THE MECHANICS OF TOTALITARIAN DRIFT

Every constitution ever written contains a clause explaining what happens if the person in charge decides not to obey it. Every one of those clauses is enforced by people who work for the person in charge. This is not a scandal. It is a wiring diagram, and it has been on the wall the whole time, and almost nobody has looked at it. Peter Kriger approaches the collapse of political restraint the way a safety engineer approaches a wrecked machine: not by asking who was at the controls, but by asking which protective circuit was supposed to trip and why it did not. The answer turns out to be embarrassingly simple. A rule is enforced by people subject to the rule. A measurement is taken by instruments the operator calibrates. A cost is paid by passengers who never bought a ticket. And the one restraint that never asks anyone's permission - somebody else's army - has been sitting untested in the dark for eighty years, which in the trade is the worst category of fault there is. Ranging from Roman dictators to Soviet grain reports, from a barley field in Lysenko's Ukraine to a room in Fukushima where all the backup generators were thoughtfully installed at the same elevation, this book replaces the tired argument about who deserves the word tyrant with something more useful: a set of gauges anyone can read. Why negative orders bind and positive ones do not. Why regimes tell the truth about physics and lie about harvests. Why wars fought at a distance have no way of ending. Why the internal politics of a small nation have almost no bearing on whether it survives. >KEYWORDS political power, authoritarianism, institutions, systems failure, democracy, accountability, international order