Concentration Of Power

Anders Corr

Description

'Since the beginning of organized societies, power and leadership have operated in human hierarchies, which are concentrating power in an accelerating manner, according to the comprehensive analysis of Dr. Anders Corr in his book The Concentration of Power: Institutionalization, Hierarchy & Hegemony. This sweeping study belongs next to Niall Ferguson and Jared Diamond in our understanding of how the world works and how it can work better. James Kraska, Harvard Law School A must-read for legislators, military strategists, leading academics, regulators, and anyone interested in the existential threat that the concentration of economic, political, and informational power in an illiberal country like China creates for the leading democracies of the world. - Kyle Bass, Billionaire investor erudite and realistic appraisal of 21st century power politics. Alex Gray, former Chief of Staff, White House National Security Council From Th

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 22 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780888903235
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Concentration of Power
Institutionalization, Hierarchy & Hegemony
Anders Corr





Contents
Introduction: The Concentration of Power
Part I — Theory of Hierarchy and Hegemony
Chapter 1: Theory Introduction
Chapter 2: Theory of Hierarchy and Hegemony
Chapter 3: Defining Hierarchy
Chapter 4: Origins of Hierarchy
Chapter 5: Functions of Hierarchy
Chapter 6: Structure of Hierarchy
Part II — Competition Between Hierarchies
Chapter 7: Competition Introduction
Chapter 8: Competition Between Hierarchies
Chapter 9: Division of Power
Chapter 10: Conflict Between Freedom and Organization
Chapter 11: International Hierarchy
Chapter 12: Domestic Hierarchy
Conclusion: The Deconcentration of Power
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
Notes
Copyright


It is the hope of great monarchs to make a single city of the entire world.
—Giambattista Vico, c. 1725


Introduction The Concentration of Power
On January 6, 2021, a red-white-and-blue mob descended on Washington, DC’s American Capitol, the most powerful symbol of democracy worldwide. A thin police line blocked the rioters, but the Proud Boys, a “patriotic” group acting in quasi-military fashion, took the lead in muscling past, breaking the dam through which a deluge of approximately 10,000 protesters then flowed. A police officer who sought to protect a door to the Capitol was pulled from the squad and brutally beaten with a hockey stick. Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter, was shot in the neck and died after trying to climb through a broken window close to the House of Representatives chamber. A Trump supporter discharged chemical spray at Officer Brian Sicknick, who collapsed that evening, and died the next day from a stroke. Three Trump supporters died from medical emergencies at the riot, and almost 140 officers were physically injured. 1
About 800 protesters made it into the Capitol Building itself. Average protesters at the building that tragic day were not like the Proud Boys, however. They were typically middle class and middle aged, and from a geographically representative sample of America’s counties. They believed they were standing up for liberty and the Constitution. They believed the election had been stolen. And, they wanted to right that perceived wrong to democracy. 2
Hundreds of millions of people around the world watched the events at the Capitol, but they viewed and judged from their own perspectives, colored by the positions and identities to which they subscribed. Democrats tended to be outraged. Many Republicans, aghast. Europeans, shocked. But some Republicans—whose industries had been shipped to China decades ago and who voted for Donald Trump in the hopes that a strong American president would turn the tide of America’s “decline”—might, like many of the rioters, have felt righteous or cathartic. African-Americans and other people of color who had lived experience of extra-legal police brutality, including that promoted by President Trump, 3 might have felt a mix of fear and foreboding at the many current and former police and soldiers, now wearing civilian garb, mixing with rioters sporting Confederate and military paraphernalia, and doing literal and symbolic violence to the nation’s Capitol Building.
Having been influenced by years of Trump’s attacks on the media as “enemies of the people,” the mob turned against the press, destroying equipment and threatening reporters. One was manhandled and thrown over a wall. Pipe bombs were found at the national headquarters of the Republican and Democratic Committees. Even after the rioters (some would say insurrectionists) breached the steps of the Capitol at 2:07 p.m., and the entrance itself at 2:16 p.m., President Trump tweeted inflammatory words against Vice President Pence, who was then overseeing the electoral count in the Senate chamber. A scaffolding and noose were erected as public “art.” Only at 3:36 p.m., about ninety minutes after the breach, did Trump authorize the National Guard to intervene. It took an additional forty minutes for him to finally heed the urging of his advisors and tweet to the rioters to go home. 4
President Trump had, an hour before, inflamed the crowd with claims that “this election was stolen from you.” In his fiery speech, he said the word fight twenty times and the word peace just once. A week after the riot, on January 13, Trump was impeached, but not ultimately convicted, for inciting an insurrection.
In prior weeks, Trump had remained silent, even supportive, with respect to his ally General Mike Flynn. General Flynn had promoted martial law to rerun the vote under military guard. One of Trump’s corporate allies was seen entering the White House just five days before the inauguration of Joe Biden, with notes that appeared to advocate utilization of the “Insurrection Act now ” and “martial law if necessary.” 5
Five months before the election, Trump had entertained the idea of utilizing military forces to oppose Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa riots. Anti-racist and anti-Trump protests were largely peaceful, but organizers tended not to acknowledge the bottles and rocks thrown at police or the fires lit on the fringes of their protests. 6
Adding to concerns leading up to Biden’s inauguration, Trump gutted his own administration on numerous occasions, including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who resigned under pressure just five days after the election. Trump then filled positions at the Pentagon with loyalists. America was polarized, on edge, and Trump appeared to be entertaining plans for martial law that threatened to stitch the country, which was ripping apart at the seams, back into a monster of its former self.
That did not happen. A peaceful transition of power occurred on January 20, when Biden took office. Democracy worked. America’s democratic institutions of over 200 years, including the Constitution, were upheld. The global public heaved a collective sigh of relief, thinking of the post-election atmosphere of crisis as an anomaly.
But considered over centuries rather than years, it was not an anomaly. It was the most recent failed step in a global concentration of power that has been ongoing for millennia. Sometimes this power concentration served some public good in response to a crisis. Sometimes, not. American presidents have been draining power from Congress since the Civil War. Brussels, in the name of the European Union (EU), is gradually absorbing the power of nation-states, like France and Germany, that have existed for hundreds of years. In Asia, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is increasingly powerful, with its leader, Xi Jinping, now “emperor for life” and attempting to push US military forces out of the region.
Not all readers will agree with every paragraph of this book. In fact, they should not. The book is not liberal or conservative, left or right. It looks at empirical evidence from prehistory, through the ancient world of Greece, Rome, and China, to the consolidation of states and empires in the nineteenth century, and makes a case for a particular theory of history in which power concentrates over time. It argues that power is concentrating increasingly in Beijing, Brussels, and Washington, DC, and that to avoid a future in which one country controls the world will require a redoubling of efforts to resist illiberal forms of hegemony.
One of the causal arguments in this book is that the concentration of power acts like a ratchet. It concentrates when conditions are ripe and force is applied, but due to ratchet mechanisms like subsidies, transfers, and corruption, power does not easily return to an unconcentrated state when conditions are not ripe. This book thus takes a position against historical theories of progress toward an egalitarian future, or an oscillation of power concentration throughout history, with equal periods of power aggregation and disaggregation. The evidence points elsewhere.
Even when power is concentrated in order to defeat power concentration—for example, the presidential powers that Franklin Delano Roosevelt acquired to defeat the Nazis—that power tends to stay in its aggregated form after the threat is defeated. The pawl in the ratchet engages to stop the disaggregation of power.
The pawl is typically some form of incentive or disincentive that those at the top of hierarchies offer or impose upon those lower in hierarchies, in order to keep them within the hierarchy and thus maintain the concentration of power. For example, Denmark imposed a trade monopoly on Greenland in 1776, closing the island to foreign access. In the 1940s and 1950s, the US, Canada, and Denmark increased the building of weather and defense installations that were used during the Cold War as a base for nuclear-armed bombers, bomber interceptors, jets, and missiles. However, both Greenland and Denmark are democracies without a law against secession. This weakens them as states. Greenland has the opportunity to break from its foreign and defense union with Denmark, which provides opportunities for internal or external powers—including the US or People’s Republic of China (PRC)—to influence the politics of both Greenland and Denmark, and potentially encourage their division. Conditions are therefore ripe for the disaggregation of Denmark’s power over Greenland and the reorientation of that power toward foreign capitals. To forestall this, Denmark makes an annual transfer of $623 million to assist in the financing of basic services in Greenland. Without this money, which acts as the pawl in Denmark’s ratchet, Greenland’s mainly Inuit people, numbering 56,000, would have to seek another source of income and might vote to secede. So public opinion in