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“Corruption: The Central Pillar of Authoritarianism”

https://open.substack.com/pub/lucid/p/corruption-a...

By Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Often defined as the abuse of public power for private gain, corruption involves a broad number of policies and practices. They encompass bribery, disregard for conflicts of interest, plunder of state resources, raids on businesses using criminal methods, sham audits or investigations, profiting from privatization or nationalization, and laws that facilitate or decriminalize wrongdoing.

Corruption is key to authoritarianism because for strongmen, public office has nothing to do with public service: rather, it is a vehicle for private enrichment, as well as escaping prosecution for crimes. They use corruption in tandem with violence, propaganda, and other tools of rule. Purges of the judiciary result in a justice system that exonerates crooks or doesn’t prosecute them at all. Journalists and activists who might expose thievery are imprisoned or smeared through propaganda. Virility makes taking what you want, and getting away with it, into the measure of manhood.

Authoritarians also create new patronage systems that offer jobs and opportunities for wealth, which help to overcome any moral hesitations some might have about collaborating. The core of the contract between the ruler and his enablers is the offer of power and economic gain in exchange for supporting his violent actions and his suppression of civil rights.

To this end, authoritarians use a divide and rule strategy that involves buying off opponents, whether individuals or institutions such as the military (as in Venezuela and Myanmar) by including them in corrupt schemes.

Corruption is a process as well as a set of practices, and the word’s Latin and Old French origins imply a change of state due to decay. This notion of corruption captures the operation of strongmen regimes. They don’t just turn the economy into an instrument of leader wealth creation, but also encourage changes in ethical and behavioral norms to make things that were illegal or immoral appear acceptable, whether election fraud, lying to the public, torture, or sexual assault.

Rulers who come into office with a criminal record (Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Trump) have a head start. They know that making the government a refuge for criminals who don’t have to learn to be lawless hastens the “contagion effect.” So does granting amnesties and pardons, which indebt individuals to the leader and make blackmailers, war criminals, and murderers available for service.
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Personality cults are key to normalizing corruption. They present the leader as a selfless fighter on behalf of the people, and religious elites collude by proclaiming that he was placed in office by divine mandate. The more corrupt the leader becomes, the harder they work to maintain an aura of holiness around him.

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