Modern dictators: third world coupmakers, strongmen, and populist tyrants

National Review, Sept 25, 1987 by Samuel T. Francis

Modern Dictators: Third World Coup-Makers, Strongmen, and Populist Tyrants

by Barry Rubin (McGraw-Hill, 385 pp., $17.95)

BARRY RUBIN'S study of modern dictatorships in the Third World is redolent of the analytical approach of James Burnham, and though Burnham is not mentioned by name, his principal mentor, Niccolo Machiavelli, is frequently cited. Mr. Rubin is coolly dispassionate in his dissection of the anatomy of contemporary tyranny, attentive to the social forces that underlie and perpetuate it, and pessimistic in his estimate of its future. His conclusions should be carefully studied, for they challenge many of the preconceptions on which most conservatives' (as well as liberals') ideas of Third World politics are based.

Mr. Rubin begins with a distinction between "traditional' and "modern' dictatorships that roughly corresponds to the familiar one between "authoritarian' and "totalitarian' regimes. The former "were conservers and manipulators of the existing order, more concerned with redividing the wealth to their advantage than in making social or political change, even when they favored economic development.' Traditional dictators like the Shah of Iran, Anastasio Somoza, and Ferdinand Marcos neglected to build a mass political base and instead relied on personal followings drawn from established elites. While their rule was generally harsh and corrupt, it lacked the ruthlessness and efficiency that a more total and impersonal mobilization of power can construct. Hence, traditional dictators often fail to transmit their personally based rule to successors and are ineffective against modern political opposition movements.

"Modern dictators,' on the other hand, seek to systematize their apparatus of power and succeed "in overcoming the gap between rulers and ruled by convincing a large portion of the people--through persuasion, benefits, and organic links--that they should support it.' The major models for modern dictatorships in the Third World have been the Nazi, Fascist, and Communist regimes of the 1930s and '40s, and their main pioneers were Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and Juan Peron in Argentina, both of whom paid close attention to the dynamics as well as the ideologies of their European models, and who have been emulated in turn by a score of lesser despots since.

Because of its cultivation of a mass political base, rigorously controlled through party organizations and twentieth-century technology, modern dictatorship defines itself in opposition to traditional elites and their social order. Hence, modern dictators make use of populist, nationalist, revolutionary, and socialist themes to unify their mass following against the old regime, to distract the masses from the systematic repression and economic catastrophe that usually result from their rule, and to legitimize and perpetuate their power. Contrary to Western hopes that technological modernization would liberalize Third World societies, "modern dictatorships . . . are products of the modernization process itself.'

Much the same can be said for the importation of Western political ideas and organizational techniques, while the dislocation of culture through Westernization allowed the formation of a narrow class of anit-Western intellectuals and technocrats who made up the core of the modern dictator's new elite. Instead of the West's assimilating the Third World to its values, the different cultures of the latter have absorbed the technological, organizational, and ideological exports of the West and transformed them into instruments for the institutionalization of anti-Western despotisms. Examples of such inversions are familiar to most Americans: Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas, Khomeini, Qaddafi, and lesser lights of state terror and genocide such as Col. Mengistu in Ethiopia, and Idi Amin.

Mr. Rubin is critical of the conventional wisdom among both liberals and conservatives about these regimes and their futures. "If conservatives tend to be complacent about traditional dictatorships as long as they were anti-Communist, many liberals have been too lenient on Third World modern dictatorships,' whose anti-Americanism the Left often likes to blame on the mistakes and abuses of U.S. policy.

But Mr. Rubin is also skeptical of the current neoconservative faith that authoritarian states in the Third World are evolving toward democracy. Jeane Kirkpatrick, among others, has argued that traditional or authoritarian regimes can develop into democratic states more easily than modern totalitarian autocracies can; and the "Reagan Doctrine' of encouraging even friendly anti-Communist traditional dictatorships toward democratization is largely based on this belief, coupled with an assumption that economic modernization will lead to political freedom. Yet Mr. Rubin points to a variety of forces in many Third World societies --military and intellectual elites, ethnic and religious antagonisms, economic conflicts over scarce resources, and the dislocations of modernization, as well as anti-Western traditions and ubiquitous Soviet subversion--that splash a bit of cold water on these sanguine expectations. The long-term advantages for international competition that industrialized democratic states enjoy may not be useful to modern dictators and the groups that depend on them, and even the new middle classes in these societies have often been more supportive of than hostile to the new regimes. "Modern dictatorship,' Mr. Rubin concludes, "seems a type of government that has great staying power in the Third World,' and Western revulsion at the characteristically brutal, exploitative, and apparently insane behavior of the dictators themselves does not mean that these dictatorships cannot endure longer than the younger and more alien political forms that have come to typify the modern West.