Sneer of Cold Command

The neocons were right about the dangers of dictatorships, but discredited their own arguments by backing the catastrophic invasion of Iraq

"Tikal-18" by GOC53 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

There is an argument that runs through many of the blog posts in Sharpen Your Axe. It goes a little like this. Power inevitably corrupts. The institutions of liberal democracy are designed to put limits on our elected leaders as they gradually become increasingly toxic. The peaceful transition of power acts as the killer app of democracy by providing a mechanism to end the career of politicians once their level of corruption becomes too distasteful for many of their own former voters.

Once the peaceful transition of power is firmly in place in a society, entrepreneurs and investors can create value for others without worrying too much about increasingly gangster-like political leaders stealing their stuff. Capitalism has its ups and downs, but we can take the edge of some of the worst excesses of the business cycle by running a market economy in parallel with a welfare state.

Sadly, some people will always be drawn to the populist misinterpretation of democratic elections (which are really a negative institution to expel our leaders). Populists instead see elections as a way of finding “the will of the people,” a phrase which makes very little sense when you sit down and think about it.

Narcissistic leaders are particularly drawn to populist narratives, believing themselves to be the true voice of the “people.” They will often base their case on conspiracy theories about actually existing elites or people who understand maths, as well as wild generalizations about big groups of people.

When populists gain power, they get very worried about the opposition, which they see as being disloyal to the “people” by definition. Populists then seek to cut the brakes through democratic backsliding and self-coups. As the institutions that are meant to check their power corrode, populist leaders will gradually become more corrupt and more intolerant of dissent. They will increasingly take worse decisions, often leading to unnecessary wars or terrible economic crashes.

This argument seems unremarkable in 2023, although I don’t think it yet seems banal. We have seen how Conservative politician Boris Johnson led the UK out of the European Union (EU) based on a combination of outright lies and half-truths, combined with wishful thinking and smearing expert views from 2016; we have seen how Donald Trump nearly broke liberal democracy in the US in 2021; and we watched Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

If we backtrack 20 or 30 years, though, the arguments laid out above would have seemed positively old-fashioned, almost Victorian. I stumbled upon Karl Popper’s defence of liberal democracy as young philosophy student and kept them in the back of my mind for many years afterwards, but I’m sure most people happily went about their lives without ever thinking of the negativity of liberal democracy in any depth.

Perhaps strangely, the strongest defence of liberal democracy in the years that capitalism was globalizing fast came from a group known as the neocons (short for neoconservatives). The term refers to a group of mainly American intellectuals, many of them of Jewish heritage, who moved from the left to the right while remaining socially progressive. One of their big themes was the idea that the West shouldn’t trust dictators, even if autocrats were happy to tie their economies to ours. Putin proved the fundamental truth of this argument in 2022.

Unfortunately, the neocons were their own worst enemies. They discredited a perfectly reasonable argument by enthusiastically backing the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Its dictator, Saddam Hussein, had already invaded two neighbouring countries (Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990) and threatened a third (Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War). However, he was bluffing about developing weapons of mass destruction in the beginning of the 21st century and the neocons made a terrible call.

The subsequent chaos in the Middle East was destructive and awful. It also generated many conspiracy theories, which were often amplified by Putin’s propaganda channels in the West as part of his mission to destabilize liberal democracy here. Our leaders were too naive in letting him spread divisive narratives in democratic societies.

Robert Kagan is one of the most interesting former neocons. A historian, he worked as an advisor to the US Republican Party from the 1980s. He spread conspiracy theories about Iraqi involvement in 9/11 before the invasion of the country. This is a telling point. Regular readers of Sharpen Your Axe will realize he was just running one model of the world. It was a pretty good model, but no model can ever be perfect. He should have gone back to the drawing board when it failed to generate results instead of deploying conspiracy theories as the bodyguards of a failing model.

To Kagan’s credit though, in February 2016, he publicly left the Repubican Party in disgust at Trump’s shenanigans, calling him both fascistic and a potential dictator. He backed Hillary Clinton in the election that year and now describes himself as liberal and progressive.

Kagan has written a fine book called The Jungle Grows Back, which looks at why liberal democracy works and why dictatorships are inherently untrustworthy. He describes societies like the modern EU as being like gardens, but warns that if we don’t care for our gardens, the jungle can grow back more quickly than we might realize. It is a powerful metaphor for anyone who has ever visited Mayan ruins in Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras or Mexico; or read Percy Bysshe Shelley.

For me, the central lesson of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lies in the way that the West needs to embed democratic values into the process of globalization. We can’t send all our production into countries that are run by dictators and just hope for the best.

Luckily, readers of the financial press will know that these ideas in the are very hot in business circles at the moment, with jargon like onshoring (bringing production back to the garden) and nearshoring (bringing it closing to the garden) replacing offshoring (sending it to the jungle). Additive printing (also known as 3D printing) is one area that many companies are exploring as a way of locating production away from jungles.

Meanwhile, energy independence is a big theme at the intersection of politics and business. This can lead to developments like district heating, which is also a hot topic for investors, entrepreneurs and elected officials. The comments are open. See you next week!

Further Reading

The Jungle Grows Back by Robert Kagan

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