The United States reflects a shift towards a system resembling pre-modern patrimonial regimes.
By Francis Fukuyama
Prior to the 2024 election, there was a debate about whether Donald Trump was a fascist. I thought that was the wrong moniker because fascism has specific associations with genocide and totalitarian power, and we weren’t close be being there yet. Fascism is driven by an ideology, and I don’t think Trump has ever been guided by anything that could be called an idea. I think he can be clearly labeled an authoritarian, as he and his allies like Elon Musk are deliberately dismantling existing checks on executive power in the U.S. constitutional system. He has not once sought to go through the Republican-controlled Congress to enact policies, deliberately preferring to do everything via executive orders like a king.
Yet the simple term “authoritarian” doesn’t quite capture the worldwide phenomenon of which Trump is a part. Steve Hanson and Jeff Kopstein are publishing a companion piece in Persuasion today, expanding on their characterization of Trumpism as “patrimonial.” Jonathan Rauch recently published an article in The Atlantic building on their use of that term. I think it is a better adjective and puts our current situation in the correct historical framework.
Max Weber used the term “patrimonial” to describe virtually every pre-modern regime once mankind graduated from decentralized tribalism. That is, the government was considered to be an extension of the ruler’s family and household. Such systems evolved out of conquest, in which the chief of a victorious band of raiders distributed land, resources, and women to his fellow warriors, who were then free to hand down those properties to their descendants.
In such a system, there was no distinction between public and private. Everything in theory belonged to the ruler, who could give away a province with all of its inhabitants to a son or daughter as a wedding present. The separation of the ruler’s property from that of the state was first laid out in the 17th and 18th centuries by theorists like Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin, who place sovereignty in a broader commonwealth and not in the person of the ruler. This made possible for the first time a phenomenon like corruption, in which an official appropriated public resources for private benefit.
One of the big themes of my two Political Order volumes was the great difficulty of creating an impersonal modern state, in which your status depended on citizenship and not on your personal relationship with the ruler. A modern economy is only possible under these circumstances as well, as the state undertakes to protect property rights and adjudicates transactions without regard to the identity of the rights-holder.
The problem with state modernity is that it is unstable. Human beings are by nature social creatures, but their sociability takes the form in the first instance of favoritism to friends and family. This leads to the phenomenon of “repatrimonialization,” a long word signifying the retreat of a modern impersonal state back into patrimonialism. This is a phenomenon that has plagued many earlier societies, like Tang Dynasty China, or the 17th century Ottoman Empire, or France under the Old Regime. In each case, an emergent modern state was captured by powerful elites close to the ruler. In France, for example, the king sold rent-seeking privileges like tax collection to the highest bidder.
I don’t need to explain that the United States is undergoing repatrimonialization as we speak. What is remarkable about the Trump administration is the degree to which it is open about its own corruption. The administration has fired inspectors general whose job it is to monitor and stop corruption; it has refused to enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; and it has made decisions favorable to the business interests of colleague-in-crime Elon Musk. Tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos came to Trump’s inauguration bearing hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts, in hopes that the king would shine favor on them. As Trump imposes tariffs on much of the world, there will be a further flow of supplicants asking for exemptions, which will be facilitated by personal side-payments.
This kind of corruption is characteristic of modern day authoritarianism. For the Bolsheviks, Nazis, or Maoists, their primary objective was not personal enrichment. By contrast, the enemies of liberal democracy today do not for the most part make an ideological case against it, as Marxists once did. Rather, they see legal institutions as obstacles to personal enrichment and attack them out of self-interest. The rulers of Venezuela or Colombia’s FARC may have started out as socialists or Marxists, but they have degenerated into criminal gangs. North Korea is heavily into a host of criminal activities from weapons smuggling and drug running to extortion.
So America is undergoing a process of repatrimonialization, just like many other societies before it. Where once the world was riven by ideologies, today it is divided into what increasingly look like criminal gangs fighting over turf and protection rackets.
Denmark was always a hard place to get to, but now it looks like an impossible dream.
---
Francis Fukuyama is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He writes the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.