In The Dictator’s Handbook, Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, Professors Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith look at historical examples as well as modern ones and conclude successful politicians do not gain power by helping “we the people,” but by knowing how to gain and maintain it. This is done primarily through supporting the correct coalition of backers. To maintain their power, they must use the funds government access provides and divvy them to supporters who brought them to power and will keep them there. Those with the longest and most “successful” careers are willing to hand out benefits and engage in corrupt actions. Those held back by moral concerns are thus disadvantaged by those with no such handicap. Ruthlessness is best.
Just as a bank is a target for robbers, power and money make the government a target for bureaucracies, corporations, and national parties. These interest groups seek politicians who will bend to their will, giving them access to that power and to funds. So politicians willing to give them what they desire are the most secure in their position. As the authors state, “power leads to corruption, and corruption leads to power.”
Mesquita and Smith found a pattern for those who stayed in power. To succeed in government, you use gifts, privileges, welfare, or subsidies to make a percentage of the population dependent on your staying in power. This is why seemingly idiotic actions and economic policies taken by our rulers make perfect sense when the priority is not the people but rulers’ close-knit supporters and friends. The goal is not to improve all Americans but to benefit the coalition in power. Speaking of these kinds of policies, Mesquita and Smith wrote, “This may be economic madness, but it is also political genius.” Further, successful leaders will punish enemies, such as an opposing party’s constituency of supporters, by increasing taxation on them; but they will hand out benefits and subsidies to those loyal and willing to switch sides, or just willing to play the game. Politicians use their control of public finances to both wage economic war on opposition and create and keep their support among the loyal.
Like giving drug addicts their fix, we hand power over to those who crave it most. Similar to the negative consequences of drug use, both the power user and the taxpayers they abuse, suffer from it. Many think all psychopaths become murderers, but most are actually highly functional and because they desire to control others, they often become successful businessmen and politicians. In addition, their attributes elevate them above the competition to become prosperous in those areas.
James Silver informs us that the traits which make for successful politicians are the same ones which “define clinical psychopathy”; they are a “lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, cunning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions.” Silver quotes Robert Hare, a leading expert, who found “psychopaths generally have a heightened need for power and prestige—exactly the type of urges that make politics an attractive calling.” Psychopaths do very well in politics because they make great first impressions, do well in high-pressure situations, are fearless and highly competitive, and stay calm in stressful situations.
Writing for Scientific American, Scott Lilienfeld and Hal Arkowitz wrote psychopaths are “superficially charming; psychopaths tend to make a good first impression on others and often strike observers as remarkably normal. Yet they are self-centered, dishonest…largely devoid of guilt…Psychopaths routinely offer excuses for their reckless and often outrageous actions, placing blame on others instead.” So very reminiscent of politicians passing legislation helping themselves as individuals or their particular party and interest groups, with no apparent concern about damage inevitably wreaked on the economy or the culture. Further, the blame for whatever harms result can always be placed elsewhere. Maybe it’s those Marxist university professors; maybe it’s white supremacists, it’s gays, it’s Christians, it’s the capitalists and so on, anything but their own fault.
