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

The structure of the book is simple. After outlining the essentials of ruling in Chapter 1, each subsequent chapter will probe a specific feature of politics. We’ll assess why taxes are higher in many poor countries than in rich countries; or why leaders can spend a fortune on the military and yet have a weak and almost useless army when it comes to the national defense. Together, the chapters will detail how the political logic of political survival—the rules to rule by—connects dots of political consequence across the widest canvas imaginable, deepening our understanding of the dynamics of all rulers and their populations. It is because of this capacity to “connect the dots” that many of our students have called our list of rules to rule by the “Theory of Everything.” We are content to codify it simply as “The Dictator’s Handbook.”

We fully admit that our view of politics requires us to step outside of well-entrenched habits of mind, out of conventional labels and vague generalities, and into a more precise world of self-interested thinking. We seek a simpler and, we hope, more compelling way to think about government. Our perspective, disheartening though it may be to some, offers a way to address other facets of life than just government. It easily describes businesses, charities, families, and just about any other organization. (We’re sure many readers will be comforted to have confirmation that their companies really are run like tyrannical regimes.) All of this may be sacrilege to some, but we believe that, in the end, it’s the best way to understand the political world—and the only way that we can begin to assess how to use the rules to rule by to rule for the better. If we are going to play the game of politics, and we all must from time to time, then we ought to learn how to win the game. We hope and believe that is just what we all can take away from this book: how to win the game of politics and perhaps even improve the world a bit as we do so.

1

The Rules of Politics

THE LOGIC OF POLITICS IS NOT COMPLEX. IN FACT, it is surprisingly easy to grasp most of what goes on in the political world as long as we are ready to adjust our thinking ever so modestly. To understand politics properly, we must modify one assumption in particular: we must stop thinking that leaders can lead unilaterally.

No leader is monolithic. If we are to make any sense of how power works, we must stop thinking that North Korea’s Kim Jong Il can do whatever he wants. We must stop believing that Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Genghis Khan or anyone else is in sole control of their respective nation. We must give up the notion that Enron’s Kenneth Lay or British Petroleum’s (BP) Tony Hayward knew about everything that was going on in their companies, or that they could have made all the big decisions. All of these notions are flat out wrong because no emperor, no king, no sheikh, no tyrant, no chief executive officer (CEO), no family head, no leader whatsoever can govern alone.

Consider France’s Louis XIV (1638–1715). Known as the Sun King, Louis reigned as monarch for over seventy years, presiding over the expansion of France and the creation of the modern political state. Under Louis, France became the dominant power in Continental Europe and a major competitor in the colonization of the Americas. He and his inner circle invented a code of law that helped shape the Napoleonic code and that forms the basis of French law to this day. He modernized the military, forming a professional standing army that became a role model for the rest of Europe and, indeed, the world. He was certainly one of the preeminent rulers of his or any time. But he didn’t do it alone.

The etymology of monarchy may be “rule by one,” but such rule does not, has not, and cannot exist. Louis is thought famously (and probably falsely) to have proclaimed, L’etat, c’est moi: the state, it is me. This declaration is often used to describe political life for supposedly absolute monarchs like Louis, likewise for tyrannical dictators. The declaration of absolutism, however, is never true. No leader, no matter how august or how revered, no matter how cruel or vindictive, ever stands alone. Indeed, Louis XIV, ostensibly an absolute monarch, is a wonderful example of just how false this idea of monolithic leadership is.

After the death of his father, Louis XIII (1601–1643), Louis rose to the throne when he was but four years old. During the early years actual power resided in the hands of a regent—his mother. Her inner circle helped themselves to France’s wealth, stripping the cupboard bare. By the time Louis assumed actual control over the government in 1661, at the age of twenty-three, the state over which he reigned was nearly bankrupt.

While most of us think of a state’s bankruptcy as a financial crisis, looking through the prism of political survival makes evident that it really amounts to a political crisis. When debt exceeds the ability to pay, the problem for a leader is not so much that good public works must be cut back, but rather that the incumbent doesn’t have the resources necessary to purchase political loyalty from key backers. Bad economic times in a democracy mean too little money to fund pork-barrel projects that buy political popularity. For kleptocrats it means passing up vast sums of money, and maybe even watching their secret bank accounts dwindle along with the loyalty of their underpaid henchmen.

The prospect of bankruptcy put Louis’s hold on power at risk because the old-guard aristocrats, including the generals and officers of the army, saw their sources of money and privilege drying up. Circumstances were ripe to prompt these politically crucial but fickle friends to seek someone better able to ensure their wealth and prestige. Faced with such a risk, Louis needed to make changes, or else risk losing his monarchy.

Louis’s specific circumstances called for altering the group of people who had the possibility of becoming members of his inner circle—that is, the group whose support guaranteed his continued dignity as king. He moved quickly to expand the opportunities (and for a few, the actual power) of new aristocrats, called the noblesse de robe . Together with his chancellor, Michel Le Tellier, he acted to create a professional, relatively meretricious army. In a radical departure from the practice observed by just about all of his neighboring monarchs, Louis opened the doors to officer ranks—even at the highest levels—to make room for many more than the traditional old-guard military aristocrats, the noblesse d’épée . In so doing, Louis was converting his army into a more accessible, politically and militarily competitive organization.

Meanwhile, Louis had to do something about the old aristocracy. He was deeply aware of their earlier disloyalty as instigators and backers of the antimonarchy Fronde (a mix of revolution and civil war) at the time of his regency. To neutralize the old aristocracy’s potential threat, he attached them—literally—to his court, compelling them to be physically present in Versailles much of the time. This meant that their prospects of income from the crown depended on how well favored they were by the king. That, of course, depended on how well they served him.

By elevating so many newcomers, Louis had created a new class of people who were beholden to him. In the process, he was centralizing his own authority more fully and enhancing his ability to enforce his views at the cost of many of the court’s old aristocrats. Thus he erected a system of “absolute” control whose success depended on the loyalty of the military, the new aristocrats, and on tying the hands of the old aristocrats so that their welfare translated directly into his welfare.

The French populace in general did not figure much into Louis’s calculations of who needed to be paid off—they did not represent an imminent threat to him. Even so, it’s clear that his absolutism was not absolute at all. He needed supporters and he understood how to maintain their loyalty. They would be loyal to him only so long as being so was more profitable for them than supporting someone else.