Paths To Power

Some thoughts from the past on the next four years

When we look at the most studied world leaders of the past, there’s no shortage of revisionist history as to how they came to and used power. When biographers look back through the window of an outcome and try to assign things to its cause in arrears we get an often untrue story with cherry picked events that fit a biased view of what’s actually happened.

Joseph Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin warns of narrative based tropes on a recent episode of the podcast Conversations With Tyler (Cowen).

COWEN: Do you think Georgian blood feud culture influenced Stalin at all in this?

KOTKIN: Yes. So, there were a lot of Georgians and there’s one Stalin. People argue that he got into fights in the schoolyard, and that the fights were nasty, and therefore he became a certain type of person. They argue that his father beat him, and therefore he became a certain type of person. The problem with arguments like that, Tyler, is that I got into fights in the schoolyard when I was his age. People beat me up because I was a half Catholic, half Jew at a Catholic school.

I was small, and people knew that they could maybe take me on bully-style because I wasn’t as big as they were. My father also disciplined me with the proverbial belt when I got out of hand. I didn’t go on to collectivize agriculture. I’m not responsible for the deaths of 18 to 20 million people. So, you’re not going to be able to explain Stalin as a phenomenon or even as a personality with those types of tropes.

What explains Stalin, at least in my view, what I argued and continue to argue in the biography, is the experience of getting into power and then exercising power. It’s building and running the dictatorship. It’s managing Russian power in the world that makes Stalin who he is, not because there’s some kind of DNA there. I don’t go for cultural DNA–like arguments.

In Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi, Thomas Weber argues a similar point. The creation of the Nazi regime was not structurally inevitable. Instead it required Hitler specifically to be the sort of leader he became through a process of gaining power by coercion, manipulation and ultimately violence. Starting with the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s gains would never be too far from a process of intimidation with a common recourse of violence. There was no lightning bolt moment that changed who he was in prison afterward the Putsch arrest or after he became Chancellor. Instead, Weber writes Hitler came to "refine his approach to integrate intimidation and propaganda with the veneer of legitimacy.” As he leaned more on violence and intimidation, he grew in power and influence. And so his regime would use it as a primary means of governing. Had it not been effective at the times and in the ways it was used, history may have been different.

Moving away from despotic murderous autocrats, Robert A. Caro’s landmark The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power illustrates a similar pattern of different base substance. Johnson coming to power in poor, rural Texas hill country during the New Deal required a balance of populist rhetoric, patronage and moral flexibility. The end game was to create a center of political power in the Texas State House then in Congress and then on to the White House that was built on a patronage principle where nearly everything was negotiable. True to the pattern, Johnson governed using the same political levers he pulled to get into the White House with the full flexibility of a moral ambivalence that left him free to bargain for the political gains of the Great Society while continuing an escalation of force in Vietnam. ““He had no ideology, no philosophy; he was interested in winning, not in issues.” Caro writes.

The winning here was of course not wars in Southeast Asia or durable civil rights gains for Americans. It was winning elections. Winning elections, for himself and others, was how Johnson became who he was. How he came to power was how he used it once in power. And once he knew he couldn’t win another one, he went away.

Top of mind for many of us today is exactly what we’re going to get out of the next four years. President Trump has held uncontested power over conservative American politics for a decade. When he leaves the White House his position atop the Republican party will have spanned 14 years. There will be a longer time passed from Trump’s first day in the White House to his last than FDR’s. Which makes Donald Trump one of the most successful politicians in American history, like it or not. Acknowledging the rare political power he’s had is likely very important to understanding how he’ll govern again. That which brought him to prominence as a real estate developer then media personality is the same thing that brought him to power in politics; over the top, consistent, personality driven branding and marketing.

What’s more interesting and maybe perhaps material to the next four years is what hasn’t helped him over the last decade. Which actually says something positive about the American political system. Contrary to critics assertions, violence or corruption have not been particularly successful Trump tools. The riot of January 6th did not keep him in power nor has it been anything other than a political albatross his supporters would rather we’d all forget. The Trump movement was at an all time low in the months afterward. It was at its height after he was a victim, not the aggressor. Political violence has never been a winning part of the Trump machine. And so I suspect we won’t see it again if he can help it.

As for corruption? It’s hard to argue that it’s not there. But I’ve long since argued his inability to follow the rules was a weakness, not a strength. And that has proven to be clear so far. None of his legal woes helped his cause. He didn’t steal any elections. When he tried, he failed and people went to jail. His popularity is despite that failure, not because of it. It’s fair to say he could have suffered more consequences. But that’s not the same thing as saying it’s a source of strength.

What is at the center of the Trump vibe shift that has brought him back to the White House is that there are simply many people with conservative beliefs. And they weren’t willing to abandon them forever because they couldn’t live with the personal conduct of the head of American conservative politics. True to who he’s been for 40 years in the public, Trump was never going to quietly go away. One can hide out in the shadows for one cycle of American politics in hopes that DT would wander off. But one won’t stay away forever. Or 14 years which is forever in politics. Once it was clear Trump was not going to abandon the conservative message and that he was never going to be dislodged from his spot as long as he was still upright, more mainstream conservatives have returned to the camp.

I’ll never forget what an old friend and former Obama White House staffer told me about the first turn over. He didn’t even turn over with anyone. No one showed up for the new administration. Because no one wanted to be a part of what could have been a short and embarrassing interlude into the wilderness of crazy. That’s not the case any more. No matter what you think about Elon Musk, he’s better positioned to help Americans and less frightening to most of us than Steve Bannon. And so one potential outcome is that the next four years will seem less unhinged than they were the first four. But I’ve learned over the last decade or so of writing, being right about predictions isn’t really my thing.