Even Dictators Can’t Lead Alone
The Ruthless Art Of Political Survival
I worked in political-risk consulting for several years, I studied international relations in college, and I have a graduate degree in history. But I could have saved myself a lot of trouble – and been way ahead of everyone else from the get-go – if I’d been able to read The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics, by two savvy political scientists, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. (I would have needed a time machine, as I finished grad school years before the authors tapped out this masterpiece… but anyway.)
The premise of The Dictator’s Handbook is that all politics – and, more broadly, all organizations, from school boards to Fortune 500 companies to the local dry cleaner – is a function of individual motivations and desires and ambitions. Institutions don’t act with single-minded objectives or goals… They’re a bubbling cauldron of individual agendas that may or may not overlap with that of the institution. It’s a simple idea… but far more nuanced in practice than you might think. De Mesquita and Smith pack the book with vivid stories and examples. And – especially today – you can see them yourself in Technicolor. This is an applied poli-sci degree in a nutshell… and well worth your time.
In the excerpt below, de Mesquita and Smith explain how France’s Louis XIV consolidated power in the 17th century… outline their fascinating – and startlingly applicable – model of political power (the “nominal selectorate,” the “real selectorate,” and the “winning coalition”)… chronicle why Che Guevara was a dead man well before he was, well, dead… lay out their “five basic rules leaders can use to succeed in any system”… and profile the politics of software giant Hewlett-Packard and its former CEO (and one-time Republican presidential candidate) Carly Fiorina.
I hope you enjoy this extract from The Dictator’s Handbook, which includes much of Chapter 1, “The Rules Of Politics,” and a portion of Chapter 3, “Staying In Power.” – Kim Iskyan, CEO and Publisher
From Chapter 1: The Rules of Politics
The Rules Of Power
The logic of politics is not complex. In fact, it is surprisingly easy to grasp most of what goes on in the political world as long as we are ready to adjust our thinking ever so modestly. To understand politics properly, we must modify one assumption in particular: we must stop thinking that leaders can lead unilaterally.
No leader is monolithic. If we are to make any sense of how power works, we must stop thinking that North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un can do whatever he wants. We must stop believing that Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Genghis Khan or anyone else is in sole control of their nation. We must give up the notion that Enron’s Kenneth Lay or British Petroleum’s Tony Hayward knew about everything that was going on in their companies or that they could have made all the big decisions. All of these notions are flat-out wrong because no emperor, no king, no sheik, no tyrant, no chief executive officer, no family head, no leader whatsoever can govern alone.
Consider France’s Louis XIV (1638-1715). Known as the Sun King, Louis reigned as monarch for over 70 years, presiding over the expansion of France and the creation of the modern political state. Under Louis (shown below), France became the dominant power in continental Europe and a major competitor in the colonization of the Americas. He and his inner circle invented a code of law that helped shape the Napoleonic code and that forms the basis of French law to this day. He modernized the military, forming a professional standing army that became a role model for the rest of Europe and, indeed, the world. He was certainly one of the pre-eminent rulers of his or any time. But he didn’t do it alone.
The word monarchy may mean “rule by one,” but such rule does not, has not, and cannot exist. Louis is famously (and probably falsely) thought to have proclaimed, “L’état, c’est moi” (The state, it is me). This declaration is often used to describe political life for supposedly absolute monarchs like Louis, likewise for tyrannical dictators. The declaration of absolutism, however, is never true. No leader, no matter how august or how revered, no matter how cruel or vindictive, ever stands alone. Indeed, Louis XIV, ostensibly an absolute monarch, is a wonderful example of just how false this idea of monolithic leadership is.
After the death of his father, Louis XIII (1601-1643), Louis rose to the throne when he was four years old. During the early years actual power resided in the hands of a regent – his mother. Her inner circle helped themselves to France’s wealth, stripping the cupboard bare. By the time Louis assumed actual control over the government in 1661, at the age of 23, the state over which he reigned was nearly bankrupt.
While most of us think of a state’s bankruptcy as a financial crisis, looking through the prism of political survival makes evident that it really amounts to a political crisis. When debt exceeds the ability to pay, the problem for a leader is not so much that good public works must be cut back but rather that the incumbent doesn’t have the resources necessary to purchase political loyalty from key backers. Bad economic times in a democracy mean too little money to fund pork-barrel projects that buy political popularity. For kleptocrats, they mean passing up vast sums of money and maybe even watching their secret bank accounts dwindle, along with the loyalty of their underpaid henchmen.
The prospect of bankruptcy put Louis’s hold on power at risk because the old-guard aristocrats, including the generals and officers of the army, saw their sources of money and privilege drying up. Circumstances were ripe for these politically crucial but fickle friends to seek someone better able to ensure their wealth and prestige. Faced with such a danger, Louis needed to make changes or else risk losing his monarchy.
Louis’s specific circumstances called for altering the group of people who had the possibility of becoming members of his inner circle – that is, the group whose support guaranteed his continued dignity as king. He moved quickly to expand the opportunities (and for a few, the actual power) of new aristocrats, called the noblesse de robe. Together with his chancellor, Michel Le Tellier, he acted to create a professional, relatively meretricious army. In a radical departure from the practice observed by just about all of his neighboring monarchs, Louis opened the doors to officer ranks – even at the highest levels – to make room for many more than the traditional old-guard military aristocrats, the noblesse d’épée. In so doing, Louis was converting his army into a more accessible, politically and militarily competitive organization.
Meanwhile, Louis had to do something about the old aristocracy. He was deeply aware of their earlier disloyalty as instigators and backers of the anti-monarchy Fronde (a mix of revolution and civil war) at the time of his regency. To neutralize the old aristocracy’s potential threat, he attached them to his court – literally, compelling them to be physically present in Versailles much of the time. This meant that their prospects of income from the crown depended on how well favored they were by the king. And that, of course, depended on how well they served him.
By elevating so many newcomers, Louis created a new class of people who were beholden to him. In the process, he centralized his own authority more fully and enhanced his ability to enforce his views at the cost of many of the court’s old aristocrats. Thus he erected a system of “absolute” control whose success depended on the loyalty of the military and the new aristocrats, and on tying the hands of the old aristocrats so that his welfare translated directly into their welfare.
