The Assault on the State
Stephen E. Hanson, Lettie Pate Evans Professor of Government at William & Mary, is the author of numerous scholarly books and articles on Russian, post-communist, and European politics in comparative perspective. He and his coauthor Jeffrey Kopstein have just published The Assault on the State, in which they offer an impassioned plea to defend modern government against those who seek to destroy it. They dissect the attack on the machinery of government from its origins in post-Soviet Russia to the core powers of Western democracy. The dangers of state erosion imperil every aspect of our lives. Hanson and Kopstein outline a strategy that can reverse this destructive trend before humanity is plunged back into the pathological personalistic politics of premodern times.
Q: Your new book is not only timely, but it also is a unique analysis of the subject, bringing to bear several disciplines -- history, political science, sociology. Who is your collaborator?
I have to begin any discussion of the book by thanking my coauthor, Professor Jeffrey S. Kopstein at the
University of California at Irvine. Jeff and I have been friends and collaborators since we met in graduate school at U.C. Berkeley in the 1980s, and we are in every sense jointly responsible for the research and writing of The Assault on the State.
Q: Maybe it’s good to start with what you mean when you say the state. What is the state and to which kinds of assaults are you referring?
One reason why there are so many conspiracy theories about the so-called Deep State, I think, is that few Americans have a clear sense of what the “state” actually is. The easiest way to define the state is simply as the central government of a country. But state power also always involves the issue of legitimacy, that is, the principles leaders use to justify the enforcement of the order they seek to create. The global assault on the state we describe in our book essentially involves the destruction of modern states based on the rule of law in order to replace them with ruling households build on the “rule of men”—and it is mostly men emphasizing their “machismo,” and not women, who lead such movements.
Q: Bureaucracy is usually something we describe pejoratively today, but wasn’t it also a way to establish a structure and the rule of law to protect citizens from patrimonialism?
Defending state bureaucracy is not an easy task in America, where people love to hate the state. However, it is one we take on in in our book, The Assault on the State. Americans have long held a cultural disdain for “government workers,” who are typically depicted as lazy parasites sucking up the tax money of ordinary hard-working citizens. But this stereotype is woefully inaccurate: our professional military, many of our most highly trained experts on public health and the environment, and even employees of public universities like William & Mary (ourselves included!) are all “state workers” in one way or another. Whether we realize it or not, we all depend on bureaucracies staffed by qualified experts to live what we now consider to be “normal” lives. Prior to the invention of the modern state, rulers facing famines, wars, and natural disasters frequently consulted oracles and soothsayers and relied on the advice of unqualified cronies, leading to terrible, unnecessary human suffering. If we destroy the modern state bureaucracy in the United States and the rest of the world and replace it with personalistic rule, we can expect similar results.
Q: You talk about patrimonialism. Could you describe what the term means and perhaps an example of where we see it?
One of the reasons why we’ve been slow to understand the full scope of the assault on modern states in the 21st century is that we don’t have good language to describe it. Most analysts and journalists have described the rise of “strongmen” over the past two decades as part of an attack on “democracy.” But this misses a crucial point: many of these leaders, including Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Donald Trump, have come to power by winning relatively free and fair elections. To portray these men as “anti-democratic” can fuel the feeling among their supporters that the “liberal establishment” is hypocritical: when liberals lose elections, they then call the winners “authoritarians.” Jeff and I think that the German sociologist Max Weber’s evocative term “patrimonialism” better describes the threat that these leaders pose to modern institutions. These men pose as “fathers” of their nations, running the state as a sort of “family business” and doling out state assets and protection to loyalists. As Weber pointed out a century ago, this mode of state-building is one of the oldest political forms in human history. But most analysts never thought patrimonialism would make such a powerful comeback in the contemporary era.
Q: How does the patrimonialism of tsarist Russia compare to the system Putin has?
Russia under the Romanov dynasty was one of the classic cases of patrimonialism for Weber, as well as for influential Russian historians such as Richard Pipes at Harvard. Although tsars like Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Alexander II did introduce significant legal reforms, it’s still striking how long the Romanovs held onto the idea of their unique personal right to control the entire Russian state, right up to the bitter end during the Russian Revolutions of 1917. In this respect, Vladimir Putin’s rule—especially since the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine in 2014—increasingly resembles that of his tsarist predecessors, whom he openly admires. Putin, like the Romanov tsars, allows some spheres for local and bureaucratic autonomy. But in tsarist fashion, he has also embraced Orthodox Christianity as a pillar of his legitimacy; he doles out lucrative state positions to loyalists as a reward for that loyalty; and he ruthlessly punishes and/or eliminates anyone who dares to organize open opposition to his regime.
Q: There’s nothing new about attacks on red tape and waste in government. Back in 1986 the outrageous example was a $640 toilet seat for the defense department toilet seats (in 2018, the example was one for $10,000). The frustration over waste transcends party lines. Everyone feels a pinch on Tax Day or when waiting at the DMV or applying for a building permit. But this feels different. It seems to go deeper. As you’ve studied this historically, is it the same or is there something different you’re seeing?
Let’s be clear: there’s nothing wrong with criticizing government waste and inefficiency. Too much state bureaucracy can be a serious drag on economic growth and individual liberty. Jeff and I know this well as specialists in the former Soviet planned economy! And the state certainly does sometimes misspend tax money. But as Kathryn Anne Edwards has recently emphasized, there is already an independent auditor of U.S. government spending: the Government Accountability Office, which reports to Congress, reclaimed $70 billion in unnecessary government spending just last year. The problem is that our understandable desire to rein in abuses of state power has now morphed, around the world, into a movement to overthrow the modern state itself, and that won’t deliver the results people expect. Instead, it will deliver state power to ruling households who think of the government as their personal property, with incalculably damaging results to our long-term safety, prosperity, and security.
Q: We tend to think the U.S. as unique, but these attacks on the state is happening around the world, is it not? Where else have you seen this phenomenon? Is what’s happening here a global trend, or do you see any aspects that are different or even unique?
In our book, Jeff and I make the case that Putin’s successful effort to rebuild tsarist patrimonialism in the 21st century sparked the current global wave of assaults on the modern state. Our point is not that Putin is a kind of “puppet master” who pulls the strings of allied rulers everywhere, of course. Putin has nowhere near that kind of power. But when Putin demonstrated that he could build a Russian state with genuine global influence out of the chaos of the post-Soviet period while relying on traditional modes of statecraft, other would-be authoritarian rulers took notice. Collectively, they want to replace the “liberal global order” with a world of Putins—rulers who would negotiate their respective spheres of influence in much the same way as the Mafia families depicted in Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather. This explains why Putin, Orban, Trump, and others like them engage in increasingly resentful attacks on the “liberal global order” as a hypocritical cabal of technocrats bent on destroying traditional family values: that liberal order is the only barrier standing between them and full personal control over their respective states.
Q: With the recent devastating hurricanes in the south, we saw something new, I think. Citizens expect the government to assist in a devastating emergency. In the past there have been complaints about the level and timeliness of assistance, but this time there were reports of distrust of and in some cases hostility against FEMA workers. Do you see that as a symptom of a trend or something we shouldn’t read too much into?
There’s no question that popular distrust of American government agencies has reached an all-time high. Some of this is due to the breakdown of trust in mainstream media outlets that still mostly observe the rules of professional journalism, requiring multiple independent sources before confirming a story and publishing corrections when they get the facts wrong. Conspiracy theories and disinformation from foreign adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran, no matter how fantastical, now “go viral” quickly once they hit the social media apps on people’s smartphones. One of the most difficult tasks we face as a nation in the years ahead is finding a way to rebuild trust in reputable media, and to encourage a healthy skepticism of increasingly unregulated social media, which in the past tended to relegate conspiratorial viewpoints to the margins of politics. Unfortunately, current trends point instead to a further weakening of trust in sources of information associated with the “establishment”—and this directly serves the interests of aspiring patrimonial rulers, who can then more readily control the political narrative.
Q: Why do you think we should be thinking about these issues?
As argued in our book, there is now a serious danger that we will witness the gradual disappearance of the modern state in the 21st century. That would be devastating for humanity, since we still need state bureaucracies staffed by experts to manage the most serious threats now facing our species—including climate change, which cannot be effectively confronted by the leaders of crony states that see fossil fuel production itself as somehow more “patriotic” than wind, solar, and hydroelectric power. How long this process will take and how far it will go, however, depends in part on whether public recognition of the issue can be raised in time to reverse the global patrimonial wave.
Learn more about The Assault on the State.
