YouSaid · the spoken record

Marcel Dirsus

lines on the record: 29
first: 2024-08-09
most recent: 2024-08-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“No threats, of course. But I just think that even though some liberal democracies might die, there are ways to reverse it. And that's really also what the book is about.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am not quite sure whether that's the way to look at it. Obviously, there are still a lot of governments in that area that are terrible. And even some of the success stories like Tunisia have sort of gone back on many of their achievements. But I think it's too early to tell what really happens because when you look at history, a lot of these periods where you have these big, big changes were very violent, things went back, things went forth, and it was really not one line of constant improvement. So I think even something like Tunisia, which now is not looking great, we might look back on, and, well, not us, but, you know, future historians might look back on it and say, yeah, look, you know, it wasn't a straight line towards improvement, but ultimately the revolution that we saw there was a key part in turning this country into a prosperous liberal democracy. So I am positive. I think we can do it, so to speak, but that doesn't mean that there are no...”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am optimistic. I firmly believe that democracy is the best possible system of government that we have found thus far. And I think democracies have a lot of strength. Like I said, not necessarily strengths that we discuss enough, but democracies are strong. I think democracies are the least bad system that we have. And all these dictators, they seem strong, but in many ways they really aren't. They have a lot of weaknesses and more is in the book, but essentially because they have to be so focused on maintaining power because they don't want to get killed, they have to make all types of bad decisions. They have all types of trade-offs that they really cannot get out of. I just don't think we pay enough attention to it. And even if you look at something like the Arab Spring, which now I suppose most of us”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“us to solve and the same mechanism still apply so if you look at somebody like Assad for example the current Assad Assad the father here of course inherited power from his dad it wasn't supposed to be him somebody else was you know destined to take over but then his brother died so then the Syrian regime elites were sort of facing the question okay like what do we do because that nightmare would be a free for all where everybody in the regime would fight against one another because that would surely lead to the destruction of all the things that make them rich and powerful so in the end they decided to support the younger Assad even though he was not an obvious candidate and he was not seen as being particularly competent but that was seen to reduce the risk of this freefall and that's a problem that dictatorships really can't solve very well so you can reduce the risk like those European monarchs did but it never really goes away and that's a key weakness of these regimes”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then the problem was that if the youngest child was often so young that it became very difficult for the child to signal to this palace elites that he would keep the system running. So that didn't really work either because of course the palace elites don't care so much about the individual king as they care about the continuation of the system that makes them rich and gives them power. So eventually what they settled on was kind of the middle, which is the oldest child. And the oldest child has that sweet spot between still having a large age difference but a higher probability of credibly signaling to the palace elites that things are going to keep moving along. And that had a massive, massive impact. So once these leaders changed to this new system, they were twice as likely to survive in power as the leaders in these other systems. And now you say, okay, well, but that's 1,200 somewhere in Bavaria or something. But I think the succession problem is still really, really difficult for dictators.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the way that it initially worked is that once the king dies, power would go to one of his brothers. But the problem with that approach is that the age difference between the king and the brother tend to be quite small. So if the brother wanted to be king, he had a massive, massive incentive to just kill the brother. And that's exactly what they did. Systems were very, very unstable. So eventually what they were thinking about is going to a system where power passes from the king to the youngest child in order to maximize that age difference. So even if the youngest child wanted to be king, they could afford to wait”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“out there about it. Succession sounds kind of boring, but I think it's extremely interesting. And again, it's something that comparatively speaking, democracies are extremely good at. So, you know, you've got Rishi Sunak walking out of the door, then you get Kir Stammer. There's an orderly process. There's a lot of legitimacy. There's a mechanism by which disputes can be handled. And the types of regimes that I've been looking at really don't have anything like that. So once again, because you know that you have this very high risk of something bad happening to you, you want to do everything that you can in order to stay in power. So one thing that you don't want to do really is designate a successor. Because once you have designated a successor, you are almost artificially creating a separate power center and you are giving that successor a massive incentive to get rid of you. And that's not a hypothetical. So in the European Middle Ages, for example, these succession rules had a massive, massive”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have a much better chance because they are less blatant in their abuse of power. That doesn't mean that they're not abusing their power. Clearly they are, but I just think it's less obvious. And even though they undoubtedly make a lot of enemies, they're probably not making as many enemies as you would if you're a Kim Jong-un, for example.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These leaders are admittedly a little bit more difficult because I think in a sense they're more, I don't want to say clever because I don't want to praise them. But in a sense, I think somebody like Erdogan is more sophisticated than some of these other dictators that we've talked about. Because with a lot of the dictators that I looked at in the book, these really are people that are using essentially brute force in order to stay in power. And that does take some skill, but I think it is vastly more difficult to not go all the way and to be somebody that's sort of in the middle. So somebody like Erdogan, you know, using more of the legal system, trying to use the courts in order to go off the political opponents or to sort of change the playfield in your favor versus the opposition rather than outright not holding elections or to throw everybody in jail or to shut down the press in its totality. So I think those leaders in a sense”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Makes it much less likely that an Aku attempt is actually going to happen because it makes it much more risky. And there are a couple of these tweaks that you can do that make it much more likely that you won't have these high risk rewards on your rule. But, and this is the problem, there's always a trade-off. So if you create your military in that way and it's primarily designed to prevent coups, then you're going to lose a lot of military effectiveness. Because of course, now that the military is split in all these different parts and you have overlapping responsibilities for your intelligence services, it is much more difficult for the generals and the soldiers to perform their core task in a democracy, which is to defend the country from abroad. So as a dictator, I think you have a”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one thing that you can do is to replace a uniform military structure where everything is under one command with multiple types of security forces that can balance each other out. So you want to avoid a scenario where one general at the top of the regular military can decide to get rid of you, and then he has the entire military to make it happen. Instead, what you want, you want to take that military and you want to split it up. So you want to have one regular military, then you want to have a very powerful national guard. Then you want to have a militarized palace guard, and perhaps you also want some overlapping intelligence services. And the reason for that is that if that general at the top of the regular military now decides to get rid of you in a coup, he doesn't just have to contend with the people that might be guarding the palace, but he knows that he might have to fight also their national guard or that he might also have to fight the intelligence services.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of patterns did you notice amongst those kind of dictatorial regimes? Yeah, I think one element of it is just luck. So a lot of leaders in the past have gotten awfully close to losing power and then perhaps losing their life. But it's more than that. And one thing that you see in a lot of these regimes is that they take good care of their military. And when I say taking good care of the military, I don't necessarily mean that they pamper them and give them everything that they want, but they structure their way in a military that makes it very difficult for the generals to take power. So what do you want to do, and I'm not endorsing this, I should say that I should have probably said that earlier successful targets and so forth, I'm not endorsing this, but what you want to do as a tyrant if you want to stay in power is to structure your military in a way that makes it difficult to carry out a coup d'etat. Because coups are one of the biggest risks to your rule, so you need to focus on the military.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The regime used footage from social media. Of protesters posted it on social media and had other people on social media identify protesters to then track them down and then hunt them down. So it's a double-edged sword. I don't think this liberation idea technology, you know, we wouldn't describe it that way anymore, but there are certainly advantages to social media. The regimes which don't fall, places like North Korea, like Saudi Arabia, obviously entirely different countries, various reasons for why those regimes might stay stable in Saudi Arabia, wealth being the key thing in North Korea, outright tyranny.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something just marching in the street. And the way that that works is because if you have enough people in the street and the regime is forced to make a decision whether to shoot or not shoot, you can oftentimes split the regime. So at the point when that decision is being made, a lot of people in the regime might say, yeah, look, let's do it. We got to shoot these people or not to stay in power. So that is what we'll do. If you have enough people in the street, you might succeed at convincing some of them that that's not the right cause of action, either because it's immoral to shoot unarmed people or because out of self-preservation because you think you might lose it so you don't want to shoot these people because then there might be repercussions. And that is something that social media can absolutely help with. But then we've also seen, including in the Irish Spring, that social media was used by these regimes in order to stay in power. So in Bahrain, for example,”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not just journalists, political scientists too. There was a lot of debate about sort of liberation technology. So I think what you say is exactly right. You had these massive difference in the Arab Spring. And I think social media, I think we now have a more realistic view of social media. Obviously, they can do very great things for people trying to get rid of dictators. And the sort of main advantage that you get through social media is that it becomes much easier to mobilize a large number of people in opposition to the regime. And that is so important because of the way that nonviolent protests work. Because, again, this is an intriguing question, right? You have this very powerful regime. They might have tanks. They have assault rifles. They might have attacked helicopters. And yet, sometimes they're brought down by just people, you know, by grandparents or kids or kindergarteners.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Peaceful protest. So when you have a peaceful protest and it actually succeeds at replacing the leader, the chance of creating a democracy is much, much, much higher than with any type of violent event like a coup or like a rebellion or like a foreign imposed regime change. And the reason for that, at least in part, is because to bring down these leaders through peaceful protests, you need a lot of people. And what those people tend to be good at is not violence. So they come into power by, you know, through collective action and by, you know, working through the differences and so forth. And then when they are in power, they can use that to their advantage because, you know, nonviolence is almost a USP. So they have very little incentive to all of a sudden become violent. But the problem is that there's sort of more”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in planning the coup, which is a pretty crazy thing to do. I mean, to go from being a peaceful activist to then, you know, having sort of video conferences with people on how to smuggle assault rifles across the Atlantic in barrels and how to take out guards that would be protecting the dictator and so forth. I think to talk to these people really gives you a different appreciation for the type of difficult decisions that they have to make and how messy reality also is. Because again, I think we have this idea of these tyrants being almost all-powerful. And then sometimes we also have the idea of a lot of nefarious things going on in the background and people do resist, but I think reality is often very messy. And in terms of what works and what doesn't, when you look at the outcome of these types of leadership changes, the best thing is really...”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was honestly one of the most interesting parts of the book to talk to people that were there on one side of the other. So, you know, for example, I talked to a coup plotter. He was a gambler-American, and he was a peaceful activist. So he had a normal day job, but he was also a peaceful activist trying to bring down the dictator in the Gambia. And then things like the Gambia got worse and worse. You know, people were getting shot in the street and it was just horrible to watch also for him. And then at some point, somebody used to work for the dictator came to him and said, look, we need to change track. We need to get rid of this man, however it may be. We need to go for a coup. And then this peaceful activist that had never held a gun in his life had a decision to make on whether he would change his approach or whether he would keep on going as he had. And after some deliberation, he decided that he would participate.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is while looking at the psychology of some of these people. So I quote a psychologist who used to work for the CIA and he looked at somebody like Saddam Hussein, for example. And what he found that there's clearly a disposition for this type of rule. So he was somebody who had a very tough time taking criticism. He had a very difficult time showing empathy for other people and he was very aggressive and he had a certain sense of paranoia. So once you combine, I think these structural factors that creep in with a certain type of personality or certain type of psychological makeup, you move further and further away from democracy and into that dictatorship realm.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the idea of tipping points is interesting in two ways. So first is that tipping point of, okay, when do you really start to try to pursue a dictatorship? And then tipping points also become relevant later on when you talk about how dictators lose power. Because I think you have that tipping point on both ends of the scale. So when we talk about how do these people change, I think two things are important to consider. I think the first is the structural element. So as we've already talked about, once you centralize power the incentives to commit these types of atrocities or human rights violations and so forth increases a lot. So that sort of leads people down a certain path once they've sort of dabbled in it, right? Because once there's the risk that you're going to be held accountable, you're just going to keep going down that path. And it's going to get worse and worse. And the incentive to try to stay in power is going to increase and increase. The second thing that I've found”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and you could still enjoy life. But now because that chance is much lower, one, because of the International Criminal Court and related sort of advancement in international justice, and also because in democracies, human rights are now playing a more important role. The incentive to try to stay in power is even higher than it used to be. So the idea that we have is that obviously we don't want these people to commit human rights. So that's why we have this deterrent, right? So even if you even if you might not be sort of held accountable nationally, there's a body above that that will hold you accountable. But the paradoxical impact of that can be that dictators are even more willing to commit human rights abuses in order to stay in power. And you saw that there's a quote from Mugabe where he said the only way he's going to leave Zimbabwe is in a coffin. And part of that is because you knew that's probably what awaited him anyway if you were to give up.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So inevitably, when you lose power, there's a very high risk of that coming whole, right? But the other thing that you mentioned is that the international environment has also changed. So it used to be that the type of leaders that commit massive atrocities and the type of leaders that don't go to exile at roughly the same rate. Now it is very, very different. If you are a leader and you're trying to stay in power through all means because you're worried about maybe being killed or maybe going to jail and you commit atrocities in order to stay power, it is very, very difficult to find a place for exile. For example, because liberal democracies are now very reluctant to gratitude, right? It used to be that if you're a leader in, let's say, Francophone Africa, supported by Paris and you commit mass atrocities that the French would just host you, right? You'd have a nice retirement at the Cotazur, perhaps.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think, you know, just talking about the general statistic. So when you look at your classic liberal democratic leader that loses office, generally speaking, they can look forward to a quiet retirement. They might be able to spend some time with family or give speeches to banks and make some extra cash. But when you look at these personalist dictators, the type of leaders that have most power individually, they often meet a very different fate. So when they lose power, they often end up in jail or they get forced into exit.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the left and right, they might have golden guns. You know, they have all this pomp and so forth. But at the end of the day, all that is only useful as long as people believe in it. If they cease to believe in it and they actually need to use their golden gun, they are in immediate danger. And you saw that very clearly, not just with Gaddafi, but with a bunch of leaders.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think there's a tendency in Western liberal democracies to focus a lot on the fragility of our own systems and of our own weaknesses, especially in the context of this, you know, how do democracies die debate. And that's good. But I think what we don't pay enough attention to are the weaknesses of these other systems of government. And the Golden Gun paradox is one of those weaknesses. So we imagine these dictators to be holding absolute power. They just snap their finger in the palace and then everything that they want just kind of happens. But I think that's a myth. No political leader has ever held absolute power and all of these political leaders, even in places like Muhammad Gaddafi's Libya or Putin's Russia, need others to stay in power. And one of the things that they rely on to keep them in line is the idea that they are powerful, right? So they have all these symbols of power. They have these soldiers.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if he loses even two hundred people, he's out. And really, I think I imagine political leaders on this type of spectrum. So, you know, once a country becomes less democratic and once you're moving into dictatorship, that number gets smaller and smaller. So there might still be votes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they really make a difference.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think the key really between the leaders that I'm looking at and sort of more democratic leaders is really this idea of who they have to please in order to stay in power. So if you look at somebody like, well, I wrote about Joe Biden defending the White House. Now it's maybe Kamala Harris fighting for the White House, she needs a lot of people in order to become president of the United States, especially the voters in the swing states and so forth. And if she can't get them, if she can't get those people to vote for her, then she's not going to take off if she's not going to become president. But the more power you have concentrated at the top, the smaller the number of people is that you need to maintain on your side in order to hold power. So if you look at the extreme end of this, you look at somebody like Kim Jong-un, the number of people that he actually needs on his side to maintain power and to stay the supreme leader of North Korea is very, very small.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I deliberately took quite an expansive definition of tyranny. I didn't want to focus on just kings or just military dictators or just one-party dictatorship. So really what I wanted to look at are non-democratic, cruel leaders that only really have to look after a very small section of the population in order to maintain power. And where that line is exactly with some of those leaders is difficult to say. Clearly somebody like Erdogan, somebody like Vuchic, is at the very least on the way to it.”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've long been interested in the question of how dictatorships function. And obviously, as you say, there's been a lot of discussion around when do democracies die, how do democracies die. And really what I figured, though, is that some of those democracies will inevitably die. And then what? We have to be ready for that moment. And I think writing this book has helped me to get a better understanding of what could come next. But at the same time, obviously, there are already a lot of tyrants, already a lot of dictators, and they wreak havoc across the world. And it's sort of an obvious question to ask, okay, how do we get rid of them? Can we get rid of them? Should we want to get rid of them? And what happens next?”
2024-08-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Keeps Tyrants in Power? with Marcel Dirsus · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT