Алистер Смит - The Dictator's Handbook - Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

Saddam Hussein’s pattern of appointments is quite typical. His successor, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, purged the security services of all Sunnis and replaced them with Shia supporters, albeit with a gentler hand than his predecessor.8 These replacements did not have the experience and training of the existing security personnel. Both leaders knew that it is better to have loyal incompetents than competent rivals.

Sometimes, of course, having competent advisers is unavoidable. Byzantine, Mughal, Chinese, Caliphate, and other emperors devised a creative solution that guaranteed that these advisers didn’t become rivals: They all relied on eunuchs at various times. In the Byzantine Empire in the ninth and tenth centuries, the three most senior posts below emperor were held almost exclusively by eunuchs. The most senior position of Grand Administrator had evolved from the position of Prefect of the Sacred Bedchamber and included the duties of posting eunuch guards and watching over the sleeping emperor. Michael III made an exception and gave this position to his favorite, Basil, rather than a eunuch. This decision cost him his life. When Basil perceived that Michael was starting to favor another courtier, he murdered the emperor and seized the throne.9

Even in modern times the principle of choosing close advisers who cannot rise to the top spot remains good advice. It is surely no coincidence that Saddam Hussein as president of Islamic Iraq had a Christian, Tariq Aziz, as his number two.

Keep Essentials Off-Balance

What we can begin to appreciate is that no matter how well a tyrant builds his coalitions, it is important to keep the coalition itself off-balance. Familiarity breeds contempt. As noted, the best way to stay in power is to keep the coalition small and, crucially, to make sure that everyone in it knows that there are plenty of replacements for them. This is why you will often read about regular elections in tyrannical states. Everyone knows that these elections don’t count, and yet people go along with them. Rigged elections are not about picking leaders. They are not about gaining legitimacy. How can an election be legitimate when its outcome is known before the vote even occurs? Rigged elections are a warning to powerful politicians that they are expendable if they deviate from the leader’s desired path.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the first to really exploit the idea of substitute coalition members. In a one-party state, he nonetheless perfected a rigged election, universal adult suffrage system. Any action he took—say, sending so-and-so to Siberia—was the will of the people, and any of the people in the replacement pool had a chance, albeit a slight one, of being called up to serve as an influential or maybe even an essential somewhere down the line. Everybody in the Soviet selectorate could, with a very small probability, grow up to be general secretary of the Communist Party, just like the petty criminal Joseph Stalin and the uneducated Nikita Khrushchev. Those already in the inner circle knew they had to stay in line to keep their day jobs. Bravo, Lenin.

Although Lenin perfected the system and probably came up with it on his own, the always fascinating country of Liberia experimented earlier on with the same phenomenon. Prior to Samuel Doe’s takeover, Liberia had been ruled by the True Whig Party. The country originated when a number of American liberal organizations, appalled by the evils of slavery, paid to repatriate former slaves to West Africa. Despite the nation’s philanthropic origins, the most important lesson the former slaves took from their experiences appears to be that slavery and forced labor worked much better for the masters than the slaves. These former slaves instituted universal adult suffrage in 1904, but with a property qualification that effectively excluded indigenous Africans from becoming insiders, making the selectorate large but the influential group relatively small. Thus, they established a system run for a small group of insiders despite the appearance of a universal franchise. This structure provided for strong loyalty to the incumbent that ensured the opportunity to suppress any opposition that might arise to their forced labor policies, a system whose policies differed from Soviet ones but whose security in office was the same.10

Virtually every publicly traded company in the world has adopted the Leninist rigged-election system and for much the same reasons. It, along with a packed board, is one of the major factors ensuring that poorly performing CEOs hardly ever get fired. Carly Fiorina had the misfortune of heading a company that might have looked like a rigged election autocracy but up close and personal remained more akin to a monarchy. Although there were millions of shareholders who in theory could shape HP policy, so many shares were concentrated in a few hands that HP had more of the characteristics of a small coalition drawn from a small group of influentials within a mostly small, concentrated group of interchangeables; that is, members of the Hewlett and Packard families.

The essence of keeping coalition members off-balance is to make sure that their loyalty is paid for and that they know they will be ousted if their reliability is in doubt. The USSR’s Mikhail Gorbachev, thought to be a good guy in western political circles, certainly understood the necessity of rewarding loyalty and shucking off all those whose faithfulness was questionable. He replaced much of the politburo within his first two years in office, picking and choosing from the Communist Party (the real selectorate) those most loyal to him. It turns out, though, that Gorbachev was much less ruthless than contemporaries of the autocratic class. He forced adversaries, like Boris Yeltsin, out of the politburo to be sure. But, as Yeltsin surely realized, he would have been killed under Stalin. Equally, he and many others must have known that it was much better to cross swords with Gorbachev, an intellectual reformer, than with such contemporaries as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire or even Deng Xiaoping of China. Deng, after all, used ruthless force to end the prodemocracy uprising at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Gorbachev, as we will see, did not hesitate to use force outside of Russia, but he also did not go around killing his political rivals. His reward was a short time in power first because he left himself vulnerable to a coup by hard-line communists and then because he allowed Yeltsin to resurrect himself politically, defeat the coup, and make himself into Gorbachev’s replacement.

The execution of opponents is a longstanding practice among most autocrats. We should not fail to appreciate the moral significance of Gorbachev’s restraint. Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Samuel Doe, and so many others showed no such restraint. They had their erstwhile backers murdered once they worked out who was most likely to be loyal and who was not. We see a nicer version of such behavior as a routine part of corporate changes when there’s a new CEO. Although the CEO is supposed to answer to the board, it is commonplace for boards to be reconstituted after a new CEO comes to power; the tail apparently wags the dog.

Being purged from the initial coalition is often fatal. Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. During his rise to power he relied heavily on the Sturmabteilung, a paramilitary force also known by the abbreviation, SA, or by a description of their uniforms, the Brownshirts. Hitler perceived the SA’s leader, Ernst Rohm, as a threat. He built up an alternative paramilitary, the Schutzstaffel, or SS, and then, on what became known as the night of the long knives, he ordered the assassination of at least eighty-five and possibly many hundreds of people between June 30 and July 2, 1934. Thousands more were imprisoned. Despite Rohm’s long term and essential backing (Rohm had been with Hitler during his failed 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch), Hitler showed no sentimentality. He replaced him with men like SS leader Heinrich Himmler, whom he deemed more loyal.