A Return to the Rules for Rulers

Half a dozen or so years back I posted a video from CGP Grey with the title The Rules for Rulers.  I did so without much in the way of comment back then.  It was illuminating then and all the more so now.  If you have some time I suggest you spend the 18 minutes needed to watch it.

The video is wholly based on The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, which Grey completely fails to acknowledge in the video itself… perhaps a touch of his own ego showing?  Yes, I know he links to it in the video notes, but how many people even look at those?   I feel that if you crib your entire video from pretty much a single source you ought to mention it in the video.

Still, I will give Grey credit for distilling the essentials of the book into a pretty easy to digest 18 minute video.  Grey is not without talent.  I also grabbed the book and read that and it goes into greater depth with real world examples, as one might expect.  You can get away with watching the video, but the book is where the real meat it.

Anyway, as you might expect, I went back to this video for a refresher on power, because power in democracies is covered as well.  The core element are what the video refers to as the “keys to power,” of which there are few in dictatorships… the tax collector, the army, and the police in the brief example… and many in a fully formed democracy like our own. (Pause for some dope to claim we’re a republic because they don’t understand what voting is.)

No leader rules alone.  To lead you must control sufficient keys to power, and to control them you must pay them off in some way.

So the question in my head on reviewing the video is which keys to power the two main candidates in the recent presidential election sought to acquire and how successful were they?  Beyond this point I will be delving into political opinion again.  You are free to skip that.  I’ll put it behind a click so you won’t accidentally slip into it.  Also, I am likely to turn comments off if the posts attracts a bunch of invective about one candidate or another.  That happened with my post election post and I am long past caring about / giving a shit about comments from dumb people.  As I said with my BlueSky post, toxic people deserve their blocks.

See you after the cut if you dare. (Unless you get this in RSS or email, in which case “sorry.”)

The Trump side is easy to spot, because there were so many targets.  If you kept a complete list of everything he promised to various groups, it would be a very very long list, sometimes containing contradictory things.  What is his actual stance on abortion, as an example?  He brags to one group that his appointees overturned Roe v. Wade, but elsewhere he has expressed the opinion that the government should be tracking women’s periods.  Wait, those are the same thing.  I mean he said he wasn’t in favor of banning abortion.  Does anybody believe that, or believe he cares either way?

So, to use the metaphor I often fall back on when my boss is making promises about projects, Trump has written a lot of check.  Is he going to cash them all?  Could he even cash them all?

Well, we know both that Trump is a constant liar, prone to simply saying whatever he thinks will put him in the best light in that moment without reference to any past statements, and that he hates to pay his bills.  So a lot of those checks are not going to get cashed.  He built a tiny segment of a wall on the southern boarder and Mexico didn’t pay a cent for that.

Who is going to get paid then?

The very rich certainly.  He got the billionaire backing because their tax cuts are going to end.  In hindsight, Trump would have been wise to have had them end in 2021.  He might have been re-elected then.  But the tax cuts end in 2025 and the billionaires want them so they put hundreds of millions of dollars out there to get Trump elected.  Not that Trump cares after the fact, but he still has use for their money so they’ll get paid.  Tax cuts will happen. Republicans only care about the deficit when they are out of power.

Tariffs will happen too, though not on random stuff.  There will be no 10% or 20% tariff on everything imported if he is at all sane.  Instead they will be placed on things that just coincidentally benefit the billionaires who backed him.  Musk will get tariffs on solar panels and batteries and electric cars and things that will make him richer.  Wall Street knows this, Tesla stock surged on Trump’s win.

Others will get regulation help.  Marc Andreesen and the crypto scammers put their money behind Trump with the promise that their Ponzi schemes will be able to continue unhindered by the FTC.  The new heads of the FTC and Justice will close current cases and decline to open any new ones.  AI will likewise be unfettered, because Larry Ellison is big on that and backed Trump.

The religious conservatives will get no federal interference in their schemes to stop abortion and impose their views within their states.  The ten commandments will be springing up everywhere and the book bans will continue unabated.  Trump will also get to put at least two new justices on the Supreme Court, though anybody who thinks Clarence Thomas will leave willingly is out of their mind.  That position has paid him millions in what are essentially bribes by billionaires whose cases he rules on.  His seat will only be vacated on his death unless somebody offers him an extremely lucrative private sector position that requires less work, and he puts in very little effort on the Supreme Court.

Trumps MAGA supporters will get very little in financial benefit.  Tariffs will hurt them more than anybody and Trump can’t make the price of eggs go down.  But they’ll make stuff up to convince themselves they were right.  The economy, which was “horrible” on election day will miraculously be “wonderful” on January 20th.  Trump got the credit for the Obama economy and wrecked it, and will now get credit for the Biden economy, which he will no doubt wreck. (Polls already show Republican voters saying the economy is great now, just days after the election.)

MAGA supporters will get one thing though.  The January 6th insurrectionists convicted of violent acts will get their pardons.  That costs Trump nothing and puts out the word that, so far as the federal government is concerned, violence in support of Trump is not a crime.  The party of law and order gets to pick and choose to whom laws apply.  We’ll be seeing a lot of that.

There will be other things, token payments to appease supporters, giving them just enough to be able to claim a promise was fulfilled.  There will be deportation theater, with all the cruelty that can be piled on, but 10-15 million people is a ridiculous number and no foreign government is going to cooperate with that.  But the token effort will be enough and supporters will claim it was 10 million people and that it brought back jobs that were already there. (Unemployment was already at historic lows before the election, but facts don’t matter.)

And, of course, Trump’s foreign helpers will get what they want.  Putin will get Ukraine and maybe the Baltic States if the US pulls out of NATO completely.  Xi will get Taiwan, or will at least be able to exert much more pressure on it, as Trump won’t defend it, and nations close to China will need to make deals for survival with Xi.  In Israel, Netanyahu won’t have even the minimal restraints Biden was trying to impose.  Gaza will be pounded until nobody can live there anymore, then sold for a few shekels to Jared Kushner so he can build his seaside resort.  West Bank settlements are a go too, along with help with anything to hurt Iran. (CNN is already reporting some of that is going ahead.)

A lot about Trump, and that is all speculation, but it feels grounded in precedent.  We’ve seen Trump in office before.  In the end Trump likes to mail it in, to do as little as possible, and spend his time golfing or promoting himself… and enriching himself.  I’ll be interested to see how Musk is going to pay him back.  He’ll probably have to do something like buy Truth Social and fold it into X at a huge price.  Elon will need to do something because he’s expended his usefulness and Trump does not like others on stage pulling attention from him.

(Also, a hat tip to the mainstream media which has ONLY NOW decided to speculate on what tax, tariff, and deportation policies might mean after a campaign long effort of turning things like Trump saying that immigrants “poison the blood of America” into headlines about Trump once again emphasizing immigration policy.)

Which brings us to the Democrats.  Which keys to power did they try to woo in the election?

Is “if we’re good people and say the right things” a key to power?  Maybe? The Democrats stood for women, minorities, and marginalized communities, and lost ground with women and many minorities in most places.

Sure, there was a lot of “the economy [from Obama] was better under Trump” rationalizations, but the Republicans were able to twist the situation into the Democrats being the party of outsiders and not real Americans.  Fear of the “other” won.

One possible key Harris went after was the mythical “sensible Republicans” by teaming up Liz Cheney, which only alienated some of her base and proved that “sensible Republicans,” all (what, six of them?) are not a demographic that can sway anything.

So Democrats failed to woo critical keys to power and now they have lost the house, senate, and presidency… and the supreme court for the next 20+ years.  Sure, they’ll probably win the house back in 2026 because Trump will spark inflation or mess something up just enough for a backlash.  (Also, Trump voters only vote when Trump in on the ballot, and Trump himself only cares about elections where he is on the ballot.)

But if they want to win in 2028 (by which time Trump will hopefully have passed away or we may be faced with him simply refusing to leave, because removing a president is difficult and there is another video about how vague the 25th amendment really is, just in case you think JD Vance is going to use that on Trump the first chance he gets, and the supreme court will throw out the 22nd amendment if Trump asks) they will need to do something different beyond “try to be good people, only more so.”

Democrats are now in the blame stage of the game.  Biden running again is a clear contender for blame, as is his failing to step aside until his awful debate performance, (20 minutes into that I declared on BlueSky that Trump would win the election… every bit of optimism I felt after that was just cope), along with there not being a “real” primary after he stepped aside (Dems complained that they hadn’t voted for her so felt betrayed that she just got handed the job), or Kamala being a woman, or for the party veering too far to the right by getting on stage with Liz Cheney, or for going too far to the left so that they got pummeled by ads run during prime time sporting events pounding her for supporting an implausible trans rights agenda, or for Biden not putting his name on stimulus checks like Trump, and a hundred other things.

The Dems have lots of problems, and the inability to focus is a fundamental one that I might demonstrate through a personal experience in another post.  But, simply put, every little faction will declare an intent to abandon the party if their needs aren’t addressed in bold type at the top of every page.  Arab Americans demonstrated that such threats are real as they abandoned the party over Gaza. (And have already reaped their reward.)  The Dems can carry on with that situation and hope the world changes so it works out for them, or they can change their constituency… or recover old constituencies.

I mean, this whole “Republicans represent billionaire AND the poor working class” is, historically speaking, bizarro world out of place.  But billionaires want autocracy (as Grey quipped, “Democracy is good for business, but business is not good for democracy”) so there is no ground to be gained there.  But if you try to side with the poor against billionaires getting tax cuts while cutting benefits, you get wall to wall ads on NFL football declaring that woke Democrats want to let trans felons use the same locker room as your high school daughter again.

So where do they go?

The sub-title of the book I linked above is Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, something aptly illustrated by the recent election.  And if you’d rather lose than alter your moral compass even slightly, be good when bad might succeed, go high when they go low, there is the summary from the video, the zeroth rule of power.

This is the rationalization that every politician has within them, that they need to win at all costs or they cannot do the good they want.

That leaves me in a pretty dark and cynical place.  You can draw a lot of bad conclusions from the idea that power matters more than platform.  That calculus almost demands the abandonment of some groups by the party.

But “platform matters more than power” gets you an ineffectual debating society that splinters over every tough decision.

I don’t have any good answers.