Unscrupulous Flattery

(A footnote on Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel, “Cults of Personality, Preference Falsification, and the Dictator’s Dilemma”, Journal of Theoretical Politics 32(3) 409-434 [2020])

Charles Crabtree, Holger Kern, and David Siegel just published an article in the Journal of Theoretical Politics that models cults of personality as screening devices. Their argument is similar to arguments I’ve made in this blog and in academic papers, though much more formal, and with a different twist. So I can’t pass on the opportunity to comment.

I can’t say I understood all the details of their game-theoretic model, but the basic intuition is simple. The key idea in a screening model of a “cult” (for our purposes here, extravagant flattery of a political leader) is that extreme flattery has a cost for the flatterer, and willingness to pay that cost provides information about the kind of person you are, or the kind of loyalty you can give – information that the leader can then use as part of their “personnel management [strategy], helping [him] sort subordinates into their most useful regime roles” (416).

On their model, this cost is primarily psychic. Drawing on Timur Kuran’s ideas about preference falsification, they note that repeating barefaced lies or exaggerated praise (things like Hafez al-Assad is Syria’s “premier pharmacist”, or Stalin is “the coryphaeus of science”, or “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration … both in person and around the globe.”) has a cost for anybody with a shred of integrity. But those who are genuinely smitten with the leader, or those who are particularly unscrupulous and opportunistic will find this cost less onerous: the first because the barefaced lies are close to what they actually believe (or are at least consistent with their beliefs), and the latter because they have no problem with lying if they can get something out of it.

In my first paper on this topic, I thought this led to a problem, since a cult could not induce a separating equilibrium distinguishing the truly loyal from the merely opportunistic in the eyes of the leader. If there are sufficient rewards for participation or strong enough punishments for non-participation, both the opportunistic and the loyal will participate in the cult equally, leading to flattery inflation as particular forms of flattery get devalued when the opportunistic or scared imitate the loyal. In these circumstances the cult could at best serve to deter collective action from the disloyal, not to clearly separate opportunists from loyalists.

But Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel note that a dictator does not always want to exclude the opportunistic and unscrupulous, since they actually need such people in their governing apparatus. In particular, the repressive agencies of a dictatorship require people who have no qualms about torturing, killing, or expropriating others, enforcers who don’t trouble themselves much with their conscience to achieve the dictator’s goals; and people who are willing to repeat barefaced lies are likely to be good at doing other morally dubious activities. As the (likely apocryphal) quote from Napoleon they use as their epigraph puts it, “the man who will say anything will do anything”.

To be sure, the unscrupulous may also be dangerous to the dictator – they are more likely to be corrupt, or more willing to betray the ruler if the occasion arises. Unscrupulousness need not imply loyalty. By the same token, loyalty need not imply total unscrupulousness; the loyal may be willing to do distasteful things up to a point, but object that these things don’t really serve the interest of the ruler, or lose their loyalty if asked to do too many such things. Moreover, the loyal and the unscrupulous may be best fitted to different tasks within a regime’s apparatus of rule – perhaps the more loyal are best suited to propaganda or supervisory roles, while the more unscrupulous are best suited to enforcement roles. So there’s still an adverse selection problem here, even if it’s a bit less urgent from the dictator’s point of view. The main contribution of Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel is to show formally that, under some conditions – in particular, when the preferences of the loyal and the unscrupulous for roles within the regime match the preferences of the dictator – levels of cult participation can sufficiently separate those who are loyal and unscrupulous from those who are merely unscrupulously opportunistic, enhancing the utility of the cult as a screening device. The model thus depicts the cult as a boutique HR department for the needs of the discerning dictator.

A couple of explicit limitations and complications of the argument are worth noting. First, Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel indicate that their focus is on leader cults in dictatorships; extreme flattery in democracies is beyond the scope of their model, I assume because in principle democracies should not have great need for people willing to engage in repression (we’ll come back to this point). Moreover, they also explicitly limit the scope of their model to elite interactions. Their argument is not meant to be a guide to why ordinary people might participate in the rituals of a cult of personality, possibly because their activity is neither directly observed by the dictator, nor likely to result in a role in the regime. Finally, they also note that the model assumes the dictator only cares about the signaling value of cult participation; if they cared about, say, the ego gratification they got out of it, they would have a harder time distinguishing the loyal and unscrupulous from the merely unscrupulous. A rational dictator should not “believe their own hype” - they may end up like Ceaușescu if they do.

Models are maps. They need not be “realistic” representations of the underlying social reality as long as they are similar enough to it in some limited respect to guide inquiry, or to allow one to do some form of inferential play. So I am not going to complain about particular assumptions of this model; it’s fun to play with. But I do have some reservations, or rather I can see some limitations that are worth exploring.

There are certainly cases where the model does seem to help us make sense of historical patterns of leader flattery. For example, the top Bolsheviks around Stalin in the late 1920s and 1930s were all ruthless people, though they varied in their level of commitment to the leader. Consider Lazar Kaganovich. Like many other Bolsheviks Kaganovich was capable of brutality in pursuit of revolutionary goals (crushing peasant uprisings or arresting “saboteurs”), but he was also unusually unscrupulous in support of Stalin (falsifying votes in the Central Committee in 1934 to help re-elect him as General Secretary), and seemed to be genuinely in awe of him, treating the latter “more reverently than Sergo [Orzhonikidze] or Mikoyan,” as Simon Sebag Montefiore recounts:

He so admired the Vozhd, he admitted, that “when I go to Stalin, I try not to forget a thing! I worry every time! I so worry every time. I prepare every document in my briefcase and fill my pockets with cribs like a schoolboy because no one knows what Stalin is going to ask.” (Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, p. 64)

(Stalin apparently reacted to Kaganovich’s “schoolboyish” adoration by “teaching him how to spell and punctuate” – Kaganovich was, like many other Old Bolsheviks, a self-educated autodidact, a cobbler with only minimal formal education).

“Iron Lazar” was one of the main promoters of the Stalin cult: he coined the term “Stalinism,” and was among the first to write paeans to Stalin in state media (a practice other senior Bolsheviks disliked in private but did not actively resist; Molotov once disdainfully said that Kaganovich was “200% Stalinist”). While Molotov, Orzhonikidze, Mikoyan, and others often argued with and disagreed strongly with Stalin well into the 1930s, and Stalin often had to apologize to them (at least in the late 1920s and early 1930s), Kaganovich was more pliable.

It might seem reasonable to infer that his high level of participation in the Stalin cult (indeed, his founding role in it) was one reason he survived the turbulent 1930s (he died in 1991!), while other Bolsheviks, who were certainly ruthless and unscrupulous (if deeply faithful to a certain ideal of revolutionary communism), sometimes had a harder time credibly signaling their commitment to Stalin (Orzhonikidze comes to mind). Their willingness to debase themselves to credibly signal their loyalty to Stalin certainly varied; these people had strong egos!

But note that extreme flattery from top Bolsheviks could not give Stalin information about their ruthlessness or lack of scruples; he already possessed a better source of that information, as the top Bolsheviks had shown time and again what they were capable of. Task performance, not cult participation, was sufficiently informative about their capacity for violence in the turbulent 1920s and 1930s that willingness to debase themselves in front of Stalin could not add anything to what was already known about their lack of scruples in pursuit of revolutionary goals. In this sense the cult may have helped to separate the loyal and ruthless from the purely ruthless, though even here the separation may have been imperfect (the seemingly amoral Beria, who would have betrayed anyone if he had seen any benefit, ended up in charge of the NKVD).

This analysis could be pursued further; unlike in many other dictatorships, in the case of Stalin we have a lot of archival evidence about the motivations and interactions of those in the inner circle of rule. But I am not certain we would find that the main effect of extreme flattery at the top level of the party was to provide clear information to Stalin about the loyalty and unscrupulousness of senior Bolsheviks, or that Stalin encouraged or tolerated such flattery for for that reason. My unsystematic reading (and I’m no expert!) of the interactions at the top of the CPSU in the 20s and 30s suggests that the effect of the cult was more to deter collective challenges to Stalin as the latter consolidated power than to allow him to determine more clearly who was loyal and who wasn’t; in a sense the cult, by forcing the public recognition of Stalin’s superior status among top Bolsheviks and making it harder for them to coordinate against Stalin, diminished the importance of personal loyalty. In an environment that created a strong collective action problem for anyone wishing to defect, he needed to have fewer genuinely committed supporters like Kaganovich.

The Chinese case is even more equivocal. There the main elite promoters of the Mao cult during the mid to late 1960s, Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, were not themselves more obviously loyal to Mao than others; Lin Biao himself seems to have had no illusions about “old Mao” (Leese, Mao Cult, p. 90), and Mao himself remained utterly suspicious of their motivations. As in the Soviet case, moreover, participation in the cult did not provide additional information about lack of scruples; we can assume that at the top of the CCP there were no naifs. There the cult (= extreme flattery at the elite level) seems to have been used far more as an instrument of factional warfare (deterring collective action by opponents) than as a way of signaling exceptional loyalty or unscrupulousness to Mao.

There’s another problem, evident in the example of Saparmurat Niyazov that Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel use to open their paper, which is that many manifestations of a cult depend on large-scale uses of resources and bureaucratic power. When the Turkmen government spends millions on statues of Niyazov, uses its airwaves to promote the Ruhnama, and so on, the audience for these manifestations of power is not Niyazov (except incidentally), and the poor saps who had to attend the design meetings for the Neutrality Monument or coordinate the publication of Niyazov’s works were likely not being promoted for their loyalty and unscrupulousness. (I don’t know, and I don’t know if anybody does know, if people at the top of the Turkmen government elite were rewarded for enabling these things; perhaps one day we might understand more about the bureaucratic politics of cult-building in Turkmenistan, as well as about the elite interactions leading to these excesses).

In some ways, the Crabtree, Kern, and Siegel model of elite flattery seems to apply more to a context like that of the Trump administration than to the classic personality cults of the 20th century, which went far beyond elite flattery to incorporate not only large-scale uses of bureaucratic power but also mass participation. This is only idle speculation, but it seems to me that in today’s USA, extreme flattery of Trump among close associates of the President does seem to go hand in hand with a willingness to break other norms. Moreover, because the reputational costs of such flattery are reasonably large outside the Trump administration, it serves as a credible signal that one is tying one’s fate to the President. If Trump wants people to break norms that have constrained previous presidents, it thus makes sense for him to recruit precisely the people who flatter him outrageously; he can probably separate the loyal and unscrupulous from the merely unscrupulous or the disloyal in this way.

Charisma and Representation

(Reflections on the nature of charisma and charismatic authority. Applications to current events and people are left as an exercise for the reader. Warning: long.)

I. Charisma as Talent

One problem I’ve been concerned with in recent times is the question of charisma in politics. What does it mean to say that a leader is “charismatic”? And how does charisma matter in politics?

Most people, I suspect, conceptualize charisma as an attribute of persons. A leader is charismatic if they have a special talent for the mobilization of others. This talent is, furthermore, described in terms of (irrational) persuasion: the leader can tell just the right stories, and use just the right symbols, to emotionally bind others to him, regardless of the actual merits of what he proposes. Charisma is thus sometimes likened to a kind of magical power: the truly charismatic leader keeps his followers “spellbound,” and can therefore ask of them sacrifices that go beyond what material incentives or threats could achieve, or that seem to actively work against their interests.

This talent for “spellbinding” may be partly inborn – some kind of personal magnetism that cannot be taught – and partly a matter of technique, showmanship, PR, whatever you want to call it. (There are even self-help books on how to become charismatic). But whatever its roots, its possessor convinces others to follow and obey them not (just) because of the rational power of their arguments or their ability to command material resources with which to reward or punish, but because of their capacity to emotionally “connect” with them.

I think some people do possess a talent along these lines. For example, the late Hugo Chávez, whatever may be said against him, certainly happened to have the knack for emotional mobilization in large-scale settings, while his successor Maduro appears to lack this talent, despite slavishly imitating many of his mentor’s mannerisms. Many other “populist” leaders and demagogues – of the left and the right – have had it. And there is something to the idea that charisma has to do with the ability to persuade others, though its effectiveness may be tied to highly contingent situational factors. (People who are effectively charismatic for some are simply boorish for others). I’m sure many of us know people who have this kind of “performative” talent for connecting with some groups.

Charisma in this sense does not necessarily depend on a talent for demagogic oratory. Not every “charismatic” leader fits the image of the great dictator riling up a crowd, and some can inspire extraordinary devotion without ever giving a public speech. This is “backstage” charisma instead of “frontstage” charisma, to use Randall Collins’ terminology. And while “frontstage” charisma is the one we are most likely to associate with the idea of the charismatic political leader, backstage charisma can be powerful too.

One of the strangest examples of backstage charisma I know of is found in Robert Crassweller’s very readable 1987 biography of Perón. The example is not about Perón (who had perfectly standard “frontstage” charisma), but about an earlier Argentine president, Hipólito Yrigoyen, who was first elected in 1916:

As a man of intrigue, Yrigoyen developed a secretive, molelike style for which no precedent seems available. He was soon known as “The Peludo,” after a burrowing species of armadillo whose underground life resembled Yrigoyen’s. He gave no speeches. His entire history before he became president in 1916 reveals only one public talk, and that was a very short one given at a very early stage in his career. For many years no pictures of him were available. He talked with many followers, but always with one at a time, meeting the solitary coworker in a small, darkened office and consulting with him in hushed tones. Even at a political convention he would not make an appearance, but would direct events from a tiny, hidden office nearby. He lived in Spartan obscurity in a small house as badly in need of refurbishing as was his meager wardrobe of rumpled clothing, it being his habit to give away the suits he was not wearing, which in any case had been tailored in the style of twenty years before.

To this furtive manner was joined the mystical element derived from his obscure religious dogmas. He viewed the Radical Party as a moral movement, a state of mind or spirit. He viewed his own role in terms of apostleship. Visitors admitted to his darkened chamber would hear from him, as from an oracle, metaphysical utterances so impressive and so incomprehensible that they left with the sure conviction of his sainthood. Amid the fascination and the soaring spiritual ideas that were thus communicated in the softest of tones and in the most unintelligible of rhetoric and syntax, something akin to a cult began to grow. Soon Yrigoyen was the undisputed political caudillo of Buenos Aires Province, and the Radical Party was beginning to take on a national dimension. (pp. 58-59)

Yrigoyen had developed a performative talent that kept some of those who interacted with him “spellbound”, even though this talent did not help him give public speeches. Yet this talent does not fully explain why he (and many other leaders) inspired extraordinary devotion at some times and not others. And because both frontstage and backstage charisma depend on recurring face to face interaction rituals to work their magic, such talents can hardly explain the importance of charisma for politics in large and complex societies where participation in public rituals is mostly optional. And indeed Yrigoyen’s “charismatic” persona did not survive contact with the Argentine presidency.

II. Charisma as Authority

Instead of looking at charisma as a talent a person has, let’s take a cue from Max Weber (who first popularized the concept as a tool of sociological analysis) and think about charisma as a form of authority others attribute to a person. Roughly, for Weber, the charismatic leader is simply the leader who is believed by their followers to have charisma, i.e., some extraordinary talent or power relevant to the (existentially threatening) problems of the group, and which therefore justifies complete submission to their authority.

The apparent tautology here indicates that the source of a charismatic leader’s hold over a group is not so much the presence or absence of some specific talent capable of compelling others to follow them (as Weber stresses, actual instances of charismatic leadership stem from vary different sources: prowess in war, persuasive speech, prophetic vision, etc.), but the act of “free” recognition by others of the leader’s unbounded personal authority. Insofar as enough people believe a particular person is the possessor of an extraordinary “gift of grace” (=“charisma”), they are willing to trust their decisions completely and follow them without hesitation. Charisma is thus primarily a pathology of collective trust: a leader is charismatic when they have followers who trust them so fully to do what is right for them, for whatever reason, that they submit themselves to their authority without reservations.

This idea is in keeping with the theological roots of the concept as the “gift of grace”. At the extreme, charismatic authority is simply personalized sacred authority, and submission to it entails complete faith in the providential wisdom of the leader. The followers may not fully understand the leader’s plan or vision, but they trust completely that the plan will work out for the best, and are not necessarily fazed by apparent setbacks, because the leader is seen as “anointed” by god.

This of course makes charismatic or quasi-charismatic authority resistant to refutation or argument (witness the kinds of justifications followers provide for their hardships under a charismatic leader’s rule); since the leader is thought to have extraordinary gifts, then there is always a reason for what they do. In Stalin’s time, people would sometimes say that “if Comrade Stalin made the decision, it means there was no alternative” in response to apparently harmful and incomprehensible policy changes; for these people – not everyone – Stalin had a kind of charismatic authority.

The “charismatic bond” between leader and followers is not in practice unbreakable, however. Weber rightly stressed that charismatic leaders need real successes, or else their followers eventually abandon them. To paraphrase Renan, charisma is a daily plebiscite. A sufficient accumulation of failures (or one big failure) may lead to a complete loss of faith in the leader. (Contemporary social theory speaks of “success charisma” as opposed to “frontstage” or “backstage” charisma). But in the ideal-typical case the leader’s charismatic authority should be strong enough to withstand a lot of setbacks.

We might say that a leader has charismatic authority when the followers develop an extremely strong “prior” that the leader will act in their interests. One could then speak of a continuous space here, with charismatic authority at one end and purely “contractual” authority at the other end, depending on both the strength of this prior and the decisionmaking contexts where it is relevant. The greater the strength of the prior, the more charismatic the bond between leader and followers; and the more extensive the decisionmaking contexts where the prior applies, the greater the scope of this charismatic authority. And of course the stronger the prior, the more the leader can withstand setbacks before losing their authority.

The person who says to a group experiencing a social crisis, “I alone can fix it”, and is strongly believed by enough of them, has made a successful charismatic claim to authority. Sociologically speaking, then, the important question is what makes such claims credible – indeed, what makes them likely to produce such strong beliefs in the providential authority of the leader that the followers are willing to forgive them all kinds of failures and overlook otherwise disqualifying traits. Here Weber pointed to social factors (situations of severe crisis) rather than performative talents for emotional connection or persuasion.

In the typical “charismatic situation”, existing leaders of a group (“insiders”) suffer a catastrophic loss of credibility due to a severe social, political, or symbolic crisis. The group’s status is declining, or its material prospects are worsening, in ways perceived to be existentially threatening. Insiders are believed to be responsible for this condition, and hence cannot command sufficient support for their proposed solutions. Yet decisive action may seem inescapable and urgent: something must be done! I may prefer my view about what should be done to that of others, but the appropriate course of action is highly uncertain, and I may be willing to gamble on decisive action by anyone who can command sufficient support to actually coordinate people’s responses. (Functionally speaking, leaders are mostly coordination devices).

Among the “outsiders” peddling solutions to the crisis some exceed expectations in initially gathering support or ameliorating the situation. Perhaps they win elections that few others thought they would, or help make members of the group feel better by violating norms that lowered their status, or maybe even preside over improvements in the group’s material situation. This reduces further the credibility of insider “models” of the crisis while increasing the credibility of the outsider’s views. Moreover, these early successes in turn lead them to gather more supporters (nothing succeeds like success), which makes it possible for them to achieve further apparent successes.

Social proof helps here: the more others connected to you support a particular leader, the more it looks like they are succeeding, and the more it seems that you should support them too. (And the more others connected to you participate in rituals of support that amplify emotional connections, the more likely you are too). After a while, the outsider may acquire a reputation as a miracle worker, at least among members of a particular group, and may accumulate a capital of credibility large enough to tide them over some lean periods before their incompetence or hubris betrays them. From this point of view, the emergence of charismatic or quasi-charismatic leaders can look like a broadly rational process of belief adjustment. (Someone with the right skills may even be able to write down a more formal model of the Bayesian updating going on here).

The period after World War I in Europe is the key example of such a “charismatic situation”, when a number of people made charismatic claims more or less successfully. The most famous of these people was Hitler, in Ian Kershaw’s classic interpretation. If we conceptualize charisma merely as a sort of talent, Hitler was an unlikely candidate for leadership. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was a loser. To be sure, he did have some qualities, including “massive overconfidence”, that would help him later in his rise to power, and he was well-served by the fascist genius for ritual spectacle; but none of these qualities, by themselves, explain his later charismatic authority over millions of people. (At best, they would have made him a moderately successful rabble-rouser – what he in fact was in the early 1920s).

What really invested him with charismatic authority among many Germans in the 1930s were his successes, including his unlikely electoral gains, his astonishing diplomatic and military victories after he gained power, and perhaps most of all the taming of German unemployment. It did not matter much whether some of these successes were actually attributable to Hitler, or based on illusory assessments, so long as he was visibly associated with them. And because Hitler wildly exceeded initial expectations (he was, after all, a perfect outsider), too many people adjusted their priors “too much” in the direction of “miracle worker.” But by the same token, when his decisions led to a massive failure that he had to take responsibility for (in particular, the defeat at Stalingrad) his charismatic authority started to ebb. (It had to be a massive failure, by the way: minor failures would not have dented his reputation much, as they would have been easily rationalized).

Similar stories could be told for other classic cases of charismatic leadership in this period. A common thread in these stories seems to be that leaders who are later said to be charismatic are successful bluffers, outsiders who make unlikely gambles and win. Mussolini with his “March on Rome” is another case in point. The march represented no big threat to the Italian state (Prime Minister Luigi Facta was ready to impose martial law to prevent it, and would likely have succeeded), yet king Vitorio Emmanuele III folded and gave Mussolini the prime ministership. This success was one event that helped construct Mussolini’s charismatic authority, complementing the ritual dimensions of fascist rule. Fascist spectacle by itself was insufficient; Mussolini, another paradigmatic outsider, required unlikely, striking successes for large numbers of people to greatly increase their trust in him as a leader. But again, when he failed, his charisma quickly ebbed, and he came to depend more and more on the legal authority of the state rather than on his personal authority as a charismatic leader.

III. Charisma as Representation

Because charismatic authority emerges from the trust of the followers in the leader, it can also be analyzed as a form of representation. The followers believe, very strongly and for whatever reason (and often wrongly!), that the leader will pursue their interests or promote their values; but if he fails in sufficiently spectacular ways, they may abandon him. In this sense charismatic authority appears quasi-democratic, since it is “freely” given by the followers, who recognize something in the leader that they think makes him likely to represent them, and who can hold him to account (by deserting him) if he does not do so. (Of course, a formerly charismatic leader may come to control other sources of authority, so “exit” may be harder than it sounds. But this problem concerns the fungibility of authority – its potential transformation into other sources of power – not the voluntary nature of the charismatic relationship).

Charismatic representation is like a pathological version of the trustee model of representation, where the “constituents” (the followers or the “base”) implicitly trust the leader to a much greater extent than is wise. To be sure, charismatic representation does not depend on fixed constituencies or on institutionalized selection procedures. Only those who flock to the charismatic leader feel genuinely represented; the rest do not. And there is something arbitrary about the way in which followers authorize their representation by “seeing” some implausible gift in a person that supposedly qualifies them to promote the group’s identity, values, and interests. But charismatic relationships still retain many of the characteristics of more institutionalized representative relationships.

Just as in institutionalized relationships of representation, charismatic relationships contain moments of authorization (the equivalent of “voting”), when followers “recognize” the leader’s charisma and submit themselves to the leader’s authority, and moments of accountability, when the base decides that some failure of the leader is sufficiently large that they no longer recognize his charismatic gift (they must have been “mistaken”). And charismatic leaders appear to be successful “representatives” to the extent that they mirror or amplify the identity, values, and interests of their base (just as we might say that an institutionalized representative succeeds when they genuinely promote their constituents’ interests). Take this example from a 1927 book on Mussolini:

the Italian people feels … that Mussolini is its purest expression. In Him we find the sum of those that are the characteristic virtues of an admirable race. He is the soul, the voice, the conscience of an admirable people. The crowd listening to him confusedly understands this, and its clapping is a cry of joy for having found such an interpreter of its deep feeling (this is from Ida Avetta’s “Mussolini and the Crowd”, cited in Falasca-Zamponi, ‘The “Culture” of Personality: Mussolini and the Cinematic Imagination’, p. 100)

We find similar language in Chavismo (see, e.g, the “Yo soy Chávez” phenomenon). It was common in both scholarly and journalistic accounts to link Chávez’ success with his personal (“charismatic”) ability to “represent” the excluded, the poor, etc. And we find it also in the justifications of the charismatic leadership of Lenin or Stalin, where the charismatic leader represents the proletariat, for example. The point of these examples is simply that followers in a charismatic relationship understand it as a particular kind of representation of themselves – a form of representation that, unfortunately, often feels more intense and authentic than institutional forms of representation.

Leaders described as charismatic are sometimes very different demographically from their followers. And so people sometimes wonder how others can identify strongly with leaders who don’t look like them, or don’t share any of their life experiences. I think the word “identification” may be misleading here: the leader who can credibly channel or mirror the group’s desires and aspirations is engaging in a kind of representation, and can therefore command the trust of the group. If the degree of trust is large enough, the resulting relationship looks like strong identification. But charismatic representation is not “descriptive”, since by definition the charismatic leader has some extraordinary gift that exalts them above their followers; it is the recognition of this “gift” that matters, not whatever apparent similarities there may be between leader and followers.

Charismatic representation, like institutional representation, also has its communicative rituals. Descriptions of charismatic leadership tend to emphasize the communion of leader and “people” in large-scale rituals where the followers communicate with the leader as well as vice-versa. The followers shout out questions or encouragement, the leader answers; it isn’t all passive. One sees this in descriptions of meetings with Chávez (who took this one step further with his “Alo Presidente” show), or Perón (there’s the famous rally at the Plaza de Mayo of 17 October 1945, described by Crassweller as a sort of “dialogue” and “town meeting”), or Mussolini (who followed in the footsteps of D’Annunzio). This is of course a fiction; no genuine two-way communication can exist in mass rituals, and the “questions” in such situations are typically softballs. But there can be a feeling of communication that cements the representative bond, even where the followers’ views have no any real impact on the leader; and a good charismatic leader can “read” a crowd well enough to understand the forces he must channel. (This is connected with the idea of charisma as a specific talent).

IV. Charisma and Democracy

Charismatic leadership claims are more likely to occur when institutional representation appears to be failing. This was clear to observers of the interwar period, when charismatic leaders benefited from a “crisis of representation”, with deadlocked parliaments and fragile coalitions seemingly unable to act in the public interest; and to observers of say, 1990s Venezuela, who also attributed the rise of Chávez to unresponsive and unrepresentative parties there. Concerns about poor representation are a common theme in the “charismatic situations” of the 20th century. Conversely, wherever most people feel institutional procedures for representation work well enough, charismatic claims are unlikely to be made, or to be successful. So there’s a clear sense in which charismatic representation is opposed to institutionalized representative government – “democracy” in the familiar sense of the term.

But the opposition between charismatic leadership and institutions goes deeper. As Weber saw, all genuinely charismatic leadership is destructive of institutions, opposing the personal authority of the “prophet” or “warlord” to the institutional authority of the existing order, whatever that order may be. The characteristic pronouncement of the charismatic leader is “you have heard … but I say unto you”; in its purest form charismatic authority is thus revolutionary. One could give Weber’s point an Arendtian gloss and say that while other forms of authority (law and tradition) reproduce themselves, strangling the spontaneity of human action, the charismatic leader breaks through the routine of everyday politics, seeming to promise “new modes and orders”. Because the leader’s followers ex hypothesi trust him to an extreme degree, he can often overcome the authority of existing norms and institutions, whether simply to destroy them or to replace them with new ones.

And yet Weber was uncommonly sanguine about charismatic or quasi-charismatic leadership in democracies. (I make this case in more scholarly detail in chapter 18 here – ungated version here). Modern democracy, with its emphasis on what Weber did not hesitate to call “demagogic” mass persuasion and its plebiscitary aspects, is fertile ground for the emergence of charismatic and quasi-charismatic leaders. In his view, modern democratic politics structurally selects for people capable of emotionally “bonding” with the electorate; demagogy and charismatic appeals are baked into the cake of modern representative government. (Weber’s opinion of the electorate’s intellectual capacities was very low). But that’s not necessarily a bad thing for him!

The personal authority of the demagogic leader seems to Weber to be the only way to break through what he saw as the bureaucratization and ossification of modern social life. Only charismatic leaders – people who are freely recognized as such by many others, not simply people with particular performative talents – are able to genuinely articulate resonant visions of public values and interests. (He does not give much thought to the alternative where collective bodies or parties embody this charismatic appeal; for him parties are essentially selection institutions for leaders). A charismatic leader is no mere mirror of a group’s desires; they “represent” (my word, not Weber’s) particular causes, not just the immediate interests of a group, and they are able to fight for these causes fiercely in the political arena. Weber’s ideal leaders have a vocation or a “calling” for politics, and are not just in search of empty popularity.

The idea that one ought to support democratic politics because it selects for genuinely charismatic leaders with a calling for politics better than other political systems is a bit of a “pact with the devil”, to use another Weberian phrase. Democratic contests do not necessarily distinguish between Cleon and Pericles, and of course charismatic leadership didn’t exactly turn out well in the Weimar Germany of Weber’s time. (Though he didn’t live to see the whole story; he died in 1920).

Weber’s view also depends on the ultimate effectiveness of institutional accountability, not just on the possibility of exit from a charismatic relationship. When constrained by electoral institutions, Weber thought that the quasi-charismatic demagogue leader cannot escape responsibility. But there’s something paradoxical in his search for a “responsible” charismatic demagogue. After all, charismatic authority is often too strong for the rule of law; it can erode and destroy even basic accountability institutions.

Nevertheless, I think Weber provides probably the most powerful account of the inescapability and importance of charisma in modern democratic politics. It is a double-edged case, yet not so easily dismissed.

Big Lies at the Monkey Cage

No, not that post. Just me talking about the uses of lies in politics, which may interest some readers here.

Posts at the Monkey Cage are highly constrained in terms of length and style, so I may as well use this blog for some additional notes and clarifications.

Mythical Lies. One point that perhaps could be stressed with respect to the political uses of myth would be that their acceptance always depends on the persuasiveness of alternative narratives. Moreover, it seems to me that the acceptance of myths usually hinges on taking particular narratives “seriously but not literally,” as was sometimes said of Trump supporters (and could, of course, be said of many other people).

For example, the appeal of the Soviet socialist myth in the 1930s did not hinge on its general accuracy or the degree to which practice lived up to its internal standards, but on its articulation of values that seemed plainly superior to the ones on offer by the major alternative narratives (liberal capitalist or fascist). Not everyone may have felt “dizzy with success” in the 1930s, but little that was credible could be said for capitalism at the time (a lack of credibility reinforced by the impossibility of travel and centralized control of information, of course, but not only by that). Here’s Stephen Kotkin in his magisterial Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization:

The antagonism between socialism and capitalism, made that much more pronounced by the Great Depression, was central not only to the definition of what socialism turned out to be, but also to the mind-set of the 1930s that accompanied socialism’s construction and appreciation. This antagonism helps explain why no matter how substantial the differences between rhetoric and practice or intentions and outcome sometimes became, people could still maintain a fundamental faith in the fact of socialism’s existence in the USSR and in that system’s inherent superiority. This remained true, moreover, despite the Soviet regime’s manifest despotism and frequent resort to coercion and intimidation. Simply put, a rejection of Soviet socialism appeared to imply a return to capitalism, with its many deficiencies and all-encompassing crisis— a turn of events that was then unthinkable. (Magnetic Mountain, pp. 153-54).

On one reading of Soviet history, the valence of the capitalist and socialist myths eventually reversed (perhaps by the late 1970s? Or later?): capitalism came to seem fundamentally superior to many Soviet citizens, despite its problems (which, incidentally, were constantly pointed out by Soviet propaganda), while Soviet socialism came to appear unworkable and stagnant (despite the material advantages that many Soviet citizens enjoyed, including great employment stability). But this reversal in valence had less to do with specific facts (popular Soviet views of capitalism in the early 90s could be remarkably misinformed) than with an overall loss of trust in the values Soviet myths articulated, reinforced by decades of failed prophecy about the coming abundance. (Perhaps best conceptualized as a cumulative reputational cost of lying?).

Strategic Lies. One thing I did not emphasize in the piece is that people may of course be predisposed to believe lies that accord with their deep-seated identities. Everyone has their own favorite examples of this, though I am reluctant to speak of “belief” in some of the more extreme cases. (See, e.g., this post about the differential predispositions of voters to identify the bigger crowd in two pictures of the inauguration; perhaps it’s better to speak here of people giving the finger to the interviewers, reasserting their partisan identities). But by the same token, these lies do not work for groups whose identities predispose them to reject the message or the messenger (e.g., Democrats, in the question about inauguration pictures).

So “identity-compatible lies” (anyone have a better term?) should be understood as ways to mobilize people, not necessarily (or only) to deceive them, which put them in the same functional category as “loyalty lies” below. From a tactical standpoint, the question then is about the marginal persuasive effect of such lies: does telling a big lie that will be embraced by supporters and rejected by non-supporters increase or reduce the chances that an uncommitted person will believe you?

I’m not sure there’s an obvious answer to this question that is valid for most situations. In any case, it seems to me that, over time, the marginal persuasive effect should decrease, and even become negative (as seems to be happening in Venezuela, where in any case most people who are not Chavistas can and do simply “exit” government propaganda by changing the channel or turning off the TV, and the remaining Chavistas become increasingly subject to cognitive dissonance (how come after all the “successes” proclaimed by the government in the economic war, the other side is still winning?).

Loyalty Lies. The idea that baldfaced lies can help cement the loyalty of the members of a ruling group when trust is scarce seems to be becoming commonplace; both Tyler Cowen and Matthew Yglesias provide good analyses of how this may work within the context of the Trump administration. (Cowen is also interesting on what I would call “lies as vagueness” and their function in maintaining flexibility within coalitions, which I didn’t mention, but which are obviously related to this and this).

But I wanted to plug in specifically a really nice paper by Schedler and Hoffmann (linked, but not mentioned, in my Monkey Cage piece) that stresses the need to “dramatize” unity in authoritarian environments in order to deter challengers during times of crisis. Their key example is the Cuban transition of power from Fidel to Raul Castro (2006-2011) – a situation which saw the need for supposedly “liberal” members of the Cuban regime to show convincingly that they were in fact “on the same page” as everyone else in the elite. And the same need to dramatize unity in a crisis seems to me to be driving the apparent lunacy of some of the statements by Venezuelan officials (check out Hugo Perez Hernaiz’s Venezuelan Conspiracy Theories Monitor for a sampling).

I suspect that the need to dramatize loyalty within a coalition (by “staying on the same page” and thus saying only the latest lie du jour) may conflict with the imperatives of strategic lying (saying things that are credible to the larger groups). Here the tradeoff is about the relative value of support outside vs. support within the ruling group; the less you depend on the former, the less it matters whether elite statements are believed "outside."

New Book: Non-Democratic Politics

My new book, Non-Democratic Politics: Authoritarianism, Dictatorship, and Democratization has been out for a few weeks (Palgrave, Amazon). For the usual vaguely superstitious reasons, I did not want to make an announcement until I had a copy in my hands, but now I do. Just in time for the holidays!

I confess that I feel a bit ambivalent about the book’s publication. On the one hand, I’m of course glad the book is finally out in the wild; it’s been a long process, and it’s great to be able to touch and see the physical result of my work, and to know that at least some other people will read it. (Much better scholars of authoritarian politics than me also said some nice things about it in the back cover, which is extremely gratifying). Moreover, if you have followed this blog, you will find that some material in the book elaborates and supports many things I have said here more informally (on cults of personality, propaganda, robust action in the Franco regime, the history of political regimes, the Saudi monarchy, etc.); one reason I wrote the book was to be able to put together in a reasonably coherent way my thoughts on these subjects, and I felt encouraged enough by some of the reaction to my writing here to think that I had something to say. (Without this blog, this book probably would not exist; thank you readers!) And since I teach this material here at Vic, the result should be useful as a textbook. (If you teach classes on non-democratic politics do consider the book for use in your course!).

But I also feel that the book should be seen as “version 0.1” of what I really wanted to do. There was more that I wanted to write, and there are things I already want to add or revise (partly in response to current events, partly in response to learning new things), though I will only be able to do this if Palgrave decides there’s enough demand for a second edition. If I had more contractual leeway (and academic clout) I would put the whole thing in my Github repository and make it into an evolving work, adding or deleting material over time as I learn more, or correcting errors as they are brought to my attention, and releasing new versions every so often. But I don’t have that kind of leeway or clout yet (perhaps in the future – we’ll see); and traditional publication still offers some advantages (including dedicated peer review, from which I benefited a lot. Thank you, anonymous reviewers, whoever you are, for helping me improve this book).

In lieu of putting the entire work online, however, I have created a website where all the charts and data in the book are available, and where I can give free rein to my love of ggplot2 graphs and data art. The site (https://xmarquez.github.io/AuthoritarianismBook/) contains replication code for all the figures and tables in the book, natural-language explanations of the code, and full documentation for all the datasets, and is to boot available for download as a single R package. It also contains some extensions of the figures in the book, including huge vertical graphs of the kind that sometimes appear in this blog but could never fit in a normal book. My hope is that people can use this package (and the associated website) to easily do their own exploratory data analysis on the topic. I have tried to make it as user-friendly as possible for people with little experience using R; and I intend to update it regularly and add new features and corrections. Check it out![1]

The hardcover is unfortunately priced (I don’t recommend you buy it, unless you’re an academic library), and I think even the paperback should be cheaper, but I don’t make those decisions. Nevertheless, if you have enjoyed this blog in the past, and would like to see how many of the aspects of non-democratic politics I have discussed here fit together, or you simply wish to learn more about non-democratic politics, consider buying it!

Normal service on this blog will resume shortly.

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1. There will also be some further narrative material available at a different website, including extended discussions of a few cases, but I’m way behind on producing these narratives. ↩

Vagueness and Political Regimes

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.

Francisco Franco, Robust Action, and the Power of Non-Commitment

(Warning: speculation about Spanish history during the Franco era by an amateur).

I’m currently in Spain, doing some research on Franco’s cult of personality. In preparing for this project, I recently read Paul Preston’s biography of Franco, which presents Franco as a selfish, vengeful, and ultimately petty tyrant who caused the death of hundreds of thousands of his compatriots. (If not for Hitler, Franco seems like he would certainly have been in contention for the “worst person of the 20^th century” award). Yet despite the evidence of Franco’s political cunning (nearly four decades at the top of the Spanish political system puts him in the top 2-3% of all modern rulers in terms of sheer longevity), the portrait that emerges from Preston’s biography is emphatically not one of a decisive and Machiavellian political leader, but one of “astonishing personal mediocrity” (Kindle Loc 17636), a ruler who constantly procrastinated important decisions, acting reactively rather than proactively, and was rarely clear or even coherent about his commitments, to the despair of allies and enemies alike. How could such a person end up leading the winning side of a bloody civil war and becoming the effective ruler of Spain for more than three decades?

Preston argues cogently that luck played a large role, but it struck me while reading his book that one possible key to Franco’s “success” (measured simply by his ability to remain in power) is something that Padgett and Ansell called, in a classic article on the rise of the Medici in Renaissance Florence, “robust action,” action that cannot be easily foiled or prevented by your opponents. Since their ideas about what enables a political leader to act in this way seem to me to illuminate Franco’s spectacular longevity in power, it’s worth describing them in some detail.

Padgett and Ansell begin their article by noting that there is something puzzling about Cosimo de’ Medici’s power in Florence. Cosimo was clearly powerful, despite not holding formal political office, as his contemporaries (including Machiavelli) appreciated keenly;

Yet the puzzle about Cosimo’s control is this: totally contrary to Machiavelli’s portrait in The Prince of effective leaders as decisive and goal oriented, eyewitness accounts describe Cosimo de’ Medici as an indecipherable sphinx …

… Lest one conclude that this implies only savvy back-room dealing, extant accounts of private meetings with Cosimo emphasize the same odd passivity.’ After passionate pleas by supplicants for action of some sort, Cosimo typically would terminate a meeting graciously but icily, with little more commitment than “Yes my son, I shall look into that” (pp. 1262-1263)

Cosimo “never said a clear word in his life” (p. 1308). But not only was Cosimo inscrutable; his actions, especially after 1434,

… appeared extraordinarily reactive in character. Everything was done in response to a flow of requests that, somehow or other, “just so happened” to serve Cosimo’s extremely multiple interests. (p. 1263)

Padgett and Ansell argue, pace Machiavelli, that there were no “deep and ruthless machinations” that explain Cosimo’s political success. Cosimo really was a “sphinx without a secret” (a term coined by one of Franco’s ministers to refer to Franco); his actions really were reactive, not the moves of someone who could always see further ahead than his adversaries. But his actions were robust (not easily foiled or prevented) precisely because he could not be pinned down by them: others had to reveal their interests when acting in ways that he did not:

We use the term “robust action” to refer to Cosimo’s style of control. The key to understanding Cosimo’s sphinxlike character … is multivocality-the fact that single actions can be interpreted coherently from multiple perspectives simultaneously, the fact that single actions can be moves in many games at once, and the fact that public and private motivations cannot be parsed. Multivocal action leads to Rorschach blot identities, with all alters constructing their own distinctive attribution of the identity of ego. The “only” point of this, from the perspective of ego, is flexible opportunism-maintaining discretionary options across unforeseeable futures in the face of hostile attempts by others to narrow those options.

Crucial for maintaining discretion is not to pursue any specific goals [my emphasis]. For in nasty strategic games, like Florence or like chess, positional play is the maneuvering of opponents into the forced clarification of their (but not your) tactical lines of action.  Locked-in commitment to lines of action, and thence to goals, is the product not of individual choice but at least as much of others’ successful “ecological control” over you … Victory, in Florence, in chess, or in go means locking in others, but not yourself, to goal-oriented sequences of strategic play that become predictable thereby. (pp. 1263-1264)

Padgett and Ansell insist that “not pursuing specific goals” is not merely a matter of strategic ambiguity. What is needed is a more radical lack of commitment to specific interests, or rather, a more radical incommensurability of one’s various interests, which they denote by the idea of “multivocality:”

But robust action is not just a matter of behaving ambiguously. Others are too shrewd not to see through behavioral facades down to presumed self-interested motivations. To act credibly in a multivocal fashion, one’s attributed interests must themselves be multivocal. (p. 1307)

In other words, in the face of unpredictable and changing conditions, too much commitment to specific objectives is damaging to one’s survival in power, as it allows others to predict your moves and to credibly paint you as acting selfishly against the interests of potential allies. To be sure, only some people are in a position to act in this way; not just anyone can “succeed” by acting reactively and inscrutably:

Of course, robust action will not work for just anyone. For the flow of requests to be channeled, only some network structures will do. And for the resolution of judge and boss to be credible, coherent interests must remain opaque as far down as it is conceivable to peer. Contra Machiavelli, even Cosimo himself did not set out with a grand design to take over the state: this assumption reads history backward. … Cosimo’s political party first emerged around him. Only later, during the Milan war, did Cosimo suddenly apprehend the political capacity of the social network machine that lay at his fingertips. (p. 1264)

Most of Padgett and Ansell’s article then describes precisely the sort of network structure that makes robust action possible. Roughly speaking, their argument is that the Medici coalition contained inherently contradictory interests, yet it was constructed in such a way that its component parts could only act together through Cosimo: “Robust action by the Medici was credible precisely because of the contradictory character of their base of support,” yet “[t]he result was an awesomely centralized patrimonial machine, capable of great discipline and “top down” control because the Medici themselves were the only bridge holding this contradictory agglomeration together” (p. 1307). By contrast, the coalition of Medici opponents was both far more “coherent” and narrow in terms of the interests it represented (and hence more predictable in its actions) and less susceptible to centralized control (and hence less effective and disciplined).

Now, there are many differences between Franco and Cosimo de’ Medici. But the overall strategies that allowed Franco to survive in power during one of the most difficult periods in European history do present some interesting similarities to the strategies Padgett and Ansell describe in their article.

Let’s start with Franco himself, who if nothing else seems to have shared something of Cosimo de’ Medici’s inscrutability. Preston recites a litany of descriptions emphasizing this aspect of his character:

He was abundantly imbued with the inscrutable pragmatism or retranca of the gallego peasant. Whether that was because of his origins as a native of Galicia, or the fruit of his Moroccan experiences is impossible to say. Whatever its roots in Franco, retranca may be defined as an evasion of commitment and a taste for the imprecise. It is said that if you meet a gallego on a staircase, it is impossible to deduce if he is going up or down. Franco perhaps embodied that characteristic more than most gallegos. When those close to him tried to get hints about forthcoming ministerial changes, they were rebuffed with skill: ‘People are saying that in the next reshuffle of civil governors so-and-so will go to Province X’, tries the friend; ‘Really?’ replies the sinuous Franco, ‘I’ve heard nothing’. ‘It’s being said that Y and Z are going to be ministers’, ventures his sister. ‘Well’, replies her brother, ‘I haven’t met either of them’. The monarchist aviator Juan Antonio Ansaldo wrote of him ‘Franco is a man who says things and unsays them, who draws near and slips away, he vanishes and trickles away; always vague and never clear or categoric’. John Whitaker met him during the Civil War: ‘He was effusively flattering, but he did not give a frank answer to any question I put to him. A less straightforward man I never met.’ Mussolini’s Ambassador Roberto Cantalupo met him some months later and found Franco to be ‘icy, feminine and elusive [sfuggente]’. The day after first meeting Franco in 1930, the poet and noted wit José María Pemán was introduced by a friend as ‘the man who speaks best in all Spain’ and remarked ‘I think I’ve just met the man who keeps quiet best in all Spain’ (‘ Tengo la sospecha de haber conocido al hombre que mejor se calla en España’). (Kindle Locations 113-130).

To be sure, Franco, unlike Cosimo, made lots of public speeches during his life and said many well-documented things to ambassadors, ministers, and other political leaders. But one point that Preston’s biography brings out well is that it is very difficult to construct a coherent position for Franco from his public statements (though Preston tries valiantly). For one thing, he seems to have had no problems disregarding the truth when it was convenient for him to deny it, and he was alarmingly willing to change his position as circumstances or audiences changed. He could say anything with apparently complete conviction: he could be a monarchist one minute, a Falangista the next, and then assert his claim to being a true Spanish democrat. Yet Preston never quite succeeds in establishing that there was one thing Franco “really believed” underneath all the bullshitting and incoherence, some ideological commitment or fundamental interest beyond his maintenance in power that could account for the many different things he said. His key political talent, Preston notes more than once, was for “shroud[ing] his intentions in a cloud of nebulous vagueness” (Kindle Location 14849-14850). Since no one could be quite sure about his real commitments, these could be “read” in a variety of different ways at the time – as fundamentally sympathetic to the Falange, or fundamentally conservative and Catholic, or as those of an anti-communist warrior.

One obvious way in which Franco avoided being pinned down to some particular goal was by often acting through intermediaries, which made it possible for him to deny responsibility. For example, he was cautious not to seem to have sought the posts of commander in chief or head of state; as Preston puts it, “[w]ith his customary caution, Franco preferred to let others make the running and wait for the new honour to be thrust upon him” (Kindle Locations 4093-4094). But as with Cosimo de’ Medici, the point is not that Franco had plotted for a long time to gain supreme power; on the contrary, his early life suggested that he was destined to be a career military man. He was promoted rapidly, and enjoyed his many positions – in particular, he appears to have been very happy as director of the military academy in Zaragoza. For a while it was even a bit iffy whether he would participate in the military rebellion that led to the civil war; it was only when circumstances made supreme command clearly possible that we can even speak of Franco pursuing that option at all, and then only in fairly indirect ways.

More broadly, Franco’s terminal unwillingness to ever close off options made it seem like he was constantly procrastinating important decisions. The most obvious example of this is the question of restoring the Spanish monarchy (one aim of the military rebellion that led to the civil war), which Franco successfully postponed for decades, in part because it would commit himself to a definite course of action, splitting his coalition. But the same was true of his neutrality-cum-covert-support for Germany and Italy in WWII (Preston has some amusing passages where Hitler and Mussolini rage against Franco’s inability to make clear commitments to enter WWII on their side), or of his actions during the civil war.

The latter provides one striking example of the contrast between robust action and non-robust action. Franco was highly dependent on material support from Germany and Italy for his war effort. And Mussolini and Hitler both had serious doubts about Franco’s abilities to lead the nationalist side to victory. So early on, German and Italian military forces sent to aid the nationalist side were only nominally under Franco’s command. But when the one of the three divisions of Black Shirts sent by Mussolini was defeated at Guadalajara, in part due to Franco’s failure to keep his word to mount a simultaneous attack in the Jarama front, Mussolini was too committed to Franco’s victory to do anything about it except continue supporting Franco, and even accede to put the Black Shirts under Franco’s command. As Preston puts it:

Mussolini could see that he had been used but he had little choice but to continue supporting Franco. Guadalajara had smashed the myth of fascist invincibility and Mussolini found himself committed to Franco until the myth was rebuilt. Equally, however galling, it was now clear that it made more sense to work with Franco for a Nationalist victory than independently. Shortly after his letter of exculpation [a letter Franco wrote to Mussolini to explain why the promised forces did not materialize during the battle of Guadalajara], Franco had requested help for a huge assault on Bilbao. Ignoring remarks made by Roatta [the Italian ambassador commander of the Black Shirts in the civil war at the time] about the miraculous appearance of the necessary forces for Bilbao which had never materialized during the battle of Guadalajara, Mussolini ordered his commander henceforth to obey the instructions and directives of Franco. Italian forces would henceforth be distributed in Spanish units and subject to the command of Franco’s generals. When Cantalupo informed him of this on 28 March, Franco was delighted. The Italian Ambassador found him as if ‘freed of a nightmare’. Franco asked him to inform the Duce of his ‘joy at being understood and appreciated’. (Kindle loc 5320-5329).

Franco had (whether by design or not; Preston is of two minds about this) managed to shape the “choice context” of Mussolini so as to induce him to commit himself to Franco’s victory, while retaining some freedom to pursue his own independent policy, despite his material dependence on Italian and German aid.

But what enabled Franco to avoid commitment to specific goals while others could not? What made it possible for him to say to Don Juan (the exiled heir to the Borbon throne) in 1954, that “I don’t find governing an onerous task” and “Spain is easy to govern”? (Kindle loc 14428-14429). Part of the answer to this question – in a sense the more superficial part – is that, as Preston notes, Franco was very good at gauging the price of people:

For nearly forty years he would use [his very extensive formal powers] with consummate skill, striking decisively at his outright enemies but maintaining the loyalty of those within the Nationalist coalition with cunning and a perceptive insight into human weakness worthy of a man who had learnt his politics among the tribes of Morocco. The ability to calibrate almost instantly the weakness and/ or the price of a man enabled Franco to know unerringly [a bit of poetic license, but we’ll let that pass] when a would-be opponent could be turned into a collaborator by some preferment, or even the promise of it – a ministry, an embassy, a prestigious military posting, a job in a State enterprise, a decoration, an import licence or just a box of cigars. (Kindle loc 6251-6255).

And like any other successful dictator, he then used this knowledge to play people against one another and thus prevent them from coordinating against him:

The ‘families’ of the Nationalist coalition would be manipulated like friendly tribes, bribed, enmeshed in competition among themselves, involved in corruption and repression in such a way as to make them suspicious of one another but unable to do without the supreme arbiter. (Kindle locs 7395-7397).

Divide et impera is, of course, the oldest trick in the book; and Franco was good at it, in the (base) sense of using it well to remain at the top of the political system despite not being very much loved, or even very much respected, by those below him. In a revealing anecdote, Preston notes the clever way in which Franco used the corruption of his ministers as an instrument of control:

Franco showed no interest in putting a stop to graft as opposed to using knowledge of it to increase his power over those involved. He often repaid those who informed him of corruption not by taking action against the guilty but by letting them know who had informed on them (Kindle locs 14795-14797).

Here we see also a way of not foreclosing any options: both the denouncer and the denounced remain dependent on Franco, yet the onus of action is put on them, not on Franco. A similar logic of inaction applied to his agents of repression during the civil war and beyond:

Franco was aware that some of his subordinates enjoyed the bloodthirsty work of the repression. His Director-General of Prisons, Joaquin del Moral, was notorious for the prurient delight he derived from executions. General Cabanellas protested to Franco about the distasteful dawn excursions organized in Burgos by Del Moral in order to enjoy the day’s shootings. Franco did nothing. He was fully conscious of the extent to which the repression not only terrified the enemy but also inextricably tied those involved in its implementation to his own survival. Their complicity ensured that they would cling to him as the only bulwark against the possible revenge of their victims. (Kindle locs 5169-5174).

Yet I suspect the deeper reason for Franco’s ability to act robustly went beyond Franco’s particular political tactics. What enabled him to be so effective at using divide et impera seems to me to be the fact that his supporting coalition – made up variously of Falangists (Spanish fascists), Carlistas, other monarchists, conservative Catholics, and the military – was inherently contradictory (as was the supporting coalition of the Medici in Padgett and Ansell’s view), yet could only act together through him. For example, Falangists were skeptical of the monarchy, and in theory had a reformist economic programme, a promise of a grand “social revolution” to which other conservative elements of the coalition were implacably opposed. Monarchists differed among themselves about who should be placed on the throne, and differed about when the monarchy should be restored. The army, which was the group best positioned to overthrow Franco (its senior commanders having “elected” him in 1936 as Generalissimo), had its own divisions and in any case was fearful of another civil war. And so on. Yet Franco’s inscrutability – which, interestingly, was not nearly as much in evidence when he was merely a career military man, and could thus afford to have opinions – allowed him to represent all of these disparate interests with enough credibility that those concerned could at least pretend to themselves that Franco was ultimately working for their ultimate aims. (Of course, you’d need a proper network analysis to make the Padgett/Ansell claim rigorously; for one thing, we’d also need to know whether the various components of the Francoist coalition had few linkages with one another, so that they could act together only through him. This I can’t tell on the basis of the evidence in Preston’s book).

Signs of Franco’s excessive commitment to a particular goal or group were sometimes even interpreted by shrewd observers as political mistakes. For example, when in 1945 Franco’s public support of the Falange seemed to  be attracting much international criticism, José María Pemán wrote in his diary: ‘if they had told me that Franco had a lover it would have seemed bad, not to say strange, but this is worse: he has got a conviction.’ But, as Preston notes, “[i]n fact, the normally shrewd Pemán was wrong. Franco may have had an emotional commitment to the Falange but it did not undermine his capacity for ruthless calculation. He had in fact worked out that there was more benefit to be derived from keeping the Falange. Not only was it a massive bulwark of support but international criticism of it also helped him capitalize on mass resentment of foreign ‘interference’.”  (Kindle locs 12440-12446). I am not sure that Franco “worked out” these benefits consciously, but it is interesting to note that Pemán saw the sign of commitment to a cause as a political mistake because it would box Franco in and close off certain courses of action. Franco’s political strength lay precisely in credibly not being for one or another part of his coalition, and this was made possible because he seems to have had no firm underlying convictions beyond, perhaps, his commitment to a picture of himself as savior of Spain. (Was his support for the Falange in 1945 sincere, or the result of a calculated gamble? Is this question even answerable?). Or conversely, we may say that because his self-image as savior of Spain could “contain multitudes” without being threatened (Franco was rarely bothered by inconsistency) that his interests were themselves “multivocal” in the Ansell and Padgett sense.  

We might also look at the eventual decay of the regime through this lens. By the end of the 60s socio-economic changes (including rapid economic development) had eroded the original Francoist coalition, and key “ideological” questions had been finally settled (e.g., the succession was finally settled on Don Juan Carlos - the current King - in 1969; the “falangist” revolution had been definitively shelved; etc.). Franco was thus less and less able to represent a diversity of interests “mutivocally;” he had, in a sense, finally been boxed in by his own success. This made Franco less and less relevant as the lynchpin of the major coalition that controlled the state, and the institutional changes he had intended to perpetuate his regime did not last. (This is an important contrast to the story Padgett and Ansell tell about the Medici).

If anyone had now the ability to represent contradictory interests “multivocally” and engage in robust action, it was Juan Carlos, who seems to have learned a few things from Franco. Apparently when Franco told Juan Carlos that he had finally decided to settle the succession on him, “Juan Carlos replied ‘rest assured, mi general, I have learned much from your galleguismo (Galician craftiness).’ As they both laughed, Franco complimented him, ‘Your Highness does it very well.’” (Kindle locs 16666-16669). Both Franco and many other people could project their ideas onto the king, who turned out, unexpectedly for a lot of people, to be a leading force in the transition to democracy. (Or am I completely off here?)

Ultimately, all this suggests to me the limits of appealing to belief in explaining political action. To attempt to explain Franco by reference to his specific ideas is to miss the possibility that it was their basic inconsistency that made him able to avoid being "boxed in."

Update 2/3/2013: Fixed some typos.