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

Now there is no doubt that Montesquieu, Madison, Hobbes, and Machiavelli were very clever and insightful thinkers (and surely brighter than us). However, they got an awful lot of politics wrong simply because they were coping with momentary circumstances. They were looking at but a small sample of data, the goings-on surrounding them, and bits and pieces of ancient history. They also lacked modern tools of analysis (which we, luckily, have at our disposal). Consequently, they leapt to partially right, but often deeply wrong, conclusions. In all fairness to these past luminaries, their shortcomings often have to do with the fact that, besides being bound by their then-present contexts, these thinkers were also caught up in “the big questions”—what the highest nature of man ought to be, or what the “right” state of government really is, or what “justice” truly means in political terms. This shortsightedness extends not only to history’s legends in political thought, but also to contemporary thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, and John Rawls—thinkers who someday may be viewed in the same light.

The big questions of how the world ought to be are indeed important. But they are not our focus. Questions of philosophical values and metaphorical abstractions—these simply don’t apply to the view of politics that we’ll present in the pages ahead. We do not start with a desire to say what we think ought to be. It is hard to imagine that anyone, including ourselves, cares much about what we think ought to be. Neither do we exhort others to be better than they are. Not that we do not hope to find ways to improve the world according to our lights. But then, we believe that the world can only be improved if first we understand how it works and why. Working out what makes people do what they do in the realm of politics is fundamental to working out how to make it in their interest to do better things.

The modern vernacular of politics and international relations, from balances of power and hegemony to partisanship and national interest, is the stuff of high school civics and nightly news punditry. It has little to do with real politics. And so, you may be delighted—or disappointed—to hear that this particular book of politics is not concerned with any of this. Our account of politics is primarily about what is, and why what is, is. In this book, we hope to explain the most fundamental and puzzling questions about politics, and in the process give all of us a better way to think about why the worlds of rulers and subjects, of authorities and rights, of war and peace, and, in no small way, of life and death all work in the ways that they do. And maybe, just maybe, from time to time we will see paths to betterment.

The origins of the ideas developed here came years ago during heated lunchtime discussions between one of the authors of this book—Bruce Bueno de Mesquita—and a coauthor of many earlier works, Randolph M. Siverson (now Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis). While munching on burritos, Randy Siverson and Bueno de Mesquita discussed a rather basic question: What are the consequences for leaders and their regimes when a war is lost?

Oddly, that question had not been much addressed in the copious research on international affairs, and yet surely any leader would want to know before getting involved in a risky business like war what was going to happen to him after it was over. This question hadn’t been asked because the standard ideas about war and peace were rooted in notions about states, the international system, and balances of power and polarity, and not in leader interests. From the conventional view of international relations, the question just didn’t make sense. Even the term “inter nation al relations” presumes that the subject is about nations rather than being about what Barack Obama or Raul Castro or any other named leader wants. We so easily speak of United States grand strategy or China’s human rights policy or Russian ambitions to restore Russia to great power status, and yet, from our point of view, such statements make little sense.

States don’t have interests. People do. Amidst all the debate about national interest, what did President Obama fret about in formulating his Afghan policy? If he did not announce a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan he would lose support from his Democratic—not his national, but his Democratic—electoral base. President Kennedy similarly fretted that if he took no action in what became the Cuban missile crisis, he would be impeached and the Democrats would pay a heavy price in the 1962 midterm election.11 National interest might have been on each of their minds, but their personal political welfare was front and center.

The prime mover of interests in any state (or corporation for that matter) is the person at the top—the leader. So we started from this single point: the self-interested calculations and actions of rulers are the driving force of all politics.

The calculations and actions that a leader makes and takes constitute how she governs. And what, for a leader, is the “best” way to govern? The answer to how best to govern: however is necessary first to come to power, then to stay in power, and to control as much national (or corporate) revenue as possible all along the way.

Why do leaders do what they do? To come to power, to stay in power and, to the extent that they can, to keep control over money.

Building on their lunchtime question about leaders and war, Randy and Bruce wrote a couple of academic journal articles in which they looked at international relations as just ordinary politics in which leaders, above all else, want to survive in power. These articles caught on quickly. Researchers saw that this was a different way to think about their subject, one tied to real people making real decisions—in their own interest—rather than metaphors like states, nations, and systems. (It seems obvious now, but among the dominant realist school of international relations this is still heresy.) But Siverson and Bueno de Mesquita also saw that the theory could be stretched across a bigger canvas. Every type of politics could be addressed from the point of view of leaders trying to survive.

The idea that the canvas was that big was scary. It meant trying to recast everything (or nearly everything) we knew or thought we knew about politics in a single theoretical whole. It was a humbling moment, and Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson felt in need of help. Enter James D. Morrow—now a professor at the University of Michigan but back then a Senior Research Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where Bueno de Mesquita was also based—and Alastair Smith. And so a foursome was born (sometimes affectionately known as BdM2S2). Together we wrote a thick, dense, technical tome called The Logic of Political Survival , as well as a long list of journal articles, that remain the foundation for this translation of our ideas into an account that we hope anyone can follow, argue with, and maybe even come to accept.12 Today the theory behind this body of research has inspired many spin-off studies by us and by other researchers, theoretical expansions and elaborations by us and by others, and some lively debate—and no shortage of controversy as well.

Using this foundation, we look at politics, the choices of public policies, and even decisions about war and peace as lying outside of conventional thinking about culture and history. It also means that we put ideas of civic virtue and psychopathology aside as central to understanding what leaders do and why they do it. Instead, we look at politicians as self-interested louts, just the sort of people you wouldn’t want to have over for dinner, but without whom you might not have dinner at all.