A Population More Radical Than Its Regime Is a Dictator's Best Insurance

There is a standard list of ways a totalitarian regime keeps itself in power: a secret police, a controlled press, an army loyal to the palace rather than the country, and, at the top of the list since 1945, nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons buy a regime something no army can: nobody will try to remove it from outside, however much they would like to.

I want to add an item to the list that is rarely named, because it works so quietly. A regime whose population is more radical than the regime itself is nearly as safe as a regime with a bomb.

The Mechanism

Consider a dictatorship that the democracies dislike. They apply the usual pressure: sanctions, conditions on trade, speeches about reform. What they want is a step toward representative government, and they say so.

Now suppose the regime can answer, truthfully, that the population it governs is more extreme than it is. The people would vote for a harsher religious law than the one in force. They would vote for war where the regime keeps an uneasy peace. They would vote to expel the minorities the regime merely oppresses. Open the door to popular rule and what walks through is not a Danish parliament but something the democracies fear far more than the dictator they already know.

The demand for reform now collapses. The democracies want reform in the abstract; they do not want that reform. So the pressure is withdrawn, the aid resumes, and the regime is recognised as the responsible adult in a room full of radicals. It has become the moderate by comparison with its own subjects.

Why It Works So Well

Two things make this better than most instruments a regime has.

First, it costs nothing. A secret police has to be paid. An army has to be kept loyal, which means fed and flattered. A nuclear programme is expensive and invites attack while it is being built. A radical population only has to be kept radical, and that is done through the schools, the pulpits, and the state media, all of which the regime runs anyway for other reasons. The radicalisation is a by-product of the ordinary apparatus of control.

Second, it is self-reinforcing. The more extreme the population, the more the democracies fear it, the less they push for reform, and the longer the regime survives to keep the population extreme. A regime that stumbled into this configuration has no reason ever to leave it.

Whether the Regime Believes It

It does not matter, and this is the part worth noticing. The regime does not need to be more moderate than its population in any real sense; it needs the democracies to believe that it is. And the democracies are eager to believe it, because the belief licenses them to do what they wanted to do anyway, which is trade with the regime, buy its oil, and sell it arms. I have argued elsewhere that realpolitik is usually a cover story; here is a cover story the regime supplies ready-made.

So there is a mutual interest in the population staying frightening. The regime wants it. The democracies' business elites, who profit from the trade, are happy to accept it. The only party with an interest in the population becoming less extreme is the population, and it has no say.

The Consequence for Anyone Who Wants Reform

If you want such a regime to reform, demanding elections is the wrong lever. The regime will point at its people and you will back down, and you will have been right to back down, because the immediate result of the election really would be worse.

The lever is the radicalisation itself. A regime that keeps its people extreme in order to stay in power is doing something specific and observable: it is running a curriculum, a broadcast schedule, and a set of pulpits. Those can be named, measured, and made the subject of pressure in a way that the vague word reform cannot. A dictatorship that had to choose between losing its foreign trade and losing its instrument of radicalisation would, at least, face a real choice.

Nobody currently frames it this way. The democracies talk about elections, the regime talks about stability, and the population goes on being educated into the very extremism that keeps it unfree. The bomb is at least honest about what it is for. This instrument is doing the same work, and it is invisible because it is made of people.