"Both Sane and Insane": Chaos as an Autocratic Governance Strategy
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Today’s essay is part of a series that is designed to deepen our understanding of how autocrats think and why they do what they do. The series also answers questions I am frequently asked about dictators: where they get their ideas from, what motivates their behavior, and how they can be influenced and opposed.
The divergent outcomes of authoritarianism as it has evolved over a century, with electoral autocracies now joining one-party states, make the coherence of the collective portrait of the autocratic leader that emerges from historical accounts and eye-witnesses more striking. While each situation is unique, there are similarities in the ways such personalities think about power, how they view themselves and the world, and how they treat others.
Consider this 1931 assessment of Adolf Hitler by the Italian Fascist writer and journalist Curzio Malaparte, who warned that if Hitler got into office, he would seek to “corrupt, humble, and enslave the German people,” given the way he was treating his faithful collaborators:
He channels his brutality into humbling their pride, crushing their freedom of conscience, diminishing their individual merits and transforming his supporters into flunkeys stripped of all dignity. Like all dictators, Hitler loves only those whom he can despise.
Not only did this turn out to be tragically accurate for Hitler, but it foretold the behavior and attitudes adopted by every other dictator, up through those currently in office.
Being aware of these recurrences and commonalities helps us predict what autocrats might do, including when they are likely to deliver “strongman surprises,” as I call them: invented emergencies that justify crackdowns, sudden changes and reversals of state policy, purges of officials, threats of military actions, etc. Knowing their weak points and what they fear also helps us to resist them effectively.
Authoritarian leaders have an entirely proprietary view of governance
“In his mind, there is only him. He is everything. Everything is his. Everything is about him. Nothing else, no one else, matters. In his own mind, he is the law. Everyone must follow him. He is the only one who gets to say what is right and what is wrong. And what is right or wrong turns on how, at any given instant of time, it makes him feel, and upon how he thinks it affects him.”
This summary by George Conway of President Donald Trump’s way of seeing himself and the world could apply to most dictators in history.
Autocrats don’t recognize boundaries between public and private, and they don’t see democratic ideas of conflicts of interest or accountability as legitimate or applicable to them. Only fools are in office to serve the people: rather, the party and government and society are supposed to serve the leader.
Every sector of government and society has their role to play in increasing the leader’s wealth, making him richer, and puffing up his personality cult so that he feels invincible and untouchable by the law. The judiciary exists to solve their personal and presidential legal problems and enable their vendettas against people who challenge them; state security forces must harass their enemies and stop public dissent; media elites must stop negative coverage and spread government talking points; religious elites must proclaim him as fulfilling divine will, and so forth.
This proprietary mentality feeds corruption because it translates into a belief that as head of state, it is their right to possess and exploit anything in the nation, from female bodies to natural resources to economic assets to information—the latter being the most valuable currency, as the former intelligence official Vladimir Putin well knows.
The lack of boundaries also means that their personal obsessions and grievances can shape domestic and foreign policy. State resources are reallocated for vanity wars, ethnic cleansing and population engineering schemes, and grandiose public works projects that attest to their manic need to leave their mark on the nation.
The strongman has no problem building palaces and ballrooms in his honor while impoverishing the population, as Mobutu did in Zaire and Trump is starting to do now. When public welfare is removed as a goal, the office-holder can focus on what really matters to him: consolidating power, making money, and humiliating and punishing his enemies.
Chaos and Unpredictability as a Feature of Autocracy, not a Bug
Autocrats thrive on chaos and disruption, even if they claim they are bringing stability to the nation. They specialize in doing unexpected things, some of which were previously unthinkable, and in shaking up the system in the interest of pushing through their agendas and consolidating their personal power.
Claims of the strongman’s efficiency are meant to cover up the upheaval generated by his impulsive nature and his constant reshufflings of government to prevent anyone else from gaining too much power. Hitler resembled many later leaders in being an indecisive and insecure ruler behind his all-powerful Führer facade, his opinions sometimes reflecting the last person he had spoken to, while Mussolini would keep his spin doctors busy by saying one thing in the morning and its opposite that afternoon.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s unpredictable decision-making, which is worsened by him surrounding himself with family members and flatterers, is typical, as is his insistence on the wisdom of his unorthodox economic policies. Muammar Gaddafi took chaos to an extreme, repealing entire legal frameworks from one day to the next. Being unpredictable and throwing people off guard energized him, as it did Idi Amin and others who “have ideas of grandeur, think that they have the answer to complicated problems and in a sense lose touch with reality,” in the words of Dr. David Barkham, Amin’s personal physician.
Amin may seem distant from Trump, and there are significant differences. He came to power via military coup, and in his seven years as a dictator had hundreds of thousands of people killed, earning the title “The Butcher of Uganda.” Yet Nigerian Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka, Ugandan communications professor Geoffrey Ssenoga, and Ugandan journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo cite megalomania, incoherent declarations, love of ritual humiliation, sadistic humor, and economic mismanagement caused by impulsive decision-making as among the similarities. In 1972, Amin suddenly expelled the South Asian population, which was the backbone of business in Uganda, leading to a recession.
All of this is why the journalist Riccardo Orizio, who interviewed Amin, concluded that he was crazy like a fox, or, as he wrote, both “sane and insane at the same time” –a description that may seem all too familiar.
“The genius of Trump is that he understands what adept guerrilla leaders [like Amin] figured out ages ago – do that which the opponent thinks is impossible or so unthinkable, they have not planned how to defend it,” wrote Onyango-Obbo in 2017. That is why being aware of this time-tested “strongman surprise” strategy is so important, as is knowledge of how autocrats think about governance and power.
“When public welfare is removed as a goal, the office-holder can focus on what really matters to him: consolidating power, making money, and humiliating and punishing his enemies.” This is Trump’s mind in a nutshell.
So we unleashed an insane felon and pedophile with his violent criminal private army while they control all levers of power in government. But what a night we had!