Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R.

[reACTIONary]

Making a Career in Dictatorship by Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel reads like a how to guide to success with insights from Hana Arendt's ideas on the "banality of evil," supported by empirical evidence and statistical analysis.

Review by Amanda Taub, NYT, No Paywall

In the absence of real data, researchers have tended to assume that those who are doing the dirty work in authoritarian regimes cooperate because of ideological extremism, fear of persecution or some combination of the two. New research, drawing on an extraordinary data set from Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s and ’80s, suggests a very different explanation.

It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.

It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality. The people who make those decisions, the research suggests, are neither extremists nor victims. They are often just middling workers looking for a way to get ahead.

... in Buenos Aires a government official dropped a fateful offhand comment during a conversation in a cafe. During the military dictatorship, the official said, the intelligence officers who did the regime’s worst dirty work were “essentially idiots.” ... “The leader knows that people are going to be more likely to be loyal if they don’t have many other career options, so when I say losers, I kind of mean it literally.” Autocrats ... appoint “loyal losers” to important positions to rubber-stamp their power grabs.

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Sound familiar????

[LymphocyteLover]

1. Yes. Sounds like Todd Blanche and this rest of this pathetic and psychopathic administration