Patrimonialism

Description

Pat Kane:

"What is being established in Trump 2.0, according to the academics Stephen E Hanson and Jeffrey S Kopstein, is often misrecognised as authoritarianism or fascism.

Instead, Hanson and Kopstein suggest we should see it as “patrimonialism”.

The term was first coined by the great social theorist Max Weber. Patrimonialist leaders “pose as ‘fathers’ of their nations, running the state as a sort of ‘family business’, and doling out state assets and protection to loyalists”, says Hanson in a recent interview.

“As Weber pointed out a century ago, this mode of state-building is one of the oldest political forms in human history”, Hanson continues. “But most analysts never thought patrimonialism would make such a powerful comeback in the contemporary era.”

What patrimonialists hate most of all, Hanson implies, are the values of an independent, reliable, universal civil service. A good bureaucracy truly gets in the way of The Grift.

“Whether we realise it or not, we all depend on bureaucracies staffed by qualified experts to live what we now consider to be ‘normal’ lives”, Hanson explains. “Prior to the invention of the modern state, rulers facing famines, wars and natural disasters frequently consulted oracles and soothsayers and relied on the advice of unqualified cronies, leading to terrible, unnecessary human suffering.

“If we destroy the modern state bureaucracy in the United States and the rest of the world, replacing it with personalistic rule, we can expect similar results.”

It is noticeable that Donald Trump’s patrimonialism comes along with a denial of climate crisis, caused by fossil fuel use. The very effects of this – extreme weather, increasing migration, crop failure, viral proliferation – are exactly why you might want a functional bureaucracy, according to Hanson’s vision. Bureaucracy is the “gyroscope of state”, as scholar Bernardo Zacka put it. Going by recent months in the American republic, it’s about to topple from its stand.

However, it doesn’t seem – at least so far – that patrimonialism underlies the anti-bureaucratic chainsaws in the Starmer project. What drives his ministers seems to be something very tangible – the many millions of physical letters and human-conducted calls that are done each week, between civil servants and citizens.

Is the assumption that much of this administration could be done by AIs?"

(https://patkane.substack.com/p/pk-in-the-national-good-bureaucracy)

Characteristics

Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein:

"To understand Trump’s political order, then, we need to familiarize ourselves with the standard operating procedures of patrimonialism. While this regime type may be novel for the United States, it is quite common in human history. In the 21st century, patrimonial regimes have been consolidated in countries as diverse as Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Narendra Modi’s India, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. Drawing lessons from regimes of this type, we can help get our bearings in what, for most Americans, is an unfamiliar new political environment.

First, in patrimonial regimes there is simply no way to distinguish between the parts of the leader’s speeches that matter politically from empty rhetoric not meant to be taken seriously. The cumulative effect of the daily storm of Trump’s announcements, social media posts, news conferences, and executive orders can be exhausting, and it’s tempting to listen to Ezra Klein when he reassures us about Trump’s statements: “Don’t Believe Him.”

But while Trump’s powers may (or may not) ultimately be limited by the courts, his stated intentions will not magically cease to matter. There are certain rules of the game in patrimonial politics. Hanging on every word of the leader is one of them. Unfortunately, then, we need to follow Trump’s communications in their entirety in order to understand where he is taking the country.

In a leader-centered political order, whatever the boss says, no matter how outlandish, sets the agenda for every underling. In fact, the willingness of subordinates to parrot and defend even the most extreme parts of his stated agenda is one of the most important signs of regime loyalty, used by the leader to decide on promotions, demotions, and in cases of open criticism, retribution. Those opposed to President Trump cannot decide, say, to ignore his social media posts about making Canada the 51st state, nor can they claim that his tariff threats are just a “bargaining chip” while focusing on his efforts to subordinate the federal bureaucracy to his will. All of these stated priorities matter, precisely because the essence of patrimonialism is the leader’s arbitrary right to treat the state as his personal property. That doesn’t mean that opponents of Trump’s regime shouldn’t pick their fights carefully, of course. But it is impossible to say in advance which of the leader’s many words merely reflect ephemeral musings, and which reveal his reasoned intentions.

Second, bitter fights among rival loyalists and their “clans” are a normal part of patrimonialism. It is a mistake to think that when such struggles are aired in public, this is necessarily a sign of regime weakness. Nor is it an indication that one faction is somehow becoming the true “power behind the throne.” In fact, patrimonial leaders benefit from internal court rivalries, as long as all sides remember who the ultimate boss is. Putin’s crony Yevgeny Prigozhin could post videos calling out the incompetence of the Russian Ministry of Defense and General Staff for months—until he organized an open mutiny against the leadership in June 2023, after which his helicopter mysteriously crashed.

Similarly, Steve Bannon can tell a journalist that he hates Elon Musk and his “technofeudalist” associates at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), as long as he concludes his interview with fulsome praise for the leader:

President Trump balances everything. He’s a common-sense conservative and a common-sense populist nationalist. In our movement, the core base of MAGA is hard-welded to Donald Trump because they admire his moral clarity. I put him at the level of President Washington and President Lincoln in this regard. This is the age of Trump.

In patrimonial regimes, that’s how disagreement is done: the children fight while deferring to the wisdom of the “good father.”

Third, the idea that various officials in a patrimonial state administration might have conflicts of interest is little more than a quaint anachronism. The phrase “conflict of interest” itself assumes that state officials are supposed to uphold the public good rather than pursue their personal self-interest. Under patrimonial rule, however, the interests of the “people” are equated with the personal interests of the ruler and his extended household, so in principle no conflict can ever arise between the two.

...

Fourth, Trump’s otherwise inexplicable threats to purchase Greenland, retake the Panama Canal, own Gaza, and even annex Canada begin to make sense in the context of the patrimonial regime he is creating. Borders for patrimonial states tend to be historical rather than legal, based on notions of patrimony rather than law. Trump’s evident acceptance of Putin’s vision of Ukraine as part of the “Russian world” should not be surprising, as Putin’s territorial claims are entirely consistent with Trump’s own view of how relations between states should work: the bosses of great powers, like the “five families” in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, should negotiate among themselves to divvy up the territories and economic resources of weaker states."

(https://www.persuasion.community/p/sins-of-the-father)

Discussion

Francis Fukuyama on the Repatrimonialization of Our World

Francis Fukuyama:

"Max Weber used the term “patrimonial” to describe virtually every pre-modern regime once mankind graduated from decentralized tribalism. That is, the government was considered to be an extension of the ruler’s family and household. Such systems evolved out of conquest, in which the chief of a victorious band of raiders distributed land, resources, and women to his fellow warriors, who were then free to hand down those properties to their descendants.

In such a system, there was no distinction between public and private. Everything in theory belonged to the ruler, who could give away a province with all of its inhabitants to a son or daughter as a wedding present. The separation of the ruler’s property from that of the state was first laid out in the 17th and 18th centuries by theorists like Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin, who place sovereignty in a broader commonwealth and not in the person of the ruler. This made possible for the first time a phenomenon like corruption, in which an official appropriated public resources for private benefit.

One of the big themes of my two Political Order volumes was the great difficulty of creating an impersonal modern state, in which your status depended on citizenship and not on your personal relationship with the ruler. A modern economy is only possible under these circumstances as well, as the state undertakes to protect property rights and adjudicates transactions without regard to the identity of the rights-holder.

The problem with state modernity is that it is unstable. Human beings are by nature social creatures, but their sociability takes the form in the first instance of favoritism to friends and family. This leads to the phenomenon of “repatrimonialization,” a long word signifying the retreat of a modern impersonal state back into patrimonialism. This is a phenomenon that has plagued many earlier societies, like Tang Dynasty China, or the 17th century Ottoman Empire, or France under the Old Regime. In each case, an emergent modern state was captured by powerful elites close to the ruler. In France, for example, the king sold rent-seeking privileges like tax collection to the highest bidder.

I don’t need to explain that the United States is undergoing repatrimonialization as we speak. What is remarkable about the Trump administration is the degree to which it is open about its own corruption. The administration has fired inspectors general whose job it is to monitor and stop corruption; it has refused to enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; and it has made decisions favorable to the business interests of colleague-in-crime Elon Musk. Tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos came to Trump’s inauguration bearing hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts, in hopes that the king would shine favor on them. As Trump imposes tariffs on much of the world, there will be a further flow of supplicants asking for exemptions, which will be facilitated by personal side-payments.

This kind of corruption is characteristic of modern day authoritarianism. For the Bolsheviks, Nazis, or Maoists, their primary objective was not personal enrichment. By contrast, the enemies of liberal democracy today do not for the most part make an ideological case against it, as Marxists once did. Rather, they see legal institutions as obstacles to personal enrichment and attack them out of self-interest. The rulers of Venezuela or Colombia’s FARC may have started out as socialists or Marxists, but they have degenerated into criminal gangs. North Korea is heavily into a host of criminal activities from weapons smuggling and drug running to extortion."

(https://www.persuasion.community/p/making-the-world-safe-for-criminals)