The Napoleon Option

Possible Futures, Installment Six

“Liberty is like love. Everyone wants it, but few are willing to rise to its impossible demands.” —Arthur Nast, The Wolf of Venus, by J. Daniel Sawyer

Historically, democracies do not last long. They begin by superseding (usually through violent revolution) the previous, more monarchical governmental forms, opening the corridors of power to a narrow coalition that is, nonetheless, broader than the previous heredity-based institutions permitted. The new franchisees are usually those who previously had influence but no hard power, and they find themselves in possession of the right to vote upon who will rule them.

Over time, the franchise gets extended to other interest and/or demographic groups, as those in the ruling class seek to broaden the voter base in order to secure for themselves more power to right the wrongs they believe (often rightly) that they have suffered at the hands of those at the top of their own class.

In time, this franchise-broadening fractures civic identity as politicians learn they can secure power by buying off different interest groups with promises of influence, favors, largess from the public purse, and especially revenge against their political or social enemies.

When the divisions run deep enough, assuming a civil war doesn’t break out, the elected governments often turn from taxation and licensure to direct expropriation (heavy directed taxation, asset seizure, etc.) of citizens to keep the public coffers filled, and, when that ceases to be sufficient to keep the machine running, democide (i.e. the slaughter of the people by their own government) often follows.

This situation eventually generates a critical mass of malcontents so that, in the final phase of the cycle, mob rule prevails, creating an untenable situation that nobody can properly manage. In times of such broad malcontent, the polis begins naturally to look for a strong man who can reign in the corruption and fix the system. Ideally, this person will profess a love of the system gone wrong and promise to fix it by sheer force of personality (backed up, naturally, by the heavy hand of the state).

The result is a marked, if sometimes quiet, return to monarchical government in substance, if not in form.

The ancients spotted this tendency, which is why they were...let’s be diplomatic and say “skeptical”...of democracy’s viability (or desirability), with the civilization that invented democracy (Athenian Greece) eventually becoming perhaps the most skeptical of all.

History’s Open Secret

Living as we do at the end of a wildfire-like spread of democratic governance for four full generations it may be hard to believe, but until the founding of the American Republic, democracy’s reputation was so bad that, for close on to two thousand years, nobody in the cultures that intellectually descended from Greece and Rome even attempted to create a democratic government larger than a city-state. The short life cycle of democracy—not to mention its baked-in game theoretic problems—did not recommend it even to the most freedom-oriented of Medieval and early-Enlightenment thinkers.

The American Founding Fathers knew this, and among them, only a few radicals (like Jefferson and Paine) wanted a democracy. Others (like Patrick Henry, who ironically coined the rallying cry “Give me liberty or give me death”) wanted a theocracy. Many of the rest wanted a constitutionally-bound parliamentary monarchy (similar to the England of the era, but with more limitations on monarchical power).

But with the memory of kings leaving a sour taste in the mouth of those who supported the revolution, and those who had been loyal to the Crown fearing a new American king might take bloody revenge against them, there were eventually only two possible forms the American nation might take:

1) A confederation of small nations each governed as they saw fit (something between the initial version of the EU and the confederation we now call “Canada”)
or
2) An imperial government modeled on Rome

The confederationists wrote the first Constitution of the United States, calling it the Articles of Confederation, but among the imperialists were several very savvy operators, and a decade later they exploited the growing pains of the new nation to throw out the Articles and replace them with a second, imperialist constitution—one which tried to chart a middle-path between democracy and monarchy while empowering the central government with the means to prosecute grand strategic ambitions—and this new Constitution, ratified in 1789, is the one we’re familiar with today.

This constitution vested different, counterbalancing powers in each interested political institution (the States, the three branches of the Federal Government, and the People). The franchise was left up to the States’ discretion (as the States were seen as primary political unit), who then typically limited the vote to white, property-owning males over the age of twenty-one.

Over time, the franchise was expanded occasionally and locally to accommodate the shifting economic and political realities with in the States. Then, beginning in the late 19^th century, the franchise was Federalized:

• The 15^th Amendment expanded the franchise to male citizens of all races.

• In 1920, the 19^th Amendment brought women to the table

• 1924’s Snyder Act re-classified Native Americans from conquered peoples to enfranchised citizens

• The 24^th Amendment got rid of common obstructions to the franchise in 1964

• In 1970, the 26^th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18

• In 2020, inspired by the stay-at-home orders during the COVID pandemic, much of the nation switched to a “vote by mail” system that removed the last possible bit of friction from the system (at least that can be achieved without another Constitutional Amendment or a wholesale switch to online voting)

All of that activity chiefly concerned the relationship of the People to their government at various levels. The States were another matter.

The Progressive Era, rife with concerns about the corruption of Industrialists buying state governmental favors (including the appointment of Senators), and with the fresh wounds of the Civil War having fostered a broad distrust of States as political units, saw growing support to disenfranchise the States. The Consitution’s original arrangement for the States guaranteed them representation via the appointment of Senators, while the People would elect their own representatives to the House.

In 1913, with the ratification of the 17^th Amendment, the States lost their voice in the Federal government.

Every step of the way, the expansion of the franchise was undertaken for very compelling reasons, whether moral, practical, or political.

And, every step of the way, the United States slid a little further down the path from Republic to Mob State that the ancients had observed every time democracy was tried.

The United States is the longest-running experiment in democratic governance in recorded history—is its time at an end?

The American Empire(s)

There’s a peculiar wrinkle in the American system and character that might make this slouch towards democratic dissolution less certain that it looks from the point of view of a history geek.

Ask your average American what constitutes “good government” and almost everyone will give at least a passing mention to the principle that a government that doesn’t preserve civil liberties and civil rights (at least the one he or she holds most dear) isn’t a very good government at all.

Of course, which civil liberties should be preserved, and who they oughta be preserved for, is a matter that varies both across the political spectrum and by the level of tribalism currently in play at the moment. Most people, after all, would gladly give up freedoms they don’t regularly exercise in order to hurt those they consider enemies. Nonetheless, even though most everyone would make exceptions to hurt and punish the “bad guys,” the ideals of liberty (and the franchise from which they are seen to flow) are things to which Americans generally pay lip service.

And most Americans are, and always have been, willing to put up with quite a lot of chicanery (corruption, scandal, bloodshed, injustice, disenfranchisement, etc.) in the name of protecting liberty and safety. This pragmatism creates a deep-rooted ability within the American system to bend where most other systems would break—even if that bend actually ends the republic in all-but-name.

Most democracies end in dictatorships, for good or ill (and there are some of each in the historical record). This is something any student of history expects.

One would not expect a democracy to survive because it descends into dictatorship.

And yet, this is exactly what the United States has done. Not once, but twice.

Both Abraham Lincoln and Franklyn Delano Roosevelt made themselves into nearly-unaccountable dictators. Lincoln did this by suspending habeus corpus by fiat when he found it inconvenient, ignoring large parts of the Constitution when it suited him, refusing to honor Supreme Court rulings reigning him in, and then by throwing 1 in every 1500 Americans—including civilians, journalists, and a few politicians before chickening out on his plans to do the same to a Supreme Court Justice—into prison for the crime of opposing him. Roosevelt accomplished his dictatorship by convincing Congress to give him the power to create a dictatorial administrative state that could reach into and control every single aspect of the economy—and thus, any part of human life that had contact with money (which is to say, all of it)—and then using that authority to expropriate the citizenry, inter several ethnic populations (not just the Japanese) in concentration camps, redistribute land and wealth, and pick the winners among various industries in order to create stability where once there was dynamism.

Each of these men, as the result of his self-coronation, unalterably changed the nature of the country to such an extent that one must admit that the United States of America is not a single country with a single constitution that has endured for 236 years so far. Instead, there have been three nations, all calling themselves the United States of America, all occupuying similar geography, and all professing devotion to the same foundation, but which are nonetheless so distinct from one another in form, policy, ambitions, and in their relationships to their citizenry that each cannot reasonably be considered the continuation of its forbear. These successive American nations have as much (and as little) in common with one another as did Octavian Rome with the Roman Republic that it supplanted.

Each of these three successive countries have lasted roughly 80 years.

So America is not a single Constitutional Republic, it is instead a nominally democratic republic which is interrupted every four generations by a dictatorship. It thus has conformed exactly to the lifespan template that the ancients would have expected of a well-organized democracy.

We must therefore consider the likelihood that, being as we are at the end of one of these cycles, we are looking at a dictatorship-in-fact in the very near future.

Talk of this is already circulating both in the corridors of power and among the out-of-power elites (hat tip to Peter Turchin for identifying this historically pivotal group, and their ubiquitous role in revolutions).

Rogue intellectual (and, arguably, aspiring emperor) Curtis Yarvin, who is newly popular (notorious?) among the shakers and movers of the revolutionary right and disaffected left, has made a career arguing that democracy is a sham: most people don’t want power, he contests, so the best form of government is the one that has historically proved the most enduring and most stable: Monarchy.

Stable? Well...kinda.

An effective monarch is unarguably one of the best (if not the best) way to govern a state of almost any size. But the stability the king provides often lasts only so long as the king himself does. In the ancient world, the Mandate of Heaven for rulers caused a great deal of mischief around the transition of power. Hereditary monarchy is a high-stakes endeavor that creates great incentives for Game of Thrones style shenanigans as a reigning monarch’s end draws near (and it’s worse in non-hereditary monarchies). Nailing the transition of power is key to the long-term viability of any civilization—screwing it up led to some of the largest civilizational spasms in human history.

But let’s ignore that for a moment and follow the argument as Yarvin lays it out, because it bears on many of the themes in this series.

The grand political systems of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, Yarvin argues, are strong (and sometimes totalitarian) precisely because they are decentralized—power devolves informally through intellectual leaders, pundits, and artists, all of whom find their will and vision enforced through well-devolved bureaucracies which continue to grind their subjects down in a blind, mechanistic fashion. Because little changes with new heads of state, one can reasonably infer that Douglas Adams was correct when he observed (in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) that the central purpose of the President is not to wield power, but to direct attention away from the true seat of power: the intelligence agencies and the administrative state. The absolute power that appears to be concentrated at the desk of the President in the Oval Office, in the Prime Minister’s office at Whitehall, and in similar places only exists at the sufferance of the vast army of Civil Servants and their sponsors, who truly run the world.

Therefore, dictatorial power centralized in one person would result in more freedom, rather than less, as a single dictator would care mostly about securing his legitimacy and legacy through good rule, whereas bureaucracy attracts those who like exercising arbitrary power for the sheer pleasure of it.

In this sense, he’s not entirely wrong. But he’s not entirely correct, either.

How is he correct?

Well, it is true that the most efficient mechanisms of social and political control are decentralized. One will find very little individualistic freedom under the radical decentralization of conservative Sunni Islam (whether in its garden variety forms or in Wahabbism, from which jihadis sprout like ticks from the spring grass). The New England Puritans had a very localized system of government, and the Amish, though descending from a very different theological and cultural tradition, have similar systems of social governance, but neither can realistically be considered beacons of liberty despite their absence of dictators. And of all the adjectives that one might apply to the Swiss Canton system, the term “libertarian” is not especially high on the list.

Ironically, if Yarvin is correct, the one thing he hopes for (a new Napoleon who can remake the West) is vanishingly unlikely, because the decentralized armies of the bureaucracy (including the secret police in their various alphabet-agency guises) and its non-governmental allies will be able to thwart radical reforms right up to the moment the system collapses on its own.

However, while Yarvin’s analysis is not without merit, he (among other failings) often neglects the pathological weakness of the bureaucratic state.

All of these decentralized systems in the preceding paragraphs are ground-up phenomena. They are (or were) not even theoretically biddable from a single point. This makes them distinct from systems of well-implemented subsidiarity such as the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, the Nazi party, the Chinese Communist Party in the days of Mao, and the Soviet system under Stalin.

All of those more effective (and often repressive) systems had the advantage of being immature bureaucracies, with aggressive staffing regimes that allowed tight ideological control of the system.

Mature bureaucracies are a different matter, and the system Yarvin is attempting to describe is a mature bureaucracy.

The nature of a mature bureaucracy—be it governmental or corporate—is to diffuse both power and responsibility (and to separate the two from one another) through a system whose primary operational rationale is the perpetuation of itself. This structure is theoretically biddable from a centralized command-and-control point, but in practice, that centralized biddability is hard to marshal because of the byzantine nature and intra-mural feuding incumbent to mature bureaucracies.

Mature bureaucracies, rather than revealing the massive strength of a state, reveal its profound weakness. Every regulation promulgated through this bureaucracy represents either a failure of previous regulations (“closing loopholes”) or a failure of institutional fortitude in the face of lobbyists who seek to capture it. Sprawling governmental bureaucracies are invented to give the state control of the economy, but their function is to give economic interests control of an increasingly ineffective and perverse government.

Notwithstanding all of that, the right person, with the right sense of destiny and popular mandate combined with canny political instincts (something sorely lacking in the last several wannabe-dictators that have occupied the Oval Office) might just be able to vivisect the bureaucracy and return it to an immature state (this is what corporate raiders—those who are actually good at their jobs—accomplish). In so doing, such a leader would turn the machinery of government into the thing that both civil libertarians and starry-eyed revolutionaries most fear:

An effective, focusable state that can be helmed by a dictatorial leader. “Turnkey totalitarianism,” or nearly so.

America had its Caesar (who used martial power to destabilize the elites and usher his own people and vision into power) in Lincoln. It had its Augustus (who extended the Imperial State’s authority into the home and throughout the economy) in FDR. What will we have next?

The rise of an American Napoleon (the conditions of Napoleon’s rise more closely match the conditions of today, in my estimation) is as likely as the nature and longevity of his empire is unpredictable.

At the time of this writing, the out-of-power elite class is filled with a morass of conflicting visions which are not easily reconciled (each class listed is followed by an easy-to-find exemplar of that group’s thinking):

• White supremacists (the Stormfront crowd)

• Racial separatists (Zero H.P. Lovecraft)

• Race realists (Steve Sailer)

• Pseudo-classicist neo-fascists (Bronze Age Pervert)

• Retro New Deal-era Democrats (Donald Trump)

• Techno-utopians (Peter Diamandis)

• Unabashed monarchists (Curtis Yarvin)

• Libertarians (Naval Ravikant)

• Exploratory Vitalists (Joe Rogan)

• Radical cryptographic decentralists (Balaji Srinivasan)

• Neo-Merchantilists (Amanda Milius)

• Black Supremacists and Separatists (the Hotep movement)

• Traditional conservatives (Ben Shapiro)

• Revolutionary American reformers (Peter Thiel)

• Disaffected Liberals (Bret Weinstein)

• “Traditionalist” Catholics (Patrick Deenan)

• Reactionary Feminists (Mary Harrington)

• Straussians (Michael Millerman)¹
  

and dozens of other factions each with conflicting visions and approaches. The only things that unite them (and keep them talking to one another despite deep personal animosities and ideological divisions) is that they are all out of power, all advocate a vision that is in some way radically divergent from the current monopolar view, all living in the shadow of an all-powerful international political and economic machine that is crumbling under the weight of its own expiring validity.

If an American Napoleon comes during this unraveling, he or she will most likely spring from this volatile stew.²

Why would I say this?

Because the collapse of one America and the foundation of another always coincides with a changing of the guard. The old consensus views, no matter how noble, are on the rocks specifically because they are no longer well-adapted to the technological, demographic, and geopolitical world in which we live. As America’s first dictator so famously said in what was effectively his announcement of his intention to reinvent America in his own image:

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

The American Jubilee³

What will result should this new dictator rise?

It’s hard to say. Americans have an uncanny ability to reinvent themselves on every level from the individual to the super-national. Americans also have a pronounced tendency (in common with uppity citizenries throughout history) to fight any changes to what they perceive as the social contract with great recalcitrance up to and including staggering amounts of violence.

If such Napoleon is able to properly read the needs of the moment and accurately-enough anticipate the direction of the future, America will emerge from the crisis to rule the globe (in fact, though not in name) for another century, will pull out of its demographic nose-dive, and might even find a new cultural equilibrium that, for the people born under its banner, will seem just and fair and free enough to be tolerable, perhaps even laudable.

But let us not forget that those lionized dictators of America’s past also slaughtered hundreds of thousands of their own people in war, interred and expropriated huge swaths of the citizenry, suspended or eliminated civil liberties enshrined in the Constitution they swore to uphold, and were succeeded immediately by leaders who conducted genocidal wars, global imperialism, and looted the hell out of the domestic adversaries whom they defeated, leading to generations upon generations of resentment that, by inches, has made the mutual grudge-holding in America look more and more like the cross-border hatred of the European continent from which so many of our country’s greatest lights fled.

The greater the reserve of these lingering resentments, the tougher row any government—let alone dictator—has to hoe.

The American Emperors are remembered as heroes rather than villains not because they were good and benevolent men with noble goals, but because their hard-reboots of the system were followed by economic bonanzas (the opening of the Frontier, and the rise of Globalization, respectively). This dictatorial reboot-and-reform ritual might be thought of as the American equivalent of the Hebrew tradition of the Jubilee, where all debts were periodically erased, resetting the balance of obligations within the nation.

But what new bonanza might follow this new dictator, and thus allow the ritual to run its course? What new frontier is left to open, what new technological revolution left to kindle, that might legitimize this next phase of the trans-continental North American Empire?

We won’t know until we find it, but find it we must, or our next dictator may be the last dictator to rule a “United” States of America.

Next time, I will look at a couple of wildcards that could, on their own, render everything we have explored to this point, moot.

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In the meantime, I invite you to post any corrections or arguments in the comments, or send them directly to me at feedback@jdsawyer.net.

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1 For the curious, you can read about the early history of this fascinating movement in The New Right by Michael Malice

2 My guess is that you'll see the new dictator’s electoral platform extolling American national identity with an emphasis on religion, a foreign policy extolling the Monroe doctrine while eschewing globalism, loudly trumpeting “the right kind” of civil liberties for individuals, a heavy element of anti-corporatist and trust-busting sentiment, a large dose of pro-natalism (perhaps to the point of opposing free access to birth control), with a rallying cry will be something like "Make the economy work for regular Americans instead of for corporations!"

3 This section owes a substantial debt to The Storm Before the Calm by George Friedman