What's with Trump? Part III

Impulsiveness and intellectual laziness, for starters. And what's with his enemies? Dishonesty, entitlement, and -- goodness gracious! -- refusal to accept the election.

The Atlantic, an intelligent but increasingly hard Left magazine, has an interesting if sourpuss article out on Trump. What caught my attention is its dissent from the reigning Leftist line that Trump is a dictator or an authoritarian — not that the article, by Jonathan Rauch, is flattering. It’s anything but. Still, it has some insights the Left usually misses (combined, unfortunately, with the arrogance and blindness it puts out almost hourly).

Even those who expected the worst from his reelection (I among them) expected more rationality. Today, it is clear that what has happened since January 20 is not just a change of administration but a change of regime—a change, that is, in our system of government. But a change to what?

A “change of regime” is putting it more melodramatically than the facts to date support, but it does capture a sense of the sea change we see with Trump.

There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism.

Two cheers for any liberal who understands that what we see from Trump, while hardly welcome from the Left’s and others’ point of view, is not an authoritarian takeover of the United States.

Last year, two professors…resurface[d] a mostly forgotten term whose lineage dates back to Max Weber, the German sociologist best known for his seminal book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Weber wondered how the leaders of states derive legitimacy, the claim to rule rightfully. He thought it boiled down to two choices. One is rational legal bureaucracy (or “bureaucratic proceduralism”), a system in which legitimacy is bestowed by institutions following certain rules and norms….

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

The Left can’t help taking its swipes (Trump is out of the “premodern world,” a gussied up form of the more usual contumacious sneer that non-Leftists are “wahoos from the sticks”). Still, Rauch is onto something: Trump does indeed see governing as something personal in a way we’ve seldom experienced before. That view comes with all the dangers self-involvement usually entails — and more, because the Presidency is rife with the singular dangers of its singular powers.

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

Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived)…

This does indeed capture something important and hazardous about Trump. I’ve noted some of these things before, as has Paul. Trump used his pardon power to reward the Jan 6 rioters without differentiating between those who used force against the police and those who didn’t (and instead, at least arguably, were swept up in the moment). That’s an extremely important distinction, one that Trump at one point recognized but ultimately disregarded. As Rauch implies, albeit with an air of prejudgment, Trump’s decision not to differentiate does bespeak a tilt toward a personal, or perhaps tribal, view of his Office. That is not healthy.

Of course it could be something less revolutionary and more ordinary: Impulsiveness and intellectual laziness. Trump simply lacked the patience, discipline and rigor to separate out the violent from the non-violent protesters. That takes work. It was enough that they all were on his side, so, moving right along………

Two things to note here. First, impulsiveness and laziness are also really bad in a President, although not as dark and sinister as Rauch would paint Trump. Second, we see that Rauch, although intelligent, leaps to assume the worst about his antagonist (something that, if I were a wiseguy, I might attribute to, ummmm, tribalism). Part of Rauch’s conclusion could appear simply because it fits his thesis better, but still, let’s pause for a moment to mourn the loss of all those good-hearted liberals who used to urge us to see poor judgment before we saw malice.

To understand the source of Trump’s hold on power, and its main weakness, one needs to understand what patrimonialism is not. It is not the same as classic authoritarianism. And it is not necessarily antidemocratic.

Patrimonialism’s antithesis is not democracy; it is bureaucracy, or, more precisely, bureaucratic proceduralism. Classic authoritarianism—the sort of system seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—is often heavily bureaucratized. When authoritarians take power, they consolidate their rule by creating structures such as secret police, propaganda agencies, special military units, and politburos.

By contrast, patrimonialism is suspicious of bureaucracies; after all, to exactly whom are they loyal? They might acquire powers of their own, and their rules and processes might prove obstructive. People with expertise, experience, and distinguished résumés are likewise suspect because they bring independent standing and authority.

Or maybe they’re suspect because they have taken over the government little by little, decade after decade for about 90 years and view themselves, with their Harvard and Yale and Stanford degrees, as intellectually and morally superior to those ungrateful, unwashed masses to whom they dole out their endless regulations with little to no fear of accountability.

Nonetheless, as patrimonialism snips the government’s procedural tendons, it weakens and eventually cripples the state….Even if authoritarianism is averted, the damage that patrimonialism does to state capacity is severe. Governments’ best people leave or are driven out. Agencies’ missions are distorted and their practices corrupted. Procedures and norms are abandoned and forgotten. Civil servants, contractors, grantees, corporations, and the public are corrupted by the habit of currying favor.

Rauch is now portraying 39 days of Trump’s administration as if it were George Orwell’s “1984” — hence overcooking his argument to the point of smelling like paranoia. But probably his most glaring error, shared by many on the Left in their loathing of Trump, is blandly to treat bureaucracy as the trustworthy custodian of democracy’s norms.

Really?

I would refer him to today’s story about one of America’s most important, and most trusted, bureaucracies, the NSA.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced Tuesday night that she was dismissing more than 100 employees of the US intelligence community (IC) who participated in “obscene, pornographic, and sexually explicit” chatrooms on a government messaging platform.

Gabbard told Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime” that the spooks — who were exposed by conservative activist Christopher Rufo for having discussed their fetishes and sexual fantasies on the National Security Agency (NSA) Intelink platform — had committed “an egregious violation of trust.”

“When you see what these people were saying,” she told Watters, “they were brazen in using an NSA platform intended for professional use to conduct this — kind of really, really horrific behavior.”

“And they were brazen in doing this, because when was the last time anyone was really held accountable?” she asked. “Certainly not over the last four years, certainly not over the last 10, maybe 20 years, [as] we look at some of the biggest violations of the American people’s trust in the intelligence community.”

Rauch’s credulous view of bureaucracy is of a piece with his view of of Trump’s Jan 6 pardons: He sees what’s wrong with them but walks right past what’s wrong with the pardons issued less than a month earlier by that paragon of institutionalism, Joe Biden. Biden, of course, redefined the phrase “abuse of office” by pardoning his son, his brothers, and (preemptively) a whole bunch of his political allies.

More broadly, while Rauch has some legitimate and worrisome insights into Trump’s style of governance — insights those of us hoping for a successful Trump presidency need to take seriously — he misses the forest for the trees.

We had an election. Trump won. He won despite (and likely in some ways because of) his spotty acquaintance with the whole truth, occasionally raunchy and juvenile personality, and unconventional view of governance — a view with which the electorate was quite well acquainted when it went to the polls. In the end, a troubling amount of what Rauch says, while in places spot on, seems often to be a more thoughtful form of election denial.