When Villains Aren’t Super
Further Reflections on “Trial Balloon for a Coup?”
I have some bad news: Television has lied to us about super-villains.
The major villains of movies and TV shows alike are invariably brilliant masterminds. Corrupt politicians protect themselves from justice (and our hero) with ten layers of schemes and twists; murderers use untraceable poisons to avenge long-forgotten insults; ancient treasures are guarded by caves full of perfectly functioning booby-traps.
There’s a good reason for this: brilliant villains make for excellent storytelling. They’re much more interesting than the ones in real life, where crooks are generally looking for the quickest way to get ahead, murders are committed by angry idiots with poor impulse control, and ancient tombs are mostly full of pot-shards.
But when we’re used to evil geniuses on-screen, we start to expect them in real life, too. And this is dangerous, because it can make us not recognize real dangers — like people threatening our democracy without being super-geniuses.
Responses to my essay Trial Balloon for a Coup? have ranged from the thoughtful to the slightly nutty, and if you’ve seen them, you may be wondering what to think: Is this a conspiracy theory? Are our choices limited to “Donald Trump (or maybe Steve Bannon) is a super-villain” or “everything bad happened by accident and Donald Trump is really a nice guy?” Can we ever know enough about people’s motivations to tell malice from incompetence, and if we can’t, does that mean we need to assume the best?
I’d like to spend some time talking about these ideas, and give an explanation for what’s going on in the news (and the ideas raised in Trial Balloon) which don’t require you to believe in super-villains or decide that you have to hold off and not act. I call it: “You can be an idiot, and still be dangerous.”
Super-Villains!
There’s a whole class of responses to the essay (both pro and con) which start from the idea that for Donald Trump to really be trying to undermine American democracy, someone, maybe him, or Steve Bannon, or Vladimir Putin, must be a Machiavellian genius, playing “11-dimensional super-chess” (as John Scalzi put it) with the country. Ben Shapiro argues that these people are clearly not geniuses of any stripe, and so the idea that they’re trying to overthrow anything is outrageous; at the other extreme, Katy Perry tells us to educate ourselves about this “evil chess game.” Between those two poles, Jake Fuentes doesn’t argue that they’re super-geniuses, but does give them credit for a fairly sophisticated and long-term plan. David Roberts gives perhaps the most insightful answer, talking about a balance between the two.
I think most of us, on left and right, will agree with Scalzi and Shapiro that Trump’s inner circle is not filled with super-geniuses. But the flaw in Shapiro’s argument is that it assumes that it would require a great mind to overthrow American democracy.
What we forget is just how fragile democracy really is. To take a very relevant example: if you or I were to ignore a court order, we would quickly be reminded by the police that court orders aren’t optional. But what happens when the court orders the police themselves to do something, or the executive branch to which the police answers? The police aren’t forcing themselves to do anything at gunpoint; their obedience to the law is ultimately a matter of custom, that deeply-ingrained American belief that nobody is above the law. Often (as an important check and balance) there are multiple police agencies in a jurisdiction, so that if (God forbid!) one of them were to declare itself above the law, another could step in; we occasionally see this when federal agents take over a corrupt police department.
But at the end of the day, every federal police agency, and every federal prosecutor, answers to the Executive Branch and the President. If the President were to order agencies to do something illegal or ignore the courts, and order the police and prosecutors not to stop them, we are trusting not in the system but in those people’s willingness to do the right thing — even if this means being fired (as people were in Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre”), or engaging in an armed standoff with police who have decided otherwise.
There are many examples like this. Courts can only work because most people obey the law; elections only work because both sides agree to accept if they lose. Democracy’s day-to-day is run by systems, but those systems are held up by mutual agreement, not a more stable bulwark.
The lesson of countries around the world is that this agreement is not always stable. Democracies have turned into dictatorships not only through violent revolutions, but through elected officials seizing power and nobody stopping them.
And crucially, these elected officials were not extraordinary geniuses: most of them are rather plain, dull men. There are well-established techniques for seizing and maintaining power, which anyone who’s spent time studying the field knows: creating confusion, sowing suspicion between dissidents, having secret information about people (which is much scarier than information that people know you have), and so on.
You don’t need to be brilliant to be a danger to democracy; quite literally, an idiot could do it.
Inventing effective authoritarianism from scratch may require an evil brilliance, but copying existing techniques requires only amorality. While these techniques may seem radical and shocking to people who are unfamiliar with them, for all too many people around the world, they are sadly commonplace.
For example, making an outrageous power grab to see just how much resistance you will encounter, and then letting yourself be “negotiated down” to a significant power grab, is a technique as old as the hills. My father calls this the “goat and cow” technique: if you want to convince someone to keep a goat in their office, put a goat and a cow in their office. By the time they’re done arguing you down to just a goat, they’ll be thrilled with their victory.
If you combine this with a truly outrageous power grab, like having a police force openly refuse to constrained by the courts, you achieve multiple goals at once. First, you get to find out just how much opposition there is to this grab, and what forms it takes; this will let you know what opposition you need to thwart next time. Second, if opposition is unexpectedly weak, you might get more than you expected. And third, by focusing everyone’s attention on the outrageous grab, you distract them from the “goat” in the picture — the fundamentally unacceptable thing you asked for.
In last weekend’s case, the “goat” is the ban order itself, blocking refugees (including ones who had already sold everything they own and who were ready to board planes), forcing out people who had been legally living in America for years, and using religious tests for visas. The “cow” was CBP having the right to detain people, keep them without counsel, and deport them, and that no law our court could tell them no. And the “wobbler” — the part that nobody could tell for sure if it would or wouldn’t stick until the end — was not only kicking out people on visas, but people with green cards who happened to be travelling, separating them from their families.
(Incidentally, if something comes up as a “wobbler” then it will very likely be grabbed by other means later. Note that while both Priebus’ statement and the CBP’s say that people with green cards, while affected, “may get waivers on a case-by-case basis,” it doesn’t say anything about whether those green cards will be revoked en masse.)
Another example: If you make a power grab and then have to relinquish it, or if you ever have to back down for any other reason, immediately deny that it ever happened. This lets you make people seem unreasonable when they accuse you of doing it, or of objecting to such a thing.
These aren’t the advanced techniques of hyper-chess masters; they’re familiar to every schoolyard bully and gaslighting domestic abuser. They’re also techniques which Trump is famous for in his business dealings; he’s particularly got a reputation for refusing to pay vendors and contractors and seeing if they manage to sue him.
All of which is to say: You don’t need to be brilliant to be a danger to democracy; quite literally, an idiot could do it.
The most important thing you need to do is simply ignore the social norms by which others are playing. If people expect you to talk to the press, ignore the press; if they expect what you say to have meaning, speak nonsense; if they expect you to obey the law, ignore it. Rules are for suckers, the autocrat believes, and power is what you can get away with. (Masha Gessen’s essays on how to survive in an autocracy should be required reading for all Americans)
Note also that (a) Trump was elected (in no small part) on the basis of his pervasive norm-breaking, his refusal to obey any rules set for him, and (b) as noted above, norms are precisely what holds democracy together. The likely result of this is left as an exercise for the reader.
Malice or Incompetence?
An important critique of Trial Balloon was Tom Pepinsky’s “Weak and Incompetent Leaders Act Like Strong Leaders.” The headline points to the heart of the argument: it can be very hard, from the outside, to tell malicious behavior from simple incompetence. And Pepinsky, as an expert in the political systems of “emerging market” countries, makes this point with good foundation.
For example, there are two ways to interpret the decision by CBP agents at at airports across the country to detain people without counsel, and on some occasions deport them, in direct contravention to multiple court orders. One possibility is that thanks to organizational chaos — brought on (among other things) by the DHS and CBP not being fully briefed on the plan until the moment it was set into action — agents in the field could get no confirmation from headquarters that they should comply with court orders, and so continued to act on prior orders. The other is that the decision to continue was made at headquarters, and either deliberately not communicated to agents in the field (to give them plausible deniability and maximize chaos) or communicated to the field and agents told to keep mum.
From the perspective of anyone outside the CBP, all of these scenarios would look very similar. Field agents inside CBP could tell the last case apart from the others, but only the innermost circle — the CBP Commissioner, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and Trump’s inner circle — would know for sure what the decision had been.
It is more common to have to guess at someone’s motivations than to know them. Very few villains hold rallies at which they proudly announce their intended villainy to cheering throngs. Even in our personal lives, we often wonder: Was what that person said intentional? Did they mean to insult me, flirt with me, remind me of an old tragedy, or was it all an accident?
Because this situation is so common, we need ways to handle it; and because it is so common, we have several.
Pepinsky ultimately tells us to withhold judgment on motivations. As he argues from several examples, what we saw could be consistent with either a strong leader showing power, or a weak one pretending to have it. While he concludes that the evidence supports Trump being weak (by contrast to, e.g., Indonesia’s President Suharto, who could have half a million people killed in relatively short order), he says that “we cannot infer what someone wants… based on outcomes alone.”
David Auerbach takes a stronger position: he argues that there is clear evidence of incompetence (such as the poor drafting of the order), and that “there is no way to assign a singular ‘goal’ to the administration,” as we already know of disagreements within the so-called “inner circle,” e.g. between Priebus and Bannon. Pointing to a legal analysis by Steve Vladeck, he argues that “we should be highly skeptical of any organized, top-down order for defiance of injunctions.” That is, Auerbach takes a strong position in favor of incompetence explaining this particular event.
More broadly, Auerbach seems to trend to the approach that we should always assume incompetence, absent compelling evidence of malice, and that believing in malice without that amounts to a conspiracy theory. It is a strong version of Hanlon’s Razor, “Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.”
This is a very generous view of humanity, one which I believe is appropriate in some circumstances (e.g., in a criminal trial where “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” is needed — that is, that any explanation other than the prosecution’s description of the (malicious) way it happened would stretch credulity), but not in all. But there is a reason we don’t expect that level of evidence in our daily lives; that level of proof is only possible after an often multi-year investigation and legal process. If your friends tell you that they were all cheated by a single con man, for example, you may be wise not to lend that person money, even if you don’t have enough evidence to send them to prison.
As a practical matter, even though certainty as to someone’s motives is rare, we tend to reach significant suspicion based on things like patterns of behavior. If you told me, for example, that Donald Trump was going to try to ignore court judgments until he was absolutely forced to obey them, or that he would lie about something he had done in public just the day before if it suited him, I would say “So, what else is new?” We’ve been watching him do these things for years, and he’s never made any secret of the fact.
The difference is that when a businessman does this, it has the potential to ruin individual vendors and contractors who can’t be paid, sour business deals, or harm his reputation. When the President does the same things, it has the potential to damage democracy itself.
But the argument that I just made that this is very possibly malicious is, without a doubt, speculative. It doesn’t answer the question of what threshold you should use before you believe in malice. I don’t think that it’s the threshold of criminal prosecution (“beyond a reasonable doubt”), or even the slightly lower threshold that Auerbach proposes (compelling evidence).
Instead, I think that, since the difference between malice and incompetence is always hard to tell, you should not predicate your life on being able to accurately tell the difference. Fortunately, many of the things we do are the same in both cases; for example, have a system of checks and balances in which each part of the government is under the power of several other parts of it. This way, even if one person, or one group, or even one entire branch of the government becomes malicious or incompetent, the damage they can do is limited.
But the best summary of all of this came from Twitter user @nomikkh, who put it well: “Prepare for malice; hope for incompetence.”
Systems or Rights?
A third critique came from Sam Kriss, who argued¹ that this focus on harm to systems — e.g., the collapse of the rule of law — is a distraction from the much more important issue of harm to human rights.
I believe that this argument is both right and wrong, in important ways. The most important thing that’s right about it is that human welfare is the fundamental goal which all of our laws and systems are trying to achieve. The Muslim Ban, as with several other of Trump’s schemes, is a direct assault on human welfare, an assault predicated on the basic tenet of nationalism: that the world is fundamentally a struggle between nations (the people, not the political entities), and that the people of one nation owe no kindness to those of another, unless that kindness can be paid back in an explicit deal.² It is evil for that reason alone, and even if there were no other reason, it should be opposed.
However, I also believe in the profound importance of systems, because they are the main thing which maintain human welfare on a day-to-day basis. The fact that we can go to the store, buy food, and eat it is not only the product of infrastructural systems (farming, transport logistics, finance, banking) but of social and legal systems: for example, the system of inspection and monitoring which largely prevents people from selling tainted food. There are plenty of countries which lack this kind of inspection system, and what they get is a lot of people dying from food-borne illnesses.
The rule of law is what lets us buy food and expect it not to be rotten, or buy a bed and expect it not to fall apart and kill us, or order from a distant vendor and expect to actually receive something: the laws, the social norms that people follow them, the social (and legal, and physical) cost imposed on those who violate them, allow society to actually function on a day-to-day basis. Without these systems, both formal and informal, our lives really would be a continuous battle of all against all.
The systems of government, both the formal checks and balances and the informal social norms which power them on a daily basis, are particularly crucial, because they limit what we have (to our sorrow) discovered to be one of the greatest destroyers of human welfare and life that there is: absolute power. The Twentieth Century, like the centuries before it, has provided us with whole great cities of the dead, tens of millions strong, killed in purges, in manufactured famines, in wars, and in gas chambers, as a reminder of what happens when those fail.
Unfortunately, America’s checks and balances have been allowed to fall into grave disrepair in the past few years. Congress has increasingly abdicated its role as a lawmaker ever since the mid-1990’s, preferring partisan posturing to making compromises and legislating. Presidents from Clinton on (and really, before) have marched straight into that power vacuum, creating an increasing culture of rule by executive order and bureaucratic manoeuver. Courts have lost many teeth as well, from their strong deference to the President “in times of war” (continuous for over 15 years now) over anything which can even remotely be claimed to be a security matter, to the elimination of an independent special prosecutor’s office not answerable to the President back in 1999.
A car with poorly maintained brakes is merely a nuisance, until the moment when you really need those brakes. We have let the country’s brakes run dry, and now we have a sharp curve ahead.
We do not fight for these systems instead of human welfare; we fight for these systems because they are among the greatest guarantors of human welfare which have ever existed.
¹ Kriss also argues that such discussions should be left to political analysts, journalists, academics, or civil servants. People who work on technology should especially stay out, as they “belong to a particular class, with a particular way of looking at the world,” which cannot understand that politics is “a space in which people have the ability to make collective demands and collectively alter the conditions of their existences,” but can only comprehend mechanical systems. Their “baseline tech-ideology” must therefore consist of “a society in which people are users or consumers, in which democracy is a series of in-app purchases, in which all power belongs to the programmers.” I really wanted to write an appropriately Marxist response about those who labor daily at the mechanisms of production possibly having just as valid a class-consciousness as the “writer[s] and dilettante[s]” among which he counts himself but mostly I just want to thank Kriss for the brief experience of what meeting one of Tolstoy’s author-insertion characters would have been like, had Tolstoy been a Socialist.
² In older texts, these groups of people are referred to alternately as “nations” or “races.” This is different from the modern American use of “race;” for example, the British, the (white) Americans, the Germans, the Russians, the Jews, and the Muslims would all be considered “nations” or “races” in these terms. The principles that the world is fundamentally a struggle between races, where strength is necessary to triumph; that strength is manifested by the strong will of the individual, as opposed to thinking (a trait of the weaker races) or collectivism; and that the strength of a group is most purely manifested in its obedience to the will of its leader, up to and including a strong leader of the race as a whole, are among the fundamental principles of National Socialism. (The idea that National Socialism has no principles, and was simply a single collection of people at a specific time, was popularized in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, as part of a broader effort to delegitimize it)
Whether any of this idea about warring nations, or how a strong leader can make things happen through the sheer force of his will, has modern applicability is left to the reader’s judgment.
