Another strange week in America: Federal judges block the domestic deployment of U.S. military troops while the president continues the operations anyway. His administration fires agency officials who resist radical policy reversals. Congressional investigations now target the investigators of the circumstances surrounding the January 6 riot. All in the same week. Each commanding attention as a separate emergency that demands immediate reaction—along with some tense music and a chyron at the bottom of the screen.
Step back from that screen, though, start talking to the right people, and something else might come into view: For all the endless, sometimes breathless descriptions of Donald Trump’s governing style as “unprecedented,” it actually follows a historical pattern some good scholars have been able to recognize. The Signal’s contributor Stephen Hanson identifies it as patrimonialism—a political tendency to build personal power and authority, at the expense of democratic institutions and standards, by treating government like a family business where loyalty matters more than rules—or much of anything else.
Why does that matter? Because the “achilles heel” of patrimonialism, as Steve has put it, is corruption. It’s how patrimonial politics gets done, and it’s how patrimonial politics can come apart. This week, Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto discovered, to his immense surprise and consternation, what happens when patrimonial corruption becomes too much for the people his legitimacy depends on: Housing allowances for Prabowo-friendly legislators worth 10 times Jakarta’s minimum wage triggered deadly protests that forced the popular strongman into immediate retreat. Prabowo’s corruption may be relatively simple to see and understand, but it raises a question no patrimonial authority operating in a democracy can entirely answer: How long can I get away with this?
This week’s member’s despatch explores what makes patrimonial politics vulnerable—and why understanding corruption as one of its defining means, and inevitable ends, might change how we see what happens next.