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

Democracies are not lucky. They do not attract civic-minded leaders by chance. Rather, they attract survival-oriented leaders who understand that, given their dependence on many essentials, they can only come to and stay in power if they figure out the right basket of public goods to provide. Small-coalition leaders figure out their solution to the exact same survival problem. It is just that when the coalition on which they rely is small then the mix of public goods is slimmer and trimmer. It is designed for survival purposes in both cases.

We don’t need to appeal to civic spirit to explain why people have so much better a life in a democracy than in an autocracy. Higher levels of education are accessible to everyone when the coalition is large; education is basic when the coalition is small. Health care is for those who are productive when the coalition is small; babies and the elderly are not excluded from health care when the coalition is large. Good water is for everyone when the coalition is large; otherwise, it is only for the privileged. And most importantly, freedom to say what you want and to dissent when you don’t get it is abundant when the coalition is large, and is scarce in the extreme when the coalition is small.

After this exploration of the benefits of living in a large-coalition system, in the next chapter we will see the dark side of democracy—for large-coalition regimes are not immune from providing private benefits to a select set of their citizenry. We will also see that corruption is a boon to small-coalition leaders and that, in fact, corruption, bribery, and other private benefits to their cronies help small-coalition leaders stay in power. These same benefits could cost large-coalition leaders their jobs. That is why the world’s most corrupt regimes are always led by a small coalition.

6

If Corruption Empowers, Then Absolute Corruption Empowers Absolutely

WE HAVE SEEN HOW LEADERS COME TO POWER, find money, and provide public goods, sometimes even for the benefit of society. Yet precious few successful leaders are motivated primarily by the desire to do good works on behalf of their subjects. Everyone likes to be liked, and there’s no reason to think that the powerful have anything against being beloved and honored by their people. Indeed, it could well be the case that there are many candidates for high office who pursue power with the intention of being benevolent leaders. The problem is that doing what is best for the people can be awfully bad for staying in power.

The logic of political survival teaches us that leaders, whether they rule countries, companies, or committees, first and foremost want to get and keep power. Second, they want to exercise as much control over the expenditure of revenue as they possibly can. While they can indulge their desires to do good deeds with any money at their discretion, to come to power, and to survive in office, leaders must rivet their attention on building and maintaining a coalition loyal enough that the ruler can beat back any and all rivals. To do that, leaders must reward their coalition of essential backers before they reward the people in general and even before they reward themselves.

We have seen how the coalition’s rewards can come in the form of public goods, especially when the group of essentials is large. However, as the essential coalition gets smaller, the efficient thing for any ruler to do is to emphasize more and more the allocation of resources in the form of private benefits to her cronies. Why? Private goods to a few cost less in total than public goods for the many, even when the few get really lavish rewards. This is all the more true when the coalition not only is small but also is drawn from a very large pool of interchangeable selectorate members, each clamoring to become a member of the winning coalition with its access to myriad private gains.

Successful leaders must place the urge to do good deeds a distant third behind their own political survival and their degree of discretionary control. Private goods are the benefits that most help rulers keep coalition loyalty. It is only the private gains that separate the essentials from the masses.

For this reason, it’s crucial that we next explore the use of private rewards as the means to survive in power. It remains to be seen what rulers do with money they do not have to spend on buying their coalition’s loyalty; that is, any money whose use is at the incumbent’s discretion. As we investigate these uses of revenue we will see that Lord Acton’s adage, “Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely,” holds generally true—however it doesn’t quite capture the causality. The causal ties run both ways: power leads to corruption and corruption leads to power. As the title of this chapter instructs us, corruption empowers leaders and absolute corruption empowers them absolutely—or almost so. Remember, as we saw with Louis XIV, no leader ever has absolute power. That’s why leaders need coalition members who support them, and why coalition members need opportunities for enrichment if they are to remain loyal to their leader, empowering her to stay on in office, getting and spending money—on them.

Power and Corruption

Corrupt politicians are attractive to would-be supporters, and politicians eager for power find it easiest to attract corrupt people to their cause. Leaders want to stay in power and must take whatever actions are needed to do so. Successful leaders are not above repression, suppression, oppression, or even killing their rivals, real and imagined. Anyone unwilling to undertake the dirty work that so many leaders are called on to do should not pursue becoming a leader. Certainly anyone reluctant to be a brute will not last long if everyone knows he is unprepared to engage in the vicious behavior that may be essential to political survival. If an aspiring leader won’t do terrible things, they can be sure that there are plenty of others who will. And if they don’t pay their backers to do terrible things, they can be pretty confident that those cronies will be bought off, exchanging terrible deeds for riches and power.

Genghis Khan (1162–1227) understood this principle. If he came across a town that did not immediately surrender to him, he killed everyone that lived there, and then made sure the next town knew he had done so. That way, in aggregate, he didn’t actually have to slaughter that many townspeople. They worked out that things would be better for them by giving up, turning their wealth over to him, and accepting that the Mongols would then pass through, leaving the survivors to fend for themselves. Genghis went on to rule much of the known world and to die in his sleep of old age at sixty-five. True, he doesn’t have the greatest reputation in the West (although he is revered in his homeland of Mongolia), but he most assuredly was a successful leader.

It is fair to say that England’s Henry V has a better reputation than Genghis Khan.1 His Saint Crispin’s day speech in Shakespeare’s play, Henry V , is received even by the modern reader with passion and admiration. We sometimes forget that Henry was capable of brutality. Much as the English revere him, it may be that he is less warmly received in France where, at the siege of Harfleur, Shakespeare had him announce, in a properly brutal leader’s terms, what he would do if the town’s governor did not surrender:

If I begin the battery once again,

I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur

Till in her ashes she lie buried.

The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,

And the flesh’d soldier, rough and hard of heart,

In liberty of bloody hand shall range

With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass