Today’s interesting conversation

[eve_prime]

Last week, G. had a group of us read and discuss excerpts from The Dictator’s Handbook, which presents a very simple pattern from political psychology, in which those motivated by a desire to keep power have to pay off those whose support they actually need, while placating those who could potentially rise to greater power, while ignoring or feeding off the rest of their population. Today he and I talked about where ideology fits in. The power-hungry leader may or may not share a particular system of beliefs (religious, or ethnonationalist, or whatever other ideology), but if one or more people whose support he needs does care about some ideology, then I’d say that the leader could pay off that supporter by advancing that belief system. In other words, in a Machiavellian system, ideology can function as yet another currency.