Competitive Sycophancy

There's a Reason Why They Are Incompetent

This week, Lindsey Graham suggested on social media that Donald Trump should become the next Pope. This post occurred after Trump himself joked that he was open to the job (of course).

What followed was the predictable social media outrage, and eventually the Tweet was framed by right wing media as a joke, with Graham playing the part of internet troll.

But as noted by James Holmes at Esquire, “You can’t be tongue-in-cheek when you are actively licking the boot. There is just not enough tongue for both jobs.” It’s hard to separate Graham’s “joke” posts from his real ones:

It’s well-established that Trump has managed to foster an enthusiastic cult of personality around himself with the Republican voters, to the point where he could probably “shoot somebody and not lose any voters,” in his own words. But it’s perhaps more important to explore what personalist authoritarianism does to politics at the elite level.

The takeaway: these systems lend themselves to a certain “competitive sycophancy,” which in turn erodes the flow of critical information reaching the top. With everybody trying to stay in the leader’s good graces, nobody is willing to say it straight and reveal bad news. Nobody is checking the leader’s power. Nobody is really debating policy decisions. At a minimum, this leads to incompetence, which we are seeing in full view with Trump’s first 100 days. But it can also lead to real policy disasters; the worst calamities in human history have occurred under personalist authoritarian regimes.

Cults of Personality and Competitive Sycophancy

Nauseating loyalty performances are a central feature in the authoritarian court. Idi Amin, who ruled Uganda from 1971-1979, was often addressed by his full title:

His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular

This is probably the most extreme example, but dictators routinely take on absurd monikers, which are echoed by loyalists to demonstrate fealty. Mao was “The Great Helmsman.” Vladimir Putin gets compared to Peter the Great. Among other epithets, Stalin was sometimes called the “Gardner of Human Happiness.”

A lot of scholarship in our field about how citizens and elites perform loyalty in order to survive and ingratiate themselves with the dictator. In her famous work, Ambiguities of Domination, Lisa Wedeen recounts the loyalty rituals of soldiers in the Syrian presidential guard:

One day a high-ranking officer visiting the regiment ordered the soldiers to recount their dreams of the night before. A soldier stepped forward and announced: "I saw the image of the leader in the sky, and we mounted ladders of fire to kiss it." A second soldier followed suit: "I saw the leader holding the sun in his hands, and he squeezed it, crushing it until it crumbled. Darkness blanketed the face of the earth. And then his face illuminated the sky, spreading light and warmth in all directions." Soldier followed soldier, each extolling the leader's greatness.

We aren’t quite at the point where Republicans are recounting their dreams about Donald Trump holding the sun in his hands, but some days it feels like we really aren’t that far off. This is what a Trump cabinet meeting looks like:

And it wasn’t just Bondi— every member’s remarks were prefaced with over the top praise for Trump himself. Note how they all have MAGA hats in front of them.

I believe the phrase “competitive sycophancy” should be attributed to General H.R. McMaster, who used it to describe the Trump policy environment back in his first term. Here’s the CCN recap:

In his blistering, insightful account of his time in the Trump White House, McMaster describes meetings in the Oval Office as “exercises in competitive sycophancy” during which Trump’s advisers would flatter the president by saying stuff like, “Your instincts are always right” or, “No one has ever been treated so badly by the press.” Meanwhile, Trump would say “outlandish” things like, “Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?” in Mexico or, “Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean Army during one of their parades?”

This is not normal, for a democracy at least. This dynamic is driven in large part by Trump’s own toxic narcissism and management style. Republican elites over the years have learned the best way to get ahead is to bootlick, the more over the top, the better. In debasing themselves, they earn Trump’s trust. If they do not, they get discarded, losing the professional opportunity they have sought their entire professional lives.

Perhaps I’m reaching here, but it also seems that Republican elites are increasingly mirroring Trump’s personality, adopting his bombastic, caustic approach to politics and communication. The White House includes a disproportionate number of toxic narcissists, who are somehow supposed to be able to work together to govern the country.

Incompetence Abounds

Needless to say, these dynamics are not indicative of a healthy policymaking process. Personalistic regimes— and by that I mean authoritarian regimes where power is truly concentrated around one individual— tend to take on the nature of the leader. They offer suffer from poor policymaking for two different but related reasons.

The first is the infamous loyalty-competence tradeoff. I’ve been revisiting some old papers about this, including the famous paper by Egorov and Sonin, “Dictators and their Viziers.” They posit that personalistic regimes often deliberately select the loyal AND incompetent, because these types of people are less threatening to the dictator, who is inherently paranoid and insecure. They have an insightful passage about Hitler, reproduced here:

In his memoirs, Albert Speer, once the second-highest ranked official in the Third Reich and a confidant of Hitler, used the words “negative selection” in his description of Hitler’s court, discussing at length the ignorance and incompetence of Hitler’s closest subordinates. Further into World War II, more military commanders, even those who were successful in the battlefield (e.g., Field-Marshal Rommel), were replaced by Nazi loyalists; with the stakes rising, competence became less important than personal loyalty to the Fuhrer. During the Nuremburg trials, one ¨ of the foremost Nazi loyalists, the foreign minister Ribbentrop, produced examples of both his unquestionable loyalty (he claimed that he was still eager to carry any Hitler’s orders) and outright stupidity.

So dictators (or in Trump’s case, a proto autocrat) differentially select on loyalty, and may even value stupidity in some instances.

The second reason is the information problem, which is quite familiar to China scholars. Things can get particularly bad when the leader becomes so powerful and so ruthless that those around him are unwilling to criticize his policies and offer genuine counsel. In cultivating an environment of loyalty and fear, a personalistic leader can quickly find himself surrounded by yes-men and sycophants, who shield him from bad news and the consequences of government decisions. Lower-level officials, eager to ingratiate themselves with top leadership, fudge numbers and pretend that things are going just fine, even when they are not. This is the broad strokes story of the Great Leap Forward and many other authoritarian famines.

To be completely clear, I am not implying that we are headed towards a famine. But it is obvious that we are being governed by people who do not know what they are doing. I think it is quite possible that Trump is being shielded in some way from the worst news by those around him, which only compounds the problem.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Best,

Rory