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

As a classroom experience, Bruce likes to ask his students how many of them want to help remove poverty in Nigeria or Mali. This idea produces universal support. And virtually everyone wants the government to provide aid to make it happen. Yet when push comes to shove, enthusiasm fades. For instance, he asks how many students are willing to give up their mobile phone service and have the funds sent to help Nigeria. Hardly a hand goes up. And when he asks about reducing their low-interest government loans that help pay tuition if the money goes to the world’s poor, even fewer hands go up even though he reminds them that they are the world’s incredibly rich “poor” and that they profess to want to help the world’s truly poor. Not at their own expense!

Aid is a tool for buying influence and policy. Unless we the people really value development and are willing to make meaningful sacrifices towards those ends then aid will continue to fail in its stated goals. Democrats are not thuggish brutes. They just want to keep their jobs, and to do so they need to deliver the policies their people want. Despite the idealistic expressions of some, all too many of us prefer cheap oil to real change in West Africa or the Middle East. So we really should not complain too much when our leaders try to deliver what we want. That, after all, is what democracy is about.

8

The People in Revolt

ASUCCESSFUL LEADER ALWAYS PUTS THE WANTS OF his essential supporters before the needs of the people.1 Without the support of his coalition a leader is nothing and is quickly swept away by a rival. But keeping the coalition content comes at a price when the leader’s control depends only on a few. More often than not, the coalition’s members get paid at the cost of the rest of society. Sure, a few autocrats become hall of famers who make their citizens better off. Most don’t. And those who don’t will spend their time in office running down their nation’s economy for their own and their coalition’s benefit. Eventually things get bad enough that some of the people tire of their burden. Then they too can threaten the survival of their leader.

Although not as omnipresent as the threat posed by the risk of coalition defection, if the people take to the streets en masse then they may succeed in overwhelming the power of the state. How to prevent and deal with such revolutionary threats is therefore a crucial lesson for dictators and for would-be revolutionaries that we must now confront.

To Protest or Not To Protest

In autocracies the people get a raw deal. Their labor provides tax revenues that leaders lavish on essential core supporters. Leaders provide them little beyond the essential minimal health care, primary education, and food to allow them to work. And if a small-coalition leader is fortunate enough to have another source of revenue, such as natural resources or a benevolent foreign donor, then he may even be able to do away with these minimal provisions. Autocrats certainly don’t provide political freedoms. Life for people in most small-coalition regimes is nasty, solitary, poor, brutish, and short. The people, seeing the hopeless path they are on, invariably want change. They want a government that provides for them and under which they can live secure, happy, and productive lives.

Why, having suffered long and hard, might they suddenly and often in multitudes rise up against their government? The answer resides in finding a crucial moment, a tipping point, at which life in the future under the existing government is expected to be sufficiently bad that it is worth their while to risk the undoubted costs of rebellion. They must believe that some few who have come forward first in rebellion have a decent chance of success and a decent chance of making the lives of ordinary people better.

There is a delicate balance here. If a regime excels at convincing people that stepping out of line means incredible misery and even death, it is unlikely to experience rebellion. Yes, life under such a government is horrendous, but the risk of failure in a revolt and the costs of that failure are way too high for people to rise up. They might be killed or imprisoned, and they might lose their job or home, even their children. That is why the Hitlers, Stalins, and Kim Jong Ils of the world manage to avoid revolt. If rule is really harsh, people are effectively deterred from rising up.

At first, a few especially bold individuals may rise up in revolt. They proclaim their intention to make their country a democracy. Every revolution and every mass movement begins with a promise of democratic reform, of a new government that will lift up the downtrodden and alleviate their suffering. That is an essential ingredient in getting the masses to take to the streets. Of course, it doesn’t always work.

The Chinese communists, for instance, declared the formation of a Chinese Soviet Republic on November 7, 1931. They said of their newly declared state,

It is the state of the suppressed workers, farmers, soldiers, and working mass. Its flag calls for the downfall of imperialism, the liquidation of landlords, the overthrow of the warlord government of the Nationalists. We shall establish a soviet government over the whole of China; we shall struggle for the interests of thousands of deprived workers, farmers, and soldiers and other suppressed masses; and to endeavor for peaceful unification of the whole of China.2

Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of Kenya’s independence movement and its first head of state, likewise declared during a meeting of the Kenya African Union (KAU) on July 26, 1952:

If we unite now, each and every one of us, and each tribe to another, we will cause the implementation in this country of that which the European calls democracy. True democracy has no colour distinction. It does not choose between black and white. We are here in this tremendous gathering under the K.A.U. flag to find which road leads us from darkness into democracy. In order to find it we Africans must first achieve the right to elect our own representatives. That is surely the first principle of democracy. We are the only race in Kenya which does not elect its own representatives in the Legislature and we are going to set about to rectify this situation.... It has never been known in history that a country prospers without equality. We despise bribery and corruption, those two words that the European repeatedly refers to. Bribery and corruption is prevalent in this country, but I am not surprised. As long as a people are held down, corruption is sure to rise and the only answer to this is a policy of equality.3

Noble words from both Mao Zedong and Jomo Kenyatta. Neither fulfilled his promises of equality, democracy, and liberty for the average Chinese or the average Kenyan. Nor did either leader eliminate corruption and special opportunities for their party faithful. Once most revolutionaries come to power, their inclination—if they can get away with it—is to be petty dictators. After all, the democratic institutions that engender the policies the people want also make it hard for leaders to survive in office. Leaders won’t acquiesce to the people’s wants unless the people can compel them. And when can the people compel an old dictator, seemingly set in his ways, or a recently victorious revolutionary, newly ensconced in power, to look out for them instead of for himself? The answer to that question is the answer to when regimes choose the road to democracy rather than to sustained autocracy.

Before deciding to gamble on the promises of revolutionaries, each prospective demonstrator must judge the costs and the risks of rebellion to be tolerable relative to the conditions expected without rebellion and relative to the gains expected with a successful uprising. Thus it is that middle-of-the-road dictators, like Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, the Soviet Union’s Gorbachev (but not Stalin) are more likely to experience a mass uprising than their worst fellow autocrats. That is not to say that when the people rise up they are right in thinking life will be better. They are taking a calculated risk. They surely understand that revolutionary success holds the prospect of betterment, but not all revolutionary movements end in democracy and not all result in an outpouring of public goods for the people.