Dem
47
GOP
53
Donald Trump has started his second term acting what appears to be irrationally. He wants to buy Greenland, conquer the Panama canal, run the Kennedy Center, and has dispatched Elon Musk to fire federal workers willy-nilly. He also alternates daily between wanting Ukraine to give the U.S. its mineral wealth and letting Russia seize it. It is hard to discern a pattern here.
Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic notes that what Trump is doing is not classic autocracy, authoritarianism, monarchy, or oligarchy. It is something else—what some scholars call "patrimonialism." This is an ancient form of government that sees the ruler and the state as the same. Some French guy, we forget who, a while back expressed it in three words: "L'État, c'est moi." The scholars called this system patrimonialism because the ruler claimed to be the symbolic father and protector of the country. The idea is what is good for the ruler is thus automatically good for the country.
The opposite of patrimonialism is not democracy, it is bureaucracy—or, in Trump's words, the deep state. Bureaucracies operate with detailed rules and procedures that the bureaucrats are expected to follow. Many dictatorships are very bureaucratic. The ruler controls the parliament (if there is one) and passes detailed laws and procedures governing life in the country and insists that the bureaucrats follow them exactly. Nazi Germany was like that. Hitler got laws passed that he wanted and then insisted that the bureaucrats vigorously enforce them. With Trump, he doesn't give a hoot if Elon Musk ignores all the laws and simply zeroes out entire federal agencies that Congress created. In fact, Trump wants to destroy the civil service precisely so they can't obey the laws. He wants them to obey his (ever-changing) whims, the laws be damned.
Some patrimonial leaders were democratically elected with substantial popular support. Only later do they weaken the bureaucracy so it can't oppose them. This has happened in Hungary and India, among other countries. Nevertheless, the leaders like to claim they are carrying out the people's will.
One of the biggest problems with patrimonialism is that the best people in the bureaucracy get discouraged by the whims of the leader, and the lack of respect for the law, and they quit. This leaves a hollowed out and demoralized bureaucracy that is not able to oppose the leader. Trump is not a true dictator and probably won't become one because he doesn't have a clear vision of anything and doesn't have the attention span to become one. What he understands is that he has "friends" who worship him and "enemies" who don't and there isn't much ideological consistency in what he is doing. For example, why is he being nice to the Democratic mayor of New York City? It is because the mayor, Eric Adams, could be useful to him for a few months. But he is not being nice to any other Democratic mayors.
Patrimonialism has a couple of weak spots, though. In the short run, the boss is invariably corrupt—because he can be. The public understands garden-variety corruption and doesn't like it. If the Democrats can catch Trump doing something that makes him or some crony a lot of money but doesn't have much value for the country, it will hurt his approval. If Trump orders the government to buy $400 million worth of cybertrucks that Elon Musk can't sell to anyone else, Trump could end up with well more than $8 worth of eggs on his face.
In the long run, the problem with a patrimonial regime is that it can't compete with a country that values bureaucracy and has highly qualified people running the show at all levels. For 1,300 years, China was run by bureaucrats, mandarins, who were rigorously selected based on their abilities. The system was formally abolished in 1905, but even now, the Chinese bureaucracy is highly competent and capable of carrying out the leader's policies. Having a bunch of nitwits trying to carry out the leader's ever-changing whims is going to be a losing proposition in the long run. (V)