DL Open Thread: Monday, March 31, 2025

Unholy Patrimonialism:  This strikes me as explaining government under Trump–including its fatal weakness:

Even those who expected the worst from his reelection (I among them) expected more rationality. Today, it is clear that what has happened since January 20 is not just a change of administration but a change of regime—a change, that is, in our system of government. But a change to what?

There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.

The term dates back to German sociologist Max Weber:

The other source of legitimacy is more ancient, more common, and more intuitive—“the default form of rule in the premodern world,” Hanson and Kopstein write. “The state was little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler; it did not exist as a separate entity.” Weber called this system “patrimonialism” because rulers claimed to be the symbolic father of the people—the state’s personification and protector. Exactly that idea was implied in Trump’s own chilling declaration: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.

In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business.

To say, then, that Trump lacks the temperament or attention span to be a dictator offers little comfort. He is patrimonialism’s perfect organism. He recognizes no distinction between what is public and private, legal and illegal, formal and informal, national and personal.

The fatal flaws?:

“Patrimonial regimes couldn’t compete militarily or economically with states led by expert bureaucracies.” They still can’t. Patrimonialism suffers from two inherent and in many cases fatal shortcomings.

The first is incompetence. “The arbitrary whims of the ruler and his personal coterie continually interfere with the regular functioning of state agencies,” write Hanson and Kopstein. Patrimonial regimes are “simply awful at managing any complex problem of modern governance,” they write. “At best they supply poorly functioning institutions, and at worst they actively prey on the economy.”

Eventually, incompetence makes itself evident to the voting public without needing too much help from the opposition. But helping the public understand patrimonialism’s other, even greater vulnerability—corruption—requires relentless messaging.

Patrimonialism is corrupt by definition, because its reason for being is to exploit the state for gain—political, personal, and financial.  (Delaware’s a state, right?  Always waiting to be exploited.) At every turn, it is at war with the rules and institutions that impede rigging, robbing, and gutting the state. We know what to expect from Trump’s second term. As Larry Diamond of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution said in a recent podcast, “I think we are going to see an absolutely staggering orgy of corruption and crony capitalism in the next four years unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 19th century, the Gilded Age.” (Francis Fukuyama, also of Stanford, replied: “It’s going to be a lot worse than the Gilded Age.”)

I found this piece real interesting.  With a road map to fight back.

Florida Pushes Child Laborers As Replacements For Deported Immigrants.  Homework can wait:

“Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when teenagers used to work at these resorts, college students should be [doing] all this stuff.”

Unsurprisingly, the proposal has alarmed immigration advocates and watchdog groups concerned about child labor abuses and exploitation.

They point out that there is nothing “part-time” in the language of the companion senate and house bills currently before lawmakers, which instead will permit unlimited working hours without breaks for 14- and 15-year-olds who are schooled at home or online, and allow employers to require 16- and 17-year-olds to work for more than six days in a row.

“It’s essentially treating teens who have developing bodies and minds like adults, and this will allow employers to schedule them for unlimited hours, overnight and without breaks, and this is during the school year,” said Alexis Tsoukalas, senior policy analyst at the Florida Policy Institute (FPI), an independent research and economic analysis group.

“We’ve been saying since 2023 that this is a way for them to exploit minors, it was when they passed this large, anti-immigrant omnibus and the same year that they tried to pass the first law gutting child labor protection,” said Thomas Kennedy, spokesperson for the Florida Immigrant Coalition.

“The only short-term answer to workforce shortages has always been net migration and they’ll never go for that because of their politics. So their only answer is to widen the parameters of who can work, and you either go older or you go younger, and they chose to go younger.”

Citizens United: Meet $1 Mill Bribes.  It’s just free speech, according to the Supreme Court.

I provide you with free speech that’s really free.

What do you want to talk about?