Hugo Chavez and the different sources of power

Whatever you think of Chavez and his now defeated package of constitutional reforms, a few things seem clear. One, it was a disastrous mistake, reminiscent of the Charlottetown referendum in Canada, to bundle so many reforms in one package. Anyone disliking a single reform strongly enough would vote against the whole package, or stay at home, as many voters did. Two, Chavez seems to believe his own press, and to surround himself with yes-people, and this, in part, has led to overreaching, paranoia, and megalomania. When the students, who traditionally supported him, turned against him, it was a sign that he had lost his own coalition, yet he preferred to mock the students as privileged elites. Three, and perhaps most fundamentally, Chavez erred in trying to replace the informal power of mobilization and politics with formal, structural power in the constitution. Even had he won, his victory was not going to be as decisive as the margins in votes on his presidency, and any increase in formal power he might have gained would have been more than offset by a sharp loss in legitimacy and informal power, which is ultimately more decisive in achieving his programme. Then there was the risk of not winning at all, and finding himself in a diminished position on many accounts, which is the actual outcome. Chavez is badly damaged.

UPDATE: Tariq Ali has a good commentary on Chavez’s defeat.

Ideology and strategy, part 1

A memorable lesson in Latin class was about Gaius Mucius Scaevola. Scaevola, or “Lefty”, snuck into an Etruscan camp besieging Rome and was captured. He was ordered burnt to death. As a demonstration of the bravery of Romans, he placed his own right arm in the fire, letting it burn without any expression of pain. To honour his courage, he was released, and the apprehensive Etruscans lifted their siege. What this taught us, my Latin teacher said, was the power of fanaticism. A lesson the Romans themselves learned at Masada, and many others since then.

Sunzi and the Greek historians describe various tactics of commitment, like burning bridges and ships to destroy any avenues of escape, that galvanize soldiers to fight to the death. Swedish berserkers committed themselves to battle through intoxication. Fanaticism, however, makes such measures redundant, and fanatically loyal elite units of every era have demonstrated this, as have guerrillas and freedom fighters of many kinds. It is not only from dispersion, anonymity, and other elements of asymmetry that guerrillas derive their power, but from the rightness, real or perceived, of their struggle.

Why the NDP can’t emulate Conservative strategy and tactics

Apparently, people close to Jack Layton and Olivia Chow are being told to read Paul Wells’ book Right Side Up and Tom Flanagan’s book Harper’s Team, because the senior NDP leadership–Layton, Chow, and Chief of Staff Bob Gallagher–admire the Conservatives’ intelligence and want to emulate them. This won’t work for any number of reasons. One is that you can’t emulate Tom Flanagan through a shallow encounter like the mass-market book he’s written. If you want to get into his head, you need to read the books he reads, understand his way of thinking, and have an aptitude for that way of thinking. That means knowing more about the man and what he knows than they’ll get from Harper’s Team.

What makes a good strategist?

What makes a good strategist? And why is strategic talent so rare? This blog is a digressive attempt to answer these questions. I will digest and improvise theory with reference to contemporary experience and historical anecdotes.

Philip Tetlock, in his excellent book, Expert Political Judgment, begins by enumerating sceptical arguments against the possibility of forecasting. One of these is the game-theoretical argument — in a game between evenly matched players who know they are evenly matched, and know that they know they are evenly matched, and so on, the outcomes are a random walk. In practice, however, players are not evenly matched, and part of the skill in any strategic encounter is calibrating the other players’ abilities. Tetlock refers to a Financial Times experiment which asked readers to guess a number that was 2/3 of the mean guess of all the respondents. The ‘correct’ game theoretical answer here, assuming all the other players are rational, is 0 (2/3 of 50 is 33, 2/3 of 33 is 22, and so on until 0). The actual winning guess was 13. Mathematically sophisticated but psychologically naive players lost this game. The skill in the game was entirely in the calibration of other players’ guesses, and their guesses about other players’ guesses, and so on.

On one level, this is not news. The importance of intelligence to military operations, and the importance of maintaining an asymmetrical position in intelligence, has been known since war was first practiced. Some aspects of intelligence gathering are straightforward–in battle, estimating the enemy’s physical complement; in politics or business, the competitor’s financial position, and so on. Other aspects, though, involving morale, character weaknesses, competences, motivation, in sum, the mind and heart of the opposing strategist, and the minds and hearts of one’s own personnel, have been less well documented. Sunzi and the Chinese strategists describe assessing one’s personnel and the opposing general. But this knowledge has never been systematized. There are reasons to believe it can’t be. But that will come in a later post.