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)