Even the most capable autocrats cannot rule alone.

就算是最有能力的独裁者也无法独自统治。

In Russia, Vladimir Putin needs his circle of handpicked oligarchs; in Iran, the Revolutionary Guard and its allies in the business world protect the regime’s power; Viktor Orban transformed Hungary into an “elected autocracy” with the help of a few crucial judges, political enforcers and friendly tycoons. But to actually carry out the dirty work of consolidating and maintaining power, such leaders rely on help from a far greater number of lower- and midlevel people: military officers, secret police and bureaucrats.

在俄罗斯，普京需要他亲手挑选的寡头圈子；在伊朗，革命卫队及其商界盟友保护着政权的权力；欧尔班在几位关键法官、政治执行者和友好财阀的帮助下，将匈牙利转变为一个“民选专制政体”。但要真正执行巩固和维持权力的肮脏工作，这些领导人还依赖数量庞大得多的中下层人员：军官、秘密警察和官僚。

Yet until recently, researchers paid little attention to how leaders convince and recruit ground-level workers to go along with their demands. The incentives for elites to stay loyal have been studied extensively, but the rank and file have remained something of a black box. In the absence of real data, researchers have tended to assume that they cooperate because of ideological extremism, fear of persecution or some combination of the two.

然而，直到前不久，研究人员还很少关注领导人如何说服和招募基层人员来配合其要求。精英阶层保持忠诚的动机已经被广泛研究，但普通基层人员仍然像是一个黑箱。在缺乏真实数据的情况下，研究人员往往倾向于假设他们之所以合作，是因为意识形态极端主义、对迫害的恐惧，或者是两者的结合。

New research, drawing on an extraordinary data set from Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s and ’80s, suggests a very different explanation. It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality. The people who make those decisions, the research suggests, are neither extremists nor victims. They are often just middling workers looking for a way to get ahead.

基于1970年代和80年代阿根廷“肮脏战争”的一组非凡数据，新的研究提出了一种截然不同的解释。研究发现，世界各地职场人士熟悉的职业压力——渴望重振停滞不前的职业生涯，或者获得一次小小的晋升——足以激励中下层官员违背职业义务、基本规范乃至最基本的道德。研究表明，做出这些决定的人既不是极端分子，也不是受害者。他们通常只是寻找出头之日的普通打工人。

“Making a Career in Dictatorship,” a new book by two German political scientists, Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel, reads like what you might get if you crossed Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the “banality of evil” with a business school guide on how to get the most out of low performers.

德国政治学家亚当·沙尔普夫和克里斯蒂安·格拉塞尔合著的新书《在独裁政权中谋求职业发展》(Making a Career in Dictatorship)读起来就像是将汉娜·阿伦特关于“平庸之恶”的观点与商学院关于如何充分激发低绩效员工潜力的指南结合在一起。

Their in-depth study of Argentina’s military during that country’s era of coups and forced disappearances found that low performers — whom they refer to as “career-pressured” individuals — filled the ranks of the secret police. That service allowed them to “detour” around the ordinary military hierarchy, the book shows, achieving promotions and career success they could never have managed otherwise.

他们对阿根廷政变和强迫失踪时期的军队进行了深入研究，发现低绩效者（他们称之为“面临职业压力”的个人）充斥于秘密警察队伍。该书表明，这份工作使他们能够“绕过”常规的军队层级制度，获得他们原本无法企及的晋升和职业成功。

It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.

事实证明，潜在的威权统治者不需要用意识形态上的死忠分子来充实政权，也不需要提供极端的诱惑或是施加严厉的惩罚，就能成功夺取权力。他们只需要弄清楚如何锁定他们理想的劳动力群体：那些受挫的平庸之辈。

Their conclusions have implications for countries around the world grappling with the stability of their democracies — including the United States.

他们的结论对世界上正在苦苦应对民主稳定性问题的国家（包括美国）具有启示意义。

A Data Set of Mediocrity

一份关于平庸的数据集

When he was a young doctoral student, Scharpf was conducting dissertation research in Buenos Aires when a government official dropped a fateful offhand comment during a conversation in a cafe. During the military dictatorship, the official said, the intelligence officers who did the regime’s worst dirty work were “essentially idiots.”

当沙尔普夫还是一名年轻的博士生时，他在布宜诺斯艾利斯进行论文研究。有一次，他在一家咖啡馆与一位政府官员交谈时，对方随口说出了一句决定性的话。这位官员说，在军事独裁时期，为政权干最肮脏勾当的情报官员“基本上都是白痴”。

At first, Scharpf thought the man was just being insulting. He soon realized that the official meant the comment literally — that the military junta’s secret police had been, in his view, incompetent losers.

起初，沙尔普夫以为这个人只是在骂人。但他很快意识到，这位官员说的是真话——在他看来，军政府的秘密警察确实是一群无能的失败者。

When he returned to his university in Germany, he mentioned the discussion to his colleague, Glassel. Both men saw a glimmer of social-science possibility. They decided to learn more. Argentina, it turned out, had published information on all of its military officers’ graduation ranks, promotions and retirements going back to the late 1800s, which meant that it was possible to identify and track the low performers. And because secret police work during the Dirty War was conducted primarily by army intelligence Battalion 601, the researchers could trace exactly which officers joined the unit, how long they stayed and what happened to their careers.

回到德国的大学后，他向同事格拉塞尔提到了这次讨论。两人都从中看到了社会科学研究的可能性。他们决定深入探究。后来，阿根廷公布了自19世纪末以来所有军官的毕业排名、晋升和退役信息，这意味着识别和追踪其中的低绩效者成为可能。而且，由于在“肮脏战争”期间，秘密警察工作主要由陆军601情报营负责，研究人员可以准确地追踪哪些军官加入了该部队、他们在那里待了多久，以及他们的职业生涯情况如何。

在“肮脏战争”期间，那些因国家安全部门而“失踪”者的母亲和亲属在抗议。

The data showed that the official’s offhand comment had been right. For the most part, the Argentine military operated under a meritocratic “up or out” system. Officers who underperformed early would fall behind their peers, and eventually be forced into retirement. But Battalion 601 offered a detour around that meritocracy: Low performers could transfer into the secret police, spend a few years earning promotions there and then return to the regular army, often leapfrogging over peers who had stayed with the regular forces. Men who took the detour ended up with longer careers, higher salaries and better pensions than similar individuals who stayed in the mainstream military units.

数据显示，那位官员随口说的话确实没错。在大多数情况下，阿根廷军队实行的是任人唯贤的“不进则退”制度。早期表现不佳的军官会落后于同龄人，最终被迫退役。但601营提供了绕过这套精英体制的迂回路径：低绩效者可以调入秘密警察部队，在那里待上几年时间，获得晋升，然后返回正规军，往往还能超越那些一直留在正规部队的同僚。走这条迂回路径的人，最终往往比留在主流军事单位的同类人员拥有更长的职业生涯、更高的薪水和更好的养老金。

How Regimes Rely on ‘Loyal Losers’

政权如何依赖“忠诚的失意者”

Ordinarily, of course, it is very difficult to get complete information on who a regime’s “dirty workers” are or what motivated them to take those jobs. So there aren’t really comprehensive data sets to compare with Glassel and Scharpf’s research on Argentina.

当然，在通常情况下，要全面了解一个政权里的“脏活执行者”究竟是谁、他们从事这些工作的动机是什么，是非常困难的。因此，实际上并不存在能够与格拉塞尔和沙尔普夫关于阿根廷的研究进行对比的全面的数据集。

However, available information suggests that other countries may have followed a similar pattern. For example, Glassel and Scharpf found that superiors in the Nazi bureaucracy skillfully exploited career pressures to recruit commanders for the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads that carried out the “Holocaust by bullets” in Eastern Europe. Many of the recruits had backgrounds that placed them at a disadvantage, such as records blemished by disciplinary proceedings, unclear “racial purity” or lack of military and policing experience. Zealous service in the killing squads helped them improve their careers.

然而，现有信息表明，其他国家可能也出现过类似的模式。例如，格拉塞尔和沙尔普夫发现，纳粹官僚体系构中的上级官员非常善于利用职业晋升压力，为别动队招募指挥官。别动队是在东欧执行“子弹大屠杀”的流动杀戮队。许多被招募者都存在某种劣势，例如因纪律处分而留下不良记录、“种族纯洁性”存疑，或者缺乏军事与警务经验。而在杀戮队中的卖力表现则有助于他们改善自己的职业前途。

In the Soviet Union, the NKVD, the secret police who killed hundreds of thousands of people during the so-called Great Terror of 1937, “deliberately recruited individuals with poor formal skills and knowledge,” Glassel and Scharpf write, often with no more than a primary school education. Senior commanders nurtured their subordinates’ fear of failure by instigating competition between different offices to see who could arrest more people.

格拉塞尔和沙尔普夫写到，在苏联，内务人民委员部——1937年“大清洗”期间杀害数十万人的秘密警察机构NKVD——“刻意招募那些正规技能和知识水平低下的人”，他们的教育程度往往不超过小学。高级指挥官通过在各个部门之间挑起竞争、看谁能逮捕更多人，来培植下属对失败的恐惧。

In the modern era, autocratic leaders often win power via elections, and then dismantle checks and balances to concentrate power in their own hands. That process tends to be far less violent than the acts carried out by the Argentine military junta or Stalin’s NKVD, but over time it sharply curtails political competition and freedom of expression.

在当代，威权领导人往往借助选举赢得权力，随后再逐步拆除制衡机制，将权力集中到自己手上。这一过程通常远不及阿根廷军政府或斯大林时期NKVD那样充满血腥暴力，但随着时间推移，它会对政治竞争和言论自由造成严重的压制。

1943年，在卡廷森林的一处万人坑中进行挖掘工作，斯大林领导的内务人民委员部曾将约2.2万名被其杀害的波兰战俘的遗体抛弃于此。

Although each country has its own idiosyncrasies, that process tends to follow a pattern, said Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies democratic backsliding. Initially, elected would-be autocrats often appoint “loyal losers” to important positions to rubber-stamp their power grabs, Frantz said. “The leader knows that people are going to be more likely to be loyal if they don’t have many other career options, so when I say losers, I kind of mean it literally,” she said.

密歇根州立大学研究民主倒退问题的政治学家埃丽卡·弗兰茨表示，尽管每个国家都各有特色，但这一过程往往遵循一种模式。弗兰茨说，最开始，当选的潜在威权者常常将“忠诚的失意者”任命到重要岗位，让他们对自己攫取权力的行为“盖章放行”。她说：“领导人知道，如果一个人没有太多别的职业出路，他就更容易保持忠诚。所以，所以当我说‘失意者’的时候，某种意义上真的是字面意思。”

The American Case

美国的情况

For Americans, this is not just an academic question. Many experts worry that democratic decay appears to be progressing especially quickly during President Donald Trump’s second term.

对美国人来说，这并非纯粹的学术问题。许多专家担心，在特朗普总统的第二任期内，美国民主制度的衰败迹象似乎正在明显加速。

Frantz sees parallels between Trump’s presidency and some of the elected authoritarian leaders she has studied elsewhere. Although Trump did not create the Republican Party, he has reshaped it over the last decade into an institution centered around himself. And a number of his Cabinet members and political appointees, particularly in his second term, appear to fit the paradigm of loyalists whose resumes would be unlikely to land them roles in any other administration.

弗兰茨认为，特朗普的执政方式与她研究过的一些“民选威权领导人”存在相似之处。虽然特朗普并不是共和党的创建者，但过去十年里，他已经把共和党重塑成了一个高度围绕个人运转的政治组织。而且，他的一些内阁成员与政治任命官员——尤其是在第二任期——看起来也符合那种忠诚失意者的模式：他们的履历不太可能在其他任何政府中为他们谋得类似职务。

匈牙利总理欧尔班在4月举行的最后一场竞选集会上。尽管他已在司法系统、新闻媒体等各个领域安插了亲信，还是在选举中落败。

So the Trump administration’s apparent attempts to secure political control over the armed services, as well as the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, stand out as worrying even when compared with other cases, Frantz said. Elected leaders “tinkering with” the security services “tends to be something that we see once a system has already transitioned to authoritarianism,” she said, rather than when democracy is in decline.

弗兰茨说，正因如此，特朗普政府明显试图对武装部队、联邦调查局和移民与海关执法局进行政治控制的举动，即便与其他国家的情况相比，也显得尤为令人忧虑。她说，民选领导人对安全机构“动手脚”，“通常意味着一个体制已经完成向威权主义的转型”，而不仅仅是民主正在衰退。

Glassel and Scharpf are concerned that Trump’s planned expansion of ICE, in particular, could make it an ideal venue for “detouring” by ambitious underperformers who could be deployed for anti-democratic purposes. The worry is especially profound given the storming of the Capitol at the end of Trump’s first term, albeit by a less organized band of loyalists.

格拉塞尔和沙尔普夫担心，特朗普计划扩大移民与海关执法局的规模，可能会使其成为那些能力平庸但野心勃勃的人通过“绕道晋升”获得发展机会的理想场所，这些人可能继而被调遣用于反民主目的。这种担忧之所以格外强烈，也与特朗普第一任期结束时发生的国会山骚乱有关——尽管那次行动的参与者还只是一个组织较为松散的忠诚者群体。

The playbook for a leader to create a loyal security service, they said, is to set up or repurpose an institution that can become a “second ladder” for career promotions, resource it generously and ensure that the barriers to getting hired there are low, signaling that it offers career opportunities to those who cannot find them elsewhere. (Cutting other government jobs or squeezing budgets can create a larger pool of potential recruits.) The leadership then signals impunity for people on that second ladder, to assure them that they won’t face consequences for wrongdoing.

两位学者表示，一个领导人若想建立一支忠诚的安全力量，通常会采用这样一套剧本：首先，建立或改造一个机构，使其成为职业晋升的“第二阶梯”；
然后，为这个机构投入大量资源，同时降低进入门槛，以此向那些在别处谋不到出路的人发出机会信号。（削减其他政府部门职位或压缩预算，也会扩大潜在招募对象。）接下来，领导层再向这条“第二阶梯”上的人释放“免责”信号，让他们相信，自己不会因为不当行为而面临后果。

The administration seems to tick those boxes, even if Trump’s intentions are obscure. (The president has spoken openly of a third term in violation of the Constitution and disparaged the need for an election.) ICE remains an anti-immigration force, but it is set to be radically expanded, with a budget that would dwarf other federal law-enforcement agencies if the current funding bill passes. The Trump administration has drastically cut employment in other federal agencies, leaving thousands of people unemployed or fearful that they soon might be. And top officials in the administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, explicitly assured ICE officers of “immunity” after immigration officers killed a protester in Minneapolis in January.

这届政府似乎正在一一对应，尽管特朗普的真实意图尚不明朗。（特朗普曾公开谈及违反宪法谋求第三任期，并贬低选举的必要性。）移民与海关执法局目前仍是针对移民的的执法力量，但正处于大规模扩张之中——若当前的拨款法案获得通过，其预算规模将使其他联邦执法机构相形见绌。特朗普政府已大幅裁减其他联邦机构的工作岗位，导致数千人失业，或人心惶惶地担忧自己即将步其后尘。政府高层官员——包括副总统万斯和特朗普的副幕僚长斯蒂芬·米勒——在移民官员于今年1月在明尼阿波利斯打死一名抗议者后，明确向移民与海关执法局官员人员承诺“豁免权”。

At the same time, it has become easier than ever to become an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. Ryan Schwank, a former training academy instructor, testified to Congress in February that new cadets “are graduating from the academy despite widespread concerns among training staff that even in the final days of training, the cadets cannot demonstrate a solid grasp of the tactics or the law required to perform their jobs.” ICE recruits must now complete only nine practical examinations to graduate from the training academy, compared with 25 exams that were listed in a training syllabus dated July 2021. It’s a good career opportunity for someone looking to get ahead.

与此同时，成为一名移民与海关执法局探员比以往任何时候都容易。前培训学院教官瑞安·施万克今年2月在国会作证称，新学员“毕业时，培训人员普遍担心，即便到了培训最后阶段，他们也依然无法证明自己真正掌握了执行任务所需的战术与法律知识”。如今，移民与海关执法局的招募对象只需完成九项实操考试即可从培训学院毕业，而根据2021年7月的培训大纲，列出的考试项目为25项。对于一个想要出人头地的人来说，这无疑是个不错的职业机会。