Cusory thoughts on the ideological limits to American authoritarian consolidation

It's remarkably labor intensive to run a repressive regime

<I’ve been terrible at writing much of anything lately. Beyond the normal excuses, it’s been hard to devote energy to writing silly little posts when I’m consumed by events home in the US. But as I wrestled with a post on the weird things economic financialization does to organization design, I had an epiphany that felt share-worthy. Normal programing to resume…well, as normal as programing has ever been here.>

Politics is largely about coalitions. Getting things done requires connecting, cajoling, coordinating, and compromising with other groups / factions / teams / interests. Which often gives the actual practice of politics a pretty boring feel. Endless meetings, arguments about the minutiae of definitions, ambiguous horse-trading, and the seemingly endless back-and-forth consumes a lot of energy. As if participating weren’t exhausting enough, those seeking to successfully lead these coalitions require skill, flexibility, foresight, strategic ambiguity, and at least a passing recognition that of the game(s) being played.

And as I look on in increasing horror at federal actions in the US, I keep returning to the bigger question of how long this may last and down what paths it may go. Clearly the Trump coalition longs for a regime where power is consolidated in the sovereign president. However, bringing this ambition to fruition in the American context faces all sorts of obstacles. Obviously given the focus of this ‘stack, I’m principally interested in the organizational ones. These include, but are certainly not limited to:

• The federal division of power among three co-equal branches.

• The division of power between state and federal governments.

• The fact that we what think of as “government” is a variably coupled collection of complex organizations.

• The organizational narratives successive governments have created and embedded in American life which constitute a sort of civil religion.

• The inertia inherent in existing organizational forms and the challenges of redirecting activities much less consolidating them.

• The broadly intentional design of US government to prevent such consolidation.

Maybe one day I’ll return to these design features of the US governing system, but in light of current efforts to impose consolidation, at least partially, from the outside I keep coming back to the coalition at the heart of MAGA and the ideological limits they impose on consolidations efforts.

Trump’s coalition has multiple elements, but I’m going to grossly simplify by distilling them into three parts:

1. The (very) rich. These are the folks who dream of stateless utopias in Greenland. Scream about Greta Thunberg as the antichrist. And complain that taxes are tyranny.

2. Racists. They distrust anyone who doesn’t look like them and see state authority as properly directed at giving those groups a hard time. Wilhoit’s Law types.

3. Dumbasses Low information voters. Muh eggs! The president is personally responsible for gas prices.

While all three overlap to some extent, it’s still a Venn Diagram and not a circle, which makes this a contingent coalition presently swirling around the problem/solution ying/yang that is Donald J. Trump. And like all coalitions, for any sort of longevity to emerge - for the connections to stabilize into some sort of reproducible “thing” over time - these needs to be mechanisms to manage of the conflicting demands and interests these groups bring with them and may develop over time. This management process may be grossly simplified into a set of processes that amplify the shared interest while seeking to dampen the conflicting ones.

Considering Trump’s obviously stunted skills at management of this variety, my hunch is the incongruent desires of these coalition partners, and the limited mechanisms available to reconcile them, will increasingly come to undermine this coalition and it’s ability to consolidate power.¹ And the one I keep coming back to is the rich part of the coalition’s hatred for labor. I don’t mean this exclusively in terms of “organized labor” (read unions), I mean they hate those who work for a living. This shows up everywhere in their worldview: dreams of automation; rigid occupational hierarchies; wage dampening; tax “efficiency”; benefits cuts; etc.; etc.

And this is the rub when it comes to authoritarian consolidation: it’s labor intensive. Sure, the tech guys will tell you how you can run a full-service authoritarian regime with just some algorithms and (ironically enough) H1-B coders. But as the DOGE wrecking crew discovered destruction is the easy part. Organizing something vaguely functional is hard. This is the problem would-be authoritarian consolidators face.²

Sure, Congress can chuck you $75bn to recruit and arm a broadly unaccountable force of out of shape yahoos. But as successive administrative regimes have found in poorly defined foreign adventures in state building, consolidating and maintaining power, especially when parts of the “governed” don’t like you, is only achieved through mass labor mobilization. Think North Korea, East Germany, the USSR, China. It takes a lot, I mean A LOT of people to manage consolidation and ongoing coordination and repression beyond initial displays of force.

Given the overt, active, focused hatred of labor that The Rich parts of the coalition harbor and the limited mechanisms available to reconcile this with the requirements to actually consolidate authoritarian control offer a glimmer of hope. Of course, this faction may come to see the vital role that mass state employment plays in the early stages of consolidation. Or they come frame these workers into some sort of appropriate hierarchy. But I have yet to see any sort of coordinating mechanism being developed to make these changes possible. No frame bridging. No leadership cues. It just festers. And damped differences can only linger for so long.

So while this coalition is presently sustaining a pretty destructive regime, the long-term viability of its agenda is threatened by these unresolved differences. This offers me a little hope about how it may end.

1. This doesn’t lessen the damage they’ll inflict. In fact, the more chaotic it becomes, the worse things will likely get. But challenges of this variety do constrain coalition’s ability to sustain themselves over time.

2. Not denying that information technologies may be handy tools for managing authoritarian regimes. But they’re tools not totalities.