the Imperium. Furthermore I don't hold that the Empire was necessarily better in a moral or philosophical sense than were the Kingdoms; it was, however, a much more successful social system. It lasted 1,779 years, after all — and, some say, exists still.
Is he softening us up for Obama?
If by “he” you mean me, the answer is no. I’d sooner vote for a can of mackerel than for Barack Obama.
The only man with no master is the dead man.
We'll have to agree to disagree there. I'm quite alive and far from alone. My only Master - well, you know Who that is.
Pulling back to history for a moment - the principal problem with autocracy is, as it has always been, one of succession. A representative government has many flaws, including placing some very flawed individuals in the role of decision-maker. What it does offer is orderly succession. (One might quibble at the notion that the circus we see before us constitutes "order" but it is, after all, far less disruptive than, say, the Wars of the Roses or the Thirty Years' War.) The country will survive a fool such as Obama placed into the chair that once held Harding and Carter because that fool must yield to the next without the citizens dying to effect it. And that is, after all, a form of order that autocracy, especially that of the Caesars, cannot offer.
Freedom is not an illusion, but it is a fragile thing and must be constantly and jealously defended. My point remains that the form of government is not irrelevant with respect to freedom, and that autocracy is inherently more oppressive than representative government. There too we must agree to disagree.
One other thing, though - the First Lie, "and ye shall be as gods" was not an expression of the relation of individual political freedom, or any other relation of man to man, it was an expression of the relation of man to God. That is the only autocracy acceptable to a free man. IMHO.
Well, I meant Bruce Lewis. I don’t suppose he is, either, but it’s hard to see where he’s going with this. It’s just sort of pessimistic, is all.
There's the flaw. Why must the "fool in the White House" yield to the next "fool"? Because some piece of parchment says so? The Romans had a piece of parchment too!
Our government is not immune to the forces that have shaped history. Some day we may get a president who refuses to yield the office (or accept a "tampered-with" election return. Alea iacta est...). The Congress and Supreme Court will have the law on their side, true, but the Commander In Chief will have the army on his. Who's going to throw him out? Now, the army swears an oath to the Constitution, not to the Commander in Chief, but no one has the power to hold them to that oath. In such a situation it will be up the the officers of the army (and the soldiers who follow them) to determine for themselves where their loyalties lie. Soldiers do not die for ideas, they die for men — men with charisma.
As citizens of a representative republic, we are no more safe from the possibility of an autocratic seizure of power than were the Romans of 44 BC. Ultimately, in every country, the Army decides who the Leader is.
Not in this one, and I'm perfectly serious about that. If it did Clinton would never have seen the inside of the White House except on a tour. No U.S. president - not Eisenhower, not Grant, not Washington himself - not one ever held office at the behest of the army. To pretend otherwise is to attempt to twist fact to fit theory.
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