Treasons, Stratagems, And Spoils

How Leaders Make Practical Use Of Beliefs And Values

F. G. Bailey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367096687
• eBook ISBN: 9780429983085
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils is a sequel to the author's highly regarded Stratagems and Spoils.Treason, the new word in the title, indicates a heightened attention to morality?to ideas of duty and conscience?as a foil to rational calculations of advantage. By providing sets of propositions and questions that illuminate narratives of political events, this book helps anyone interested in struggles for power understand politics and political leaders in their own and in other cultures. The method can be used to make sense of power struggles in peasant villages, electoral and presidential maneuvering in the United States, the confusions of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, or Gandhi's morality deployed as a weapon to drive the British out of India.

Part ONE
How to Understand: The Basics

In politics nothing is contemptible.

—Disraeli

• The practice of politics concerns the orderly distribution of power; and power is the capacity to make someone do something, whether they want to or not, whether they know what is happening or not. The word “orderly” is a trickster because, as I said in the preface, it covers two very different situations: an order that is rationally designed as against a pattern that evolves on its own, that is natural and spontaneous, that can be described and to some extent understood after the event, but was not planned.
• The first chapter—on the basic features of political ideas and actions (as I choose to see them)—has three parts that arise out of that distinction.
  • The first is a tension between dutiful action and self-interest, which produces the contradiction between an intended order (legal, constitutional, to some extent customary) and a natural order that evolves out of the initiatives taken by people eager to gain power or to avoid having it wielded over them.
  • Second, the designed order is limited because reason has only a limited role to play in political arenas. People react off the cuff, without thinking things through; more than that, there is a limit to rationality and some matters, always and everywhere, precede reason and must be taken on faith.
  • Third, the intended institution-based order is precarious in politics because self-interested actors may profit when they circumvent it—hence “In politics nothing is contemptible.” At the same time, the slide into chaos is countered by the natural tendency of power to expand into spaces where freedom once existed.
• Successful politicians need to comprehend not only the normative order of the political arena in which they operate—etiquette, customs, rules, and regulations—but also its unintended and unforeseen patterns. In other words, they must try to make sense of political events scientifically, seeing these events as parts of a natural system. That kind of understanding is also the goal of this book. For this purpose a method is required. Its basic elements and assumptions are outlined in Chapter 2.

1
The Aroma of Politics

• This introductory chapter highlights three features that are found in political arenas everywhere:
  • first, a tussle between the public weal and private interests;
  • second, mindlessness; and
  • third, an ever-present risk of collapse either into chaos or into excessive regimentation.
• In each of these, like a perfume hiding a disagreeable odor, a respectable theme masks something that is less presentable: duty fronts for self-interest; reason cloaks mindlessness; and behind order lurks chaos or, facing about, freedom falls prey to despotism.

The Public Weal, Private Interests, and Realpolitik

People with political power rarely admit that they enjoy it, and never say that they use it to benefit themselves. In the past they said that God appointed them and gave them a divine mandate to govern, and whatever they did, they did for God’s glory. (That voice is heard now from ayatollas in Iran and fundamentalist Christians in the United States.) A generation or two back—and still sometimes today—politicians invoked the Fatherland or the Motherland or the Nation or the Race and proclaimed their devotion to it. In the United States, nowadays, they prefer a common touch and speak about service to “the American people” and their duty to exercise responsibly the authority entrusted to them. Their rivals say that such claims are false and hypocritical and that only they themselves are the people’s true and sincere servants. Cynical persons, outside the political game, declare that power inevitably corrupts; if you want to understand how politics work, find out who has a piece of the action and ask what is the payoff to being in power.

Situations are rarely so transparent that you can decide without hesitation where truth lies. Look at this example; it reeks with ambiguity. Many years back, over a period of several weeks in March and April, I watched a man in a village in India being—metaphorically—crucified. His name was Tuta. He was a man of low caste (a Washerman) who, through hard work and some good luck, had become richer than the village leaders thought he should be (they were of high caste) and they were able, by judicial means, to wrest away some of his wealth and put it into the public purse; they fined him. I thought at the time—I still think—that at least some of them were politically motivated: They were thinking about power and at the same time looking for a chance to get their hands on his money. They wanted to cut him down to size, and they knew he did not have the means to fight back effectively. But this was a judicial matter, the case was argued in a series of meetings of the village panchayat (council), and they could hardly make his prosperity the basis for an indictment and a fine. Instead they accused him of harboring a spirit—what they call a devata—which served him and made him rich; but it had run amok and killed an adolescent girl in a neighbor’s house. Tuta was only one of half a dozen people in the village who kept a devata, and they were all uncovered by means of an elaborate divination. All except Tuta were penalized with small fines. He, since his was the devata that, according to the divination, had done the killing, was fined thirty times as much as any other offender—equivalent at that time to the income that a reasonably comfortable household could expect to receive over a period of two months. Tuta’s money was supposed to pay the cost of the divination.

I wrote a book about that incident and called it The Witch-Hunt, because what the villagers did seemed to me to have precisely the flavor of the dictionary’s definition of a witch-hunt: “a single-minded and uncompromising campaign against people with unacceptable views or behaviour, one regarded as unfair or malicious persecution.” The clique in the village council that engineered the prosecution did not, of course, present the affair in that way; if challenged they would have said (and probably believed) that they were acting in the public interest by ridding the community of a dangerous presence. Nor did most other people (I met two skeptics) consider the indictment to be unfair or malicious. But I saw the incident as essentially political: It had to do with power. Powerful people were seizing the opportunity, occasioned by the girl’s sudden and unexpected death, to put an upstart back in his place. I think most villagers had a more clinical definition of the situation; the issue for them was public health and public safety, not power.

From another aspect their concern might have been judged political. We use that word not only to talk about the exercise of power and its distribution but also with reference to the purposes for which power is exercised. In this sense politics is the art and science of government: Political institutions look to the good order and well-being of the city or the state or whatever constitutes the body politic. Tuta and his devata were a cause for apprehension, a threat to the community, and a public menace. Those who punished him were doing their civic duty.

In what might seem to be free association but is not, I saw Michael Dukakis, the Democratic contender in the 1988 presidential election in the United States, as another Tuta, a man put down by a witchhunt. Tuta and Dukakis differ along virtually any dimension that I can think of, except one. In what certainly seemed to me an act of “unfair or malicious persecution,” Dukakis was nailed by totally fabricated rumors about mental illness and by that infamous Willie Horton message on television. Horton, a violent criminal, was released from a Massachusetts jail under a parole scheme. Dukakis was then the state’s governor. While on parole Horton committed another violent crime. The ad, as I recall it, was macabre and shadowy, showing a turnstile gate revolving as dark figures in jail clothing moved in and out. The message was clear: Dukakis, governor of a state and a would-be president, far from being the keeper of good order and the guardian of the public interest, favored policies that were a cause for apprehension. He was himself a public menace.

These two cases suggest that there are different ways to think about politics. The traditional way—the one that I learned as a student—is in line with the derivation of the word from polis, the Greek word for a city. The study of politics is the study of the institutions that we use to manage public affairs, to govern, to keep things orderly. It is the study of persons in authority. We learn about the rights and duties of presidents and prime ministers and dictators, about legislatures, about law courts and other judicial institutions, about rules of succession, about elections, about state and local government, and so on. Politics focus on public affairs and public institutions. One studies political forms and constructs a chart that shows how different institutions are connected with one another and how the tasks of government are divided between them. Then one sets the chart in motion, so to speak, and asks what actions are taken in the course of managing public affairs, that is, to what use is power put and what checks on the abuse of power regulate the system. The grand assumption behind this model is legitimacy; politics is public service. On balance power is exercised in a responsible and statesmanlike manner through institutions that are accepted as legitimate; otherwise we would not have survived. The body politic, as that metaphor suggests, consists of functionally integrated members. Attention is directed toward institutions and institutionalized roles. Leaders, in that scheme, are modeled less as politicians than as statesmen, who do their duty by serving the public interest before they serve themselves.

There are very few political leaders, now or in the past, who are thought to deserve that accolade, and no one—not even Gandhi, who was morality incarnate—goes unchallenged. The skepticism arises out of the other model of politics, which envisages the body politic not as a well-adjusted organism but as an arena in which politicians fight for power, always and everywhere. In this model, the orderly management of public affairs is only half the story, perhaps the lesser half. It may indeed be no more than a façade, a screen that the contestants erect to hide the unsavory things they do to one another (and to the public interest) in the struggle for power. Concern for the public weal is then a cover story. Tuta was punished not because his devata had done harm, but because the ruling elite wanted him humbled. The Bush campaign didn’t give a hoot about Willie Horton and public safety. They didn’t make any effort to do a serious cost-benefit analysis of the Massachusetts jail-parole program. They wanted to frighten the electorate out of voting for Dukakis so that George Bush would become the next president. That is Realpolitik, politics that are practiced without concern for morality in public life.

The public-weal model, which is the denial of Realpolitik, has always seemed to me either wishful thinking (it too readily assumes that what should go on does go on) or, in the hands of practical politicians, it is a ruse to conceal their domination over and exploitation of those who do not have the power to resist them. I do not mean that all politicians all the time are totally unconcerned with the well-being of the body politic. Each instance deserves its own evaluation. I do mean that most of them most of the time see themselves in power as a precondition for the general good; their own power is always at least a part of the equation, no matter how much they play it down. “Seek ye first the political kingdom,” said Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister, being unusually frank about the matter for a politician. It pays to start with the assumption of Realpolitik and see how well it fits the case, for if one starts at the other end, assuming that all concerned are motivated only by a concern for the public interest, there is a temptation to pay exclusive attention to the purposes for which power was used and the results that were (or were not) achieved—Roosevelt and the New Deal, Johnson and the Great Society, Reagan’s Evil Empires and Star Wars—and never to ask how the leaders managed to wield power in the first place. The public-weal model is more a design, an ideal, than a description of any political reality. It takes for granted that politicians come to power through elections and exercise it by virtue of the office they hold; it overlooks the many things that politicians do to win an election and the many stratagems that are needed to convert constitutional power—the power of office—into practical power. The political achievements of great men and women are, of course, a legitimate historical study; so also is the study of institutional forms; but neither is a substitute for the analysis of political strategies and the political process.

Reason, Emotion, and Presuppositions

The public-weal way of looking at politics has a distinctively rational view of political behavior. For sure things may go wrong because people may act foolishly and irresponsibly, but by and large the system works well to the extent that the leaders and the led are agreed on the goal and ready to use their minds not only to plan logically about how best to serve justice, create prosperity, and maintain good order, but also to think critically and examine the evidence for and against whatever is proposed. It is assumed, in this scheme, that, since everyone agrees on what the goal is (the public good), reason can play a major part in governing the world. (That point of view is hard to maintain when one thinks about the Willie Horton message. It wasn’t addressed to anyone’s mind; it was designed to short-circuit logic and fire up emotions, including racist feelings—Willie Horton was black.)

Realpolitik notions also rest on rationality. They suggest that, in order to make sense of politics, you should model successful politicians as cunning, scheming fellows, who may not have read Machiavelli but in truth don’t need to, because anything they could have learned from The Prince has been acquired in the school of hard experience (if it was not already bred in the bone), otherwise they would not be successful politicians. Rational calculation, in other words, dispassion and cold reason unhindered by moral scruples or emotional commitment, dominate the political arena. Both that judgment and its moral equivalent (that rationality serves the public weal) overlook a significant feature of politics everywhere: Political arenas all the time exhibit behavior that clearly indicates one or another form of mindlessness, both in leaders and among the led. Let us start with the led.

Those who gave George Bush a vote in 1988 solely because the Willie Horton message convinced them that Bush would be the better president were making minimal use of their minds. Rational voters would have wanted evidence that what happened in the Horton case was the norm, or at least part of a statistically significant pattern. They might also want to know what black marks were on record against Bush, who already had a long career in public affairs. Beyond that there is almost an infinity of inquiries that would be needed to make a rational decision about who best deserved to become president.

An “infinity” of inquiries suggests that they are not going to be made. Political strategists seem to assume—I think rightly—that Ordinary Jane and Ordinary Joe are quicker to feel than they are to think; they respond more readily to a message that touches their emotions than to one that requires them to attend to a carefully reasoned argument. Reason does not mobilize support; slogans do. Reasoning is demanding; slogans are comfortably compelling. I will have more to say about this in the chapters on leaders and leadership, but for the moment it is enough to borrow a word from a man talking about Mussolini’s Fascists, and say that all political regimes—democratic, dictatorial, oligarchic, or whatever else—promote diseducation. Some do it more discreetly than others, but all leaders, if they are to gain and use power, must at some stage put a stop to their own critical thoughts and doubts and to critical comment from their followers. No action is possible if questions continue to be asked; no regime can govern without some level of faith and trust and consent. Democratic regimes insist that the consent should be “informed,” but, as the Willie Horton message suggests, cleverly packaged disinformation can also be an effective persuader. Politicians and political institutions need commitment, which is an unthinking, unquestioning, quasi-religious willingness to accept the regime’s fundamental values and beliefs. Leaders want service that comes from the heart, not service doled out according to a cost-benefit reckoning. Of course there is homely wisdom about not being able to fool all of the people all of the time, which may be true if time is taken to mean the longest of long runs. But you can certainly fool enough of the people—”dumb them down”—to get them doing what you want, and to keep up the sham over a long period, sometimes so long that only later generations come to realize what went on behind the smoke and mirrors. That is the tale of any era or any regime or any person when they are viewed from the perspective of a later generation—colonialism, America’s “Manifest Destiny,” the USSR, the Victorians, even, at present, what Henry Kissinger did or failed to do when he was in a position of power.

Diseducation is a policy. A policy implies a policymaker who decides on it and puts it into practice. That supposes two kinds of people in the political arena: those who do the persuading and ruling, and those who are ruled and persuaded. Policymakers, unlike their victims, must—at some stage—use their minds. But rationality is not a simple on/off matter; the word “reason,” like many words that refer to human behavior, has several meanings. A Swedish statesman, Count Oxiensterna, wrote, in a letter to his son in 1648, Nescis, mi fili, quantilla ratione mundus regatur—“You do not understand, my son, how small a part reason plays i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One How to Understand: The Basics
• Part Two How to Lead: Leaders and Followers
• Part Three How to Win: Leaders and Opponents
• Conclusion: The Normative Façade
• Notes
• References
• Index