Erica Frantz
speaker
113 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Erica Frantz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, it basically means a situation where you can envision, you know, a monarch and the members of their court sitting around the throne on bended knee, there to flatter the monarch, there to make sure that, you know, that everything that the monarch wants is implemented. You know, I often think about the story, you know, of the emperor with no clothes.
That sort of dynamic translates to these settings. And it's, again, I've talked earlier about disproportionate political influence, but The monarch is in the throne lofty above these other individuals. And you can visualize that sort of power dynamic. And that's what we see in places where power is concentrated.
Yeah, that's a really interesting insight there about the broadening. And it makes sense because in these places with more concentrated power, we do see more volatile policy choices. And that's because policies are based on the whims of the leader. And if a particular leader happens to stick to an ideological platform, then you might not see so much dramatic change.
But leaders can change their minds very quickly. You know, in Turkmenistan, which is very different than the United States, the leader there, Sepimur Niyazov, in his court, was his former dentist, who ended up succeeding him, I believe. So they're really going after people who they think are going to be their loyal advocates.
And even if those people have kind of bizarre ideas or ideas that are counter to what you might expect, If they're in the leader's ear, we might see those policies implemented. In this instance, with the skilled immigrants, you know, that might be something that economists would say is good for the health of the economy in the U.S. So it might not always be a bad choice.
But the fundamental problem with these leaders, these personalist leaders, is that there's no predictability in terms of what they might choose to pursue. And oftentimes, they make bad choices.
So that's an excellent insight. And there are some really nice parallels to authoritarian politics in that personalist leaders in those contexts often pursue what we call divide and conquer as a strategy. So it is intentional that they want a divided elite. They don't want any risk that the individuals around them could behind their back coalesce to challenge them.
So from the perspective of a power-hungry leader, you want to have a less cohesive internal circle. You want people to fear that, you know, they're in a game of musical chairs. You know, the smallest sign of disloyalty, that person's going to lose their office. They want to create an environment of total uncertainty among those in their elite circle.
And one way that they do that is by, again, like pursuing this game of musical chairs. I think I mentioned the study from Russia that shows that the legislators that are in the pocket of the Putin regime are actually rotated out of office fairly quickly. They gain office, are in the legislature, get a few luxury cars, and then they leave power.
And, you know, this musical chairs is intentional because they are ensuring that individuals can't coalesce. to join forces to challenge them, that they're divided, and that they aren't very powerful as individuals, that no individual is very powerful apart from the leader.
Yeah, so you've identified a number of things that are fairly troubling in terms of like from a democracy expert perspective. And that is that we might think of the media as like a fourth branch of government. The media play a critical role in keeping our leaders in check. And calling out corruption scandals and all sorts of things.
And so the obsession that we are observing from Trump in terms of ensuring that nothing negative is stated about him, even if it's something as minor as the poll, as you mentioned, is troubling because that's a classic part of the playbook. where we nearly always see these leaders that are intent on securing more control target the media.
And they're either going to do it by sidelining the media, either through lawsuits, as you mentioned, that could bankrupt them, or by gaining more control over the media. We saw this with Orban in Hungary, where now the media in Hungary are pretty much fully under the Orban regime's control.
Circling back to the bankruptcy thing, though, I did want to mention, it's interesting you said that, because in Singapore, under the People's Action Party, one way that they are able to prevent their opponents from gaining much influence is by suing them in these libel lawsuits that bankrupt these individuals.
So by targeting these individuals through these kind of minor libel lawsuits, they're able to bankrupt them and minimize the threat. And that's kind of this very effective tactic because it's not this like super easily observable red flag that democracy is falling apart.
But it is a subtle thing that accumulates to a larger problem where if there are enough of these media organizations that go out of business or that are self-censoring, that we no longer have that kind of fourth check on the executive that I mentioned.
So I tend to think that the personality of the leader is unimportant and that instead politics is an outcome of institutions and institutional bargaining and things and relationships and so forth. But one thing that we do observe is that when individual politicians personalize their party, let's say, that type of power and influence tends to lead to more narcissistic behavior.
So rather than seeing like this underlying narcissism as something that is going to predict power concentration, I think it's important to identify the ways in which power can shift the attributes of these leaders. And they tend to become obsessed with their own image and obsessed with the ways in which they're portrayed in the media. This is not something that is unique to Trump.
We see it in a variety of contexts, particularly in authoritarian contexts, where leaders become obsessed with their own image. They build these personality cults. There's stories in Mobutu Zaire of him on the news making sure that he was descending from the heavens on the nightly news every day. So that is part of this personality cult, an obsession with having a positive image in the media.
So leaders don't want news headlines that are critical of them, right? It is going to be a challenge. And Trump has been very savvy at navigating the media, right? And at developing his own media company and so forth, similar to the ways in which Bukele has been really savvy.
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