It is easy to chuckle at the absurdities of unrestrained power. Little wonder that some analysts of these regimes describe them as “autocracies.” That term entered the English language (from the French autocratie and originally Greek autokráteia) in the mid-seventeenth century and came to mean a type of government in which one person has uncontrolled or unlimited power over everybody else, leaving them to wallow in their powerlessness and to draw the grumbling conclusion (as the contemporary Russian joke has it) that autocracy is Putin plus a daily diet of three packets of cheap cigarettes and a liter of vodka. Actually, the old term “autocracy” is misleading, and shouldn’t be used when probing the new despotisms. As we’re about to see, the sobering fact is that quite a few of them show signs of turning themselves into highly resilient “enlightened” despotisms.
Their rulers are arrogant, no doubt. They boast. They peacock. Impeccably plumed with long tails, some fancy themselves as popular leaders walking in the giant footsteps of Moses and Solon, Lycurgus and Cyrus, Philip and Alexander. The new despots like to sidestep institutional rules by exercising their power through trusted and willing vassals and clients. They enjoy triggering uncertainty and confusion that they alone think they know how to resolve. Yet their extravaganzas are not solo performances. Striking is the way the new despotisms survive because they find clever new ways of ensuring that their subjects let them survive. Their resilience is guaranteed by people’s willingness to conform, to do nothing to disrupt the regime and its routines, to nurture blind eyes and cloth ears when faced by dysfunctions and injustices. Durable despotisms are systems of voluntary servitude. As Thomas Paine long ago spotted, despotisms turn their subjects into carriers of despotic ideas, ways of speech, and other symbolic practices that serve to lubricate the machinery of arbitrary power.1
But how in practice do they manage to do this? What are the magical secrets of success of these smart new despotisms? Many outside observers understandably find the questions difficult to answer. It is safe to say that among the new despotisms’ prime sources of success is the way people’s daily lives within these political orders are shaped by connections, webs of patronage protected and managed by government, business, religious bodies, and other gatekeeper organizations. Our muse Montesquieu was on to something important by noting, for instance, that all despotisms foster subjects’ entanglement in intricate spiders’ webs of power. The sway of despots, he pointed out, always requires dependence upon others. Despots thrive by dishing out favors to their dependents. They feed upon the “busy laziness” of diligent sycophants. Despots suppose that their “sovereign grandeur” entitles them to disburse favors to anyone who displays loyalty, regardless of merit, so obsequiousness is rewarded according to the rule that dependents are “made excellent simply by the decision to honor them.”2
The point is bigger than Montesquieu imagined, bigger than the influential English liberal democrat John Stuart Mill, writing a century later, could comprehend when insisting, in a moment of biting sarcasm, that a “good despotism” cultivates to perfection the art of “relaxing and enervating … the thoughts, feelings, and energies of the people.”3 From a distance, and even up close, the webs of patronage that hold together these new despotisms are more-or-less invisible to the naked eye of outside observers. They are certainly difficult to measure. Despotic states are marked by the trimmings and trappings of well-governed polities. They appear to be bound by well-defined laws, institutional rules, and agreed-upon procedures; they have presidents and prime ministers, cabinets and parliaments, chief executives, boards of directors and shareholders. There are courts and laws, police, prisons and probation systems. Daily life is saturated with flows of information emitted by television, newspapers, radio, and digital platforms. These kinds of institutions appear to lay down the rules for the power games people play; they enable and set limits upon what individuals and groups can do. Or so it seems.
The lived reality is different: despotisms are in fact political systems energized by connections. The patronage radiates down and out from the top, all the way to the bottom. Those who govern the new despotisms avoid what has been called the tyrant trap. These are not systems of government by one person whose concerns are merely self-interested, concentrated on their own material desires or those of their family and friends. Quite unlike (say) the Central African Republic under Jean-Bédel Bokassa, or Rafael Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, or Haiti in the grip of the Duvaliers, the new despotisms are not examples of what has been called “sultanism,” discretionary governments run by interfering and whimsical megalomaniacs.
The new despotisms also cannot be defined as tyrannies, at least not in the exact sense that the ancient Greek historian Thucydides described the generations of tyrants that arose in Greece and its Italian tributaries in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. These tyrants of the Hellenic cities, he wrote, were obsessed with “the security of their persons, and the aggrandizement of themselves and their families.”4 The definition offers one clue as to why the despotisms of our age are different: today, those who rule do not rule alone. It is a mistake to see these regimes as tyrannies gripped by tyrants inebriated by absolute power. Journalists commonly say that Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Recip Tayyip Erdoğan are autocrats and dictators, but the truth is that the despots of our age are not old-fashioned pharaohs. The belief that they alone are in charge of state affairs is a delusion, for they are always surrounded and pushed and pulled by clusters of well-organized associates and potential rivals who exert influence and control over their masters. Little wonder that leaders often lament privately how they yearn to lead normal lives of their own choosing; or that if the despot-in-chief is deposed, a basic continuity of sorts prevails. Things carry on, sometimes in their name, despite talk of “handovers” and “transitions” and “new eras.”5 Despots know the dangers of self-aggrandizement. That’s why they give some part of themselves away, as it were, by becoming dedicated practitioners of patronage: huge favors, sums of money, and other resources such as jobs and access to contracts are disbursed through the political order with the help of semiofficial fixers and project managers (Russians call them kuratory, or curators).
The tight links between Hungary’s Viktor Orbán (known locally as the “Viktator”) and the mayor of his hometown, Lőrinc Mészáros, are platinum-plated symbols of this top-down favoritism. Over little more than a decade, Mészáros, a friend of Orbán’s from primary school, went from being a pipefitter on welfare to the fifth-richest oligarch in the country. His business portfolio extends from construction, agriculture, and mineral water production to hotels and golf clubs. His vocal opponent in the 2014 municipal elections died in circumstances that remain mysterious. Mészáros attributed his rise to wealth and fame to “the good Lord, good luck, and the person of Viktor Orbán.”6
Close connections at the top count, but they don’t stop there. If we had a computed tomography (CT) scanner large enough to examine the way things work in the new despotisms, we would see that connections run through the whole body politic. At all levels, in everyday life as much as in the fields of formal law, governmental administration, and business enterprises, cultivated connections to well-placed others really do matter. Unlike twentieth-century totalitarian systems, which cultivated “the atomisation and isolation of the individual,” rendering people “more easily manipulable” by destroying civil society associations and replacing them with “huge and undifferentiated mass organizations,” the new despotisms thrive on privatized connections.7 Contacts, bargaining, deals, kickbacks, favors, and gifts both of money and in kind are a common currency of power.
Many institutions, including government bureaucracies, parliaments, and the courts, are captured by these networks of patronage. Universities are no exception; in Oman, reports an observer, “intellectuals are employed by the university, they read books and at 14:30 they go back home and sleep. The government forbids them to carry out interviews and investigations. And in exchange they earn their salaries without any problem.”8 Patronage decides appointments to office and access to privileges. It enables people to get their hands on goods and services that are needed or in short supply. Under conditions of despotism, formal rules and informal practices are mixed together. And those who govern from the pinnacles of state power dispense government resources to win the loyalty of their client subjects. They treat their official positions as personal prebends, wellsprings of material benefits for themselves, their current supporters, and future potential allies.
Much the same disbursement of patronage happens in the middle and at the bottom of the political hierarchy, where individuals, households, and groups depend upon the informal connections that pervade everyday life. With the help of these connections, people solve problems that formal rules and institutions manifestly fail to address. The upshot is that under conditions of despotism, the functional importance of patron-client connections, as they are technically called, casts doubt on the old social science idea that webs of patronage (clientelism) are a vestige of political underdevelopment, a traditional form of getting things done that modernization and modernity will sweep away. The new despotisms show otherwise: these ultramodern regimes prove that patron-client bonds and ties are neither things that belong to the past nor symptoms of economic and political backwardness. Patron-client connections have a deep functional importance in people’s lives. They transform everybody into beggars of others’ gifts. Goods, services, and money are exchanged among subjects operating within nested power arrangements that are developed and ultimately protected by the political rulers of the system.
Despotisms are systems of patron-client connections. Such a sentence may feel unfriendly, but these are the words needed to make sense of a basic fact of life under conditions of despotism. Matters such as securing a government contract, finding a job, winning promotion, enrolling a child in a prominent school, arranging a quick passport renewal, or dodging an overdue tax payment are typically taken care of by intermediaries, go-betweens, small men, big men, and other assorted fixers and power brokers. They help bail out people in sticky situations. In Uzbekistan there is reportedly widespread reliance on friends, acquaintances, and other networked contacts (called tanish-bilish) when drivers are pulled over by a traffic police officer. The drivers’ first move, typically, is to make a phone call to someone they claim to be prominent. If merely being seen to place the call doesn’t work, they hand the phone to the police officer. If that fails to yield results, more phone calls are made, or a bribe is offered directly to the officer.9
The dynamic of tanish-bilish illustrates the way that favors are typically arranged and dispensed within the mesh of connections that run from top to bottom and from side to side throughout the structures of power framed by despotic states. The point is that who gets how much, when, and how in life is heavily determined, though not by officials following strict bureaucratic rules (pedantocracy, as John Stuart Mill called it). Nor is the distribution of life’s goods primarily decided through open market competition, or by educational merit and achievement, or by shows of hands and secret ballots in public meetings. Things happen because of whom you know, by means of informal personal connections—what Russians call blat and in China are called guanxi. In Turkey, these connections are known as torpil or destek or arka, in Vietnam móc ngoặc, and in Cambodia khsae (“strings”), while in Arabic the preferred word for them is wasta (jokingly known as the sexually transmitted disease of the Arab world).
It’s important to understand that patron-client connections are not to be confused with friendship, charity, or bonding by open and unforced consent. While favors are often arranged by friends and are sometimes infused with charitable qualities, such as helping friends build their house, their basic logic is different. Patron-client bonds are exercises in mutual back-scratching: someone requests, another person offers, and a deal is struck such that something is given or gets done in return for compensation; in the end (runs the logic), all parties benefit. Patron-client connections are power games whose logic seems eminently democratic: everybody in the system, from top to bottom, is involved in daily navigations through the reefs and islands and archipelagos of connections, favors, setbacks, failures, and successes. These navigations are always complicated by official rules and regulations, but the fact is that people inside these despotisms spend a great deal of time bending and breaking those rules, figuring out clever ways of getting stuff and making sure things happen.
Under these conditions, nothing can be taken for granted; outcomes are often uncertain. Despotism might even be defined as a peculiar type of power that intensifies people’s uncertainty about how they lead their lives and how they can best get what they want. Like the fabled labyrinth built by Daedalus for King Minos of Crete, connections fling everybody and everything into a state of suspension. Just one thing is certain: everybody knows that everybody knows that this is how things happen and why, so it seems, things have to be this way and can’t be otherwise.
The point is that connections make the world of despotism go around. In a strange way, their pervasiveness lends them a measure of acceptance and legitimacy. They have a perversely egalitarian feel, in that all actors are equally entangled in behind-the-scenes ways of doing things on a daily basis. What could be more fair-minded than the working formula “I offer you something; when you accept, both of us benefit”? The formula implies that “we’re all in this together,” that there is equal opportunity to extract favors and to make things happen. Its sense of equivalence is reinforced by the fact that everybody’s entanglement within these sticky webs of influence functions as an antidote to corrosive feelings of isolation, loneliness, and uprootedness. In matters ranging from buying food, finding a job, and renting an apartment through purchasing theater tickets, avoiding army conscription, and arranging a funeral, patron-client connections really count. They are talking points; and there are moments, in quiet corners or over a meal, when connections are the butt of rollicking jokes—for instance, about individuals who sleep or drink or lie their way to the top, or second-rate characters who become famous for being famous. But connections are normally serious business. They draw everybody together, into a cat’s cradle of power. In the game of life, all the players are gripped by the sense that they are entangled in a much bigger world of links, tie-ins, and attachments.
This shared sense of interdependence doesn’t automatically make things easy for the subjects of despotism. Attachments dirty lives and reputations; nobody is innocent. Each soul is implicated in nested circles of soiled solidarity. However, strange as it may seem, connections also offer a sort of comfort: they provide the reassuring daily reminder that everyone is in the same boat. Yet inside the belly of the new despotisms, reality is less forgiving. Life can be stressful. It can be dangerous. And there are times when the world of connections resembles pure unreality. Everybody is forced to drink from the waters of incertitude: it feels as if the political order is riddled with ambiguity. People easily lose their bearings. Daily existence is a maze of locked doors, tall hurdles, and high barriers. Much time and energy has to be expended squeezing through loopholes, scraping under fences, scaling walls. Under these trying conditions, staying positive is imperative: when the boat hits the bridge, Chinese people say, there’s still a river (chuán dào qiáo tóu zì rán zhí). There are ways through and around, but avoiding the game altogether is impossible. In this sense, everybody must be on guard. Connections are synonyms for complications, annoying traps, and worrying troubles. That’s why everyone is forced to practice the art of what Arabs call shaatir and Russians call pochuya: sussing out situations.
A complicating factor is that connections among patrons and clients breed corruption. If by corruption is meant illegal or extralegal transfers of money and other resources in exchange for favors, then not only does despotism promote corruption, but corruption feeds despotism. To put things this way may seem tautological, but within the new despotisms getting things done usually involves rewarding people who really matter in any given situation: friends, neighbors, acquaintances, journalists, bureaucrats, legislators, judges, opinion pollsters, celebrities, gangsters, and businesspeople.
Iran’s Mohammad Rasoulof captures the point in his bitingly revealing film A Man of Integrity (2017). Everybody behaves at every point as if they are courtesans of power. From top to bottom, everybody in the system is corrupt. There are willing sellers and willing buyers everywhere. Ethical numbness flourishes.10 It’s normal to be unconcerned about the plight of others who are not family and close friends. Nobody gives a shit. In order to live and to thrive, everybody is drawn into gluey webs of lived lies from an early age. In Iran, a country full of kind and courteous people, young children learn to swear that their fathers do not have a basement booze cellar; teenagers fib about their spent virginity; during fasting months, shopkeepers allow friends and customers to drink, smoke, and eat as usual in their back rooms. The lines between loyalty and betrayal, religiosity and profanity, honor and disgrace are gossamer fine. Under conditions of the new despotism, it is as if everybody lives the proverb in Sa’adi Shirazi’s landmark of Persian literature, The Rose Garden (1258): “Better the lie that keeps the peace than the truth that disrupts.”11 Evils fueled by little fibs consequently spring up everywhere. What seems like an innocent rule—everybody should give each other this, both of us take that, and each of us benefits from giving this and receiving that—has the perverse effect of promoting double-dealing and duplicity, lying and cheating, callousness and outright sadism. Hence the shrewd moral conclusion of Rasoulof’s protagonist: “You are the suppressed,” he says, “or you have to join the suppressor to survive.”
Decadent dynamics of this kind are most pronounced within the connections that flourish in the shadowy criminal worlds of despotism. Naked to the invisible eye and unrecorded by official government statistics, these hidden zones of connections are proof that unchecked power can be dangerous. Payments for the sale of government offices and to seal large business transactions, commissions for arranging procurement deals with government agencies, and transfers of funds from state budgets are examples of kickbacks that operate as a system of negotiated bribery. The payments are rarely isolated, one-off deals. They happen within an organized meshwork of bribery and extortion run by money- and power-hungry entrepreneurs and government poligarchs. Such operators are typically backed by subcontractors and suppliers, stooges, sidekicks, and other corruption brokers who do the routine but sometimes unpleasant work of bridging gaps, fixing or unfixing deals, recovering debts, and providing protection against other criminals.12 Sometimes these underground networks attract the attention of government regulators, prosecutors, judges, and police. But rather than dismantle the networks, or even merely turn a blind eye to such organized bribery, they provide it with protective “roofs” (what Russians call krysha). They benefit like parasites from what is in effect a shadowy mafia state within a state. An example of how things work is the soccer stadium and academy complex built and operated using government funds, tax breaks, and protection money on the private family estate of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán (an ardent football fan) in his home village, Felcsút.13
Life within this murky world of wheeling and dealing is oiled by more than personalized kickbacks. Organized extortion, prostitution, drug running, and protection rackets are usually part of the game. A strange but striking feature of this dark universe of criminal power is that it comes wrapped in local versions of omertà, the mafia code of silence. Things are decided behind closed doors and kept camouflaged. Connections require what Russians call “understanding” (poniatiia): everybody is expected to follow the informal rules of the game. Just as early modern mafia networks refused to tolerate the “private thief,” the new despotisms are not describable in terms of a life-and-death struggle of each against all.14 Rather, the shadowy connections have a kinship-like quality about them. Those who question or transgress the rules of political kinship become vulnerable to verbal threats, blackmail, even acts of physical violence. Well aware that they are taking risks and supping with the devil, they prepare for the worst—they look for escape routes, ways of exfiltration, ratlines. In a world of parasites and thieves, winners can take all, and servility has its limits. Things can end badly. Gang wars are possible. So is bloodless liquidation. And murder happens.
Within this rough reality of organized bribery, some players are evidently much more equal than others. Opportunities and outcomes are unevenly distributed, and structured by chains of command. Mighty are those who manage to position themselves as patrons lording over their clients. Under conditions of despotism, everybody knows that the cards are stacked in favor of the powerful, the organized upper world of big shots. Government leaders, business oligarchs, high-level bureaucrats and their advisors, and senior army and police officers enjoy great privileges. Oligarch capture by state actors is reinforced by state capture by oligarchs. The upshot is that patron-client relations are not just mutually beneficial relationships of exchange but asymmetries of predatory power.
In Hungary, the Orbán government cultivates a nouveau riche, a privileged “bureaucratic new middle class” who offer political fidelity in exchange for beneficial tax exemptions, business opportunities, and good jobs.15 In the nearby Republic of North Macedonia, where facilitation payments and gifts are strictly prohibited under the country’s Law on Prevention of Corruption, businesses regularly pay bribes to get things done: to cut through red tape, win favorable legal rulings, obtain construction permits and government procurement contracts, pay for police protection, and shake off customs restrictions and state-imposed operational delays.16 The slick moves by the Erdoğan government to destroy opponents and transfer assets to political allies, using various state agencies, are equally exemplary of a much broader trend in which the new despotisms cultivate selective access to key resources, such as money, schooling opportunities, reputations, jobs, business deals, thugs, and guns. The point is those who enjoy access within the tangle of patrons, subpatrons, and brokers both desire and functionally require the subordination of clients. It follows that more than a few people find themselves marginalized, their life chances reduced to a low level or even zero.
The despotisms of our age are vertically arranged pyramids of privilege and systems of injustice. Russians call it the sistema, and it has its own rules: get even with your enemies, get rich, and then make it legal. The saying serves as a reminder that just a few people determine the fates of the rest. Despotisms are twenty-first-century iterations of what the ancients called chrysocracy, government by and for the rich. In the language of our time, we could say that the new despotisms are plutocracies, governing arrangements mixed with concentrations of private capital, wealth, and income. These top-down regimes follow to the letter Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s famous first principle: “Let some people get rich first.” Actually, they amend and extend the rule, so as to justify a permanent wealth-based rule greased by the desire for material gain. “Let those who have grown rich keep their wealth” runs the mantra of those skilled at using the machinery of the state to nurture their private business interests. “Let we the rich rule. The first must be first, for we are the source of our country’s wealth, power, greatness, and pride.” Cambodia’s despot-in-chief Hun Sen, who fancies himself as a man of merit (neak mean bon), pushes things further, urging his subjects to “make the bosses rich” because if “a country has no millionaires where can the poor get their money from?”17
This mentality of plutocracy feeds a wide range of practices that work to the systematic advantage of the wealthy. It keeps them at the top of life’s pile. Secret deals based on access to insider information, the bending and exploitation of ambiguous laws and legal loopholes, and the bribing and manipulating of rump legislatures and judiciaries and state bureaucracies are among their favorite tactics. Tax evasion and money-laundering schemes, embezzlement of state funds, and graft and kickback arrangements on government contracts are equally attractive. The net effect of all these arrangements, as former Putin advisor Andrei Illarionov famously pointed out, is a political system that privatizes profits and nationalizes costs. Wits build on the point by saying that all this collective fiddling at the top means that, in effect, the rich enjoy a form of socialism while at the bottom the people are forced to practice the ways of dog-eat-dog capitalism.
The tomfoolery makes one thing clear: when it comes to matters of wealth and power under conditions of despotism, there’s no level playing field, only the rapacious accumulation of wealth and profits in the hands of plutocrats, rich oligarchs known as bosses, mafia, or clans who are always intimately linked to those who govern. Extreme cases of the resulting collaborative predation are often found on the fringes of the world of despotism, as in Cambodia, where a pact among the local ruling elites is guided by “Hunsenomics”: a strange potion of shameless patronage mixed with enforced evictions, foreign capital investment, elite philanthropy, impunity-fueled violence, and large-scale forms of rapacious privatization. In the name of peace, order, sovereignty, free markets, and economic growth, some 45 percent of the country’s landmass was sold off in quick time by the Cambodian People’s Party government led by strongman Hun Sen, who enjoyed the backing of fat cats like Keat Kolney—a politically connected businesswoman renowned for hoodwinking villagers into parting with their land to make way for rubber plantations and honored officially as an oknha (tycoon) for her “contributions to society”—and Teng Bunma, the billionaire entrepreneur and suspected drug trader who, in a fit of rage, shot out the tire of a grounded airliner in a dispute over lost luggage and at gunpoint forced an airline crew to delay takeoff until his late-arriving plutocrat friends were onboard.18
Despotisms elsewhere feature more measured figures like Sultan Qaboos in Oman. In this gas-and-oil regime, he was flanked by a circle of leading Muscat families and large companies, like the Khimji Ramdas group, who are routine beneficiaries of state infrastructure projects and the licensing of overseas companies such as Fujitsu, Pizza Hut, and Philip Morris.19 Despotisms like Singapore have more than their fair share of “three-comma club” members (those whose net worth is figured at $1 billion or more)—figures such as Philip Ng Chee Tat, CEO of the Far East Organization and a real estate baron. There are local moneybags characters known as Chuppies (Chinese yuppies) and HNWIs (high-net-worth individuals), figures that featured in the film Crazy Rich Asians (2018), based on Kevin Kwan’s best-selling novel of the same title. Despotisms provide room for characters such as Turkey’s Alp Gurkan, CEO of the Soma Holding Company, a coal tycoon linked directly to the ruling party’s election tactic of handing out free coal to voters. Gurkan symbolizes Turkey’s grimy underbelly of corrupt links between business tycoons and officials in the Erdoğan government, relationships punctuated by lavish champagne dinners, carefully vetted marriages, luxury holidays in secluded locations, and access to the right people in power.
Iran has its plutocrats too. There is pious Sayyed Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei, the rich second son of Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, who himself presides over Setad, a business juggernaut worth tens of billions of dollars, with stakes in telecommunications, oil, finance, birth control products, and even ostrich farming. And there is Asadollah Asgaroladi, a tycoon whose massive fortune was made through investments in real estate, Chinese retail banks, health care, and exports of agricultural produce such as pistachios, spices, and dried fruit. He was helped by a 1990s trade license deal (supported by the Iranian Ministry of Commerce, at the time run by his brother Habibollah Asgaroladi) that enabled him to buy large quantities of US dollars at a heavily discounted rate and then sell them on at an estimated 300 percent profit.
Last but not least there’s Hassanal Bolkiah, the sultan of Brunei, whose lifestyle of splendor seems materially insatiable. His residential palace, the largest in the world, reportedly contains more than 250 bathrooms, five swimming pools, a mosque, and an air-conditioned stable for 200 ponies. He is the proud owner of fancy hotels, private jets (among them an Airbus A340 fitted with a conference room), and a collection of five thousand luxury cars, including a custom-built, gold-plated Rolls-Royce.
These minted characters are part of a much wider picture. Under conditions of despotism, vast private fortunes are made, unmade, and remade. It’s true things sometimes go wrong for entirely local reasons, as when inner-circle oligarchs fall afoul of the ruling structures and end up in serious legal trouble or behind bars. That was the fate of Chu Hao, Vietnam’s former technology vice minister turned publisher, who was found guilty of publishing books out of step with the party line. And Russian oil oligarch Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, once the wealthiest man in Russia, was charged with fraud, sent to prison, pardoned after an international outcry, and forced to live in exile in Switzerland. These oligarchs may even find themselves on death row, the fate in 2014 of Iran’s richest man, Mahafarid Amir Khosravi, for alleged “corruption on earth,” embezzlement of state funds, money laundering, and bribery.
There are also moments when word gets out that the ruling oligarchs are badly divided, and the titans bicker and quarrel openly. Life at the top then becomes a zero-sum struggle. Their bitter spats and wranglings are made public. Jokes, rumors, and harsh words against the regime soon irrupt and go viral on social media. As the drama unfolds, great surprises often happen. A prominent political oligarch steps forward to call for more “freedom” and “democracy.” This is music to the ears of the street crowds. Foreign journalists flock to the country like hungry birds to a harvest. Their briefings, often superficial, speak of “openings,” “political breakdown,” “revolution,” and a possible “transition to democracy.” Confusion, panic, and excitement spread. The mice begin openly to rebel against the cat. Regime change seems just around the corner. But then—as happened during the so-called Snow Revolution protests against electoral corruption in Moscow in 2011 and the bread riots that erupted in Iran in late 2017—the pandemonium fades. The crumbling castle is repaired. Order is restored. Police dressed in riot gear take care of business: swooping down onto their prey, they clear the streets, breaking limbs and cracking heads. Intense behind-the-scenes political jockeying yields a new compromise among the big power players. The rich oligarchs get real and come to their senses, resembling the sick drunkards from the parable by the eighteenth-century Polish writer Ignacy Krasicki, who were forced temporarily to give up drink so they could carry on drinking.20 The oligarchs’ political noses tell them that preservation of the ruling order is their number-one priority. This necessitates high-level losers: political barons who suffer demotion, in extremis a prime minister or president forced to resign. The amputations help the body politic recover, in reshaped form. The governing arrangements are rescued by a realignment of forces. The political rulers, business oligarchs, and their faceless allies within the various state ministries are bound together anew. The local despotism survives, but on a different and more durable footing. What looked like the end of the despotism turns out to be its dynamic renewal.
The capacity of rich plutocrats to retain their grip in these exceptional situations is remarkable, and it shows just how misleading is the commonplace saying that money makes the world of the new despotisms go round. In fact, these despotisms are labyrinthine systems of government in which politics is always the deciding factor. Within these systems—which in reality are a strange new species of capitalism, a type of economy that morphs humans into buyable and sellable commodities—markets are hardly free or competitive. To speak in the language of economists, competition is typically impure. True, there are pockets of purer unregulated capitalism in the form of market competition, such as among local traders. Despotisms are dual economies. That means that at the peripheries of economic life there is space for small- and medium-sized enterprises, for instance open markets in taxis, restaurants, street food (Vietnam’s famous buôn bán and chọ’ cóc spring to mind), agriculture, and tourism; bazaar, souk, and (in Kazakhstan) baraholka merchants selling brightly colored clothing, gold and silver jewelry, electrical equipment, and antiques inside settings shaped by arches and winding alleyways, fast-food cafes and places of worship. Under conditions of despotism, this kind of petty capitalism is supported and often encouraged, yet small businesses are generally marginal and parasitic upon the wider political economy that is best described as a new kind of state capitalism.21
What does this phrase mean? Simply put, the new despotisms are big-business states. They are a novel brand of capitalism that in practice blurs the boundaries between market and state, between economy and politics. Under conditions of state capitalism, the means of investment, production, and exchange are heavily controlled by state officials, who are themselves closely connected with big-business circles. Despotisms are heavily regulated regimes of accumulation. High-ranking officials sit on the boards of large state-run and private companies. Business oligarchs bribe state officials in order to do business, making these officials de facto participants in the management process, almost always to the detriment of uncorrupted corporate governance. Government officials help run state-owned companies for private gain, amassing enormous wealth, although they do what they can to conceal their riches from the public in order to maintain the illusion that they are on some level public servants. Government officials and private business tycoons dine at the same tables and enjoy strategic power positions together in sovereign wealth fund management schemes (state-controlled investment portfolios), state-owned enterprises, and privately owned corporations operating in such fields as the production of carbon- and solar-based energy, military weapons and equipment, and telecommunications.
The state is meanwhile the champion of economic growth and the principal distributor of both its fruits and its environmental consequences. It is the reliable buddy of big business. While bitter tensions sometimes erupt when state officials are tempted to squeeze private companies, so violating the principle of what the Chinese call “co-management by state-owned enterprises and private firms” (gōng sī hé yíng), government generally refrains from issuing decrees covering who should produce what, when, and how. There are moments, as in the live-streamed retrial of the oligarch Gu Chujun by the Shenzhen Supreme People’s Court, when the state even strives hard to be seen as the legal defender of property rights.22 The point is that the state provides the broad functional framework of the big-business environment—for instance, through the provision of cheap loans, as in Russia, where giant state banks such as Sberbank, VTB, VEB, and Gazprombank control more than half of the country’s banking assets.23 State banking loans are in effect subsidies for companies and whole industries, granting them a competitive edge. Government also places heavy restrictions on outside investment and pressures foreign companies to share locally their technologies and production methods. The state is heavily involved in local and global stock markets and generally promotes global investment and trade. It extracts taxes from the population, decides where to allocate or reinvest profits, and negotiates international loans, remittances, and various forms of foreign aid.
Note that, within the new despotisms, government-controlled companies are strategically important players, and leading businesses must be on good terms with powerful politicians and officials. Despotisms are not states that have been kidnapped by business but the converse: such states, armed with “a stick” (Vladimir Putin), specialize in what Russian analysts call business capture. Despotisms make property rights thoroughly conditional upon political favors. That means there is no independent business community, no bourgeoisie in the sense described and analyzed by Karl Marx and other European political economists. Business and government are mingled and mashed together. Note as well that the new despotisms are not closed economies, as in the former Soviet Union, where within an imperial setting the state owned and controlled the means of investment, production, and exchange and defended the whole political economy against outside capitalist forces. The new despotisms do not practice autarky in this sense. Their heavily regulated systems of state capitalism do discriminate against foreign investment in certain locally sensitive fields, such as telecommunications and the handling of big data, but they are comparatively open to the world. They actively participate in regional and global markets, and many of their “national champions”—companies like Russia’s Gazprom, the chief provider of natural gas to the European Union, or Vietnam’s military-run, state-owned telecommunications giant Viettel, which does business on three continents under the slogan “Say it your way”—are competitive on a global scale.
The entanglement of business and government under conditions of despotism drives home the point that capitalism in despotic form is a power system that cares less for public good and much more for private gain. Despotism is wealth-powered rule lubricated by the desire for material gain. Little wonder that wealth and income patterns are so skewed in favor of the rich. Defined by lopsided patterns of property ownership, wealth, and income, the new despotisms are in effect wealth creation and protection rackets for the privileged. Inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, runs high (although official figures are typically unreliable because of incomplete and doctored data). The rich care first and foremost about manipulating the machinery of the state and doing deals that serve the growth of their business interests and their wealth holdings. The wheeling and dealing are for the most part hidden from the public eye. They go on behind closed doors, with investigative journalists nowhere to be seen.
The rich hide behind tall walls and gated communities. They mix within narrow social circles. They have the mentality of slave owners: their self-esteem rests upon the degradation of others. Sure that the elite must remain few in number, they wrap themselves in upbeat talk of the national interest and national solidarity. They speak of the need to respect the law and of protection from foreign enemies. The plutocrats talk hypocritically of divine inspiration and make allusions to climbing Jacob’s ladder to heaven; they yammer on about the need for anti-imperialism or ethnic mobilization, and there’s lots of post-truth talk of the need for benevolence and “serving the people.” In China, officials peddle words and phrases such as “socialism,” “harmonious society,” “ancient Chinese civilization,” and the “China dream.” There’s abundant talk of the “people” and “democracy.” But none of this stylized language bears much relationship to the harsher reality in which institutions, connections, and everyday life are marked by great gaps between the rich and the rest.
Cutthroat struggles for political and economic advantage are commonplace. Rent-seeking, dark money corruption, and cronyism are normal, especially at the summits of governmental power.24 In countries such as Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, despots live parasitically off the earnings and profits of state capitalist enterprises. They stash huge sums of cash in offshore accounts; Kazakh tax dodgers have deposited outside the country an estimated $138 billion in individual assets, more than four times the country’s estimated state revenues.25 Price, profit, and tax considerations are of little concern to them; all they care about is feathering their nests with riches extracted and stolen using all possible means.
The details reveal a more general pattern whereby despots’ first priority is to manipulate the machinery of the state to serve their own financial interests. Private business interests do the same: their aim is to sidle up to the governing institutions in order better to extract resources and profits from their state patrons. Consider the case of China, where each week, on average, two new billionaires are minted, thanks to a combination of rapid urbanization, productivity growth, leveraged new technologies, and the growth of financial services, retail, and health care industries. In 2017 the number of Chinese billionaires reached 373, one-fifth of the world’s total.26 China has now overtaken the United States as the country where wealth is created at the fastest rate. Given these trends, it is not surprising that many of the three thousand Party-appointed members of China’s National People’s Congress are filthy rich by both Chinese and global standards. Despite the talk of socialism, the fifty richest delegates are collectively sixty times wealthier than the fifty richest members of the US Congress. The combined net worth of these Chinese delegates is estimated at $463.8 billion, more than the annual economic output of Austria.27
Wealthy oligarchs like Aleksey Mordashov (co-owner of the world’s largest tourism company, TUI Group) and Leonid Mikhelson (a natural gas and petrochemical tycoon) similarly enjoy political prominence in Russia, where the executive arm of the state, the dominant force in the whole political order, jealously protects the interests of big business and guards itself against challenges from independent-minded judges, voters, and journalists.28 While the regime selectively displays some market economy features, it allows these to operate only to the extent that they benefit, or do not harm, a ruling group that is corrupt to the bone. In power-sharing constitutional democracies that enjoy a robustly independent judiciary, the ruling group would be subject to criminal prosecution, with hefty fines or imprisonment. Yet in Russia, as well as in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, wealthy oligarchs escape these elements of monitory democracy. The plutocrats are serial tax dodgers. They steal taxation revenues, practice large-scale graft and kickbacks on major contracts, use insider information, engage in influence peddling, and manipulate ambiguous laws and pliant courts.
These particular countries are no exception to the general rule that the new despotisms are larcenous states, more or less. Their founding often involved brazen theft and brutality, as for instance during the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the breakdown of law and order, the freeing of prices, and wealth-grabbing through privatization suddenly produced a new class of hyperrich oligarchs. In the space of just a few years, the size of the Russian economy shrank by half. A decade into the transition away from totalitarian rule, amid top-level talk of “rule by the people” (narodovlastie), organized criminality controlled an estimated 25 percent of Russia’s gross national income.29 Thuggery, kidnappings, protection rackets, and hit-squad murders (the cheapest way to deal with business opponents) flourished. More than half of the oligarchs who acquired their status during the postcommunist years under Boris Yeltsin lost their wealth or their lives. Yet the number of billionaires tripled. Half of the country’s wealth was expropriated by 10 percent of the population. The lives of millions of citizens were badly damaged. Some lost their entire life savings, and their shirts and skirts, in just a matter of weeks. On the streets of Moscow, not surprisingly, the disgruntled reportedly denounced privatization as “grab-it-ization” (prikhvatizatsiya) and understandably cursed democracy as “shitocracy” (dermokratizatsiya).30
Concentrated wealth in the hands of poligarchs is a defining feature of the despotisms, which is why, to put things bluntly, these systems of power specialize in dishing out harms, if by harmful acts we mean the transference to the ruled of the corruption that the rulers bear in themselves. Their machineries of government are stacked heavily in favor of private splendor and the protection of plutocrats, who in effect take the rest of the population for a ride. There are despotisms, Qatar and Saudi Arabia for instance, where a big majority of subjects are migrant workers who are typically treated as indentured wage slaves in what are in effect systems of brown apartheid. Yet it is a mistake to think of the new despotisms as large-scale brazen stealing machines. They are not tin-pot kleptocracies or “gangster states” that enable a few rich people and their families to operate an “organized crime ring masquerading as a state” that robs the rest of the population blind.31
They have a kleptocratic quality, certainly, but despotisms learn to operate in more subtle ways, in effect by concealing their larcenous features through crafty statecraft. An important way they do this is by adopting measures designed to imbue the bulk of the population with the vague feeling that over time their standards of living are improving. State sovereign wealth schemes backed by substantial reserves of hard currency and gold are among the favored strategies. So are state infrastructure projects of the kind promoted in Putin’s Russia, which in recent years built stadiums for the 2018 World Cup, constructed a new ring road around Moscow, and modernized the Trans-Siberian and Baikal-Amur railways. These projects are not just investment and wealth-generation schemes. They have propaganda value for the regime. Guided by the principle that the subjects of power need to be calmed, reassured, persuaded, and politically seduced through managed communication, these schemes suppose that reality is not given, but made. That means in practice that public consent must be engineered by presenting the wealth funds and their linked infrastructure projects in the most favorable light. Old Machiavelli warned that a ruthless prince must do everything to avoid stirring up popular resistance by “interfering with the property of his citizens and subjects or with their women.” Clever princes surprise their subjects with gifts. “Nothing causes a prince to be so much esteemed as great enterprises and giving proof of prowess,” he noted.32 Impressing their subjects with breathtaking gifts is exactly what the new despotisms do.
Despotic power wants to be seen as munificent. It purports to give, not take; to reward, rather than to rob. The Kazakh government’s construction from scratch of a brand-new capital city, Nur-Sultan, exemplifies this gifting. The city features flashy grand signature buildings that are monuments to riches and repression: a glass pyramid, towering apartments, a Disney version of the US White House, a finance ministry shaped like a US dollar bill, and a vaselike tower with a ball on top that the president apparently designed on the back of a napkin during a state dinner. There’s also the Norman Foster–designed Khan Shatyr shopping center; housed inside the world’s largest marquee, it features a temperature-controlled artificial beach with sand imported from the Maldives.
Exemplary as well is the Saudi government’s effort to stem the decline of petroleum revenues by adopting a much-publicized reform blueprint known as Vision 2030, backed by a showpiece $2 trillion Public Investment Fund. Planned to be twice the size of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, currently the world’s largest, the Saudi fund includes the assets of the giant state-owned oil firm Aramco and private equity funds generated through global partnerships with robotics and artificial intelligence companies such as Japan’s Softbank and giant US health care and real estate equity firms such as Blackstone. The Public Investment Fund has something for everyone. In the desert sands of the country’s northwest, the state is erecting a $500 billion city called Neom that is designed to be a carbon-neutral innovation hub for engineering, science, and technology firms. The fund has launched an entertainment investment company to oversee the development of a massive theme park outside the capital, Riyadh, and to incubate companies that cater to the needs and wants of Saudi youth. The Public Investment Fund is backing small and medium-sized businesses, setting up real estate companies to build new hotels at the holy pilgrimage sites in Mecca and Medina, and carving out new beachfront resorts and artificial island retreats in the Red Sea, where women can dress, move, and mingle among fellow subjects more freely than elsewhere in the kingdom.
Government-provided handouts and welfare programs are also among the favored strategies of despots. These are not to be understood as welfare state measures cross-linked to guaranteed democratic entitlements and rights of citizens, as applied during the brief Keynesian welfare state capitalism of the mid-twentieth century in countries such as Britain, Germany, and Canada.33 Rather, these handouts and programs have a vassalage quality, resembling the medieval European practice of lords handing out benefice in exchange for their subjects’ loyalty. Once upon a time, perquisites functioned to strengthen the bonds of servitude between rulers and ruled. Those who governed paid special attention to the ruled in order to turn them into followers. Allegiance of subjects to the system was everything. Satisfying them was imperative. In the much-changed circumstances of the twenty-first century, despots are well aware that their subjects are capable of restlessness and disloyalty. The allegiance of the powerless must be bought using a range of welfare measures designed to guarantee that the vassal subjects serve their lords in return for honores and beneficia, as they were called during the early medieval period.
In those times, there were ceremonies known as commendatio in which bareheaded and unarmed vassals knelt respectfully before their lords, clasped their hands to signal their unconditional submission, then extended their hands toward the lord. The master reciprocated by grasping the hands of their vassals, thus affirming through an act of homage (in Latin it was called the immixtio manuum and in German the Handgang) that lord and vassal had entered into a sacred relationship of mutual dependency at once protective and possessive.
The despotisms of our age dispense with such ornate rituals, but their preoccupation with vassalage and the loyalty of their vassal subjects is strikingly similar. Surplus government revenues generated by agriculture, mining, and energy exports certainly come in handy in dampening opposition and transforming people into subjects, subordinates, and servants. Loyalty is purchased. An example is the way the Arab uprisings during 2011 prompted the despotisms of the region to bump up welfare payments in an effort to calm nerves and head off social resistance.34 The Saudi monarchy nearly doubled state spending by investing a whopping $130 billion in salary increases for state officials, job-creation schemes, a minimum wage for Saudi workers, and infrastructure development projects. Public employees and military personnel in Qatar received generous pay and benefit increases. The government of Jordan kept food and fuel prices low while boosting public salaries and job creation. Kuwait’s regime, under Sheikh al-Sabah, granted each citizen a lump-sum payment of $3,500 along with free foodstuffs for a year. With the help of the United States, the despotisms rallied to the side of their endangered neighbors. In Bahrain, where a major social uprising in fact took place, grievances linked to joblessness and inequality were countered by the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council with military intervention followed by a $20 billion aid package to Bahrain and Oman that looked rather like a regional Marshall Plan in support of despotism, not democracy.
The vassalage is practiced by other despotisms on a more permanent basis. The government of Singapore regularly issues cash payments such as GST Vouchers, lump-sum bonuses to civil servants, and baby-bonus payouts. In Russia, the lives of an estimated 50 percent of the population are primarily dependent on direct or indirect payments provided by the regime. State expenditure in Oman is around 30 percent of GDP, among the highest rates in the world. Vast oil rents have been splurged on schools, health centers, asphalted roads, and special one-time payments, such as increased social security family allowances and raises in basic salaries for state employees.
The People’s Republic of China is perhaps the most developed case of popular dependency on government. State provision of public goods and services is a defining feature of daily life under one-party rule. There are huge social and regional inequalities in what the state provides (average pension payments for a retired state employee are around fifty times greater than for an elderly rural dweller), and education spending favors urban elites. Large-scale measures such as health care and protection for the unemployed fail to alter the fact that the country is a species of state capitalism that feeds local billionaires. And yet the rulers of China plausibly lay claim to important social achievements, such as the massive expansion of higher education and the lifting since the 1980s of perhaps 200–300 million people above the poverty line (given China’s share of our planet’s population, that achievement accounts for three-quarters of the global reduction of extreme poverty during the past four decades). Less well known are the efforts by the central government to consolidate social policy provisions that first appeared in piecemeal fashion during early reforms under Deng Xiaoping. Major recent innovations include the adoption of a single national pension plan for urban areas, improving rural health care coverage, standardizing unemployment insurance, the introduction of trilingual education policies in some ethnic-minority regions, equalizing social welfare spending across provinces, and HIV / AIDS awareness programs. Official statistics show that state spending on health care, education, and pensions increased from 6.3 percent of GDP in 2007 to 11.6 percent in 2016—faster than spending on policing and military programs.35
The social reforms have reinforced the Party state’s deep involvement in economic life, to the point where the state / economy distinction makes little or no sense. Statistics are notoriously unreliable—official data in China is often “man-made” and “for reference only,” Premier Li Keqiang confessed with a smile over dinner with the United States ambassador—but available figures suggest that the Chinese government extracts through taxation a minimum of 25 to 30 percent of GDP.36 The high-tax regime is succored by revenue extracted from the profits of state-owned enterprises, land transactions, social insurance payments, and party and union membership dues. Social spending is also covered by revenues generated from household savings, which run at the highest rate in the world and are heavily taxed (at a rate of around 20 percent) when deposited in banks. Local governments, meanwhile, borrow heavily to pay for local social services; they also extract levies and fees from land sales, development projects, and other schemes. The combined effect is that in the name of “socialism,” “development,” and “democracy,” nearly two-thirds of GDP is consumed by the Chinese state, “second to none in its extraction and taxation.”37
The lavish megaprojects and welfare schemes hosted by the new despotisms help us understand why they are not to be thought of as tin-pot plutocracies that rob their dependents blind. These are state capitalist systems well aware that capitalism cannot survive unless its losers feel included. Fashionable talk of kleptocracy is doubtful for another reason: the most stable despotisms nurture a sizable middle class that usually lends its loyal support to the political order. We could say that despotism specializes in promoting embourgeoisement, and it often does so with important local and cross-border effects. These middle classes live in interconnected cities such as Guangzhou, Shanghai, Bandar Seri Begawan, Moscow, Budapest, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, and Dubai, where they can be seen rubbing shoulders in airport lounges, fancy hotels, and shops. They are usually educated to at least the secondary level and enjoy the use of credit cards (on Huawei phones, if they are Chinese). They own or rent a house or comfortable apartment, and they have some spare cash to spend on themselves and their family.
When measured by Marxist standards, they are a motley crew. They are hardly a class at all. They comprise salaried and self-employed people, including medical doctors, small business entrepreneurs, journalists, academics, executives of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), administrators, and functionaries in state and private bureaucracies. The middle classes of the new despotisms usually constitute only a minority of the population (around 15 percent in Vietnam, 20 percent in Russia, 40 percent in Turkey), but they have a definite public visibility and they are certainly a political force to be reckoned with. Who exactly belongs in the category of the middle class is of course a matter of wrangling among scholars and statisticians. Putting a firm figure on the definition (such as a $5,000 annual income) makes little sense, if only because of great variations in the standard of middle-class living among despotisms. The Hungarian middle classes live more comfortably than, say, their counterparts in Vietnam and Uzbekistan. Other experts therefore say it is better to define middle classes as people who in matters of consumption find themselves between the 20th and 80th percentiles of the population, or whose per capita income stands between 0.75 and 1.25 times that of other people. This makes more sense, since what must be remembered is that being middle-class is a felt disposition. Middle classes sense that they live somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy of power, wealth, and status. They hold certain attitudes and values in common, intermingle and intermarry, and feel that ultimately their lives are wedged between the rich and the poor of their society.
Classic discussions of the middle class typically underscore its good sense and moderation. Aristotle thought those who owned “a moderate and adequate property” would be “most ready to listen to reason.” The middle class would be the “steadiest element” and “least eager for change” within any given city-based polity. Self-government “is attainable in those states where there is a large middle class,” he added.38 His observation underpinned confident claims by later observers that the middle classes usually opt for self-government of the people. “No bourgeoisie, no democracy” runs a famous formulation. The same idea has featured in historians’ descriptions of classic (European) middle-class bourgeois virtues, which were said to be centered on such norms as work, private property, thrift, religious commitment, patriarchal family life, public respectability, and disciplined order. Bourgeois culture also emphasized the importance of education, music and literature, table manners, titles and dress, and representative government.39
The Atlantic-region middle classes were bulwarks of power-sharing democracy, and they remain so, according to some current-day observers. They acknowledge that these middle classes are sometimes tempted to “align themselves with authoritarian rulers who promise stability and property rights protection.” Yet more usual and striking is their support for legal rules and institutions that guard their property, civil rights and daily lives from predatory government. Finding themselves in the social middle inclines them to moderation and balance. That is why they like the rotation of representatives and governments by the pendulum swings offered by free and fair elections. Especially when their numbers are large, and they command substantial public influence and respect, “a broad middle-class” is “extremely helpful” in sustaining “liberal democracy.” The conclusion: “Middle-class societies, as opposed to societies with a middle class, are the bedrock of democracy.”40 Or so runs the argument.
It turns out the middle classes of the new despotisms defy modern social science predictions. Their education, occupations, and assets incline them to be loyal to the system; they show few signs of wanting to walk in the footsteps of the independent-minded, property-owning citizens of the early modern period. Why? How do these middle classes think? What is their philosophy of life?
Generalizations are hazardous. Minimally, one thing is clear: these middling classes don’t have a common life philosophy. Fickle pragmatists, they are skilled at navigating mazes of connections. They value elasticity when handling the unexpected. They’re good at mental acrobatics and at practical writhing and wriggling. They scale walls, unlock doors, and open windows of opportunity. The middle classes have few scruples. Their ranks contain more than a few pedants, hairsplitters, and hard-boiled skeptics. They can also be hardheaded; they are prone to feel their reality is the only reality that counts. They can be “simple-minded avoiders of complexity,” but this disposition is both a product and a support of despotism, not a “natural variation in human ‘political character’ ” that is “largely heritable and relatively immutable.”41 And the middle classes are opportunists. When they speak about being middle-class, they say it is less about actual wealth and more a mindset that believes in education, hard work, personal resolve, and (of course) whom you know. Sometimes their willful ignorance about things begets a sense of innocence. They scoff at the privileges of the rich and kick down at the poor, who fail, they say, because they lack guts and gumption sufficient to change their lives.
These middle classes are self-employed, run small businesses, and hold down professional jobs. They dream of a lifestyle where things are comfortable—where, as the Turks say, their salt is dry (tuzu kuru). In reality they earn enough to live comfortably, not extravagantly, and they expect their children to do well in life. In families with children, both parents usually work and their hours are typically long, which means they rely on relatives or hire domestic help such as a housecleaner and cook. Pressed for time, they still manage to squeeze annual vacations into their busy schedules. They have access to reasonable medical care, and they own a car or two or a scooter. They enjoy good dinners with friends and family. They are not especially religious, though they find Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and other forms of spirituality congenial. Their consumption of alcohol and drugs isn’t unknown. It would be unfair to dub them “philistines” (as Hannah Arendt said of the broken-down bourgeoisie of totalitarian regimes) marked by nothing more than “single-minded devotion to matters of family and career.”42
These middle classes yearn for a good and better life. They want it to be fulfilling and fun. Yet they often complain, though with a wry sense of humor. They are the first to laugh at the old joke that when optimists say a bottle is half full and pessimists think it is half empty, the middle classes conclude the bottle is fully empty. Their humor and cynicism are not to be underestimated, nor is their melancholia. In conversation, their pulses often seem unexcited by pros and cons. They sometimes feel jaded, especially when gripped by the feeling that they’re on their own; and there are times when they express their irritability about the world because it feels as though the whole system is so rigged that the best thing to do is get on with their own lives.
When it comes to democracy, the fickleness of these middle classes is remarkable. Indulging private life, skilled at creating sanctuaries for themselves and their families and friends, happy in the hives of their homes, they watch what they say and to whom. Life under conditions of despotism is a constant masquerade. Keeping silent about personal convictions is part of the chess game of existence. There are moments when they applaud their leaders, as if they really believe in the whole system. They sometimes complain about excessive state meddling in their lives, yet they admit that their daily lives are heavily dependent on state policies, regulations, and edicts. They are often the first to defend state-enforced law and order. They say they like democracy but in the next breath they curse the “corruption” of politicians and the disorder born of “politics.”
Their reticence about power-sharing democracy and their taste for tough leadership and top-down rule should come as no surprise. Writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, the astute early analyst of democracy Alexis de Tocqueville feared the advent of a peculiarly modern form of “democratic despotism” backed by a bourgeoisie and its selfish individualism and live-for-today materialism. The coming despotism would encourage “citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves.” Its foundation would be a middle class feeding upon their “bourgeois pot of stew” and “constantly circling for petty pleasures,” a stratum of so-called citizens willing to embrace an “immense tutelary power” that treats its subjects as “perpetual children,” as a “flock of timid and industrious animals” in need of a shepherd.43
Tocqueville’s warning that the sheepish middle classes would plump for despotism proved prescient. One lesson of the new despotism is that the middle classes have no instinctual love of open power-sharing. Guided by a mixture of motives, including greed, professional and family honor, respectability, and anxiety about the future, they seem happy to be kidnapped by state rulers, willing (as per the Stockholm syndrome) to be bought off with lavish services, cash payments, and invisible benefits such as being left alone to live their lives. That’s true for state-revenue-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Kuwait, the UAE, and Iran. It is equally true of countries such as Russia, Vietnam, and China, whose expanding middle classes, all things considered, definitely have a taste for regime stability plus private comforts. Protected by the “immense tutelary power” of the state, they strive after “petty pleasures” centered on the trimmings and trappings of conspicuous consumption. In bold contrast to the “uniformly gray and uniformly indigent” Soviet-type regimes of the twentieth century, plagued as they were by the “chronic lack of consumer goods” and cursed by products of “a single second-rate quality,” the despotisms of the twenty-first century are consumer paradises, at least for some.44 Priority is given by governments to paving the road to paradise, as in Turkey, where the number of shopping malls jumped nearly eightfold during the first two decades of rule by Erdoğan. Little wonder that shopping is a source of middle-class spiritual comfort. Shopping malls and online retail portals are places of pilgrimage, glitzy labyrinths of color and sound designed to dazzle pilgrims into lingering in expectation, to spend to the hilt so as to earn absolution through consumption. From within these temples they chant the litanies of Singles Day (China), Harajome (Iran), and Russian Black Friday, with their refrains of “hurry, buy now, everything must go.” Kitchen gadgets, paintings for the walls of the living room, designer clothes, smartphones, same-day delivery services, thirty-day return policies, free size exchanges, and 24 / 7 customer service support are their salvation.