Voluntary constraints on power

The big-picture danger is not men such as the Russian dictator. It’s the totalitarian states that produce them.

Vladimir Putin is one man. How has it come to pass that a single man, the corrupt and banal ruler of a decadent and backward country, should be able to convulse the entire world, more or less on his own?

There are analogous situations in private life. A screaming baby may be the least powerful person in a room, but he can dominate the room with his screams. A heckler can momentarily interrupt a performance and command the attention of a thousand people in a theater. Criminals often are weak men, but they can impose their will on others simply by being ready to violate laws and social rules.

All voluntary constraints on power create advantages for those who do not accept such constraints — that is one of fascism’s genuine political insights and the reason fascists and fascist organizations reject constraints on power in principle. This is true both of the sort of fascist who calls himself a fascist and of the sort of fascist who calls himself a socialist (Lenin, Castro, etc.) and of the sort of fascist who spurns ideological language for vague promises of national greatness.

I have observed in the past that either socialism is the unluckiest ideology in the history of politics — inexplicably being taken up by Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Mao, Honecker, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, etc. — or there is something wrong with socialism. Which, of course, there is.

F. A. Hayek dedicated a chapter in The Road to Serfdom to the question of why the world is so full of Putins: “Why the Worst Get on Top.” Considering the question in the context of totalitarianism generally, Hayek identified three factors that cause such systems to throw up monsters. The first is that ruling a society does not require a majority, only the support of the largest politically useful faction. “A numerous and strong group with fairly homogeneous views is not likely to be formed by the best but rather by the worst elements of any society,”

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Second, the energy and the certitude of the united cretins will be enough to overwhelm the “docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own . . . [and] who will thus swell the ranks of the totalitarian party.”

Third, it is easier to get people to agree on a negative program than on a positive agenda, and the easiest kind of negative program to articulate is hatred — of some enemy, real or imagined. “The contrast between the ‘we’ and the ‘they,’ the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action,” Hayek writes. “It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses.” Hayek observes that this explains why the socialists of his time, who were in theory internationalists, became violent nationalists upon achieving power.

The totalitarian environment repels moral men, but, as Hayek notes, it also creates “special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous.”

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The danger, then, is not men such as Vladimir Putin. The danger is totalitarian states per se. Every society has men such as Putin, and healthy liberal societies often find useful work for them to do. In totalitarian societies, such men end up commanding armies — and, in Putin’s case, a vast nuclear arsenal.

It is not as though these tendencies do not exist in liberal societies. American politics often attracts the worst sort of men and women our country can cough up, and they achieve power through the same dynamic Hayek described in the totalitarian states, welding together effective factions of the low-minded but like-minded. We have the testimony of no less a totalitarian than Adolf Hitler that the greatest strength of the totalitarian states is that they force those who fear them to imitate them, a principle that can be seen at work in the distinctly autocratic and centralizing tendency of the Franklin Roosevelt administration or in the desire of the Trump administration to become Beijing’s mirror image. What liberal societies have is not better men — it is independent courts, a free press, the rule of law, checks and balances, democratic accountability, competitive elections, powerful private institutions, and vibrant civic life. There have been some men of remarkably low character elected to the American presidency, but the American system has limited the damage they could do.

A Problem Like Putin