Tag Archives: Atlantic

Patrimonialism

What in the world is “patrimonialism”?

In a recent Atlantic essay, Jonathan Rauch argues that Trump’s approach to governance isn’t classic authoritarianism, autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Instead, Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. (I’m evidently not much of a scholar, because that’s a term I had never previously encountered. Live and learn…)

Rauch began by describing what we’ve all seen:

Since taking office, he has reduced his administration’s effectiveness by appointing to essential agencies people who lack the skills and temperaments to do their jobs. His mass firings have emptied the civil service of many of its most capable employees. He has defied laws that he could just as easily have followed (for instance, refusing to notify Congress 30 days before firing inspectors general). He has disregarded the plain language of statutes, court rulings, and the Constitution, setting up confrontations with the courts that he is likely to lose. Few of his orders have gone through a policy-development process that helps ensure they won’t fail or backfire—thus ensuring that many will.

In foreign affairs, he has antagonized Denmark, Canada, and Panama; renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”; and unveiled a Gaz-a-Lago plan. For good measure, he named himself chair of the Kennedy Center, as if he didn’t have enough to do.

Rauch cites to scholarship that locates the origin of the term in the writings of Max Weber–he of the Protestant ethic.

Weber explored the issue of legitimacy. What elements of leadership support an individual’s claim to rightful rule? According to Weber, there are two avenues to such legitimacy. One is “bureaucratic proceduralism”– a system in which following the rules and norms of institutions bestows legitimacy,. That, of course, is the system Americans have taken for granted. It’s why Presidents, federal officials, and military inductees swear their oath to the Constitution, not to a person.

The other source of legitimacy is more ancient, more common, and more intuitive—“the default form of rule in the premodern world,” Hanson and Kopstein write. “The state was little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler; it did not exist as a separate entity.” Weber called this system “patrimonialism” because rulers claimed to be the symbolic father of the people—the state’s personification and protector. Exactly that idea was implied in Trump’s own chilling declaration: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

In his day, Weber thought that patrimonialism was on its way to history’s scrap heap. Its personalized style of rule was too inexpert and capricious to manage the complex economies and military machines that, after Bismarck, became the hallmarks of modern statehood. Unfortunately, he was wrong.

As Rauch explains, patrimonialism isn’t a systematic approach to governing; instead, it is “a style of governing,” replacing  rule-based, formal lines of authority with highly personalized ones based on loyalty to an individual. It’s a “system” of rewarding the leader’s friends and punishing his enemies. (Think about how “governance” works in tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.)

In government, it’s running the state “as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business.”

The difference between patrimonialism and autocracy is the former’s disdain for bureaucracy, because bureaucratic rules and processes might obstruct the “dear leader’s” desired actions.

People with expertise, experience, and distinguished résumés are likewise suspect because they bring independent standing and authority. So patrimonialism stocks the government with nonentities and hacks, or, when possible, it bypasses bureaucratic procedures altogether. When security officials at USAID tried to protect classified information from Elon Musk’s uncleared DOGE team, they were simply put on leave. Patrimonial governance’s aversion to formalism makes it capricious and even whimsical—such as when the leader announces, out of nowhere, the renaming of international bodies of water or the U.S. occupation of Gaza.

Rauch points out that Trump is patrimonialism “perfect organism.” He’s unable to distinguish between public and private, legal and illegal, national and personal. As John Bolton, Trump’s first-term national security advisor, said “He can’t tell the difference between his own personal interest and the national interest, if he even understands what the national interest is.”

Patrimonialism has two fatal flaws: incompetence and corruption, and Rauch spends much of the essay documenting the evidence of both. It is well worth your time to click through and read in its entirety, especially since most observers–including this one–have been fixated on the incompetence and insanity, and only vaguely aware of the copious corruption. As Rauch reminds us, however, corruption is the real Achilles’ heel, because it’s understandable– not an abstraction like “democracy” or “Constitution” or “rule of law.”

The resistance needs to focus on it.

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Fascinating…And Complicated

One of the problems of living through the Trump/Musk attack on the rule of law is that their firehose of assaults distract us from considering longer-term issues. I know that I have neglected reading the meaty academic studies that used to help me understand our social and economic environment. I just don’t have enough energy to dive into a lengthy “think piece” after a day of hysteria over the latest illegal and unconstitutional Trumpian eruptions.

But every once in a while, I encounter a really compelling analysis that offers a new way of understanding American culture. And that is certainly the case with Yoni Applebaum’s cover story for the March Atlantic.  Applebaum’s article–“Stuck in Place”–considers the drastic reduction in American mobility that has occurred since the mid-twentieth century.

When I was young (late Ice Age), it was a given that lots of Americans moved each year.  I never considered the social consequences of that fact of American life until reading the essay in which Applebaum asserts that diminished mobility constitutes “the single most important social change of the past half century.” Mobility, he says, was key to the American character.

Entrepreneurship, innovation, growth, social equality—the most appealing features of the young republic all traced back to this single, foundational fact: Americans were always looking ahead to their next beginning, always seeking to move up by moving on. But over the past 50 years, this engine of American opportunity has stopped working. Americans have become less likely to move from one state to another, or to move within a state, or even to switch residences within a city. In the 1960s, about one out of every five Americans moved in any given year—down from one in three in the 19th century, but a frenetic rate nonetheless. In 2023, however, only one in 13 Americans moved.”

I was particularly struck by the connection Applebaum drew between mobility and acceptance of diversity.

These ceaseless migrations shaped a new way of thinking. “When the mobility of population was always so great,” the historian Carl Becker observed, “the strange face, the odd speech, the curious custom of dress, and the unaccustomed religious faith ceased to be a matter of comment or concern.” And as diverse peoples learned to live alongside one another, the possibilities of pluralism opened. The term stranger, in other lands synonymous with enemy, instead, Becker wrote, became “a common form of friendly salutation.” In a nation where people are forever arriving and departing, a newcomer can seem less like a threat than a welcome addition: Howdy, stranger.

The essay grapples with the reasons why Americans have abandoned our former itch to move, and largely blames the progressives whose insistence on preservation–historic and otherwise–has led, in his analysis at least, to NIMBYism, and a “defense of communities in their current form against those who might wish to join them. Mobility is what made this country prosperous and pluralistic, diverse and dynamic. Now progressives are destroying the very force that produced the values they claim to cherish.”

If this assertion is true–if the efforts to preserve and celebrate existing structures and places have morphed into resistance to a wide variety of changes we once embraced– it would seem that we are experiencing yet another lesson in unintended consequences.

Appelbaum argues that we should make an effort to restore the bygone mobility that led people to move for better jobs, less expensive homes, a better quality of life, and/or just a desire to try new things. He advocates for what he calls “three simple principles.” One is consistency; he says that rules applied uniformly across a city will tend to produce neighborhoods with diverse populations and uses. Another is tolerance; he notes that organic growth is messy and unpredictable, but the places that thrive over the long term are those that empower people to make their own decisions, and to build and adapt structures to suit their needs. The third is abundance; he argues that the best way to solve our current housing supply crunch is to add supply, especially in places that are attractive and growing, so that housing becomes a springboard.

I certainly agree with the argument that we need to build more housing; I’d have to think long and hard about the other two–but then, I’m undoubtedly one of those “progressives” that values historic districts and the zoning laws that prevent your friendly liquor store from locating next to my house. Surely there is a middle ground…

That said, arguments that tie mobility to entrepreneurship and acceptance of diversity echo similar concerns about the end of frontiers. They’re reasonable and persuasive.

It’s complicated.

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George Packer On How We Got Here

I consider The Atlantic a truly indespensible source of information and commentary.  The publication is a welcome island of thoughtful and penetrating articles in our ocean of superficial punditry and outright propaganda. I subscribe to the old-fashioned print magazine, and the last issue included an introductory essay by George Packer that I found particularly insightful. (Okay, honesty compels me to admit that I found his essay so “on target” because he essentially agreed with my own analysis. I’m not immune to confirmation bias…)

The essay is titled “The End of Democratic Delusions.” I think the following paragraph tells us how America has come to this unfortunate place.

This new era is neither progressive nor conservative. The organizing principle in Trump’s chaotic campaigns, the animating passion among his supporters, has been a reactionary turn against dizzying change, specifically the economic and cultural transformations of the past half century: the globalization of trade and migration, the transition from an industrial to an information economy, the growing inequality between metropolis and hinterland, the end of the traditional family, the rise of previously disenfranchised groups, the “browning” of the American people. Trump’s basic appeal is a vow to take power away from the elites and invaders who have imposed these changes and return the country to its rightful owners—the real Americans. His victory demonstrated the appeal’s breadth in blue and red states alike, among all ages, ethnicities, and races.

If we look back at history, at other periods of rapid, dizzying change, we see similar reactions and upheavals. The Industrial Revolution sparked labor uprisings, anarchist movements, and clashes between traditional monarchies and then-emerging democratic and socialist movements. The Protestant Reformation fractured the Catholic Church’s authority, reshaped Europe’s religious and political map, sparked religious wars (think the Thirty Years’ War), and devastated large parts of Europe. There are plenty of other examples.

As Packer notes, reaction is insular and aggrieved, and it “paints in dark tones.” It’s characterized by an intent to undo what most of us see as progress and “reverse history, restoring the nation to some imagined golden age when the people ruled.”

When Democrats lose a presidential election, they descend into a familiar quarrel over whether the party moved too far to the left or to the center. This time the question seems especially irrelevant; their political problem runs so much deeper. The Democratic Party finds itself on the wrong side of a historic swing toward right-wing populism, and tactical repositioning won’t help. The mood in America, as in electorates all over the world, is profoundly anti-establishment. Trump had a mass movement behind him; Kamala Harris was installed by party elites. He offered disruption, chaos, and contempt; she offered a tax break for small businesses. He spoke for the alienated; she spoke for the status quo.

As Packer also notes, we are at a time when the parties have once again switched identities. The GOP of Lincoln was anti-slavery and the Democratic party of the time (and for many years after) was the party of White supremacy; in the 20th Century, they essentially traded places. More recently, another major switch made Democrats rather than Republicans the party of institutionalism. As Packer points out, that realignment has been going on since the early ’70s:

Democrats now claim the former Republican base of college-educated professionals, and Republicans have replaced Democrats as the party of the working class. As long as globalization, technology, and immigration were widely seen as not only inevitable but positive forces, the Democratic Party appeared to ride the wave of history, while Republicans depended on a shrinking pool of older white voters in dying towns. But something profound changed around 2008.

Packard points to three of those profound changes: a growing “conviction that the political and economic game was rigged for the benefit of distant elites; a sense that the middle class had disappeared; and the absence of any institutions that might have provided help, including the Democratic Party.”

Packer is hardly the only political scientist who has reminded Americans that the reactionary period we are experiencing is global. He spends much of his essay focusing on the challenges posed by what he calls “The Trump Reaction,” which he also says is more fragile than many believe, thanks to the fact that Trump has surrounded himself with ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots who will inevitably turn on each other–and the even more obvious fact that Trump has absolutely no interest in governing.

Prior eras of rapid change have also sparked chaos and irrational reaction. History tells us that “this too shall pass.”

We really need to figure out how to speed that passage.

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America: The Tower Of Babel

An article I read recently in the Atlantic compared today’s United States to Babel. 

The Genesis story of the Tower of Babel is a tale about a mythical time when all people on Earth spoke the same language. They decided to build a great tower reaching up to the heavens. God, seeing their project as evidence of pride, confused their languages so they could no longer understand each other. That lack of ability to communicate caused them to abandon the unfinished tower and disperse across the Earth.

“Babel”  means “confusion” in Hebrew, and references to the “Tower of Babel” are often used as a shorthand for our very human miscommunications and misunderstandings.

Trump did not destroy the tower, but he exploited its fall.

He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the post-Babel era, in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments—so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.

So much of our current dysfunction as a society is a result of the current, fragmented state of an information environment that encourages people to indulge confirmation bias and reject inconvenient realities–an environment in which propaganda and conspiracy theories thrive. (Not that what we call “legacy media” is exactly covering itself with glory…) The result is that people live in alternate realities and are increasingly unable to communicate.

That mutual incomprehension doesn’t just infect our political life.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people.

The article notes that initially–in the 1990s–the Internet, with its chat rooms, message boards, and then its first wave social-media platforms (launched in 2003) were hailed as boons to democracy.

Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable. By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more than 100 million monthly users, on its way to roughly 3 billion today. In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?

What holds large and diverse secular democracies such as the United States together? Research has identified three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: “social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.”

Social media has weakened all three.

The article explains how social media has changed over time—and especially since 2009–with the introduction of algorithms that encourage dishonesty and what the author calls “mob dynamics.” The lengthy article is well worth reading in its entirety, but the following observation is at the crux of the (very persuasive) analysis:

The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.

It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.

Thanks to social media–our very own “tower”–we’re in a fragmented world of hurt, and I don’t see us emerging any time soon.

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Misinformation And The Economy

I recently had coffee with one of the smartest political scientists I know. Given his knowledge and access to data, I hoped he’d provide me with comfort about our upcoming election. He did share his reasons for being cautiously optimistic, but he also shared his distress over the magnitude of disinformation and the credulity of far too many Americans. 

He then said something that set my hair on fire: “If Trump wins, it will be the last real election we have.” This time, he’ll be surrounded by fanatics who know what they’re doing.

We are barreling toward the most important election in my lifetime, and the “chattering classes’ are already making predictions, based largely on elements that have affected political choices in more traditional times. Primary among those is the state of the economy, so Joe Biden should be riding high. But he isn’t–thanks to  the overwhelming amount of misinformation emanating from Faux News and other propaganda sites. The propaganda has convinced large numbers of citizens that what they see with their own eyes isn’t representative of the larger society.

The Atlantic recently addressed this situation in an article titled “U.S. Economy Reaches Superstar Status. No, really.”

If the United States’ economy were an athlete, right now it would be peak LeBron James. If it were a pop star, it would be peak Taylor Swift. Four years ago, the pandemic temporarily brought much of the world economy to a halt. Since then, America’s economic performance has left other countries in the dust and even broken some of its own records. The growth rate is high, the unemployment rate is at historic lows, household wealth is surging, and wages are rising faster than costs, especially for the working class. There are many ways to define a good economy. America is in tremendous shape according to just about any of them.

The American public doesn’t feel that way—a dynamic that many people, including me, have recently tried to explain. But if, instead of asking how people feel about the economy, we ask how it’s objectively performing, we get a very different answer.

The article points out that America’s current economic-growth rate is the envy of the world–that between the end of 2019 to the end of 2023, GDP grew by 8.2 percent, which was “nearly twice as fast as Canada’s, three times as fast as the European Union’s, and more than eight times as fast as the United Kingdom’s.” During the past year, others– some of them among the world’s largest– have fallen into recession, complete with mass layoffs and angry street protests. That included Germany and Japan.

The article analyzes people’s buying power over time. Since 1947, prices have increased by 1,400 percent. That sounds terrifying–except that incomes have increased by 2,400 percent over that same period. And thanks in no small measure to Biden’s focus on “growing the middle out,” several analysts have found that “from the end of 2019 to the end of 2023, the lowest-paid decile of workers saw their wages rise four times faster than middle-class workers and more than 10 times faster than the richest decile.”

 Wage gains at the bottom, they found, have been so steep that they have erased a full third of the rise in wage inequality between the poorest and richest workers over the previous 40 years. This finding holds even when you account for the fact that lower-income Americans tend to spend a higher proportion of their income on the items that have experienced the largest price increases in recent years, such as food and gas. “We haven’t seen a reduction in wage inequality like this since the 1940s,” Dube told me.

The unemployment rate has been at or below 4 percent for more than two years, the longest streak since the 1960s. 

The article has much more data–all positive–and its findings have recently been echoed by the World Bank, which says the U.S. economy is the envy of the world. As the linked story from the Washington Post reports,

While Americans’ unhappiness with high prices remains a key vulnerability for President Biden’s reelection bid, the World Bank now expects the U.S. economy to grow at an annual rate of 2.5 percent, nearly a full percentage point higher than it predicted in January. The United States is the only advanced economy growing significantly faster than the bank anticipated at the start of the year.

The excellent performance of the economy should lift Democratic prospects–but the propaganda war has been effective, especially with the low-information voters who (as still other studies confirm) are most likely to support Trump.

The only good news is that these low-information folks are also the least likely to vote. We can hope….

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