Title: The Dictator’s Handbook
Rating: 2 Stars
As I was reading this, it seemed to be, at its core, a fresh look at the same set of topics tackled in Machiavelli’s The Prince. It eschewed theory or philosophy and was dedicated to the basic concept of how to gain power and how to keep it. It advertised itself as a realistic look at the nature of power.
It starts with the axiom that leaders, for all of their talk of progress, fair play, and justice, are actually only interested in getting power and keeping it. This is true regardless of whether the leader is Abraham Lincoln or Adolph Hitler. It’s not even limited to political leadership. The same holds true for corporate executives. Fair enough.
A leader’s population can be broken into three constituents. One group they call the interchangeables. This is the group of people that have a nominal say in the selection of their leaders. This group can range from Americans that do have a choice of candidates to the old Soviet Union, where the only choice a citizen had was to vote yes for the slate of candidates.
Next we have the influentials. This is the group of voters that actually choose the leader. Using the same example nations, for the US, the president is actually decided by an electoral college. Its members have theoretically free choice in the manner, although they have nearly always been bound, either legally or via elective norms, to select the candidate that their state’s voters have chosen. In the old USSR, the influentials would be members of the Communist Party.
The third group are the essentials. These are the people that actually decide who rules. Although the people vary, in the US, at least in the last couple of elections, it has been a very small set of voters spread out over Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. In 2020, out of some 150 million votes cast, something close to 100,000 votes spread across these states made the difference. No wonder Donald Trump was so eager to find 11,000 more votes in Georgia. In the old USSR, the essentials would have been the relatively small number of members of the Politburo who had the power to select a new leader, enact policy and, if necessary, replace the leader if circumstances demanded it (I’m looking at you, Krushchev).
Given these categories, it’s apparent that, if a leader wishes to stay in power, that they must work hard to keep the essentials happy. They are the group that, if they abandon the leader, will inevitably lead to the leader’s downfall. A leader has to at least heed the influentials. They are free to ignore the interchangeables as they have no real role to play in the leader selection process.
As I’ve mentioned, these categories aren’t limited to political leadership. In a large corporation, individual shareholders are the interchangeables. The managers of funds that hold large blocks of stock are the influentials. The board are the essentials.
How is this useful? Well, depending upon how the population is split among the three constituencies, leaders will want to lead differently. For instance, in an autocracy, the interchangeables are really meaningless. The essentials, small in number, wield enormous power. To keep the essentials content, the leader must bestow riches upon them at the expense of the interchangeables. The structure of this leads almost inevitably to something approaching a kleptocracy.
On the other hand, in a robust functioning democracy, the interchangeables, even if individually have little power, collectively have a tremendous amount of power in choosing a leader. A leader cannot stay in power by just bribing essentials. Not only that, since the group of interchangeables is so large, a leader can’t even bribe them. The leader must commit to public works that they hope convinces the interchangeables that he has their interests at heart. Again, the point is that the leader is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart. In a democracy, this is the only way to stay in power.
That’s the basic argument. The authors have many examples from history. From this basic idea, they draw several additional conclusions. Democracies will historically have stronger economic growth than autocratic ones (the statistic that they bring out is that 24 of the top 25 economies are democratic in nature, Singapore is the only exception). Autocracies are quicker to go to war with the hope of invading, stealing treasure to further enrich their essentials, and then just as quickly exiting the war. Democracies, on the other hand, are slower to war, but once they commit to war, they stick to it as long as it takes (look at how long the US fought in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan). In autocracies, educated people are potentially a threat, therefore education in such states typically ends at primary school.
What do I think of all of this? Well, some if it seems pretty obvious. Leaders want to acquire power and keep it. There’s nothing particularly earthshattering about that. Leaders recognize who they owe their power to and will do whatever necessary to appease those to stay in power. Again, duh.
As I was reading this, several questions came to mind.
First of all, this was written in 2011. Hence they had no words about Ukraine or Trump. In the case of Ukraine, the idea that autocrats just want to get in, steal wealth, and exit again is at odds with Putin. First of all, Russia has been fighting Ukraine for years now. Secondly, I don’t believe that Putin had a short term goal in mind. I think that he wants to reconstitute the old Soviet Union and that this was just a step in that process. That seems to defy the short term thinking that the authors hypothesize.
Donald Trump is, if anything a thornier problem. Who is his constituency? They do not seem to be motivated by possible riches as much as avenging grievances and poking sticks in the eye of those that they presume look down upon them. Anger and vengeance seem to be their priority.
In fact, this idea of the motivation of Trump’s essentials strikes at the heart of my major concern with the book. In economics, there is the theory of the Economic Man (ie Homo Economicus). This is the idea that, if left to their own devices, that people will always choose the path that is most materially advantageous to them. People will choose with perfect rationality. This is one of the great arguments of libertarians. If left unregulated, people will naturally choose the best course of action for them which then collectively adds up to the greater good.
By now, I think that this has been pretty much debunked. In fact, people choose with all kinds of biases or misunderstandings or just plain cognitive mistakes that are irrational in nature. We are not perfect calculating machines.
So it is here. Thinking that leaders are perfectly rational beings that make decisions based upon some cold calculation of facts does not reflect reality. Since the authors essentially brag that their book is based upon nothing but how the real world works, this would seem to be a serious flaw in their argument.
dorkenstein 