Put democrats in power
How to beat populist elected dictators — 2
The first reaction to populist success is often to ask: How did they win over their voters? What ideas or tactics did they use? How did we allow them to win?
This instinct isn’t wrong, but it is secondary. The most important thing is to have people who believe democracy serving in both elected and unelected institutions, including courts, security forces and broadcasting authorities.
That’s part of what saved democracy in Israel and the United States in 2020 and 2023. In Israel, the defence minister stood up against the Netanyahu’s judicial coup and public demonstrations prevented him being fired. The Supreme Court then preserved its right to strike down unconstitutional legislation.
US Chief of the General Staff Mark Milley made sure troops knew their loyalty was to the Constitution and not to the person of the President — in that case Trump. Five former Republican Secretaries of Defence came out in support of the constitutional democracy.
Democracy is the system we use to give some of us power over us all. It’s a way to choose who gets to make the rules or apply them to us. If the wrong people get in, they’ll take this freedom away from us and, because they’re human after all, help themselves to what they can get.
Liberal democracy isn’t just about choosing who gets to rule: it’s also about setting the rules people have to obey when they exercise power over us. They hold offices with specific powers, and they can be stopped, or punished if they exceed them. They are supposed to disclose information so that we can decide what we think, and, ultimately, vote them out if enough of us don’t like what they’ve done. Governing power is huge, we’ve learned it needs to be constrained by constitutions, law courts, parliamentary opposition, the media and civil society, and an independent private sector as well as elections.
Elected dictators tear down this web of checks and balances.
They do so by abusing another mechanism: patronage. Patronage greases the wheels of power. If all those checks and balances worked to the max, nothing would ever get done. Patronage is how people with power incentivise and control those below them. They hand out rewards for loyalty, effectiveness and determination. It’s one of the forces that holds political parties together (the other is ideology, which can be a countervailing force; I’ll talk about in a later piece), and we tolerate it in limited quantities.
But it doesn’t take a genius to see how patronage can be abused. The minister who appoints incompetent officials. The lackey entrusted with running the “impartial” board. It easily shades into corruption. If competence is less relevant, what’s the problem with people buying their way into positions of power?
Elected dictators go further. They appoint people to subvert checks and balances: to ensure public contracts go to their friends, that independent-minded journalists are fired from public service TV and radio.
That’s why Father Ted exists, by the way, because Dermot Morgan was fired from Irish public radio because is satirical show “Scrap Saturday” was cancelled for skewering Charlie Haughey’s populist government too well
As the rot goes deeper, government-friendly businessmen buy up independent media, as happened to Origo and 888 in Hungary, turned into government mouthpieces. Poland’s Law and Justice government instructed the state oil company to buy local newspapers.
All this happened because people hostile or just indifferent to democracy won political power, and it means the focus for democrats needs to be on making sure that elected — but also unelected — political office is in the hands of convinced democrats.
Mid-20th century Communist coup-plotters would talk about seizing the “power ministries” from their opponents. In a modern democracy under attack from wannabe elected dictators the range of agencies to watch is broader: media authorities, anti-corruption bodies, civil service leadership councils, regional governments, are as important as the chief of police, the judiciary and elected parliamentarians.
The more of those posts that are held by convinced democrats, the harder it will be for a demagogue to transmute one election victory into dictatorial power.