Category: comparative politics

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The Iron Law of Oligarchy, revisited.

Of all the lessons learned from the Blue Wave Blowout in the US, an essential one has been largely missed: a political party should not subordinate its fortunes to the thrall of one person, i.e., “the duty of the party is to itself.” This is a core axiom of organisational theory.

The original take on this is from the sociologist Robert Michels, Political Parties (1911), in which he coined the phrase “iron law of oligarchy” to describe the organisational features of successful political parties in democracies. Mutatis mutandis, I have conceptually repurposed here.

The irony is that “vanguardist” parties organised by Lenin-inspired Marxists, Maoists and other “hard” Leftists are the ones who fully embraced Michel’s principles. They understood that in order to reproduce as a political organisation, the Party had to supersede the individual ambitions of the people within it, regardless of the ideological purity that they professed. That is why vanguard parties are in part identified by their regular use of purges and other casting-off or marginalizing measures to curb the enthusiasm for individual independence within the ranks.

The Chinese Communist Party under President Xi Jinping is a good example of this, although the irony is that he is violating the iron law of oligarchy and vanguardist principles by attempting to perpetrate his control over the party rather than the other way around. In other words, he is more like Trump or Kim Jung-un because he desires to turn a complex organization like the CCP into a personalist dictatorship with dynastic pretensions. That violates the iron law of oligarchy but the reason Xi and Kim are able to do so with some success is that they are at the top of authoritarian regimes without the system of institutional checks and balances, electoral openness and representation of interests associated with democracies.

That is where Trump’s admiration for dictators failed him. He failed to realise that what works for them cannot work for him, at least in equal measure, because of the institutional apparatus in which he is inserted. He may rail against the “Deep State” and to an extent he may be correct in that it is the ongoing historical institutions known as free and open elections and their accoutrements that, despite MAGA /GOP efforts to gerrymander and engage in voter suppression and intimidation, proved to be their and his undoing. Perhaps they should have read their copies of Michels’ famous tract more closely because the worse thing that they did, contrary to the wisdom embedded in the iron law of oligarchy (which in spite of its name is not a defense of authoritarianism), was and is to not only ride Trump’s coattails during his first term, but then morph into a cult that transcended politics and become a cultural flash point in his second term.

Interestingly, the organisations that have most assiduously followed Michels’ dictums are labour unions and business associations. There are many reasons for this and a dedicated literature that explains them in detail, so I shall not attempt to do so here. What is relevant here is that in the democratic political realm, many parties such as Labour and National have attempted to adopt types of vanguardist approaches to internal party organization, whereas other like the Greens have tried, with very mixed success, to adopt anti-vanguardist principles when it comes to leadership selection and decision-making. As for others such as Winston First and ACT, the personalist nature of leadership is both their immediate strength and eventual Achilles Heel.

The case against subordinating party fortunes to the fortunes of one person applies to all complex organisations, but in politics it is especially true. Even Obama, Kennedy, Roosevelt or Reagan understood that Party came before person. If we add in the corruption, racism, bigotry, cruelty, vanity and assorted other pathologies contained in the persona known as Trump, then the makings of the 2026 Blue Wave disaster began long before this week. It was only a matter of time before he took the GOP down with him.

Two early signs of this was, first, his purge of “moderate” Republicans from Congress during his first term and during his stint out of office. He used forced resignations and primary election targeting to remove from office all those in the GOP he considered disloyal or not supplicant enough. The second indicator was the drop in Fox News viewership in his second term, which in the last fiscal year fell 27 percent compared to the previous year, which itself was well below the historical average for that network. Trump claims that viewership fell because they started criticising him, but the reality is that his claim is the mirror version of the real reason: it was because of their blanket platforming of his lies and stupidity in the face of deteriorating economic and social conditions caused by his actions that even conservative people stopped watching Fox News.

Now even the freak show talking heads on the network are barking at each other about who is to blame. The larger point is that it is clear that Fox News was transmitting from a different reality–the MAGA bubble, as it were–that ran counter to the lived experiences of his most ardent supporters. And because everything was about him, his administration and GOP supination to MAGA excess on a variety of fronts, both viewers and constituents eventually voted with their eyes and feet. Blue Wave Tuesday was the result.

As an aside it should be mentioned that one of the risks of prioritising personalist loyalty over all other traits is that the effect obeys what I will call Pablo’s Law of Personnel Appointments: “The degree of loyalty is inversely proportional to the level of competence of the individual involved.” With a retinue of grossly incompetent yes-people, grifters, opportunists and charlatans surrounding him (including in the media), Trump’s violation of Michels’ axiom and Pablo’s Law have become fatally egregious for the GOP.

Now the knives are coming out within the GOP. The sharks sense blood in the water. The rats are looking to jump ship. The fleas are leaving the dog. The roaches are running for cover. Think of scum like JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, who went all-in with Trump and Trumpist cruelty in the midterm campaigns. Or Ken Paxton and Greg Abbot in Texas, two Trump toadies now looking for honest jobs that they are singularly unsuited to hold. Or closet Queen Mike Johnson, yesterday the Speaker of the House, tomorrow just another bum in seat on the GOP side of the aisle and soon likely to be out of politics altogether. Or, speaking of closet Queens, Lindsey Graham, who even in death is now being brutally outed as the hypocrite that he was in service of his Trump master and whose sister became a living symbol of political nepotism at its finest (and Pablo’s Law). Then there is the low-hanging impeachment fruit waiting to be picked: Hegseth, JFK Jr., Sean Duffy and others. It is only a matter of time before the floodgates open and the moment of serious reckoning begins.

In the end, for all of the talk about the Iran War, gas prices, candidate quality and reverse coattail effects, along with the changing voter demographic (younger, browner, more secular and cosmopolitan than 20 years ago) and the old saying about “its the economy, stupid,” the truth of the Michels dictum remains above all other lessons learned.

From that comes a pretty straightforward prescription for political success in democracies: parties need to first read the electoral demographic terrain, then factor in as a priority economic conditions translated as wallet concerns in that demographic, and apply iron law of oligarchy principles to their campaigns and policy objectives given the ideological bases that they adhere to and the institutional frameworks in which they operate.

For the MAGA/GOP during his second term so far, Trump’s overwhelming presence ensures that no such prescriptions are considered. Perhaps that will now change.

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End of a Political Septic Fever.

In the interest of transparency, here is another quick take from my other social media accounts.

I do not know about the rest of you, but I feel as if a septic fever is about to break in the US (and perhaps in NZ, although the latter is not yet as severe). The boil gets lanced today, the MAGA purulence oozes away over the next couple of years, the body politic begins to gradually clear its system of residual pustulent agents, and like a deeply embedded rusty nail, the largest source of the infectious rot known as MAGA is removed in 2028.

This is more than a Blue Wave moment. It is the beginning of a Blue Biospleen cleansing (https://hms.harvard.edu/news/blood-cleanser-sepsis) of the US body politic. One can only hope that the same happens in Aotearoa, beginning with a strong dose of anti-rightwing election virals on November 7.

Let’s get the treatment going!

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When “secular communions” become contested.

I may have said this on previous occasions, but the Chilean sociologist Eugenio Tironi remarked about the foundational election after Pinochet was voted out of the presidency by referendum in 1989 that democratic elections were a type of “secular communion” between the people and political leaders of a nation. Elections are both a ritual and an agent of change or reaffirmation as well as an indicator of public satisfaction with current political policy and socioeconomic affairs. In 1989 Chileans voted to say enough of the military dictatorship and welcome to a democratic government led by a Christian Democrat, Patricio Alwyn.

If Tironi’s remark is true, then I have been lucky to have received communion twice in recent weeks. Last Friday I received notification that my ballot was accepted by the Palm Beach County Board of Elections for the November 3 US midterms. Today my wife and I went down to our son’s soccer club, which doubles as a polling station, and voted in NZ’s general election. In both cases I voted for progress, enlightenment and fairness over the forces of darkness, division and evil.

In Europe, Hungary and Serbia have undergone electoral shifts to the Left after years of rightwing, increasingly authoritarian rule. Brazil re-elected left-leaning Lula in the face of overt interference by Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk in favour of the neo-imperialist son of a seditionist former president with ties to organised crime. In NZ the race is tight between a Labour/Green-led coalition and the incumbent MAGA mini-me’s. Tomorrow Israel votes on whether Netanyahu and his genocidal cohort should stay or go. And then a week from today the US decides whether the MAGA experiment is working or not in making “America Great Again.”

I don’t know about you, but I sense that change is in the air.

Because of that, for the first time in a while I feel pleased about participating in these secular communion rituals. I sure do hope that they make a positive difference this time around.

Casting my NZ vote today also gave me pause to reflect more broadly.

Generally speaking, there are two types of democratic elections: 1) the tension-release model; and 2) the contention model. In stable democracies and historically in the West, the tension-release model predominated: campaigns built up voter enthusiasm, elections were held, results were announced, people accepted them and returned to their routines. Institutional continuity prevailed and political stability ensued.

In contrast, many recent democratic elections have been of the contested sort: campaigns are divisive and polarising, elections are viewed with suspicion and bitterly disputed, results are not accepted in defeat. Institutional legitimacy and continuity are challenged and political stability is threatened.

This leans closer to civil war than stable governance, something that should be of concern to all of us. Ironically, both of these models derive from historical analyses of social revolutions (a scholar by the name of Charles Tilly in particular), so draw your own conclusions about what the move from one to the other implies.

Remember that the hallmark of democratic elections is that all contenders agree to play by the same set of rules and losers accept defeat in exchange for getting to “play” again at specified, institutionally guaranteed intervals. Once that basic premise is disputed, then the very procedures of democracy (as supposedly neutral arbiters of electoral competition) are undermined. Once those are undermined, then, as I mentioned in the previous post, the threshold of mass contingent consent may be crossed, with the latter withdrawn and the political future made more uncertain than what is already embedded in any electoral contest.

At that point Tilly’s original analyses comes into play.

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The threshold of consent.

Long-time readers will recognise that consent (specifically, mass contingent consent) is something that I have written about regularly, here at KP as well in my academic life. In light of what is happening in Europe and elsewhere with regards to popular unrest in democracies, the concept is worth reviewing. There is a phrase in comparative politics and political theory known as the “threshold of consent.” That is the point at which people have had enough, reached the limits of their toleration and decide to push back one way or the other at the government and, in the case of revolutions, the State itself (remembering that revolutions involve but are not reducible to revolts, uprisings, riots etc.). What is happening in many contemporary democracies may in fact be that moment, the moment where mass contingent consent is withdrawn and people cast their gaze over the “valley of transition” between the extant order and whatever comes next. Elections are supposed to channel such discontent, as are policy reforms, well before the valley of transition is even a distant consideration, but as France and other countries (including Italy, India and Argentina) have recently demonstrated, that may not be enough to stave off mass insurrectionist urges. When the valley appears to be transitable and something better appears to lie on the other side, the moment of substantive social change has arrived.


The threshold of consent varies from society to society. In some societies material things like standards of living matter most. In others respect for cultural traditions or religious beliefs are of primary importance. In others freedoms of association, speech, thought and representation are treasured above all. In many places the threshold of mass contingent consent (contingent in that it is not given once, forever, but is dependent on expectations being met and regularly reaffirmed or renegotiated) is like a dew point in that it is a combination of expectations from those governing on the part of those being governed at any given moment in time. What people will tolerate and consent to in the US or NZ is different than what people will consent to in Bangladesh or Albania (I will refrain from mentioning whether this applies in Cuba or Singapore, which if to be treated properly because of the complexities involved needs a dedicated essay of its own). What people consented to five decades ago may well be different than now. When mass contingent consent is withdrawn, it is from country-specific political, economic and social configurations even if the sources of discontent (e.g., material deprivation, lack of opportunity, systemic exclusion) are more widely propagated around the world.

Add to that the fact that for the threshold of consent to be reached an alternative has to be realistically feasible. Withdrawal of mass consent does not necessarily entail the fall of a regime. People may just hunker down, grin and bear it, and go about their daily routines as best they can without making waves or calling negative attention to themselves from authorities. They do not need the stress created by political involvement or social activism, so they retreat into what I have termed elsewhere “survivalist atomisation:” they keep to themselves and focus on their own personal circumstances rather than those of the society at large. In my youth Argentines had a saying for living under the various dictatorships that I experienced: “De la casa al trabajo y del trabajo al hogar” (“from house to work and work to home’). This “heads down” behaviour is what dictatorships cultivate via repression, threatened or actual (because just the threat of official State violence against people for dissent is a very effective weapon of mass control). Since no peaceful or legitimate institutional channels exist for public feedback and redress under most dictatorships, the only alternative is collective violence–organized if it is to be successful in fostering real social change, but spontaneous and disorganised by default.

People throw rocks, burn cars, break storefront windows and loot. They vent their rage, and then go home if they have not been hurt or detained. They may come back and repeat their rage-venting for a period of time, but without leadership, organization and concrete objectives they are no more than an angry mob that will, even if slowly, be forced to heel by the organised violence meted out by the State. Revolutionaries spend much time trying to turn mob spontaneity into organised collective violence with the goal of social or regime change, even going so far as to advocate so-called “leaderless resistance” tactics so as to force authorities to over-extend the repressive apparatus in pursuit of the hydra heads behind the insurgent masses. Depending on what the threshold of mass consent is in a given context (including a tolerance for collective pain) , they may or may not succeed. But modern history is not in their favour, especially in the developed liberal democratic world. Simply put, social revolutionaries do not overthrow democracies. Only authoritarian coup plotters do, and they most often do so from within the State rather than from without it (even in the case of so-called “constitutional coups”).

Liberal democracies cannot resort to repression as a normal part of governance–it must be selective and used as the exception against “outlaws” in a usually peaceful society ruled by law. As Gramsci noted, repression is the iron fist within the velvet glove. The glove is ideological and usually suffices in order to maintain consent. But when ideological consensus frays and State authorities are forced or choose to remove the glove, then what is left is the moment of force. Trouble is, using repression as the basis for rule is a short term solution at best. The State cannot coerce the same number of the people in the same measure indefinitely. It has to replace repression with something else and try to re-establish the basis for mass contingent consent, because at some point the ongoing resort to repression may well make the valley of transition begin to appear transitable by those on the sharp end of the stick, water cannon, tear gas or gunfire. The necessity is to reestablish the bases of mass consent, not confirm the fact of its withdrawal.

All of which is to say that places like France need to move beyond the moment of force and onto the type of reform-mongering that addresses the root causes of popular unrest. Prime Minister Macron did that several years ago in the face of soaring petrol prices that occasioned trucker and commuter strikes, but in doing so via tax breaks and subsidies he only increased French sovereign debt, which has now come due and which contributed the politics of austerity that protestors are currently demonstrating against. As his example shows, all too often, by the time leaders undertake reforms, it is too little, too late and temporary at best. Effective reform has to be anticipatory and proactive, not reflexive and reactive. In European democracies today, that does not appear to be the case.

Elsewhere, things could get worse. If Trump tries to overturn the midterm electoral results, the US may well reach the triggering moment, even if only in some states or in a federal government versus state rights type of conflict.

Whatever happens, it is clear that the bases of the mass contingent consent that was given to liberal democracies in the post WW2 era has now crumbled under the weight of political sclerosis, government non-responsiveness and official corruption accelerated by increasing oligarchical control and manipulation of the State, economic deprivation for many and enrichment for a few, increased social alienation, stratification, material deprivation and intra-group enmity, and a breakdown of the liberal rules based International order (such as it existed, at least on paper). It is a turn to a feral politics, of might makes right, of “to the rich go the spoils” social order where mass contingent consent is no longer seen as a core requirement of democratic (capitalist) stability. In fact, even democracy as a political construct and form of rule is now being openly questioned by “techbro” oligarchs and alienated masses alike. For them, the withdrawal of consent to liberal democracy has already occurred.

A simple analogy may help drive home the point. At what moment does an abused spouse or child say enough is enough and walk out, retaliate against, or seek help with regard to their abuser? The specifics of individual circumstances may differ but the commonality is that a threshold of consent has been reached, then breached. In whatever manifestation, the individual withdraws their consent to the family arrangement, the exit option becomes necessary and, if there is shelter and support available away from the oppressive context, then becomes a feasible, if not desired alternative. At that point, the valley of transition for that individual has been reached and the moment to move is at hand..

As collections of individuals marshalled into groups, democratic societies follow this basic pattern of human behaviour. They consent to a given form of rule in exchange for expectations being met (even if these expectations are ideologically framed and manipulated by dominant groups). When those expectations are not met and are not reform-mongered by way of redress, then the threshold limit of consent will be reached, mass consent is withdrawn and the valley of transition becomes a possibility.

It remains to be seen what will happen with the democracies in Europe and elsewhere, especially given the authoritarian resurgence world-wide and the global rise of rightwing politics that seek to narrow rather than confirm or extend notions of rights and responsibilities in the social order. Whatever happens, it is clear that as a political construct liberal democracy has reached its limits when it comes to mass contingent consent to the established project. What lies next is unknown and uncertain, but what is clear is that for many, the threshold of consent was crossed some time ago.

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Weathervane elections.

Here is something short from my other social media accounts.

Weathervane elections forthcoming: Brazil presidential run-off, Israeli parliamentary elections, US midterms and NZ general elections. These are true tests of where voters want their countries to go. The choices are foremost about reaffirming or rejecting the Right as a governing force. These elections occur in four parts of the globe with country-specific issues needing address but one unifying, underlying question: does the (moderate) Left present a realistic and preferable alternative to Rightwing dominance of national politics in these (ostensible) democracies?

At the risk of over-simplification, here is a quick take:

I have already written here about how the NZ Left has to reframe the political narrative away from the market mantras of the last three decades. So far it has not done so, which means it is nibbling around the margins of a pie that is already cooked (in both senses of the term) rather than focusing on its ingredients and allocated portions. The Greens are trying to do that, but Labour prefers to nibble. And in spite of its obvious decay and increased price of the pie, National claims that it is perfectly edible even if it now has an (Opportunity-flavoured) teal mold tinge to it, while Act wants the pie smaller and NZ First wants it to be a different colour with less flavour ingredients.

In Brazil the question is whether to re-elect a corporate Left leader with corruption problems or a Trump-worshipping son of a convicted seditionist former president with ties to organised crime (both of them). It is about becoming a servitor imperialist vassal that submits to the “Donroe Doctrine” or remains an independent sovereign State in a highly stratified society.

In Israel it is about reaffirming or rejecting the politics of genocide and ethnic cleansing. There is more than that, of course, but above all it is a referendum on the Netanyahu-led coalition’s policies leading up to and after October 7.

In the US it is about consolidating the slide into neoimperialist kleptocratic despotism or breaking the Russian-favoring stranglehold that the MAGA Right has on US politics.

For these reasons the next three weeks are very significant in terms of electoral politics in democracies. What happens in them and what their results turn out to be will set the stage for what is to come in global politics, for better or worse.

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Fear-mongering the “Other.”

One of the signs of desperation of a political campaign, movement or ideology is the resort to fear mongering. Rather than offer a a bias for hope in the form of positive policy initiatives, fear mongerers use stereotypes, scapegoats and distorted narratives to stir anxiety and dread of the “others” in amongst the body politic. The “others” are the usual suspects–immigrants and foreigners, sexual, ethnic, religious and racial communities, social classes, intellectuals (remember Pol Pot?) ideological non-conformists and contrarians, witches and witch doctors, heavy metal Satanists, even tax-and-spend liberals–the list is as long as human history itself. New ones are invented every generation. They often are held to be carriers of disease and other pestilence or are pet eaters, children snatchers, rapists and murderers. They could well be shape-shifters or aliens, so the best precaution against their insidious designs is to beware and vote/follow those who saw the danger first and call it out. Oftentimes fear mongers will try a rock by rock approach, throwing out accusations against one entity to see if they can gain political traction with it, and if not, then move on to another scapegoat. Again, the targets are endless.

In recent times the US Right has focused on Islamicists and communist/socialists. The election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New Youk and Abdul El-Sayed as Democratic candidate for the US Senate from Michigan has galvanised US conservatives into a frenzy of xenophobic bigotry over what they see as the imminent takeover of the self-proclaimed land of the free by Islamocommies. These forces of doom used to be called Islamofacists but once they introduced social democratic views into their political discourse, then they conveniently morphed into “commies” because as we all know, for the Right, socialists and communists are two sides of the same Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Trotsyite-Castroite coin, with a little Ho Chi Minh, Guevara, Bukharin, Luxemburg and Angela Davis thrown in.

I will leave aside the differences between communism, socialism, social democracy and democratic socialism because my point (beyond the fact that most of the Right would not know the difference between them) is that for the fear mongers the objective is to tar them all with the same “othering” brush, to conflate them as one evil hydra and inflate them as an existential threat to the Republic and the Nation on which it purportedly stands.

NZ has its mini-me variant of that with the peripheral Right parties scapegoating various immigrant communities, most lately Indians (NZ First), and the ACT Party seeing Reds under beds anytime regulations are proposed or rights extended rather than curtailed. They both see Te Pati Maori as Maori-communists and the Green Party as wokester-communists seeking to infringe on the traditional rights of patriarchical white cis male capitalists (or, as they would say, “natural leaders”). The key point is that, because they have nothing positive to offer anyone other than their corporate patrons and pocket-liners and the mouth-breathing troglodytes who find reassurance in their hatreds, the NZ Right, just like the US Right, resorts to fear mongering as its weapon of choice.

Moving past the cut and thrust of the daily political news cycle, this is the lesson of the moment. The Right, both here and elsewhere (there are parallels to be drawn in places like Argentina and Brazil as well), have crested their wave of electoral popularity and run out of ideas for governing besides scripted corporate-speak mantras about financial discipline, governmental efficiency, law and order and traditional values. In fact, it is the lack of new policy ideas and initiatives that have made them electorally vulnerable, which is why they are now resorting to their weapon of choice.

I can only hope that the opposition in the US, NZ and other places like Argentina can focus on this syndrome as a campaign issue while offering a more positive vision for the future based on concrete proposals to improve commonweal conditions in the countries in which they are located. This means rejecting timidity, incrementalism and purely centrist-focused prescriptions in favour of bolder initiatives that move beyond cautious and defensive postures that serve to reaffirm the status quo by tinkering around the margins and onto more progressive actions that seek to accomplish more than just undo the bad Right policies of the recent past. That involves taxation, social policies, macro-economic re-orientation, foreign relations and a re-framing of what government exists to do and what the role of the State is in doing it–both a narrative and a substantive change, in other words–so that the tired recourse to fear-mongering can finally be put to rest based on a new, more inclusive social contract in which the license of consent is granted by the masses, not just by the entrenched elites of the current moment.

All of this must be done as a “sincere” campaign strategy rather than by hiding behind a curtain of centrism while the governing Right defends its position via fear mongering about “extremism” and assorted “other” assaults on the social fabric. Because in doing so, the Right inadvertently demonstrates that the time is ripe for more radical and progressive change. If being radical is to be progressive, then to be status quo is to be regressive. And regression is the breeding ground for fear-mongering “others.”

In this context bold change is not being ideologically extremist. It is being realistic and practical given the circumstances and alternatives. So Carpe diem!

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Media Link: “A View from Afar” on Systemic Change.

Selwyn Manning and I discussed some of the things that I have been thinking about recently in today’s podcast. I have written about these themes on these pages but this video format allows Selwyn to get his two cents in and expand the discussion. I hope that you find it of interest.

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Regime transition sequencing.

I was reading a recent article in which the author wrote that the US has actually made the transition to democracy in Venezuela more difficult than it could have been by removing Nicolas Maduro and his wife from the country but leaving the rest of his regime intact. In the author’s words, “they took the dictator but left the dictatorship.” He went on to write that the usual order of things is to embark on a political regime transition (presumably to democracy if the starting point is authoritarian) followed by an economic regime transition (say, in simplistic terms, from communism to capitalism) or at least significant economic reform. In Venezuela’s case, the US has pushed for US-investor friendly economic reforms in the extractive industrial sector but left the Bolivarian regime otherwise intact and has not bothered with broader economic reforms that promote market diversification, income redistribution, decreased dependence on primary good exports (including but moving beyond petroleum), and more value-added domestic commodity and service production.

That got me to thinking about one major theme of the first generation regime transition literature of the (late) 1970s-1980s, which focused on the transition from democracy to authoritarianism in Europe, East Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and early 1970s and then the transitions form authoritarianism to democracy in the rest of the 1970s and 1980s. One theme that emerged was the sequence by which regime transitions occurred. We might call it a type of “chicken or egg” question.

Some argued that what was needed first for democracy to obtain was an economic transition from state-centric (e.g., Keynesian welfare or socialist) to free market models, which was believed would promote the civic freedoms needed for democracy to emerge as the corresponding political form (this was grounded in what was known as “modernisation theory,” which was a 1950s-era prescription for overcoming underdevelopment in the “Third World”). That was the “egg” answer, which was used as one justification for the US support for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. As with original modernization theory, the underpinning syllogism proved incorrect.

Instead, both in the PRC and in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) as of the 1990s, communist party leaders engineered the move from a state-controlled command economy marshalled along what might be described as Stalinist or Maoist lines to a state capitalist economy in which investment and production was incrementally opened to private (including foreign) investment while the State controlled overall economic management decision-making and kept a stake in specific productive assets (e.g., telecommunications in both instances).

In effect, capitalism came but democracy did not. In both the PRC and SRV change occurred within the political regime, not of it, regardless of economic change. Communist Parties still control both countries and staff the leadership of the State. Their respective leadership architectures and other partial regimes within the larger whole have been subjected to reforms of various magnitudes, including those deemed required to accommodate the economic changes undertaken by the national political leaderships in question. The same is true, in another variation on the theme, in Singapore under the PAP regime: the overall regime remains and reforms (in Singapore’s case by “liberalising” when it comes to political and civil rights without giving up ultimate authority) while the economy changes (from post-colonial trading to techno-finance capitalism). In other words, rather than a transitional sequence, in some instances economic change can occur under the aegis of a stable political regime (at least if it is authoritarian).

Others have disagreed with the economic–>political change thesis, noting that political regime change was required before economic regime change could happen because economic policy is ultimately a political choice made by regime leaders. This is the “chicken” answer. The 1948 Chinese, 1959 Cuban and 1979 Nicaraguan revolutions are considered emblematic in this regard.

In both types of sequence, the key issue is one of parametric change: the boundaries of political and economic life are fundamentally altered as a result of the major institutional changes that define regime transition as a social phenomenon no matter which way the chain of causality proceeds.

Among other subtopics, one part of the debate about regime transitions in the 1980s centred on the preferred “regime change sequence” leading to democratisation. It was a simple, perhaps crude measure, but it had the virtue of forcing scholars and policy practitioners to address the linkage between political change and economic development and reform rather than just one or the other. It also broadened the “chicken or egg” question with regard to the linkage between economic development and political regimes, Was there a correlation or causal relationship between specific regime types and certain levels of development? If so, in which direction and of what specific type in both categories? Capitalist to socialist, socialist to capitalist or somewhere in between? Authoritarian to democratic or democratic to authoritarian and if the latter, what type of authoritarian? The possibilities of political-economic regime change are not as straight forward as might seem at first glance.

There is a third type of regime change that is also theoretically possible> It is simultaneous rather than sequential in nature. This is a situation where economic and political regime change occurred simultaneously, as part and parcel of the same transitional dynamic. This alternative was particularly of interest to students of the fall of the USSR and Eastern bloc regimes grouped in the Warsaw Pact as well as of the revolutionary transitions such as that of Nicaragua and Iran in 1979. In the former the hope was they would transition to both democracy and capitalism in short periods of time. In the latter the expectation was that with revolutionary overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship, socialism as an economic model could be rapidly imposed. The 1979 Iranian revolution represented a variant on that model, with many hoping that the post-Reza Pahlavi regime would be a theocratic democracy wedded to an Islamic market economy rooted in traditional Bazaari social relations of production.

Sadly, in both instances the 1979 revolutions eventually brought economic changes, but under a different type of authoritarianism than what existed before rather than the democracy that was promised. This may have been partially a product of the hostile reaction and pressure placed on the revolutionary regimes by the US and other Western states, but the fact is that be they simultaneous or sequential, the 1979 revolutionary regimes delivered something different than what was hoped (and fought) for.

The simultaneous transition possibility was also considered in the rise of Hugo Chavez and Bolivarianism in Venezuela in 1979 via electoral means, which presumably would have paved the way for a peaceful revolutionary change towards popular democracy and socialism, much in the way hope was previously raised along the same lines by the 1970 election of Salvador Allende in Chile. Alas, neither expectation was met: Allende was overthrown and killed in 1973 by a US-backed military coup d’état supported by rightwing forces while Chavez and his successor Maduro descended into authoritarian-kleptocratic rule culminating in the US military kidnapping of the Venezuelan leader in January of this year. As the author mentioned at the beginning of this post noted, the Venezuelan political leader has been forcibly removed but the regime has not.

As for former Soviet states, the record is very mixed. Russia has reverted to authoritarianism with a state capitalist/oligarchical hybrid economic model grounded in fossil fuel extraction and modernised Soviet-era industrial production.. Some former Warsaw Pact states have gone both democratic and (mostly) market capitalist. Others have gone autocratic and state capitalist/kleptocratic. Some have gravitated towards the European Union and even NATO. Others have remained within the Russian orbit on both political and economic grounds. This is especially true for Central Asian former Soviet republics (the so-called “Stans”), which have not undergone appreciable political regime change except to use elections as legitimation devices while economic control of extraction-based primary good production remains in the hands of nepotistic political elites and politically-connected interests.

It can be argued that simultaneous regime transitions cannot happen simply because of the turmoil and complexities involved in attempting to manage profound political and economic changes all at once. The cases cited above support that view regardless of what eventuated after the old political regime was displaced or the economic model substantially altered. But the issue of transitional sequencing remains an important one, not just conceptually but also as a matter of policy practice, especially if the goal is to restore or revive democratic governance.

As an example, my stay in the Pentagon in the early 1990s was based on a successful fellowship application that was centred on a proposal on how to democratise civil-military relations in post-authoritarian Latin America. I had noticed the difficulty with which new civilian elected governments were coping with entrenched authoritarian traditions in the (sometimes Prussian) military cultures of several Latin American nations, and so outlined in the fellowship proposal ways in which US non-lethal military aid, weapons sales and peer-to-peer training programs, coupled with legal and normative changes to the institutional relationships between the armed forces and civilian government, might help “democratise” the relations between political leaders and the military hierarchies of the time.

This was just one part of the political regime transition from dictatorship to democracy in that region–what was called “partial regime change,” where the sum of a number of reforms in the constituent parts of an electoral democracy (civil rights, election procedures, interest group intermediation systems, inter-agency accountability, policing authority, budget-setting agendas, federal-state relations, and even the relationship between civilian and military authorities)–were reformed, reconstituted or revitalised with the purpose being to provide institutional underpinnings that would support, then sustain and eventually reproduce democratic governance structures.

Again, the results were mixed but for the most part I am pleased to see that in places like Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, the changes that my colleagues and I proposed seem to have stuck.

Getting back to the subject of Venezuela and now the attempt at forced regime change by the US in Iran, the folly of the move becomes clearer (as if it was not already). Not only were the “decapitation” strikes simply instances of state-sanctioned murder (by proxy, since the Israelis did the actual bombing of targeted leaders like the Ayatollah Khamenei), the Islamic regime and its constituent partial regimes remain intact, albeit with a stronger military influence replacing a weakened clerical caste headed by Khamenei’s badly injured son Mojtaba (something that is more the result of Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) dissatisfaction with the cleric’s enforcement of theocratic social policy prior to the US/Israeli attacks rather than the US/Israeli strikes themselves). If anything, what political regime change might be underway is, by several accounts, one from a theocratic to a military-dominated regime, conveniently reinforced by the foreign aggression waged upon Iranian society.

Lines of succession, promotion, policy and operational authority remain in place. So do the underlying civic structures, including the Bazaari social networks that even if now in opposition to most of the hard-line elements in the regime, remain fiercely anti-Western and Persian nationalist in orientation. In other words, the partial regime mosaic that when taken together constitutes the institutional edifice of the Islamic regime continues in place and functioning. Like in Venezuela, some former leaders are gone (dead) but the regime remains even as it evolves from within. Nor has the economy changed–although porous sanctions and the Revolutionary Guard toll booth blockade of the Hormuz Straits has strengthened the Islamic Republic regime’s control over it.

In effect, we have seen leadership change without regime change, little significant economic change other than a shift in beneficiaries in the Venezuelan case, and no real transitional sequence at all. This demonstrates the shallowness of what passes in the US for strategic thinking, comparative political analysis and foreign country expertise, to say nothing of the ahistorical ignorance of the MAGA elites in and outside of government who enable and support US foreign adventurism under Trump.

In fact, it might do well for scholars, politicians and economic interests alike to return to that literature on authoritarian regime demise to develop a US-focused idiosyncratic conceptual and practical framework for studying the late stage dynamics of the second MAGA administration. Because it is quite feasible that its demise will more resemble that of dictatorial collapse rather than that of democratic decline even if certain electoral trappings and procedural niceties cloak the entire process. The question for the US then is: if the transitional sequence begins with political change away from MAGA, will it a) result in its elimination from political society? and b) what if any economic and other partial regime reforms will come from the anti-MAGA political change if it occurs?

Without both, regime (or at least government) change in the US away from what exists today will not happen. Depending on one’s perspective, that may or may not be a good thing.

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An analogy and an axiom.

Some words to the wise.

Analogy: Trump’s war against Iran might be the geopolitical equivalent of Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn. Built on arrogance born of easy bullying in lesser conflicts, he has overestimated his capabilities and grossly underestimated his opponent. Iran may be Trump’s Sitting Bull, but the analogy holds only if Custer had a malevolent manipulator like Netanyahu leading him to his ignominious comeuppance.

Axiom: History shows that the side that prevails in war is not always the one that can deliver greater punishment to the adversary but the one that can absorb the most punishment and keep on fighting. Superior weapons do not always overcome determination and will.

Remember that “asymmetrical warfare” does not only refer to differences in weapons capabilities, kinetic mass and quality of forces brought into battle. It also refers to the motives and commitment that adversaries bring to the fight.

The US is an instant gratification, short attention span culture with a low social pain threshold and technology fetish, especially when it comes to gadgets, weapons and war-fighting (which feeds into the other cultural traits). Iran is the birthplace and seat of a 6000 year old Persian culture that invented chess and carpet weaving. Both of these endeavors require consummate patience, perseverance, imagination, complex multidimensional thought and extended foresight that sees the “play” several moves ahead of the current moment. At the behest of an international pariah client-state partner unable to “go it alone,” the US has launched an opportunistic expeditionary war of aggression against Iran during a midterm election year. Iran is fighting an existential defensive war of attrition in and from its ancestral homeland against the US and its regional (including Arab) allies, including the pariah state.

Given these differences, the axiom could well explain the analogy.

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Dark Parallels.

Here is a thought that I originally posted as social media commentary:

The Epstein client list epitomises the decline of liberal internationalism. The list is a who’s who of (mostly Western) liberal internationalist leaders: billionaires, bankers, Silicon Valley tech moguls, athletes, academics, royalty, fashion entrepreneurs, politicians, philanthropists, diplomats, former presidents and prime ministers, special envoys, international organization leaders, sundry oligarchs and industrial magnates, etc. Other than some decadent Arabs, no tin-pot Latin American, African or Asian dictators are to be found amongst them. They were/are a E Suite aggregation and living embodiment of the liberal international order taken to excess, a epiphenomenal reflection of the institutional decay that infected the entire postcolonial, post WW2 edifice once the Cold War ended.

They traded in money, power, status, influence and darker things. It was their step into darkness that toppled them. Otherwise they would still be networking as usual and their sordid hypocrisy–enlightened and rationalist on the outside, greedy, privileged and perverted on the inside– continue unabated. Theirs was a culture of impunity destroyed by venal over-reach.

Likewise, liberal internationalism as a global ordering device fell due to its own internal decay, corruption, sclerosis and contradictions, not from the actions of external actors (although some may have pushed from the margins). The behaviour of liberal institutions like the World Bank, IMF, WEF and assorted subject and regionally focused agencies belied their ostensible universalist and humanitarian goals. In other words, the downfall of liberal internationalism is self-induced. That includes democratic governance in the West, which has been in decline for well over a decade due to its lack of responsiveness to public demands and capture by elite-driven special interests.

Like the Epstein investigation, the post-liberal international order must begin with an evaluation of its institutional architecture and the flaws inherent in it. From that can come an improved edifice better prepared to confront the global challenges that lie ahead in a more equitable and inclusive fashion. Because in an age of AI, robotics and nanotechnological crossover that knows no national borders and where post-industrial knowledge economies are the wave of the future where the privilege of Empire no longer applies, an International system made for and by Anglo-Saxon white males no longer is suited for, much less capable of dominating, the demands and pressures emanating from those who are not part of that demographic. In a time in history where things like climate change impacts and commercial and military use of space and deep sea environments are tangible and real, there is urgency to the needs for institutional transition.

Hint: the interests of the Global South (understood as a post-colonial ideological construct, not a geographic designation) need to be accommodated in a more equitable honest way.