I've been recently re-reading Juan Linz's Totalitarian
and Authoritarian Regimes, a book I didn't appreciate enough
when I first studied it many years ago. Linz had an encyclopedic knowledge of
political life in modern societies, and the book is a bit like a modern version
of Aristotle's Politics -- a little
dry, but attentive to the concrete details of institutions in a huge variety of
countries in order to develop theoretically useful "ideal types"
(even though Linz, unlike his more illustrious ancient predecessor, keeps the
normative discussion to a minimum). In particular, Linz had a fine Weberian
sense for the complexities of the link between ideas and political power; and
one specific question he raises struck me as interestingly related to some of the
things I was saying earlier this year about Franco. The
question concerns why some non-democratic political regimes have highly
articulated ideologies (e.g., Marxism-Leninism), whereas others have at best
what Linz calls "mentalities" -- "ways of thinking and feeling,
more emotional than rational" (p. 162), vague "intellectual
attitudes" and ill-defined symbolic commitments to "the nation"
or "order and progress." What accounts for these differences? And do
they have any bearing on how political power is organized?
Linz argues that there is a functional
affinity between the degree of "pluralism" of a regime and the specificity
of its ideological commitments. The more a regime depends on a variety of
groups, none of which can defeat the others, the less specific its ideology. By
the same token, we should only see very specific ideological commitments among
regimes that emerge from the victory of a single, highly mobilized party over
disparate opponents, which is precisely how totalitarian regimes arise.
Ideological vagueness is the glue that allows the disparate elements of an
authoritarian coalition to hold together, as in
Franco's Spain[1]:
In our view the complex coalition
of forces, interests, political traditions, and institutions -- part of the
limited pluralism [of an authoritarian, rather than a totalitarian regime] --
requires the rulers to use as symbolic referent the minimum common denominator
of the coalition. In this way the rulers achieve the neutralization of a
maximum number of potential opponents in the process of taking power (in the
absence of the highly mobilized mass of supporters). The vagueness of the
mentality blunts the lines of cleavage in the coalition, allowing the rulers to
retain the loyalty of disparate elements. The lack of an assertion of specific,
articulated, and specific commitments facilitates adaptation to changing
conditions in the nonsupportive environment, particularly in the case of
authoritarian regimes in the Western democratic sphere of influence. The
reference to generic values like patriotism and nationalism, economic
development, social justice, and order and the discreet and pragmatic
incorporation of ideological elements derived from the dominant political
centers of the time allow rulers who have gained power without mobilized mass
support to neutralize opponents, co-opt a variety of supporters, and decide
policies pragmatically. Mentalities, semi- or pseudoideologies reduce the
utopian strain in politics and with it conflict that otherwise would require
either institutionalization or more repression than the rulers could afford.
The limited utopianism obviously is congruent with conservative tendencies. (p.
164)
In Linz's view, the vagueness of
ideological commitments in authoritarian (as opposed to totalitarian) regimes
limits the appeal of these regimes for those groups of people who make ideas
their business, or who for some other sociological reason have a need to find
"meaning" in politics:
Such regimes pay a price for
their lack of ideology in our sense of the term. It limits their capacity to
mobilize people to create the psychological and emotional identification of the
masses with the regime. The absence of an articulate ideology, of a sense of
ultimate meaning, of long-run purposes, of an a priori model of an ideal society
reduces the attractiveness of such regimes to those for whom ideas, meaning,
and values are central. The alienation of intellectuals, students, youth, and
deeply religious persons from such regimes, even when successful and relatively
liberal compared with totalitarian systems, can be explained in part by the
absence or weakness of ideology. One of the advantages of authoritarian regimes
with an important fascist component was that this derivative ideology appealed
to some of those groups. But it also was one of the sources of tension when the
disregard of the elite of the regime for those ideological elements became
apparent. (pp. 164-165)
Nevertheless, we might think that the very
non-specificity of authoritarian ideological commitments means that these
regimes can often rely on the "shallow" support of people who do not
need to find special meaning in politics: as long as no specially controversial
commitment is demanded of them, they may be happy to go along, given the costs
of resistance. Shallower commitments among the masses may be traded off for
deeper commitments among specific groups.
At any rate, I suspect this mechanism is
more common than Linz indicates, operating not only within authoritarian
coalitions but also in democratic societies, and accounting in part for the
recurring feelings of disappointment to which electoral politics gives rise
among many people. The problem seems to be that there is a trade-off between
the ritual use of emotionally charged but non-specific ideas that can mobilize
many people "shallowly," such as vague nationalistic symbols, and the
ritual use of highly specific and tightly interlinked symbolic systems that can
mobilize fewer people "deeply," such as Marxism-Leninism. The
trade-off arises because insisting on the specificity of an ideological system
intensifies conflicts within a coalition, but also encourages more committed
activists, whereas vague symbolic commitments can maintain a larger coalition
(as in catch-all parties in many democracies) but decreases the degree to which
the coalition members can coordinate on specific actions.
We should thus expect that vagueness
"works" as a policy to hold together a diverse coalition when members
believe that their goals cannot be achieved "outside the tent" but
the vagueness of particular symbolic commitments lets them believe that they
have a chance to push specific policies in their favored direction. The first
belief is strengthened when rival coalitions are deeply mistrusted (e.g., the
left and the right after the Spanish civil war, or to a lesser extent Democrats
and Republicans in the USA today); the second when coalition members have
long-term projects (perhaps themselves vague) rather than one-off specific
demands. In these circumstances, the problem for coalition leaders is that the
moment specific actions are actually undertaken, members learn information
about the chances of their preferred outcomes actually happening, threatening
the unity of the coalition. Leaders interested in political survival thus have
an incentive to procrastinate and act in ambiguous ways (as Franco did), so
long as they do not have the resources to definitively resolve ideological
conflicts in their favor. By contrast, when leaders expect to win such
conflicts, or when coalition members come to see that their chances of
achieving their deeper objectives are as good outside the tent as inside,
vagueness loses value: either the leader demands commitment to more specific
programmes, or vague symbols fail to keep coalition members in line. This
explains why the most committed are the first to leave when they figure out
that their ideals cannot be realized within the coalition; it was the most
ideological falangistas who became Franco's "a-legal right
opposition," not the moderates, for example.
It is also interesting to consider why
highly articulated ideologies should be able to produce deep but narrow
mobilization; and here I think that Linz is a bit off. The mobilizational
capacity of "ideology" (in Linz's sense) has less to do with its utopian
content than with the fact that strong ideological commitments develop in tight
chains of often face-to-face interaction. Consider the way in
which Marxism diffused in pre-revolutionary Russia through study groups,
participation in clandestine activities, and other recurrent situations that
made it a sort of common language among a set of people with similar core
values, facilitating their identification with the ideology as a symbolic
whole. The argumentative context of many of these situations (where activists
argued with one another over means and ends) produced more or less coherent
belief systems, though it also encouraged splintering, and regular face to face
interaction produced deep commitments through emotional amplification, but also
limited the degree to which many people could fully identify with the ideology
as a whole. (The history of the Bolsheviks seems to be illustrative here).
Indeed, to the extent that ideologies become politically dominant (through the
victory of specific groups in war, for example) and can be used, given their
explicitness, as "test[s] for loyalty" (p. 162), large incentives for
dissimulation also emerge, limiting their mobilizational capacity: consistency is maintained at the price of mass commitment. By
contrast, shallow commitments to vague symbols do not require the same sorts of
feedback, and they can be maintained by the typical means of mass politics,
haphazard as they are. Vagueness, not consistency, thus seems to be the price
of large-scale coalition politics.
[1] Franco's Spain was, of course, Linz's
paradigmatic case of authoritarianism, and the country he knew best.
