Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics

Kirkpatrick wrote a book that deserves to be more widely read. The title refers to the American tendency which has never left us, even during supposedly conservative eras, of assuming that all dictatorships are alike or that so called right wing dictatorships are worse than socialist or communist dictatorships. The chapter dealing with that issue is the most famous. She draws a distinction between autocrats and totalitarian rulers. The former are not democratic and can be brutal. Their brutality aims to keep them in power and maintain their privileges. But they don't just use force. The rulers have familial and often historic ties to the ruled. They create patronage and dispense largesse. Unless seriously opposed, they generally leave people alone to do business, worship, and conduct family life. They often allow some measure of freedom of the press and tolerate some criticism. Generally, they only notice those who try to overthrow them. Life continues for most people as it always have. They live by tradition and custom. This means that most are poor and that life is bounded by the family, the village, the ethnicity, and the religion. There is a lot of injustice, especially by modern western standards. But life is not totally arbitrary. There is law. There is custom by which the people can protect and exercise such rights as they have. Their situation is akin to that in Europe when it was ruled by kings and most were peasants. It is possible that such societies can become richer, raise the living standard, and become more democratic. Totalitarian rulers, however, are not just content to have power. They want the state to own everything and all loyalty to be to the state. They want to remake human nature according to rationalistic of scientific principles. So everything that exists, every way of thinking must be destroyed. It is not enough to act loyal. Every cell in the body must be loyal. The mind must be controlled. There is no such thing as privacy. Loyalty to religion and to family must be destroyed. This is always strongly resisted, which is why the totalitarian must always end up killing by the millions. Attachment to anything but the state or the party is regarded as political opposition and that is not tolerated. There is no other way except mass murder to disengage parents from children, husbands from wives, people from their tribe or their religion or their customs. Every lapse must be punished. Citizens are taught to scrutinize each other and even family members for improper or "reactionary" or unrevolutionary thoughts. Children are taught to report on their parents. In the old world, if one said our leader should be overthrown, one might get some time in jail. In the new world, a person who forgets and invokes the name of a saint might end up in a camp or dead because religion has been abolished. The power sought by the totalitarian is far above that sought by the usual third world dictator. The totalitarian st

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, former Ambassador to the United Nations under Ronald Reagan, is the author of one of the three most famous essays in the history of American foreign policy, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," Commentary (November 1979)--the other two being George F. Kennan's call for "containment" of the Soviet Union and The End of History by Francis Fukuyama. In it she argued that it was incumbent on the United States to differentiate between authoritarian regimes and totalitarian regimes. Authoritarian regimes she argued, like Iran and Nicaragua, though they obviously did not meet our preferred standards of democratization, were fundamentally just harsh, but traditional, governments of countries which had known no other type of government and were perhaps not yet ready for democracy : "Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other resources, which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations." Essentially, the autocracies protect their own power and wealth, but leave most other aspects of life relatively untouched. As the name implies, they are more concerned with who in society will wield authority, i.e. themselves, than with imposing any particular ideology. Because this is the case, they in fact preserve many of the institutions upon which democracy can later be built, whether the Church or corporations or other civic organizations. Totalitarian regimes, on the other hand, as the name implies, seek to totally reinvent and control every aspect of society. This requires them to so violate the existing institutions as to render the society nearly incapable of evolving into a democracy. These fundamental differences between the two types of regimes suggest important reasons that we should be more rigorous in our approach to the one than the other. Because authoritarian regimes are less oppressive of their citizens and are more amenable to democracy they are more susceptible to pressure from without, but at the same time, particularly when Kirkpatrick was writing, at the very nadir of the Cold War, it was especially dangerous to destabilize these generally friendly regimes, particularly in light of the fact that they could be expected, over a period of years, to gradually transform themselves into more democratic societies. Meanwhile, authoritarian regimes, like Cuba and Vietnam, though they tend to cast their ideology in the language of progressive democracy, which makes them seem somehow more akin to the U.S., in reality are much more oppressive of their people and, because they destroy traditional institutions, tend to create such devastation that it is extremely difficult for external pressure to aid the rise of